Israel
Throughout Cotton Mather’s essays runs a string of symbolic connection linking the New World to Israel. The colonies—New England, in particular, and specifically the Puritan colonies of New England—are viewed through a religious lens that calls sees their establishment as being the work of the hand of the God. This essentially has the power as a result of repetition becoming an example of America as the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy. Unavoidably, however, the underlying tension in this approach is the inevitable realization that prophecy also determined the destruction of Israel as punishment for breaking its covenant with God.
The Apocalypse
Whether referred to as “the Apocalypse” or “end of days” or the “millennialism” the symbolic significance is all the same. The essays of Mather takes on the concept of the destruction of Israel in a comparison to the New World as a modern Israel by continually suggesting that the end is nigh. Mather came to passionately believe not only that the final showdown between good and evil would take place on the battlefields of the New World, but that he would be one of the leaders of the warriors for good.
Angels
Angels are figures with a presence that becoming solidified from the symbolic to literal at certain points. It is beyond question that Mather fully believed in angels; an angel was the messenger telling him not only that his writings would be published and read in Europe as well as America, but that he was to become that leader of the army of lightness against the forces of darkness.
Devils (Demons)
Just as angels recur as a motif to become both literal and symbolic agents in the service of good, so were there messengers from the dark side. America’s indigenous population were as a whole were determined to have been living in what Mather called the “Devil’s Territories.” Their lack of awareness of the story of Christ could be attributed to only one thing in Mather’s mind: the influence of the devil. Thus the arrival of the Puritans became in a part a response to this call from God to fight back against the domain of the devil in those territories which he had been ruling freely.
Cotton Mather
Clearly not by intention, Cotton Mather himself has since become perhaps the single greatest symbol to arise from his writings. His diaries and essays paint a portrait of a complex mind at work with the science at his disposal with the result being that while he clearly possessed an educated mind, the sheer volume of that which he got painfully wrong has created for history a symbol of a profoundly superstitious man working without principle to support a baseless ideology. This in itself would likely have left Cotton Mather as just another Puritan theologian, but when combined with his active investigations of witchcraft and the influence of his “devils” upon the minds of innocents, it is Mather above all else who rose to the become the central symbolic figure most closely associated Puritan narrow-mindedness, persecution and irrational religious zealotry.
