The Real Causes and Unfortunate Consequences of the Salem Witch Trials: from Ancient History to Today
Oh, man, this one got out of hand. This week, I brought it all the way back to the beginning, to our roots, to the one that started it all: my Groupthink episode on the Salem Witch Trials. But this time, I’m taking it all the way back to the beginning of humans’ obsession with witches.
A history lesson! I can hardly wait.
Shhhhh, it’s important.
Historically speaking, witches don’t exist. Obviously. And I don’t mean this to invalidate self-identifying witches who practice paganism of any kind - reclaiming the term witch and using it to describe your spiritual practice is valid, especially when that was really all the original witches were.
Most of them were simply healers who used natural remedies and spiritual connection as their profession. They were known to make house calls, deliver babies, help with infertility, and cure impotence. According to one scholar, “What’s interesting about them is that they are so clearly understood to be positive figures in their society. No king could be without their counsel, no army could recover from a defeat without their ritual activity, no baby could be born without their presence.”
A couple theories reign supreme on how this was perverted over time: one is that Indo-Europeans brought a culture that valued aggression and Gods of War that overshadowed and pushed out female worship. Another is that, when Hebrews settled in the Middle East, their canonization of Judaism solidified male-centric creation and monotheism and eventually outlawed witchcraft as heretical and dangerous.
In fact, some of the earliest examples of witchcraft in “media” were actually featured in the Hebrew bible, once in 1 Samuel when King Saul asked the Witch of Endor to summon the spirit of the prophet Samuel to help him win a war with the Philistines. The story is posed as a tragedy, wherein Samuel’s spirit foretells the deaths of all of Saul’s sons and Saul himself. The next day, all Saul’s sons are killed in battle and Saul commits suicide.
There are other more direct condemnations of witchcraft in the Old Testament, like that famous one “thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” and warnings against witchy activities like divination, chanting, dead-people summoning, etc.
Were witches only from the Bible?
Not at all! In the Classical era, we saw early instances of winged harpies and “strixes” – which were like harpies except they ate babies.
In Ancient Greece, we saw Circe, an enchantress goddess, and her niece Medea, who were both kinds of witches. Circe could turn her enemies into pigs, and Medea had ties to the goddess Hekate which could be where she gained her magical powers.
All this broiled together to create what are now central traits of “witchliness”, but the classic witch aesthetic iconography was influenced most by an early Renaissance artist named Albrecht Dürer.
Sounds German.
That’s because he was German.
Dürer is almost single handedly responsible for what would become the stereotypes of a witch’s appearance with two extremely famous sketches, which I’m going to send you now. The first is The Four Witches (1497), which features four young, beautiful women. This version of a witch is seductive, almost a taboo fantasy, her physical charms capable of enthralling men.
The Four Witches, Dürer, 1497
The other piece, titled Witch Riding Backwards on a Goat (c 1500), featured an old and hideous witch riding, as the title suggests, a goat (the symbol of the devil) backwards with her hair flowing the wrong way to suggest her magical influence over physics.
Witch Riding Backwards on a Goat, Dürer, c. 1500
Scholars theorize that Dürer got this particular interpretation from another artist, Andrea Mantegna’s engraving of Envy, who “was emaciated, (I love this) her breasts were no longer good, which is why she was jealous of women, and she attacked babies and ate them. She often had snakes for hair.”
Close up from Battle of the Sea Gods, Andrea Mantegna, c. 1485
Yeesh, lots of bad press for witches.
You have no idea.
During this Inquisition era, the church (and, by consequence, most laypeople) spread stories of witches worshipping in large nighttime revelries, where various “social ills” were performed, including pre- or extramarital sex, naked dancing, and gluttonous feasting on the flesh of babies. Some people at the time even believed that the Devil himself would appear at the climax of the festival and participate in an unbridled orgy with all the witches in attendance.
As a result, there was a sudden influx of brutally misogynistic witchcraft imagery, and artists were able to take advantage of the invention of the printing press to spread their material more widely than ever before. So, this new obsession was both fueled and perpetuated by the printing revolution. Neat, huh?
Bringing us to the topic at hand, all that was a long history that spans several centuries, but witch trials weren’t really practiced for that entire period. In fact, witch trials as we understand them today didn’t really pick up in Europe until the 1300s. Now, something really important happened in Europe in the 1300s - do you remember what it was?
Oh no…
You guessed it! The Black Plague had just finished killing a third of Europe by 1351, so people were in a state of constant fear, stress, and bitterness at the state of things. I wonder what that’s like.
Now, you may remember in one of our most recent minisodes about freak accidents, I talked about how Mass Psychogenic Illness can manifest in large populations during times of inordinate stress - and that those manifestations are usually influenced by the cultures of the people experiencing them. So, it’s no surprise that the people of Europe began looking, most likely unconsciously, for things upon which to blame the world’s sudden misfortune. Most of them tended to land, predictably enough, on the Devil and his worshippers. At this point, the Catholic church’s “Holy Inquisition” had been established since the 12th century.
I know what the Inquisition, but my friend doesn’t…
For those who aren’t familiar, the Inquisition was a branch established by the Catholic church to identify and punish heresy throughout Europe and, eventually, the Americas. Its existence spanned for hundreds of years, and it became infamous for the severity of its tortures and its persecution of Jews and Muslims. The most well-known iteration of the Inquisition was the Spanish Inquisition… I bet you weren’t expecting that.
Anyway, it had been torturing folks who didn’t perfectly subscribe to Catholicism for decades. But it was the renewed fear of Satan and his occult that sparked the Inquisition’s efforts to root out and punish “the non-Catholic causes of mass death,” which, in this case, includes so-called witches.
Enter a very famous book, called Malleus Maleficarum (1487), or The Hammer of Witches, written very possibly but inconclusively by Inquisitors named Jacob Springer and Henrik Kramer.
Sounds difficult to pronounce.
It is! To hear me try really hard to say it, listen to the podcast!
The official description I saw for this book was that it was written to “assist witch hunters in the gruesome task of diagnosing and punishing so-called witches, who as women were sexually vulnerable and therefore easy prey for the Devil.” A quote translated directly from the manuscript itself sums that attitude up pretty well: “What else is a woman but a foe to friendship?” wrote the monks. “They are evil, lecherous, vain, and lustful. All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is, in women, insatiable.”
To get into the Malleus Maleficarum in more detail, because I do think it’s important to how things ramped up from “witches are bad and heretical” to the actual regular burning of humans:
The book has three sections: the first part presents arguments against the existence of witches and then refutes those arguments to solidify that anyone who claims witches aren’t real is actually a hindrance to justice and probably guilty themselves.The ultimate conclusion is that witchcraft must be real because the Devil is real. Witches entered into a pact with Satan to allow them the power to perform harmful magical acts, thus establishing an essential link between witches and the Devil.
The second outlines what witchcraft actually looks like, from physical descriptions, to practices, and finally prevention of possession by the devil and remedies for those who have been “bewitched” by witches’ spells. Interestingly, it says that it is mostly witches, as opposed to the Devil, who recruit other witches, by meddling in the life of respectable women which then forces her to consult the knowledge of a witch. A witch might also introduce young maidens to “tempting young devils.”
The third part is a legal guide on prosecuting witches. The section offers a step-by-step guide for conducting a witch trial, from the initiating of the process and assembling accusations, to the interrogation (including torture) of witnesses (you heard that right - witnesses, not just the accused), and the formal charging of the accused. Fun fact: Women who didn’t cry during their trials were automatically believed to be witches and convicted.
Some other fun tidbits in the book: It actively encourages both torture - with instruments such as thumb and leg screws, head clamps, and the iron maiden - and straight up lying to get people to confess to witchcraft. For instance, telling the accused that they won’t be executed if they confess, then executing them anyway when they finally do. Even worse, it warns torturers not to make eye contact with their victims, as the witch’s “evil powers” might cause the torturer to develop feelings of compassion. Yowch.
As per this book, a witch could only be a witch if they:
Entered into a pact with the Devil (and had turned away from Christianity),
Had sexual relations with the Devil,
Practiced aerial flight for the purpose of attending rituals
Attended assemblies presided over by Satan himself (at which initiates entered into the pact, and incest and promiscuous sex were engaged in by the attendees),
Practiced maleficent magic,
Slaughtered babies.
So this was the playbook for witch hunts?
Exactly.
Within a century of when they began, witch hunts in Europe were common and reached a peak in the 1600s. Most of the accused were executed by burning at the stake or hanging. Unsurprisingly, single women, widows and other women on the margins of society were especially targeted.
France and Germany had it the worst - there was a town in Germany where magistrates decided most of their citizens were possessed by Satan and sentenced hundreds of people (mostly women) to death. There are some artist renditions, like the one I’m sending you now, that provide a glimpse into what townspeople were witnessing with disturbing regularity. Take note of the number of people chained to those pyres. Apparently there were some towns that, once the Inquisition had finished with them, had no women left at all. When this period ended at the beginning of the 18th century, an estimated 60,000 people in Europe had been killed as witches, with well over 100,000 people tried.
So, not to be that guy, but can we talk about Salem now?
YES! And it’ll make so much more sense now! As you might remember from all those many (3) years ago, there were actually two Salems in Massachusetts: Salem Town and Salem Village.
Salem Town was a commerce-oriented port community, which eventually became the modern city we know today. As most port-cities were, it was relatively prosperous and filled with mostly wealthy merchants. The village was about 10 miles inland from the town, and it had a population of around 500 that consisted mostly of far-less-wealth farmers. A good way to sum up the relationship between Salem Town and Salem Village is with the two leading families of the village: the Porters and the Putnams.
The Porters were well-connected, super wealthy, and had strong ties to the Town. The Putnams, on the other hand, were like the Lorax: they spoke for the trees- I mean, the villagers. The Putnams’ main concern was the village’s autonomy, which the Porters weren’t huge fans of. Arguments, physical fights, and litigation concerning land ownership were incredibly common. So, we have class and power conflict.
Around the time witch hunts and trials began winding down in Europe, a few important things were happening in the “New World” colonies. As the backdrop for the colonies’ attitude toward witchcraft, in 1604, a law called the Witchcraft Act was drafted and served as the primary English law for witchcraft, deeming it a felony. A witch convicted of a minor offense could be imprisoned for a year; a witch found guilty twice was sentenced to death.
Then, in 1641, a legal treatise called the Body of Liberties was written that said, in line with the book of Exodus, anyone found to be a witch would be executed.
There was also a temporary suspension of the Massachusetts Bay Colony Charter after some political and religious tension between the colony and England. A new governor and a new charter from England arrived in 1692, but the General Court did not have enough time to create any laws, so the legal system in the colonies was in flux that whole time.
Socially speaking, there had also been a recent influx of refugees from King William’s War with French colonists. There had been a recent smallpox epidemic, also the constant perceived threat of attack from the indigenous population.
And none of this event accounts for the Puritans’ religious and cultural beliefs. For example, if the crops failed, the Devil may have played a role. Those beliefs played a central role in the way the community self-governed. All this, coupled with the growing rivalry with Salem Town and between the leading families created the perfect blend of suspicion, resentment, fear, and misery to spark what happened next.
That’s very foreboding.
Enter: Samuel Parris, a merchant from Boston by way of Barbados who failed out of Harvard and was instead appointed as the pastor of Salem Village’s Congregational church. He also brought along his wife, three children, his niece, and two enslaved people he had abducted from Barbados, who he called John Indian and Tituba.
By the way, as a note on this: there are arguments for both ideas that John and Tituba were of African heritage or Indigenous Caribbean heritage. Unfortunately, we’ll never know. We won’t even know these people’s real names, because their history and ancestry were stolen from them. But the point remains the same: if Tituba and John were originally from Barbados, then they were abducted from their ancestral home. If not, they were initially abducted and sold to work on plantations in Barbados and then once again displaced from the country they’d lived and worked in since childhood to work as enslaved people in Massachusetts.
Anyway, Samuel Parris wasn’t a universally popular man. He was strictly orthodox Puritan, so he was known to deliver fire-and-brimstone sermons and force non-members out of the church before Communion was observed. He was also arguably greedy, depending on your view of things, as he insisted multiple times on pay raises and complete ownership of the church.
Gotcha, we don’t like Samuel Parris.
One day, in early 1692, something strange began to happen to Samuel Parris’ daughter, Betty, and his niece, Abigail Williams. See, Parris had noticed shortly before that the girls had been playing with what appeared to be fortune telling materials. They claimed that they had looked into a crystal ball and seen a coffin, and soon after started suffering fits of convulsions, strange noises that were interpreted as speaking in tongues, biting and pinching sensations all over their skin, and, weirdly enough, throwing things.
In February, unable to account for their behaviour medically, the local doctor, William Griggs, took the next logical course of action and blamed it on the occult. Possibly fearing retribution, Tituba baked the girls a “witch cake,” which was made using Abigail and Betty’s urine and fed to a dog to try to find the supernatural perpetrator of the girls’ illness. Obviously, nothing happened, but the cake’s existence alone outraged Parris, who saw it as a blasphemous act, and focused more blame on Tituba.
Samuel wasn’t about to let it go, so he laid the pressure on to get Abigail and Betty to tell him who had cursed them. Their accusations didn’t just target Tituba, though - they also accused two community outcasts who didn’t regularly attend church: Sara Good, a beggar, and Sarah Osbourne, an elderly disabled woman who had been labelled a pariah for her romantic relationship with an indentured servant.
What happened to those initially accused?
On March 1, magistrates arrived in the village. Their names were John Hawthorne and Jonathan Corwin, and their sole job was to conduct an investigation into the claims of witchcraft in the community. Sara Good and Sarah Osbourne both immediately denied the claims (though Sara Good threw Osbourne under the bus). But when the investigation moved on to Tituba, who had already been deposed in prison before the trial, things changed. Dramatically.
At the beginning of her interrogation, she also held fast to her innocence. But when questions began changing to veiled accusations, so too did Tituba’s answers change to affirm the magistrate’s perspective on reality.
When the magistrate asked her, as he did with the other two accused, who had employed her to hurt Abigail and Betty, she told them that she had been visited by the devil, who she described initially as a tall man with white hair. She said he had ordered her to hurt the girls and threatened to kill her if she didn’t. She described Satan’s accomplices and their animal companions, their magical powers, etc. She implicated both Sara Good and Sarah Osbourne, who she claimed had animal companions themselves and had signed the devil’s book. She even claimed that one of them had visited her while the family was praying and made her deaf for a time so she couldn’t hear Scripture, though she couldn’t tell which woman it was.
Essentially, Tituba would deliver exactly what she thought Magistrate Hawthorne wanted to her when he questioned her. If he asked her what the devil looked like, she would provide a long, vivid description. If he asked her for details on rituals or incantations, she had seen them firsthand. As an enslaved woman, it’s not hard to imagine Tituba feared for her life if she appeared defiant to the white men of the court. She spoke broken English as a second language, had been conditioned by her various kidnappers to be subservient and accommodating, and now she was being asked to affirm the court’s firm belief in witchcraft. How could she say no? So with every retelling the story got more detailed, more lush, more outlandish - and the village hung on every word.
It didn’t have the effect she likely wanted, though. After three days of vivid testimony, she suddenly cried out and claimed that she could no longer see - the Devil had blinded her for revealing his secrets to the court. After her testimonies came to an end, she spent 15 months in prison, never again asked to testify. Her words, however, would shape the remainder of the trials. She had given them all the evidence they needed that they were on the right track. Her story went viral, but her words were twisted by the various testimonies of other accused people. Some who decided to give confessions were said to have rescinded their initial testimonies to align more closely to Tituba’s.
And that sparked the fire, huh?
You guessed it. That was March 1. By May 27, Governor William Phips established a Special Court that was called the Court of Oyer and Terminer, which translates to “to hear” and “to determine” from French. Since, as I mentioned earlier, their laws were in flux at this point and they didn’t have a solid court system, Phips and the judges of the new court accepted “Spectral Evidence” as compelling evidence of guilt of witchcraft. Spectral Evidence, by the way, means that they were willing to accept dreams, visions, fits, etc. as undeniable proof of demonic presence.
Over those first few months, other girls and young women began experiencing fits similar to Abigail and Betty’s. Some notable names were Ann Putnam, Jr.; her mother; her cousin, Mary Walcott; and the Putnams’ servant, Mercy Lewis. As time wore on, many of the accused proved to be enemies of the Putnams, and Putnam family members and in-laws would end up being the accusers in dozens of cases. At that point, the accused witches were no longer just outsiders and outcasts but rather upstanding members of the community, beginning with a woman named Rebecca Nurse, an older woman who had some influence in the community.
Rebecca Nurse has got to be the most angelic name I’ve ever heard.
This story is particularly sad to me. Rebecca Nurse had everything going for her when it came to escaping conviction: she was known throughout both Salem Village and Salem Town to be an upstanding citizen, an overall pious woman with no history of crime, scandal, or wrongdoing to speak of. She was also 71, so the idea that this village elder would suddenly turn to devil worship was unthinkable within the community.
The accusations came from Edward and John Putnam on the grounds that a few babies in their family had died while being delivered by Nurse. Of course, she denied the accusations outright, and the public immediately came to her defense. There were petitions for her release, statements on her behalf - even people who didn’t really care for her spoke up in her defense.
But when her trial began in June (mind you, three months after she had been arrested), members of the Putnam family who claimed to be bewitched by Nurse began writhing and crying out even while she was testifying, claiming that Nurse was actively hurting them with her devil powers. Or something. And, since spectral evidence was allowed, it was taken as at least somewhat convincing.
In the end, the jury ruled Nurse to be not guilty. But the accusers (and the few who believed Nurse to actually be a witch) weren’t happy - they went to the judges and demanded a retrial. The judges, in turn, met with the jury and reviewed the case. One of them brought up a weird point, and the jury asked for another chance to make their decision.
On the stand, the jury referred to a moment in the original trial where Rebecca Nurse had called another accused witch named Deliverance Hobbs “one of her company.” As a 71 year old woman, Rebecca Nurse couldn’t hear the question, and her confused response seemed to be an admission of guilt. Later, when her kids told her what the question had been, she said she’d simply meant that Hobbs was also accused of being a witch just like herself. But it was too late; the jury changed their verdict. They sentenced her to death, and she was executed by hanging.
Good lord, that doesn’t sound very fair.
That’s pretty much how all the trials worked, except they were worse. Nurse was at least given a partial benefit of the doubt because she was overwhelmingly loved in the community. But most of the accused were social outcasts who had little to no social support. So for them, it went something like this:
The trials were presided over by William Stoughton, the colony’s lieutenant governor, and the court consisted of seven judges. Anyone accused of witchcraft was forced to represent themselves in court - no one was allowed legal counsel.
For the most part, the judges took accusations to be self-evident. Very rarely could anyone convince judges that the accusations were false - especially when spectral evidence was interpreted to be the most damning. All the accusers had to do was writhe and yell in court, and they’d pretty much always secure a guilty verdict.
Those who confessed in court were usually spared execution. I mentioned it earlier, but the Puritan take on this was that God would punish them when they died, but that they had repented for their sins on Earth.
However, anyone who defended themselves ended up being martyred by their own senses of fairness and justice. Unsurprisingly, even those who viewed the witch trials as monstrous stayed silent for the duration for fear they would be targeted as well - which perpetuated this cycle of abuse, torture, and silence.
Of those who were executed, some notable ones were:
Bridget Bishop—who had been accused and found innocent of witchery some 12 years earlier—was the first of the defendants to be convicted. On June 10 she was hanged on what became known as Gallows Hill in Salem Village.
George Burroughs, who had served as a minister in Salem Village from 1680 to 1683, was deposed from his new home in Maine and accused of being the witches’ ringleader. Despite being nowhere near Massachusetts at the time, he, too, was convicted and, along with four others, was hanged on August 19. As he stood on the gallows, he recited the Lord’s Prayer perfectly—something no witch was thought to be capable of doing.
Giles Corey is super famous for his accusation and subsequent execution. Upon being accused of witchcraft and refusing to entertain the spectacle by entering a plea, he was subjected to “strong and hard punishment” and pressed beneath heavy stones for two days until he died. The only thing he said while they executed him was, famously, “More weight.”
How long did this go on?
This continued for months on end and even spread to 24 neighboring villages, and eventually people started to get tired of the constant barrage of violence and death.
On October 3, Cotton Mather’s father, Increase Mather, an influential minister and the president of Harvard at the time, condemned the use of spectral evidence and instead favoured direct accusations. Not exactly a stunning condemnation of the witch trials, but a step in a direction, I guess.
On October 29, Governor Phips finally stepped in, ordering a halt to the proceedings of the Court of Oyer and Terminer because the accusations had spread to include his own wife. He then established a Superior Court of Judicature to replace the Court of Oyer and Terminer, which was instructed not to admit any spectral evidence.
Trials resumed in January and February, but, without spectral evidence, only 3 were convicted of the 56 indicted. And even those convicted, along with everyone held in custody before their trials went to court, were eventually pardoned by Governor Phips by May 1693 as the whole bloody business came to an end.
All told, 20 people had been executed, and another four had died in custody. Those executed were Bridget Bishop, Sarah Good, Rebecca Nurse, Susannah Martin, Elizabeth Howe, Sarah Wildes, Martha Carrier, John Willard, Reverend George Burroughs, George Jacobs, Sr., John Proctor, Mary Eastey, Martha Corey, Giles Corey, Ann Pudeator (pyoodeeator), Samuel Wardwell, Mary Parker, Alice Parker, Wilmot Redd and Margaret Scott. Those who died in jail were Lydia Dustin, Ann Foster, Sarah Osborne, and Roger Toothaker.
Also, as an aside, this doesn’t account for the other deaths and traumas endured by those who survived. Sara Good, for example, was jailed while pregnant, and her four year old daughter was brought into custody and interrogated for two weeks. After those two weeks of malnutrition and no heat supply, which on its own is impressive for a four year old, she finally broke and told the investigators what they wanted to hear. Sara Good was convicted based on that confession, and when Sara gave birth in prison, the baby was left to die.
As for the original players in the start of the trials, Tituba was actually pardoned because she confessed and she disappeared from history. The theory is that she went North with whoever paid her bail, but at the very least she was able to escape with her life.
Surprisingly, there is no historical documentation suggesting why Abigail Williams virtually disappeared from the court hearings after they started. And what’s more, there are no records indicating what happened to Abigail after the events of 1692. It is suggested that she never married and died a single woman, but, without any evidence, we can’t know for sure.
Tell me Parris got his comeuppance.
After public outcry for his complicity in the deaths of the accused, Samuel Parris was later dismissed from his job in 1697, after years of quarrels and lawsuits between him and his parishioners. Parris then moved away from Salem with Betty and his family, serving as a preacher in Dunstable and then Sudbury, where Betty lived until adulthood. In 1710, Betty married a shoemaker, named Benjamin Baron, and had four children. She passed away at her home in Sudbury, MA on March 21, 1760.
All in the span of one year. Damn.
So, once all this is said and done, the question is constantly begged: why? And, as you’d probably guess, no one has the whole answer - and we’ll never really know, since we weren’t there. But here are some theories:
For a while scholars thought it was some combination of asthma, encephalitis, Lyme disease, epilepsy, child abuse, delusional psychosis, or convulsive ergotism (which was a theory for the dancing plague from our last minisode). None of that is terribly convincing and has been pretty much ruled out because of the behavioral aspects, though.
Many experts still believe that misogyny played a big role in the whole thing, that women were targeted for being outspoken or a social variant. While there’s probably something to be said for the fact that the judges and political leaders were all men and the majority of victims were women who were inherently questioned by those men, a fair number of men were also executed. Not even animals were safe, as two dogs were executed for their alleged involvement in witchcraft. So, misogyny may have been a player in how some trials went, but I certainly don’t think it was the primary motivator.
So what do you think happened?
For my part, I think it was spurred by a few things I mentioned earlier. First, Salem village was a social breeding ground for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder; they had gone through recent famines and plagues, political tension, immigration crises, conflict with the indigenous people, and largely had no outlet for those stressors other than religion.
Second, there’s historical precedence that shows witch trials are more common after a period of especially cold weather. An academic named Oster wrote that “the most active period of the witchcraft trials (mainly in Europe) coincides with a period of lower-than-average temperature known to climatologists as the ‘little ice age.' From Oster’s piece: “The colder temperatures increased the frequency of crop failure, and colder seas prevented cod and other fish from migrating as far north, eliminating this vital food source for some northern areas of Europe.” She also posed that “people would have searched for a scapegoat in the face of deadly changes in weather patterns.” As it turns out, the year 1692 fell right in the middle of a 50-year-long cold spell from 1680 to 1730. And this isn’t a difficult jump; many people at the time believed that witches were able to control the weather and destroy crops. So when people suffered from poor harvests and bad weather, some may have concluded that it was all the work of witches.
So, we have this lightning rod for dysfunction given the stressors the villagers had to deal with. And then there are the children: Abigail and Betty, the girls who started it all, ages 9 and 11.
At the time, the Puritan culture dictated that children were rarely, if ever, allowed to play. Their time was primarily spent working or studying the Bible, so kids didn’t have the liberty of blowing off steam in the midst of all this social pressure. Simply put, they were bored.
And bored kids find things to entertain themselves with.They had access to Tituba, who had her own cultural practices and beliefs that were foreign, interesting, and taboo to Abigail and Betty, so they started playing with forbidden non-Christian paraphernalia.
Now, I don’t know if you remember what it was like doing sneaky, forbidden things as a nine year old. But what I remember is feeling intense guilt about it for a long time afterward, and sometimes even confessing to my crimes before I was caught because I just wanted the other shoe to drop. Guilt is a huge stressor, especially on kids, and they had also been raised to believe that their behavior was actually dangerous to them spiritually.
In response to that stress and fear, they began to behave oddly. As it so happens, their bouts of odd behaviour also mirrored that of children in a Boston family who in 1688 were believed to have been bewitched. A description of that family had been written by Congregational minister Cotton Mather in his book Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcraft and Possessions (1689). And it just so happens that this book was in Samuel Parris’ small library when the hysteria began. Just saying.
The hysteria experienced by the girls may then, in turn, have triggered a collective delusion, or Mass Psychogenic Illness, among the villagers that made them believe witches were in their midst.
So it was a cascade of psychological opportunities that just so happened to come together and spiral out of control. I don’t think any one person here was necessarily malicious (though one could make individual assessments of the Putnams for their political motivations). I think that these were deeply distressed people living in what I can only assume to be a nightmare scenario of constant survival-mode. Given the right pushes in certain directions, their conditioning and mental states led them to act in the only way they thought logical at the time - and no one was willing to interrogate those decisions after the fact because there were immense spiritual consequences if they were wrong about being wrong.
That sounds like a terrifying Catch 22.
Which brings me to a small aside that relates to that last point. Today, Salem is a tourist city. A lot of folks who own businesses there capitalize on the novelty of being “the place where a couple dozen people were executed for witchcraft.” There’s a particular aesthetic I’m talking about where people buy shirts that say “I got stoned in Salem” and it’s a ha-ha funny weed joke. Or they pose with props that relate to the executions. Or they visit because they’re drawn to the place where these people died and regard them as martyrs for the witch/wiccan community today.
Candidly, the local folks think that this whole aesthetic is tasteless and disturbing - especially merchandise that trivializes real people’s deaths. They’re even more annoyed by the various museums and so-called experts who blatantly provide misinformation to make money or manipulate the story for their own agendas.
For example, the Salem Witch Museum uses the story as a symbol for feminism and the iron fist of the patriarchy. For example, their narrative in a huge timeline that spans a wall starts with Jesus’ crucifixion and then draws an implicit connection between that event and the witch burnings of the 1600s. They also focus heavily on Wicca and claim it to be an ancient religion, when the reality of the matter is that Wicca was created and popularized in the 50s. So much attention is paid to the practice of Wicca that it’s easy to miss the one-off mentions that the executed victims of the Salem Witch Trials were actually Christians who were entirely unfamiliar with anything remotely similar to Wicca.
They refer to a wax statue of the Wicked Witch of the West, and, completely ignoring that the green skin was only popularized iconography after The Wizard of Oz in 1939 because they wanted to show off their use of Technicolor, the docent apparently mused aloud about whether witches’ skin was green because of the herbs they used. During that visit, a witch visitor said that she saw the green skin as symbolism for the bruises intolerant Christian men left on peaceful witches for their independent thought.
Wanting to create an experience more aligned with the history of the trials to help people think critically about the mentality of those who sentenced innocent people to death, a woman named Kristina Stevick created the Cry Innocence project, which was a mock trial where audience members were encouraged to participate. Stevick refers to some of the common misconceptions about the trials as the motivation behind the project: she wanted to show people the ridiculous variety of circumstances that drove these people to violence. Having seen the reductive and ahistorical interpretations of the Salem Witch Trials, Stevick encourages an interaction with this content rooted in understanding and actual history: “What I would hope is that a person who has had 45 minutes to flirt with a 17th-century English mindset … would understand why a person might accuse somebody of witchcraft.”
That’s a great goal!
It doesn’t always work. She recalled in an article a middle school group who had booked a show and went in with all these super incorrect ideas about how the trials went and the motivations behind the decisions. Apparently, their responses to questions and their commentary during the performance was notably distressing to the actors. And when Stevick spoke to the teacher after the fact, the teacher was shocked that the Cry Innocence project wanted to go into so much detail. She had figured that this would be a good experience to teach the kids the evils of the patriarchy.
So, we find ourselves in an interesting position. We have people like Stevick, who genuinely want to help folks understand what really happened so we can avoid repeating these mistakes. And then there are people who want to twist the narrative to fit their own agendas because it makes for an easier explanation for the chaos. In a nutshell, the Salem Witch Museum and others who adopt their mentality are examples of the exact mindset that perpetuated the witch panic to begin with.
Well, that’s disheartening.
It doesn’t necessarily have to be. When I relistened to the first recording of this topic, I was shocked to hear just how cynical and judgmental I was in my response. Sure, I had come away with slightly more grace for how delicate the human brain is, but I still had reservations about how someone “normal” could resort to this level of violence to protect their own versions of the truth. There was also talk about whether some people were just sociopaths who desperately seek out negative attention, which we were noncommittal about at the time.
Today, I vehemently disagree with that idea. Evil doesn’t exist. Suffering exists, and people who create suffering (i.e. all of us) exist, but evil on the core level like you read about in stories isn’t real. Human violence doesn’t come out of a vacuum, it’s a result of subconscious conditioning, maladaptive survival tactics, and very real fear. From today’s perspective, of course it’s insane to think about turning your neighbor in as a witch - because, by and large, we don’t believe in witches like these anymore.
For the Puritans, witches’ existence was a given. It wasn’t even in question. Not believing in devil worshipping women who eat babies was on the fringe! So how were they supposed to respond when they saw things affirming their beliefs and fears in real time?
They would have needed an outside voice they’d listen to.
And that leads to my final points. In the original episode, Olivia said that we were on a tipping point of violence in our country. That was in 2018, and so far she’s proven to be right on a scale that, personally, I hoped would never happen. We’re watching people who are so terrified of fallacies, manufactured fears sold to them by politicians and business owners, that they’re willing to literally kill people in an attempted coup. Not because they’re evil, but because they’re deeply ill and find it easier to believe stories than the truth.
But we also said that by the time someone becomes a fanatic, that it’s too late to help them. To a certain, nuanced degree, I agree that, when violence has overtaken a group, it becomes dangerous to try to reason with them. At that point, disagreement is a direct threat to them and they’ll likely take out their panic on you.
But I also now know that there are ways we can help deprogram fanatics - regardless of what their belief is. Whether it’s spiritual, religious, political, or whatever doesn’t matter. What matters is how they believe it - they’re idealogues who feel they have absolute say over what is and isn’t the truth. Once they have reached a conclusion, they reject the idea that they ever have to interrogate that conclusion again.
That idea is intoxicating. It feels much safer to a traumatized person to insist that you’re always right. It’s easier to blindly believe something illogical or harmful than to admit that your entire worldview is garbage. So, instead of dealing with reality, they reject it outright in favor of comfort. They become addicted to the feelings of security and superiority.
We, as witnesses to fanatics’ behavior, can aim to understand them as sick individuals who are addicted to their harmful behavior. It doesn’t make it right, but it does put us in a better position to prioritize healing over pointing and laughing.
How do we do it?
I read an article from a man who was a QAnon believer, Trump supporter, and Neo-Nazi named Tony McAleer who eventually completely changed his identity and became an advocate for social justice and deprogramming. In his article, he defines fanatics as people whose identities are combined with their ideologies. When someone criticizes their beliefs, it’s tantamount to attacking their core identity. And once their ego kicks in, they aren’t likely to absorb anything else from the conversation.
Instead, he advocates for building a human connection with them. Which is, uh, hard. Because these people actively create harm wherever they go - it’s part of their ideologies. We certainly can’t ask oppressed and disenfranchised groups to do the work of befriending people who actively want them dead.
I understand how reaching out and relating to fanatics seems far too soft a reaction to people who actively abuse others, and that’s largely because we’ve been conditioned into a punitive society (that’s a conversation for another time). But people who join hate groups because they have an unmet need and they feel listened to and seen by the people in those hate groups. They feel supported, like they have a community regardless of how abusive that community is.
When we listen to fanatics and truly acknowledge their grievances - whether we agree with them or not - we show those fanatics that other people can be their friends. That they don’t have to seek out violence to fulfill their emotional needs. These people are deeply ill and feel a very real sense of entitlement, loss, or deprivation. To us, the complaints may be stupid and based in privilege and out of touch with reality, but they don’t and can’t see that.
Why can’t they just choose to get help?
Because we’re being conditioned by society to practice logical reasoning in a way that’s counter to our biology. Our brains naturally are wired to reason in groups of 5-7, not alone and certainly not with thousands of faceless people on the Internet.
The idea goes like this: I can research and find out all the best arguments for my own bias, and someone else can do the same for their bias, and then we argue until one of us is proven right. That way, none of us have to do the work of finding all the answers.
But our individualist society rejects that level of cooperation. Instead, it demands us to know everything at all times. And, if we don’t, we run the risk of social isolation, judgement, the loss or damage of everything humans value. Our society is sick right now, and it’s because we’re constantly being told not to trust or work with one another.
Quoting Tony McAleer: “If we are to be the compassionate society that we claim to want to be, then great courage is in order to be the change we seek. We are beyond the time when society’s divisions can be solved from within our comfort zone. We must be prepared to listen without judgment, without the need to be right, in order to arrive at understanding—the foundation from which reconciliation, healing, and eventually, unity can emerge. Compassion—when married with healthy boundaries and consequences that holds people accountable—can be a powerful equation.”
Sources:
https://www.biography.com/news/salem-witch-trials-facts
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/unraveling-mysteries-tituba-salem-witch-trials-180956960/
https://allthatsinteresting.com/salem-witch-trials-causes
https://historyofmassachusetts.org/betty-parris-first-afflicted-girl-of-the-salem-witch-trials/
https://salemwitchmuseum.com/2012/01/16/what-happened-to-abigail-williams/
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/12870/tituba-early-american-witch
https://www.britannica.com/event/Salem-witch-trials
https://allthatsinteresting.com/history-of-witches
https://www.history.com/topics/folklore/history-of-witches
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20140925-where-do-witches-come-from