The mystery of “J.N.”

Ichabod Wiswall. Apparently the first man known to have given a funeral service in North America, at Massachusetts in 1697 (that was five years after the Witch Trials of 1692). Why did a Christian minister have his gravestone flanked by two Cthulhu-like sea creatures?

The gravestone is one of three known made by a carver who signed himself “J.N.” (and of whom nothing more is known — see the 1966 book: Graven images: New England stonecarving and its symbols, 1650-1815, by Allan I. Ludwig, p. 296). Nine other gravestones done in the same manner and style are known locally. J.N.’s workmanship was far in advance of the local carvers. Ludwig writes of…

“the enigmatic Dagons or Tritons which ornament his most representative stones. The use of Dagons on Puritan gravestones is puzzling in the light of the fact that they were associated with paganism and the evil doings of Thomas Morton and his merrymen. … Yet pagan Dagons remained to grace the stones of many a proper Boston family in the late 17th century. … It is not clear what pagan water deities were doing on Puritan gravestones.” — Graven images, Ludwig.

The roots of Dagon in New England have, of course, been investigated already by Lovecraftian scholars. See Will Murray’s “Dagon in Puritan Massachusetts,” Lovecraft Studies, No. 11 (Fall 1985), pages 66-70.

Harriette Merrifield Forbes’ The Gravestones of early New England and the men who made them: 1653-1800 (1927) tells us that Wiswall was also an astrologer…

“In Duxbury we discover another stone [i.e.: the one seen above], quite different from the other two and signed ‘JN’ in script below the left-hand border. It is that of the Reverend Ichabod Wiswall, a man ‘famous as an astrologer.'”

“famous as an astrologer” — interesting. No-one else with net-accessible information on him mentions that fact. Forbes’ source appears to be the 1854 book A history of the early settlement of Newton, county of Middlesex by Francis Jackson, which adds that he predicted the death of his child…