Salem Witchraft Hysteria
Crisis started during the winter of 1691-2 in Salem village
north of Boston. Small groups of adolescent young girls became
obsessed with the occult and the supernatural. One group was
centred on the house of Rev Samuel Parris, minister at Salem.
Girls began acting strangely, speaking in tongues, having fits
etc. Parris called in the village doctor, William Griggs who
could find nothing wrong with them, but believed them in the
grip of the ‘evil hand’ in other words under the influence of
witchcraft.
The girls were asked who had put them under the influence of
witchcraft. Under extreme pressure they named three women,
Tituba, a West Indian slave woman belonging to Parris; Sarah
Good, widely disliked in Salem with a reputation for
neglecting her children; and Sarah Osborne, a bed ridden old
woman, who when young had engaged in pre-martial sex,
something prohibited in Massachusetts. These three women were
brought in and questioned. During questioning the girls began
to fall into fits, and Tituba confessed that she still
practised the art of Voodoo. This was enough evidence to
convince the authorities that witchcraft was rife in the
community. The girls were then taken around the village and
where they fell into fits people were arrested for sorcery.
By mid 1692 the Salem prison held more than 100 alleged
witches who could not be tried because of the suspension of
the Massachusetts Bay charter during the Dominion period. With
the arrival of Governor William Phips in May 1692 a new court
of Oyer and Terminer was established to judge these cases.
Bridget Bishop was the first to be tried, - show trial. Bishop
unpopular, been married three times, duly found guilty and
hanged on June 10th 1692 at Witches Hill. She was followed to
the gallows by 18 other people. Not all submitted to the trial
process, illegal to try someone if they failed to enter a plea
of guilty or not guilty. To overcome this the courts could
order someone to be pressed, whereby they were strapped down
and each hour a stone slab would be placed on their chest. If
at any time they entered a plea, they would be tried in the
regular way, but if they did not successive slabs would be
placed on the individual, until he or she was crushed to
death. Several of those accused in Salem died in this manner
rather than face a trial and almost certain execution as a
witch.
The trials were bizarre affairs. They involved the narration
of exotic and far-fetched happenings, evidence which was
acceptable to the court included physical blemishes which
would be taken as the Devil’s Mark. The girls were often
hysterical when the accused entered court, and would fall into
fits on the floor if they were looked at during the trial.
They would claim that they could see the Devil talking to the
accused, helping them, even in the court room. This admission
of Spectral evidence was highly irregular, and was not usual
in New England witch trials.
But Salem was a society where Devil was ever present and where
he influenced events. It was perfectly believable that he
would seduce women and use them to cause chaos.
During the autumn of 1692 some puritan ministers began to
express doubts about the validity of the testimony of the
girls. On October 3rd Increase Mather, one of the most
influential people in Puritan society, preached a sermon
questioning the spectral evidence of the girls. He suggested
that some of the evidence may be fabricated, and that it was
‘better that ten suspected witches escape than one innocent is
condemned’. On October 12th Governor Phips prevented any more
trials or executions and on the 15th he dissolved the special
court.
A new court was established to examine the remaining cases.
All but three of the fifty still in jail were acquitted and
those three were officially pardoned.
Explanations
17thC people tended to believe in the power of God and Satan.
Ministers warned about the power of the Devil to corrupt.
Widely accepted that if you signed the Devil’s book, you sold
your soul to him in return for supernatural powers, which you
could use for personal gain, and to cause mischief for Satan.
Events which were unexplained, or unexplainable, such as a
sudden illness, a premature death, or a run of amazing
fortune, led people to suspect supernatural interference. New
Englanders no different from Europeans, where most ordinary
people still firmly believed in magic. Not only the lower
classes who believed, 1597 King James VI published Daemonolgie
which discussed the existence of witches, declaring that
‘witchcraft and witches have bene, and are, the former part is
clearly proved by scripture, and the last by daily experience
and confessions’. Hopes that pious people would be protected
by God sufficiently to defeat and kill witches. Death for
witches was ‘not only the lawful way, but also the most sure’
way of protecting society - bible instruction that ‘thou shall
not suffer a witch to live’. Episodes of witchcraft occurred
throughout the 17thC in New England, but usually isolated
cases, not mass hysteria like Salem.
Key differences between the accusers and the accused. The
accusers were usually young women, aged between 11 and 20. 80%
of those accused of witch-craft in Salem were women, usually
over 40, often had few or no children in a society were large
families were the norm, they were often feisty, argumentative
characters of relatively low social status, and they had
usually fallen foul of the law before their accusation. Many
of accused were midwives, link between the wonders a midwife
could achieve with
a new born baby, and accusations of
supernatural powers. John Demos in his book Entertaining
Satan, has argued that generational gap is the key, gives
weight to a theory that these young girls were rebelling
against the authority of older women. It was also true however
that the girls were from older families, which had resided in
the area for several generations, whereas the accused were
usually recent immigrants to Salem. Some scholars interpret
this fact as showing that the witch trials were actually
embodiments of the discontent felt by older settlers with new
arrivals, and the disruption they inevitably caused in
society. Salem was not peaceful society, town meetings often
acrimonious, ministers had come and gone with great
regularity, failing to provide stabilising influence. Demos
believes this instability goes someway towards explaining the
explosion of hysteria in 1692 - tinderbox waiting for a match
to be thrown in to it.
Link to Glorious Revolution is the social uncertainty caused
by transition from puritan to mercantilist state.
Salem is the last case of widespread witchcraft hysteria in
the western world.