Witchcraft in Salem: Unraveling the Truth Behind the Accusations

In the late 17th century, the town of Salem in Massachusetts became infamous for the witchcraft trials and executions that took place there. The witch trials were a dark chapter in American history, fueled by fear, paranoia, and superstition. The main idea is that the depictions of witchcraft in Salem were shaped by societal beliefs and religious fervor. The first recorded case of witchcraft in Salem occurred in 1692, when two young girls, Betty Parris and Abigail Williams, started exhibiting strange behavior. They claimed to be possessed by the devil and accused three women of bewitching them. This accusation led to a series of trials that resulted in the execution of twenty people.

After Tituba’s confession, more villagers came forward with accusations of witchcraft and bewitchment, leading to more imprisonments. Sarah Good’s four-year-old daughter, Dorothy, was also imprisoned for nearly five months before being released. “You had mothers accusing daughters, grandmothers accusing grandmothers, neighbors accusing neighbors, people accusing ministers of being witches,” says Baker. “It turns out that in most cases of witchcraft across most cultures, usually three fourths of the victims are women. In fact, it’s even more one-sided than that because most of the men who are accused are either relatives of those women or men who will stand up to defend those women.”

Minister Cotton Mather and his father, Increase Mather who was president of Harvard at the time , implored the court to not allow the use of spectral evidence in the trials, saying it were better that 10 suspected witches should escape than one innocent person be condemned, yet 19 innocents were murdered. Minister Cotton Mather and his father, Increase Mather who was president of Harvard at the time , implored the court to not allow the use of spectral evidence in the trials, saying it were better that 10 suspected witches should escape than one innocent person be condemned, yet 19 innocents were murdered.

This accusation led to a series of trials that resulted in the execution of twenty people. The depiction of witchcraft in Salem was heavily influenced by the prevailing beliefs of the time. Puritan society in New England had deeply ingrained religious beliefs, with a strong belief in the existence of the devil and his power to corrupt souls.

The Salem Witch Trials: A Story of Patriarchy, Persecution and Misogyny

The Salem Witch Trials of 1692 tell us so much about how women have been targeted throughout history.

It’s hard to imagine that the sleepy, bucolic New England town of Salem, Massachusetts, was once known for atrocity, paranoia, and murder. Driving along its winding roads, the proclaimed Witch City has no shortage of shops offering spell castings and divination, potions, herbs, and pendulums. A Bewitched statue commemorates the filming of the iconic 1960s show; the official Salem Witch Museum features mannequin reenactments; and the Salem police logo even features a witch riding a broomstick. At All Hallows Eve, you can see eager tourists dressed in pointy black hats, and scores of Sanderson Sisters look-alikes.

These joyful scenes are a far cry from 1692, when mass hysteria and collective paranoia led to the wrongful imprisonment of more than 150 innocent Salem residents, including a four-year-old child, and the execution of 19 victims — most of whom were women. Their crime was witchcraft.

So what happened? How did we get from there to here? It turns out the Salem Witch Trials were just one small example of a phenomenon that spanned continents and centuries: targeting women as a corrupting force and persecuting them for perceived societal ills.

“From a sociocultural perspective,” says journalist Heather Greene, author of Lights, Camera, Witchcraft, “accusations of witchcraft are a weapon thrown at women.”

“It’s not only a derogatory label that’s associated with women, it’s also a term that’s been used to define the ‘evil aspects’ of femininity. And that comes from Malleus Maleficarum [a 15th-century handbook written by Johann Sprenger and Heinrich Kraemer] — on how to figure out if someone was a witch, how to find them, out them, and how to kill them,” Greene explains.

In 1630, the Massachusetts Bay Colony was an early English settlement consisting mostly of Puritan refugees. Salem was slated to be its “shining city, a beacon on the hill,” says Emerson W. Baker, a professor of history at Salem State University and author of A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience. It was meant to be a Christian utopia, one that the rest of the world would look upon as an example of harmony and peace.

But even the Pilgrims found the Puritans too strict in their ways. “Puritans were seeking their own version of religious freedom. They were a pretty intolerant lot — freedom for themselves to practice and worship God as they saw fit. It was really a religious colony, a religious experiment,” Baker says. And they had been fighting for their way of life for years before coming to America.

Maureen MacLeod, an assistant professor of history at Mercy College, agrees: “[The Puritans were] pushed from England, Holland, then they’re pushed again from England, and then they go to Massachusetts,” she says. “There’s a lot of mental anguish that comes with being pushed from multiple countries for your beliefs. It’s really fascinating — they’re coming for this religious freedom, but the Puritans are religiously intolerant.”

It came down to control: In the wake of their own persecution, this God-fearing, patriarchal society was determined to preserve its way of life and belief system at any cost.

In 1689, a new reverend named Samuel Parris came to town and became Salem Village’s first ordained minister. According to Smithsonian magazine, he wasn’t well liked due to his “rigid ways and greedy nature,” and quarreling began among the villagers. Mysteriously, in 1692, the reverend’s 9-year-old daughter, Elizabeth (aka Betty), and 11-year-old niece, Abigail, began having fits. These included “violent contortions and uncontrollable outbursts of screaming.” A local doctor diagnosed them with “bewitchment,” and soon after other young girls in the village began exhibiting similar behaviors. When questioned, the girls accused three women for causing their afflictions: Sarah Good (a middle-aged beggar woman), Tituba (an Indigenous Caribbean woman who was a slave in the Parris household), and Sarah Osborne (a widowed elderly woman).

Under pressure for her life and likely beaten into submission by Parris, Tituba ultimately “confessed” to the crime. “The Devil came to me and bid me serve him,” she allegedly said. She described the Devil appearing as a “hog and sometimes like a great dog”; a “thing with a head like a woman with two legs and wings”; a hairy creature; a red rat and black rat; and a tall man in black clothes with white hair. She also confessed to riding on sticks with the children. In spring 1692, all three women were imprisoned on suspicion of witchcraft and “afflicting” the young girls; over the next year, more than 150 people would be imprisoned for witchcraft.

The “witch craze” of those days has little to do with modern witchcraft or paganism. For starters, contemporary iterations do not typically involve a devil figure in the Christian sense. “Even though the idea of [the Devil] isn’t in paganism, we have to think of evolutionary ideas of religion,” MacLeod says. “Catholicism definitely [has] this idea of a polar opposite of good and evil. In Protestantism, the whole idea is to make sure you get into heaven: If it is deemed not ‘good,’ then you’re being pulled into the negative direction with the Devil. And it’s a scare tactic. It evolved within Christianity, within Catholicism early on," she adds.

In the 17th century, it was believed the Devil could give witches — read: women — supernatural or spiritual powers in exchange for their service and loyalty. In essence, this was a genuinely dangerous moral panic that mixed class, religion, gender, and fantastical imaginings.

“In the witch-hunting era, blaming the Devil for death, disease, disaster, or misfortune was an easy sell," explains writer and educator Kristen J. Solleé, author of Witch Hunt. "Any belief, practice, or behavior that didn’t align with prevailing Christian doctrine could be deemed satanic.”

After Tituba’s confession, more villagers came forward with accusations of witchcraft and bewitchment, leading to more imprisonments. Sarah Good’s four-year-old daughter, Dorothy, was also imprisoned for nearly five months before being released. “You had mothers accusing daughters, grandmothers accusing grandmothers, neighbors accusing neighbors, people accusing ministers of being witches,” says Baker. “It turns out that in most cases of witchcraft across most cultures, usually three fourths of the victims are women. In fact, it’s even more one-sided than that because most of the men who are accused are either relatives of those women or men who will stand up to defend those women.”

The first to be convicted was Bridget Bishop, a 60-year-old woman who was hanged in June 1692 on what later became known as Gallows Hill. Five others were executed a month later. Minister Cotton Mather and his father, Increase Mather (who was president of Harvard at the time), implored the court to not allow the use of “spectral evidence” in the trials, saying “it were better that 10 suspected witches should escape than one innocent person be condemned,” yet 19 innocents were murdered.

Contrary to widespread misbelief, the victims were not burned at the stake — they were either hanged, tortured, or died in prison. Giles Corey, a 71-year-old man, refused to enter either a guilty or innocent plea to the court; as a punishment, heavy stones were pressed against him until he perished.

It wasn’t until 1702 that the court declared the witch trials unlawful. “It was such a fall from grace. The people who settled Massachusetts came with such high, idealistic, unattainable expectations of what life would be like and the godly community they would build," Baker says. "I think the shock of that downfall, with the witch trials, was something that people here never forgot and were never really [able] to forgive themselves for.”

As it turns out, witch hunts were nothing new. The Salem trials, tragic though they were, pale in comparison to what happened elsewhere. “We know that during the so-called great age of witch hunts, between roughly 1400 and the American Revolution, about 100,000 people were tried as witches in Europe and its colonies, and half of them were executed," Baker says. "This was a huge phenomenon that [went] on for centuries. In some witch hunts, 1,000 to 2,000 people died over a period of a couple years.”

Solleé says there were many factors that combined to spur witchcraft accusations throughout Europe in those years, including “instances of plague, war, and famine, with crop yields impacted by the climate change of the Little Ice Age. You also have the invention of the printing press, which allowed treatises on witches, the Devil, and supernatural evil to spread more widely.”

Women were seen, according to biblical doctrine, as weaker vessels and therefore more susceptible to evil and Satan’s wiles, explains Baker. “Going back to the biblical teachings where Eve [was] fashioned from a rib of Adam, women were considered to be inferior to men," he adds. "It almost sticks in my throat to even say that today, but this was the belief in the 17th century.”

Solleé also highlights the role of gender in witch hunts, noting that “70-80% of those accused of witchcraft in early modern Europe and North America were women.” She continues, “Most of the accused witches in Salem were middle-aged women, which aligns with what happened in Europe, where most accused witches were over 40, which coincides with waning fertility, the criterion upon which a woman’s worth was predominately judged back then. By the time the incident in Salem occurred, you had centuries of myths, folktales, and historical records linking the demonic figure of the witch with women and femininity.” Furthermore, "in 17th-century Christian thought, female bodies and minds were thought to be more inclined to vice and more susceptible to Satan. So the woman-as-witch mythos was deeply entrenched in Western culture by 1692.”

It’s worth pointing out that the accusers were also young girls, another fascinating aspect of the Salem story. MacLeod says it’s hard to know if their claims were made out of childish manipulation, genuine physical pain, or something else entirely. She posits that perhaps the accusers were just being “little manipulative girls…[perhaps] going through puberty.” The historical record is limited and “we can only know what has been written” — again, largely by men.

In 1976, an article by psychologist Linnda Caporael published in Science suggested the delusions were possibly brought on by ergot poisoning from contaminated rye bread, which can cause hallucinations, convulsions, and delirium. The condition used to be common, according to Caporael. The girls’ symptoms fit with the side effects of this fungal poisoning.

Solleé points to a more sociological alternative, noting that some historians believe the girls “were exacting revenge for perceived familial and community slights.” Says Solleé, “From my perspective, internalized misogyny was a reality back then just as it is now. Witch hunts have never simply been about men in power versus powerless women — the gender politics are much more complicated. You can look at many witch hunts as attempts to regulate and maintain the established gender hierarchy in a given community, which is to say, the patriarchy.”

The endless opportunities for interpretation mean that we are still utterly fascinated by the Salem trials today. They remain embedded in our cultural consciousness, appearing in pop-culture films such as Hocus Pocus, Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, and even on an episode of The Simpsons.

“It’s part of our legacy,” Greene says. “Even if Salem wasn’t really all that interested in promoting it until much later, the witch trials were first history — our history — and then it sort of became a mythology. It developed another side: It became a symbol. If it’s set in Salem, from the moment the credits begin, [you know] it’s going to be a film about witches, whether it’s a horror movie or a rom-com.”

That rings true, as does the more unsettling suggestion that different forms of witch hunting are still with us today. “Every generation has its Salem," Baker says. "Until we as a society get rid of rushing to judgement, scapegoating, trying to blame people because they’re different than us — until we get rid of that, we’re going to have some version of a witch hunt.”

“In the witch-hunting era, blaming the Devil for death, disease, disaster, or misfortune was an easy sell," explains writer and educator Kristen J. Solleé, author of Witch Hunt. "Any belief, practice, or behavior that didn’t align with prevailing Christian doctrine could be deemed satanic.”

Witchcraft was seen as a direct threat to the community's religious order, and anyone suspected of practicing it was seen as a threat. The accused witches were often portrayed as being in league with the devil and capable of supernatural feats. They were said to have made deals with the devil, cast spells on people, and caused harm to others through their witchcraft. These depictions were fueled by the testimonies of the accusers, who claimed to have witnessed these acts firsthand. The trials themselves were highly sensationalized, with public hearings and dramatic confrontations between the accused and their accusers. The accused witches were subjected to intense interrogations and often coerced into confessing their supposed crimes. These confessions were often used as evidence against them in court. As the trials progressed, the hysteria surrounding witchcraft grew. More and more people were accused, and the trials became a frenzy of accusations and executions. The accused witches were seen as dangerous individuals who needed to be eliminated to protect the community from their supposed dark powers. The depictions of witchcraft in Salem were shaped by the religious and societal beliefs of the time. The accused witches were seen as agents of evil, capable of causing harm and destruction. The trials and executions that took place during this time were a tragic reminder of the dangers of fear, superstition, and mass hysteria..

Reviews for "Witchcraft and Politics: The Intersection of Power and Fear in Salem"

1. Emily - 2 out of 5 stars - I found "Depictions of witchcraft in Salem" to be incredibly disappointing. While I was initially excited to learn more about the history of witchcraft in Salem, this book fell short in its execution. The writing was dry and lacked any real depth or analysis. Additionally, the author seemed to rely heavily on previously published works without contributing any new or unique perspectives. Overall, I was hoping for a more engaging and informative read, but unfortunately, this book did not deliver.

2. James - 1 out of 5 stars - "Depictions of witchcraft in Salem" was a complete waste of time. The author's research is questionable at best, with many historical inaccuracies and unfounded claims. I was constantly frustrated by the lack of evidence and critical analysis provided. The entire book felt like a regurgitation of commonly known facts, offering nothing new or insightful. I would not recommend this book to anyone interested in learning about the topic, as there are far better resources available that provide accurate and well-researched information.

3. Sarah - 2 out of 5 stars - As a history enthusiast, I was excited to delve into the subject of witchcraft in Salem, but "Depictions of witchcraft in Salem" left much to be desired. The author's writing style was monotonous and failed to capture my attention. Additionally, the book lacked a clear structure, making it difficult to follow the author's arguments and analysis. I was hoping for a more engaging and comprehensive exploration of this topic, but unfortunately, this book fell short. I would recommend looking for alternative sources for a more satisfying and informative read on witchcraft in Salem.

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