what caused the salem witch trials thesis

What Caused the Salem Witch Trials?

Looking into the underlying causes of the Salem Witch Trials in the 17th century.

In February 1692, the Massachusetts Bay Colony town of Salem Village found itself at the center of a notorious case of mass hysteria: eight young women accused their neighbors of witchcraft. Trials ensued and, when the episode concluded in May 1693, fourteen women, five men, and two dogs had been executed for their supposed supernatural crimes.

The Salem witch trials occupy a unique place in our collective history. The mystery around the hysteria and miscarriage of justice continue to inspire new critiques, most recently with the recent release of The Witches: Salem, 1692 by Pulitzer Prize-winning Stacy Schiff.

But what caused the mass hysteria, false accusations, and lapses in due process? Scholars have attempted to answer these questions with a variety of economic and physiological theories.

The economic theories of the Salem events tend to be two-fold: the first attributes the witchcraft trials to an economic downturn caused by a “little ice age” that lasted from 1550-1800; the second cites socioeconomic issues in Salem itself.

Emily Oster posits that the “little ice age” caused economic deterioration and food shortages that led to anti-witch fervor in communities in both the United States and Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Temperatures began to drop at the beginning of the fourteenth century, with the coldest periods occurring from 1680 to 1730. The economic hardships and slowdown of population growth could have caused widespread scapegoating which, during this period, manifested itself as persecution of so-called witches, due to the widely accepted belief that “witches existed, were capable of causing physical harm to others and could control natural forces.”

Salem Village, where the witchcraft accusations began, was an agrarian, poorer counterpart to the neighboring Salem Town, which was populated by wealthy merchants. According to the oft-cited book  Salem Possessed by Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Village was being torn apart by two opposing groups–largely agrarian townsfolk to the west and more business-minded villagers to the east, closer to the Town. “What was going on was not simply a personal quarrel, an economic dispute, or even a struggle for power, but a mortal conflict involving the very nature of the community itself. The fundamental issue was not who was to control the Village, but what its essential character was to be.” In a retrospective look at their book for a 2008 William and Mary Quarterly Forum , Boyer and Nissenbaum explain that as tensions between the two groups unfolded, “they followed deeply etched factional fault lines that, in turn, were influenced by anxieties and by differing levels of engagement with and access to the political and commercial opportunities unfolding in Salem Town.” As a result of increasing hostility, western villagers accused eastern neighbors of witchcraft.

But some critics including Benjamin C. Ray have called Boyer and Nissenbaum’s socio-economic theory into question . For one thing –the map they were using has been called into question. He writes: “A review of the court records shows that the Boyer and Nissenbaum map is, in fact, highly interpretive and considerably incomplete.” Ray goes on:

Contrary to Boyer and Nissenbaum’s conclusions in Salem Possessed, geo graphic analysis of the accusations in the village shows there was no significant villagewide east-west division between accusers and accused in 1692. Nor was there an east-west divide between households of different economic status.

On the other hand, the physiological theories for the mass hysteria and witchcraft accusations include both fungus poisoning and undiagnosed encephalitis.

Linnda Caporael argues that the girls suffered from convulsive ergotism, a condition caused by ergot, a type of fungus, found in rye and other grains. It produces hallucinatory, LSD-like effects in the afflicted and can cause victims to suffer from vertigo, crawling sensations on the skin, extremity tingling, headaches, hallucinations, and seizure-like muscle contractions. Rye was the most prevalent grain grown in the Massachusetts area at the time, and the damp climate and long storage period could have led to an ergot infestation of the grains.

One of the more controversial theories states that the girls suffered from an outbreak of encephalitis lethargica , an inflammation of the brain spread by insects and birds. Symptoms include fever, headaches, lethargy, double vision, abnormal eye movements, neck rigidity, behavioral changes, and tremors.  In her 1999 book, A Fever in Salem , Laurie Winn Carlson argues that in the winter of 1691 and spring of 1692, some of the accusers exhibited these symptoms, and that a doctor had been called in to treat the girls. He couldn’t find an underlying physical cause, and therefore concluded that they suffered from possession by witchcraft, a common diagnoses of unseen conditions at the time.

The controversies surrounding the accusations, trials, and executions in Salem, 1692, continue to fascinate historians and we continue to ask why, in a society that should have known better, did this happen? Economic and physiological causes aside, the Salem witchcraft trials continue to act as a parable of caution against extremism in judicial processes.

Editor’s note: This post was edited to clarify that Salem Village was where the accusations began, not where the trials took place.

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• Bill of Rights Institute - The Salem Witch Trials
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• GlobalSecurity.org - 1692 - The Witches of Salem
• The National Endowment for the Humanities - The Salem Witch Trials According to the Historical Records
• Ancient Origins - Salem Witch Trial hysteria and the courageous stance of Giles Corey
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On May 27, 1692, after weeks of informal hearings accompanied by imprisonments, Sir William Phips (also spelled Phipps), the governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony , interceded and ordered the convening of an official Court of Oyer (“to hear”) and Terminer (“to decide”) in Salem Town . Presided over by William Stoughton, the colony’s lieutenant governor, the court consisted of seven judges. The accused were forced to defend themselves without aid of counsel . Most damning for them was the admission of “spectral evidence”—that is, claims by the victims that they had seen and been attacked (pinched, bitten, contorted) by spectres of the accused, whose forms Satan allegedly had assumed to work his evil. Even as the accused testified on the witness stand, the girls and young women who had accused them writhed, whimpered, and babbled in the gallery, seemingly providing evidence of the spectre’s demonic presence. Those who confessed—or who confessed and named other witches—were spared the court’s vengeance , owing to the Puritan belief that they would receive their punishment from God. Those who insisted upon their innocence met harsher fates, becoming martyrs to their own sense of justice . Many in the community who viewed the unfolding events as travesties remained mute, afraid that they would be punished for raising objections to the proceedings by being accused of witchcraft themselves.

On June 2 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 . On July 19 five more convicted persons were hanged, including Nurse and Good (the latter of whom responded to her conviction by saying that she was no more a witch than the judge was a wizard). George Burroughs, who had served as a minister in Salem Village from 1680 to 1683, was summoned from his new home in Maine and accused of being the witches’ ringleader. 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—raising doubts about his guilt for some in attendance, though their protests were refuted, most notably by Mather , who was present. (Mather’s role in the trials in general was complex, as he at various times seemingly both condoned and questioned aspects of the proceedings.) On September 22 eight more convicted persons were hanged, including Martha Corey, whose octogenarian husband, Giles , upon being accused of witchcraft and refusing to enter a plea, had been subjected to peine forte et dure (“strong and hard punishment”) and pressed beneath heavy stones for two days until he died.

As the trials progressed, accusations spread to individuals from other communities , among them, Beverly , Malden , Gloucester , Andover , Lynn , Marblehead , Charlestown , and Boston . On October 3 Cotton Mather’s father, Increase Mather , an influential minister and the president of Harvard, condemned the use of spectral evidence and instead favoured direct accusations:

The devil never assists men to do supernatural things undesired. When, therefore, such like things shall be testified against the accused party, not by specters, which are devils in the shape of persons either living or dead, but by real men or women who may be credited, it is proof enough that such a one has that conversation and correspondence with the devil as that he or she, whoever they be, ought to be exterminated from among men. This notwithstanding I will add: It were better that ten suspected witches should escape than that one innocent person should be condemned.

On October 29, as the accusations of witchcraft extended to include his own wife, Governor Phips once again stepped in, ordering a halt to the proceedings of the Court of Oyer and Terminer. In their place he established a Superior Court of Judicature, which was instructed not to admit spectral evidence. Trials resumed in January and February, but of the 56 persons indicted, only 3 were convicted, and they, along with everyone held in custody, had been pardoned by Phips by May 1693 as the trials came to an end. Nineteen persons had been hanged, and another five (not counting Giles Corey ) had died in custody.

In the years to come, there would be individual and institutional acts of repentance by many of those involved in the trials. In January 1697 the General Court of Massachusetts declared a day of fasting and contemplation for the tragedy that had resulted from the trials. That month, Samuel Sewall , one of the judges, publicly acknowledged his own error and guilt in the proceedings. In 1702 the General Court declared that the trials had been unlawful. In 1706 Ann Putnam, Jr. , apologized for her role as an accuser. Twenty-two of the 33 individuals who had been convicted were exonerated in 1711 by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which also paid some £600 to the families of the victims. In 1957 the state of Massachusetts formally apologized for the trials. It was not until 2001, however, that the last 11 of the convicted were fully exonerated.

The abuses of the Salem witch trials would contribute to changes in U.S. court procedures, playing a role in the advent of the guarantee of the right to legal representation, the right to cross-examine one’s accuser, and the presumption of innocence rather than of guilt. The Salem trials and the witch hunt as metaphors for the persecution of minority groups remained powerful symbols into the 20th and 21st centuries, owing in no small measure to playwright Arthur Miller ’s use in The Crucible (1953) of the events and individuals from 1692 as allegorical stand-ins for the anticommunist hearing led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare of the 1950s.

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The Witches of Salem

In 1692, the Massachusetts Bay Colony executed fourteen women, five men, and two dogs for witchcraft. The sorcery materialized in January. The first hanging took place in June, the last in September; a stark, stunned silence followed. Although we will never know the exact number of those formally charged with having “wickedly, maliciously, and feloniously” engaged in sorcery, somewhere between a hundred and forty-four and a hundred and eighty-five witches and wizards were named in twenty-five villages and towns. The youngest was five; the eldest nearly eighty. Husbands implicated wives; nephews their aunts; daughters their mothers; siblings each other. One minister discovered that he was related to no fewer than twenty witches.

The population of New England at that time would fit into Yankee Stadium today. Nearly to a person, they were Puritans. Having suffered for their faith, they had sailed to North America to worship “with more purity and less peril than they could do in the country where they were,” as a clergyman at the center of the crisis later explained. On a providential mission, they hoped to begin history anew; they had the advantage of building a civilization from scratch. Like any oppressed people, they defined themselves by what offended them, which would give New England its gritty flavor and, it has been argued, America its independence.

New England delivered greater purity but also introduced fresh perils. Stretching from Martha’s Vineyard to Nova Scotia and incorporating parts of present-day Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Maine, it perched on the edge of a wilderness. That was a precarious position well before 1692, when the colony teetered between governments, or, more exactly, as a Boston merchant put it, “between government and no government.” The settlers unseated their royal governor in a deft 1689 military coup. They had endured without a charter for eight years.

From the start, the colonists tangled with that American staple, the swarthy terrorist in the back yard. Without a knock or a greeting, four armed Indians might appear in your parlor to warm themselves by the fire, propositioning you, while you cowered in the corner with your knitting. You could return from a trip to Boston to find your house in ashes and your family taken captive. The Indians skulked, they lurked, they flitted, they committed atrocities—and they vanished. “Our men could see no enemy to shoot at,” a Cambridge major general lamented.

King Philip’s War, a fifteen-month contest between the settlers and the Native Americans, had ended in 1676. It obliterated a third of New England’s towns, pulverized its economy, and claimed ten per cent of the adult male population. Every Bay Colony resident lost a friend or a relative; all knew of a dismemberment or an abduction. By 1692, another Indian war had begun to take shape, with a series of grisly raids by the Wabanaki and their French allies. The frontier had recently moved to within fifty miles of Salem.

From the pulpit came reminders of New England’s many depredations. The wilderness qualified as a sort of “devil’s den”; since the time of Moses, the prince of darkness had thrived there. He was hardly pleased to be displaced by a convoy of Puritans. He was in fact stark raving mad about it, preached Cotton Mather, the brilliant twenty-nine-year-old Boston minister. What, exactly, did an army of devils look like? Imagine “vast regiments of cruel and bloody French dragoons,” Mather instructed his North Church parishioners, and they would understand. He routinely muddied the zoological waters: Indians comported themselves like roaring lions or savage bears, Quakers like “grievous wolves.” The French, “dragons of the wilderness,” completed the diabolical menagerie. Given the symbiotic relationship of an oppressed people and an inhospitable landscape, it was from there but a short step to a colluding axis of evil.

The men who catalogued those dangers—who could discern a line of Revelation in a hailstorm—protected against them, spiritually and politically. They assisted in coups and installed regimes. Where witches were concerned, they deferred to the Biblical injunction: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” Exodus commands. The most literate men in Massachusetts in 1692 were also the most literal. Among them, few probed the subject of witchcraft as intently as did the lanky, light-haired Mather, who had entered Harvard at eleven and preached his first sermon at sixteen. He knew that the hidden world was there somewhere. He would relinquish no tool to exhibit it.

Mather shared the North Church pulpit with his illustrious father, Increase Mather. The president of Harvard, Increase was New England’s best-known and most prolific minister. (His son would eventually eclipse him on both counts, publishing four hundred and thirty-seven books, twenty-six of them in the next four years.) The elder Mather was returning from England that spring with a new charter. The fruit of three years’ negotiation, it promised at last to deliver Massachusetts from chaos. The colonists awaited it in jittery suspense; all manner of rumor circulated as to its terms. So unreliable was the news that a monarch could be dead one minute and alive the next.

In isolated settlements, in smoky, fire-lit homes, New Englanders lived very much in the dark, where one listens more acutely, feels most passionately, and imagines most vividly, where the sacred and the occult thrive. The seventeenth-century sky was crow black, pitch-black, Bible black, so black that it could be difficult at night to keep to the path, so black that a line of trees might freely migrate to another location, or that you might find yourself pursued by a rabid black hog, leaving you to crawl home on all fours, bloody and disoriented. Even the colony’s less isolated outposts felt their fragility. A tempest blew the roof off one of the finest homes in Salem as its ten occupants slept. A church went flying, with its congregation inside.

A visitor exaggerated when he reported that New Englanders could “neither drive a bargain, nor make a jest, without a text of Scripture at the end on it,” but he was not far off. If there was a book in the house, it was the Bible. The early modern American thought, breathed, dreamed, disciplined, bartered, and hallucinated in Biblical texts and imagery. St. John the Baptist might well turn up in a land dispute. A prisoner cited Deuteronomy 19:19 in his own defense. When a killer cat came flying in your window—taking hold of your throat and crushing your chest as you lay defenseless in your bed—you scared it away by invoking the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. You also concluded that your irascible neighbor had paid a call, in feline form.

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Human frailty was understood to account for inclement weather: teeth chattering, toes numb, the Massachusetts Puritan had every reason to believe that he sinned flamboyantly. He did so especially during the arctic winter of 1691, when bread froze on Communion plates, ink in pens, sap in the fireplace. In tiny Salem village, the Reverend Samuel Parris preached to a chorus of rattling coughs and sniffles, to the shuffling of cruelly frostbitten feet. For everyone’s comfort, he curtailed his afternoon sermon of January 3, 1692. It was too cold to go on.

Weeks later, word got out that something was grievously wrong in the Parris household. The minister’s eleven-year-old niece and nine-year-old daughter complained of bites and pinches by “invisible agents.” Abigail and Betty launched into “foolish, ridiculous speeches.” Their bodies shuddered and spun. They went limp or spasmodically rigid. They interrupted sermons and fell into trances. Neither appeared to have time for prayer, though until January both had been perfectly well behaved and well mannered. At night they slept like babies.

In 1641, when the colonists established a legal code, the first capital crime was idolatry. The second was witchcraft. “If any man or woman be a witch, that is, has or consults with a familiar spirit, they shall be put to death,” read the Massachusetts body of laws. Blasphemy came next, followed by murder, poisoning, and bestiality. In the years since, New England had indicted more than a hundred witches, about a quarter of them men. The first person to confess to having entered into a pact with Satan, a Connecticut servant, had prayed for his help with her chores. An assistant materialized to clear the ashes from the hearth and the hogs from the fields. The servant was indicted in 1648 for “familiarity with the devil.” Unable to resist a calamity, preternatural or otherwise, Cotton Mather disseminated an instructive account of her compact.

In 1688, four exemplary Boston children, the sons and daughters of a devout Boston stonelayer named John Goodwin, suffered from a baffling disorder. “They would bark at one another like dogs, and again purr like so many cats,” noted Mather, who observed Goodwin’s family and wrote of their afflictions in “Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcraft and Possessions” the following year. (The 1689 volume was a salute to his father’s “Illustrious Providences,” a grab bag of apparitions and portents, published five years earlier.) The Goodwin children flew like geese, on one occasion for twenty feet. They recoiled from blows of invisible sticks, shrieked that they were sliced by knives or wrapped in chains. Jaws, wrists, necks flew out of joint. Parental reproof sent the children into agonies. Chores defied them. But “nothing in the world would so discompose them as a religious exercise,” Mather reported. Thirteen-year-old Martha could read an Oxford compendium of humor, although she seized up when handed a volume he deemed “profitable and edifying,” or one with the name Mather on the cover.

To observe her symptoms more closely, Mather that summer took Martha Goodwin into his home. She cantered, trotted, and galloped about the household on her “aeriel steed,” whistling through family prayer and pummelling anyone who attempted it in her presence—the worst house guest in history. She hurled books at Mather’s head. She read and reread his pages on her case, lampooning their author. The sauciness astonished him. “And she particularly told me,” Mather sputtered, four years before the Salem trials, “that I should quickly come to disgrace by that history.”

The cause of Martha’s afflictions was identified soon enough. The witch was the mother of a neighborhood laundress. On the stand, the defendant was unable adequately to recite the Lord’s Prayer, understood to be proof of guilt. She was hanged in November, 1688, on Boston Common.

Samuel Parris, the Salem minister, would have known every detail of the Goodwin family’s trials from Mather’s much reprinted “Memorable Providences.” The book included the pages Martha wildly ridiculed. The “agitations, writhings, tumblings, tossings, wallowings, foamings” in the parsonage were the same, only more acute. The girls cried that they were being stabbed with fine needles. Their skin burned. One disappeared halfway down a well. Their shrieks could be heard from a distance.

Through February, Parris fasted and prayed. He consulted with fellow-clergymen. With cider and cakes, he and his wife entertained the well-wishers who crowded their home. They prayed ardently, gooseflesh rising on their arms. They sang Psalms. But when the minister had had enough of the “odd postures and antic gestures,” the deranged speeches, when it became clear that Scripture would not relieve the girls’ preternatural symptoms, Parris called in the doctors.

In 1692, a basic medical kit looked little different from an ancient Greek one, consisting as it did of beetle’s blood, fox lung, and dried dolphin heart. In plasters or powders, snails figured in many remedies. Salem village had one practicing physician that winter. He owned nine medical texts; he could likely read but not write. His surgical arsenal consisted of lances, razors, and saws. The doctor who had examined a seizing Groton girl a generation earlier initially diagnosed a stomach disorder. On a second visit, he refused to administer to her further. The distemper was diabolical in origin.

Whoever examined Abigail and Betty arrived at the same conclusion. “The evil hand” came as no surprise; the supernatural explanation was already the one on the street. The diagnosis likely terrified the girls, whose symptoms deteriorated. It may have gratified Reverend Parris. Witchcraft was portentous, a Puritan favorite. Never before had it broken out in a parsonage. The Devil’s appearance was nearly a badge of honor, further proof that New Englanders were the chosen people. No wonder Massachusetts was troubled by witches, Cotton Mather exulted: “Where will the Devil show most malice but where he is hated, and hateth most?” The New England ministry had long been on the lookout for the apocalypse, imminent since the sixteen-fifties. The Book of Revelation predicted that the Devil would descend accompanied by “infernal fiends.” If they were about, God could not be far behind.

Soon the twelve-year-old daughter of a close friend of Parris’s began to shudder and choke. So did the village doctor’s teen-age niece. A creature had followed her home from an errand, through the snow; she now realized that it had not been a wolf at all. The girls named names. They could see the culprits clearly. Not one but three witches were loose in Salem.

What exactly was a witch? Any seventeenth-century New Englander could have told you. As workers of magic, witches and wizards extend as far back as recorded history. The witch as Salem conceived her materialized in the thirteenth century, when sorcery and heresy moved closer together. She came into her own with the Inquisition, as a popular myth yielded to a popular madness. The western Alps introduced her to lurid orgies. Germany launched her into the air. As the magician molted into the witch, she also became predominately female, inherently more wicked and more susceptible to satanic overtures. An influential fifteenth-century text compressed a shelf of classical sources to make its point: “When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil.” As is often the case with questions of women and power, elucidations here verged on the paranormal. Though weak willed, women could emerge as dangerously, insatiably commanding.

The English witch made the trip to North America largely intact. She signed her agreement with the Devil in blood, bore a mark on her body for her compact, and enchanted by way of charms, ointments, and poppets, doll-like effigies. Continental witches had more fun. They walked on their hands. They made pregnancies last for three years. They rode hyenas to bacchanals deep in the forest. They stole babies and penises. The Massachusetts witch disordered the barn and the kitchen. She seldom flew to illicit meetings, more common in Scandinavia and Scotland. Instead, she divined the contents of an unopened letter, spun suspiciously fine linen, survived falls down stairs, tipped hay from wagons, enchanted beer, or caused cattle to leap four feet off the ground. Witches could be muttering, contentious malcontents or inexplicably strong and unaccountably smart. They could commit the capital offense of having more wit than their neighbors, as a minister said of the third Massachusetts woman hanged for witchcraft, in 1656.

Matters were murkier when it came to the wily figure with six thousand years of experience, the master of disguise who could cause things to appear and disappear, who knew your secrets and could make you believe things of yourself that were not true. He turned up in New England as a hybrid monkey, man, and rooster, or as a fast-moving turtle. Even Cotton Mather was unsure what language he spoke. He was a pervasive presence, however: the air pulsed with his minions. Typically in Massachusetts, he wore a high-crowned hat, as he had in an earlier Swedish invasion, which Mather documented in his 1689 book. Mather did not mention the brightly colored scarf that the Devil wound around his hat. Like the Swedish devil’s gartered stockings or red beard, it never turned up in New England.

By May, 1692, eight Salem girls had claimed to be enchanted by individuals whom most of them had never met. Several served as visionaries; relatives of the ailing made pilgrimages to consult with them. They might be only eleven or twelve, but under adult supervision they could explain how several head of cattle had frozen to death, several communities away, six years earlier. In the courtroom, they provided prophetic direction, cautioning that a suspect would soon topple a child, or cause a woman to levitate. Minutes later, the victim’s feet rose from the floor. With their help, at least sixty witches had been deposed and jailed by the end of the month, more than the Massachusetts prisons had ever accommodated. Those who had frozen through the winter began to roast in the sweltering spring.

On May 27th, the new Massachusetts governor, Sir William Phips, established a special court to try the witchcraft cases. He assembled on the bench nine of the “people of the best prudence and figure that could be pitched upon.” At its head he installed his lieutenant governor, sixty-year-old William Stoughton. A political shape-shifter, Stoughton had served in five prior Massachusetts regimes. He had helped to unseat the reviled royal governor, on whose council he sat and whose courts he headed. He possessed one of the finest legal minds in the colony.

The court met in early June, and sentenced the first witch to hang on the tenth. It also requested a bit of guidance. During the next days, twelve ministers conferred. Cotton Mather drafted their reply, a circumspect, eight-paragraph document, delivered mid-month. Acknowledging the enormity of the crisis, he issued a paean to good government. He urged “exquisite caution.” He warned of the dangers posed to those “formerly of an unblemished reputation.”

In the lines that surely received the greatest scrutiny, Mather reminded the justices that convictions should not rest purely on spectral evidence—evidence visible only to the enchanted, who conversed with the Devil or with his confederates. Mather would insist on the point throughout the summer. Other considerations must weigh against the suspected witch, “inasmuch as ’tis an undoubted and a notorious thing” that a devil might impersonate an innocent, even virtuous, man. Mather wondered whether the entire calamity might be resolved if the court discounted those testimonies. With a sweeping “nevertheless”—a word that figured in every 1692 Mather statement on witchcraft—he then executed an about-face. Having advised “exquisite caution,” he endorsed a “speedy and vigorous prosecution.”

A month later, Ann Foster, a seventy-two-year-old widow from neighboring Andover, submitted to the first of several Salem interrogations. Initially, she denied all involvement with sorcery. Soon enough, she began to unspool a fantastical tale. The Devil had appeared to her as an exotic bird. He promised prosperity, along with the gift of afflicting at a glance. She had not seen him in six months, but her ill-tempered neighbor, Martha Carrier, had been in touch on his behalf.

At Carrier’s direction, Foster had bewitched several children and a hog. She worked her sorcery with poppets. Carrier had announced a Devil’s Sabbath in May, arranging their trip by air. There were twenty-five people in the meadow, where a former Salem village minister officiated. Three days later, from jail, Foster added a malfunctioning pole and a mishap to her account. The pole had snapped as the women flew, causing them to crash, Foster’s leg crumpling beneath her.

She appeared entirely coöperative, both in a jail interview with a minister and before her interrogators. The justices soon learned that Foster had failed to come clean, however. It seemed that she and Carrier had neither flown nor crashed alone on that Salem-bound pole: a third rider had travelled silently behind Foster. So divulged forty-year-old Mary Lacey, a newly arrested suspect, on July 20th. Foster had also withheld the details of a chilling ceremony. The Devil had baptized his recruits, dipping their heads in water, six at a time. He performed the sacrament in a nearby river, to which he had carried Lacey in his arms. On July 21st, Ann Foster appeared before the magistrates for the fourth time. That hearing was particularly sensational: Mary Lacey, who supplied the details missing from Foster’s account, was her daughter.

“Did not you know your daughter to be a witch?” one justice asked Foster. She did not, and seemed taken aback. Mary Warren, a pretty, twenty-year-old servant, helpfully chimed in, a less dramatic witness at Foster’s hearing than she appeared on other occasions, when blood trickled from her mouth or spread across her bonnet. Warren shared with the court what a spectre had confided in her: Foster had recruited her own daughter. The authorities understood that she had done so about thirteen years earlier. Was that correct? “No, and I know no more of my daughter’s being a witch than what day I shall die upon,” Foster replied, sounding as unequivocal as she had been on the details of the misbegotten Salem flight. A magistrate coaxed her: “You cannot expect peace of conscience without a free confession.” Foster swore that if she knew anything more she would reveal it.

At this, Mary Lacey was called. She berated her mother: “We have forsaken Jesus Christ, and the Devil hath got hold of us. How shall we get clear of this evil one?” Under her breath, Foster began to pray. “What God do witches pray to?” a justice needled. “I cannot tell, the Lord help me,” the befuddled old woman replied, as her daughter delivered fresh details of their flight to the village green and of the satanic baptism. Her mother, Lacey revealed, rode first on the stick.

Court officers removed the two older women and escorted Lacey’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Mary Lacey, Jr., into the room. Mary Warren fell at once into fits. At first, the younger Lacey was unhelpful. “Where is my mother that made me a witch and I knew it not?” she cried, a yet more disturbing question than the one posed in June, when a suspect wondered whether she might be a witch and not know it. Asked to smile at Warren without hurting her, Mary Lacey failed. Warren collapsed to the floor. “Do you acknowledge now that you are a witch?” Lacey was asked. She could only agree, although she seemed to be working from a different definition: a recalcitrant child, she had caused her parents plenty of trouble. She had, she insisted, signed no diabolical pact.

The ideal Puritan girl was a sterling amalgam of modesty, piety, and tireless industry. She was to speak neither too soon nor too much. She read her Scripture twice daily. Increase Mather warned that youths who disregarded their mothers could expect to “come to the gallows, and be hanged in gibbets for the ravens and eagles to feed upon them.” The attention to a youngster’s spiritual state intensified at adolescence, when children became simultaneously more capable of reason and less reasonable. Fourteen was the dividing line in law, for slander among other matters. One was meant then to embrace sobriety and to “put away childish things,” as a father reminded his Harvard-bound son.

The father was the master of the family, its soul, the governor of all the governed. He was often an active and engaged parent. He sat vigil in the sickroom. He fretted over his children’s bodies and souls. A majority of the bewitched girls had lost fathers; at least half were refugees from or had been orphaned by attacks in “the last Indian war.” Those absences were deeply felt. A roaring girl wrestled aloud with the demons who would assault her the following year: she was well aware that she was fatherless—how often did they need to remind her as much? But she was hardly an orphan. In a heated, one-sided conversation, observed and preserved by Cotton Mather, the seventeen-year-old admonished her tormentors, “I have God for my father and I don’t question but he’ll provide well for me.”

The justices reminded Mary Lacey, Jr., that if she desired to be saved by Christ she would confess. “She then proceeded,” the court reporter noted. She was more profligate with details than her mother or her grandmother had been. It was a hallmark of Salem that the younger generation—Cotton Mather included—could be relied on for the most luxuriant reports. It appeared easier to describe satanic escapades when an adolescent had already been told, or believed, that she cavorted with the Devil. The record allows a fleeting glimpse of Mary’s sense of herself. “I have been a disobed—” she began, after which the page is torn.

Following Mary’s testimony, her mother was returned to the room. The older woman had so often scolded that the Devil should fetch her away. Her wish had come true! Tears streaming down her face, the teen-ager now managed a spot of revenge: “Oh, mother, why did you give me to the Devil twice or thrice over?” Mary sobbed. She prayed that the Lord might expose all the witches. Officials led in her grandmother; three generations of enchantresses stood before the justices. Mary continued her rant: “Oh, grandmother, why did you give me to the Devil? Why did you persuade me and, oh, grandmother, do not you deny it. You have been a very bad woman in your time.” The three returned to jail as a clutch of warrants made their way to Andover.

By the end of July, it was clear that— with the help of a minister mastermind—the Devil intended to topple the Church and subvert the country, something he had never before attempted in New England. Certain patterns emerged as well. To cast aspersions on a bewitched girl, to visit one’s imprisoned spouse too regularly, was to risk accusation. It bordered on heresy to question the validity of witchcraft, the legitimacy of the evidence, or the wisdom of the court. The skeptic was a marked man. It could be wise to name names before anyone mentioned yours. It was safer to be afflicted than accused. Increasingly, you slept under the same roof, if not in the same bed, as your accuser.

Bewitched women choked with fits, whereas men—who stepped forward only once the trials had begun—tended to submit to paralyzing bedroom visits. Imputations proved impossible to outrun. The word of two ministers could not save an accused parishioner. Neither age, fortune, gender, nor church membership offered immunity; prominent men stood accused alongside homeless five-year-old girls. No one ever suffered afflictions without being able to name a witch. Many braced for a knock at the door.

The court met again early in August, when three men were convicted: George Jacobs, an elderly farmer; John Willard, a much younger one; and John Proctor, the first village man to have been accused. In Cotton Mather’s first Thursday sermon that month, he addressed the trial that all of Massachusetts awaited. Tipping his hand a little, he called once for compassion for the accused, twice for pity for the justices. They were, after all, up against the greatest sophist in existence. They labored to restore the innocent while excising the diabolical; it made for a hazardous operation. The following day, Mather wrote excitedly to an uncle in Plymouth. God was working in miracles. No sooner had they executed five witches—all impudently protesting their innocence—than God had dispatched the Andover witches, who offered “a most ample, surprising, amazing confession of all their villainies,” acknowledging the five executed that had been their confederates, and naming many more. They identified their ringleader, who came to trial that afternoon. “A vast concourse of people,” noted Mather, made their way to Salem for the event, his father among them.

The demonic mastermind was a minister in his early forties named George Burroughs. He had grown up in Maryland and graduated from Harvard in 1670, narrowly missing Samuel Parris. He was in his late twenties when he first arrived in Salem village, where he spent three contentious years. He was never ordained. Before and after that tenure, Burroughs served on the vulnerable Maine frontier. During a 1689 raid, he had joined in a seven-hour battle, waged in a field and an orchard. A veteran Boston militia captain lauded the Reverend for his unexpected role. The assault cost the settlers dearly; two hundred and fifty of them were killed or taken captive. Twice widowed, Burroughs retreated down the coast to Wells, eighty miles north of Boston. From a lice-infested garrison, he several times in the winter of 1692 appealed to the colonial authorities, who had withdrawn troops from the frontier, for clothing and provisions. The enemy lurked outside. They could not hold out for long.

Burroughs’s spectre had been terrifying Salem villagers since April, when he first choked the twelve-year-old daughter of the Parris stalwart. He nearly tore her to pieces, bragging afterward that he outranked a wizard—he was a conjurer. (Days later, he introduced himself with the same credentials to Parris’s niece, whom he also bewitched.) He had murdered several women and—evidently a secret agent, in the employ of the French and the Indians—dispatched a number of frontier soldiers as well. His mission was a frightful one, he informed the twelve-year-old: he who should have been teaching children to fear God had now “come to persuade poor creatures to give their souls to the Devil.” It was he who presided over the satanic Sabbaths.

Sixteen people had given evidence at Burroughs’s preliminary hearing. Nearly twice as many testified at his trial. Eight confessed witches revealed that he had been promised a kingship in Satan’s reign. Nine witnesses accused the short, muscular minister—a “very puny man,” in the estimation of Cotton Mather—of feats that would have taxed a giant. (Mather provided the sole surviving account of the trial, although we have no evidence that he ever entered the courtroom.) “None of us could do what he could do,” a forty-two-year-old Salem weaver recalled. He had attempted to lift a shotgun that Burroughs had fired but, even with both hands, could not steady the seven-foot weapon. Asked to account for his preternatural strength, Burroughs said that an Indian had assisted him in firing the musket. Lurking behind the testimony was what may have been the most pertinent charge against the former village minister: he had survived every Indian attack unscathed. Several of the bewitched had not been so lucky. Others who might have testified about the musket handling were dead.

The girls delivered up their own reports with difficulty, falling into testimony-stopping trances, yelping that Burroughs bit them. They displayed their wounds for court officials, who inspected the minister’s mouth. The imprints matched perfectly. Choking and thrashing stalled the proceedings; the court could do nothing but wait for the girls to recover. During one delay, Chief Justice Stoughton appealed to the defendant. What, he asked, did Burroughs think throttled them? The minister replied that he assumed it was the Devil. “How comes the devil then to be so loath to have any testimony born against you?” Stoughton challenged. A brainteaser of a question, it left Burroughs without an answer.

He was equally bewildered when ghosts began to flit about the overcrowded room. Some observers who were not bewitched saw them too. Directly before Burroughs, a girl recoiled from a horrible sight: she explained that she stared into the blood-red faces of his dead wives. The ghosts demanded justice. By no account an agreeable man, Burroughs managed to join abusive behavior at home with miraculous feats abroad. If those in the court did not know already that, as Mather had it, Burroughs “had been famous for the barbarous use of his two late wives, all the country over,” they did soon enough. He monitored their correspondences. He made them swear never to reveal his secrets. He berated them days after they had given birth. All evidence pointed to the same conclusion: he was a bad man but a very good wizard.

At one point, a former brother-in-law testified, Burroughs had vanished in the midst of a strawberry-picking expedition. His companions hollered for him in vain. They rode home to find that he had preceded them, on foot and with a full basket of berries. He had divined as well what was said about him in his absence. The Devil could not know as much, the brother-in-law protested, to which Burroughs replied, “My God makes known your thoughts unto me.” Was it possible, the chief justice suggested, that a devil had fitted Burroughs into some sort of invisibility cloak, so that he might “gratify his own jealous humor, to hear what they said of him”? Burroughs’s answer is lost; Mather deemed it not “worth considering.” The evidence dwarfed the objections. Burroughs does seem to have bungled his defense. He stumbled repeatedly, offering contradictory answers—a luxury afforded only the accusers. As for “his tergiversations, contra-dictions, and falsehoods,” Mather chided, “there never was a prisoner more eminent for them.”

Out of excuses, Burroughs extracted a paper from his pocket. He seemed to believe it a deal-clincher. He did not contest the validity of spectral evidence, as had others who came before the court, who did not care to be convicted for crimes they committed in someone else’s imagination. Instead, Burroughs, reading from the paper, asserted that “there neither are, nor ever were witches, that having made a compact with the Devil can send a Devil to torment other people at a distance.” It was the most objectionable thing he could have suggested. If diabolical compacts did not exist, if the Devil could not subcontract out his work to witches, the Court of Oyer and Terminer had sent six innocents to their deaths.

A tussle ensued. Stoughton—who had graduated from Harvard around the time Burroughs was born—recognized the lines at once. Burroughs had lifted them from the work of Thomas Ady. A leading English skeptic, Ady inveighed against “groundless, fantastical doctrines,” fairy tales and old wives’ tales, the results of middle-of-the-night imaginings, excessive drinking, and blows to the head. Though witches existed, they were rare. The Bible nowhere connected them with murder, or with imps, compacts, or flights through the air.

Ady believed that witches were a convenient excuse for the ignorant physician. He suggested that when misfortune struck we should not struggle to recall who had last come to the door. Burroughs denied having borrowed the passage, then amended his answer. A visitor had passed him the text in manuscript. He had transcribed it. He had already several times agreed with the justices that witches plagued New England. It was too late for such a dangerous gambit.

Early on the morning of August 19th, the largest throng to date turned out to inspect the first men whom Massachusetts was to execute for witchcraft. Martha Carrier joined them on the trip to the gallows. As the cart creaked up the hill, George Burroughs, George Jacobs, John Proctor, and John Willard insisted that they had been falsely accused. They hoped that the real witches would soon be revealed. They “declared their wish,” a bystander reported, “that their blood might be the last innocent blood shed upon that account.” They remained “sincere, upright, and sensible of their circumstances, on all accounts.” They forgave their accusers, the justices, the jury; they prayed they might be pardoned for their actual sins. Cotton Mather journeyed to Salem for the execution. Some of the condemned appealed to him in heartrending terms. Would he help them to prepare spiritually for the journey ahead? It is unclear if he did so or if he held the same hard line as the Salem town minister, who did not pray with witches.

Burroughs appears to have climbed the ladder first. With composure, he paused midway to offer what many expected to be a long-delayed confession. A wisp of his former self after fourteen weeks in a dungeon, he remained a contrarian. Perched above a crowd that included his former in-laws and parishioners, a noose around his neck, he delivered an impassioned speech. With his last breaths, Burroughs entrusted himself to the Almighty. Tears rolled down cheeks all around before he concluded with some disquieting lines. “Our Father, who art in Heaven,” Burroughs began, continuing, from the ladder, with a blunder-free recitation of the Lord’s Prayer—an impossible feat for a wizard, one that any number of other suspects had not managed. For a few moments, it seemed as if the crowd would obstruct the execution.

Minutes later, the minister dangled from a roughly finished beam. The life had not gone from his body when Mather, on horseback, pressed forward to smother the sparks of discontent. He reminded the spectators that Burroughs had never been ordained. (That was also true of others on the hill that day, but at least made the dying minister seem unorthodox.) What better disguise might the Devil choose on such an occasion, Mather challenged, than to masquerade as “an angel of light”? To the last, George Burroughs was condemned for his gifts. The protests quieted, as did the minister hanging in midair. He may have heard a portion of Mather’s remarks.

The execution of a beguiling, Scripture-spouting minister, protesting his innocence to the end, created nearly as much disquiet as had the idea that a beguiling, Scripture-spouting minister recruited for the Devil. It raised qualms about the court and on the bench. Several of the justices soon allowed that their methods had been “too violent and not grounded upon a right foundation”; were they to sit again, they would proceed differently. And it sent Cotton Mather to his desk.

On September 2nd, he wrote to the chief justice. Already, Mather claimed, he had done far more behind the scenes than Stoughton could possibly know. He had been fasting almost weekly through the summer for an end to the sulfurous assault. He felt that the Massachusetts ministers ought to support the court in its weighty, worthy task; none had sufficiently done so. He volunteered to step into the breach, to “flatten that fury, which we now much turn upon one another.” He had begun to write up a little something, “to set our calamity in as true a light as I can.” With this new book, he proposed to dispel any doubts that innocents were in danger, a passage he underlined. Mather promised to submit his narrative to Stoughton, so that “there may not be one word out of point.” Might the chief justice and his colleagues sign off on his endeavor, which would remind the people of their duties in such a crisis? In a singular valediction, Mather wished Stoughton “success in your noble encounters with Hell.”

Increase Mather, too, was at work on a book. As father and son wrote, confessions and concerns multiplied. Reports circulated that seven hundred witches preyed on Massachusetts. A prominent Bostonian carried his ailing child the twenty miles to Salem, the Lourdes of New England, to be evaluated by the village girls, incurring the wrath of Increase Mather. Was there “not a God in Boston,” he exploded, “that he should go to the Devil in Salem for advice?” Things were wholly out of hand when a Boston divine was up against an adolescent oracle. On October 4th, for the first time, seven suspects, all under the age of eighteen, went home on bail. Among the eldest was Mary Lacey, Jr., Ann Foster’s headstrong granddaughter.

“I found this province miserably harassed with a most horrible witchcraft,” Governor Phips wrote on October 12th, in his first report to London on the supernatural plague. He sounded as if he were writing from Sweden rather than from Boston, borrowing Mather’s details of that infestation. Grappling with the future of the court, which was scheduled to reconvene in two weeks, he insisted that the justices had always ruled with empirical evidence, but admitted that many now condemned their work. He placed a ban on witchcraft books. “I saw a likelihood of kindling an inextinguishable flame if I should admit any public and open contests,” Phips explained. That ban applied only to volumes that did not bear the name Mather on the cover. “The Wonders of the Invisible World” soon slipped into print, followed by Increase Mather’s “Cases of Conscience,” both artfully postdated to 1693.

“The Wonders of the Invisible World” was America’s first instant book. Garlanded in credentials, it advertised itself as having been “published by the special command of his Excellency the Governor.” Stoughton prefaced the volume, professing himself mildly surprised but immensely gratified by the work. What a timely account, so carefully and moderately composed! The chief justice was particularly grateful for Mather’s painstaking efforts, “considering the place that I hold in the Court of Oyer and Terminer, still laboring and proceeding in the trial of the persons accused and convicted for witchcraft.” Cotton Mather introduced the text with a tribute to his own courage. It was crucial that proper use be made of the “stupendous and prodigious things that are happening among us.” He did so only, he professed, because no one else volunteered. Weeks earlier, he had promised that his work would in no way interfere with that of two colleagues, whom he effectively cut off at the pass.

What constituted sufficient proof of witchcraft? Father and son disagreed. Fifty-three-year-old Increase explained in “Cases” that a “free and voluntary confession” remained the gold standard. When credible men and women could attest to these things, the evidence was sound. He had no patience for mewling teen-age girls. One did not accept testimony from “a distracted person or of a possessed person in a case of murder, theft, felony of any sort, then neither may we do it in the case of witchcraft.” He cast a vote for clemency: “I would rather,” he wrote, “judge a witch to be an honest woman than judge an honest woman as a witch.”

Cotton Mather worried less about condemning an innocent than about allowing a witch to walk free. In “Wonders,” he set out “to countermine the whole plot of the devil against New England.” He would not be surprised if the witchcraft reached even farther than was suspected, folding into his volume an account of a celebrated thirty-year-old English case, similar to Salem’s, except perhaps for a combusting toad. He chose that trial with reason: it was one in which spectral evidence had served to convict. Mather seems occasionally to have embroidered on court reports with details that appear nowhere in the surviving pages: the smell of brimstone, money raining down, a corner of a sheet ripped from a spectre. He otherwise adhered closely to the evidence while working some magic with his pages; no witnesses for the defense or petitions on their behalf appear in “Wonders.” Mather included all the crowd-pleasing spectral stories, while issuing regular reminders that flights and pacts played only supporting roles in the convictions.

He expressed his fervent hope that some of the witches in custody might prove innocent. They deserve “our most compassionate pity, till there be fuller evidences that they are less worthy of it.” Twenty pages later, he wrote of George Burroughs, “Glad I should have been if I had never known the name of this man.” His very initials revolted Mather. He wrote up five trial accounts in all; Burroughs alone was so powerful a wizard that he could not be named.

As quickly as Mather worked, “The Wonders of the Invisible World” arrived as a case of too much too late. Conceived as a justification, billed as a felicitous accident, advertised in the author’s own words, the volume read as a full-throated apologia. Governor Phips disbanded the witchcraft court at the end of October. Days after the book’s publication, Mather wailed to his Plymouth-based uncle. A cataract of “unkindness, abuse, and reproach” roared his way. People said lovely things to his face and hideous things behind his back. He meant only to tamp down dissent at a critical time. He found himself under fire for another infraction as well: filial disrespect. He had not endorsed his father’s volume. (Nor had his father endorsed his.) Among all the freewheeling accusations in 1692, not once had a father accused a son or a son implicated a father. He could see little to do but die.

The new administration could ill afford a rift at this juncture; Increase Mather added a postscript to his pages. He remained convinced that witches roamed the land. He meant not to deny witchcraft but to make its prosecution more exact. He had declined to endorse his son’s volume only out of an aversion to nepotism; he was most grateful to him for having established that no one had been convicted purely on spectral evidence. He too made a point of including Burroughs, who had, Increase Mather assured his readers, accomplished things that no one who “has not a devil to be his familiar could perform.” Burroughs had deserved to hang. As Cotton Mather saw it, he had made a case for prosecuting the guilty, his father for protecting the innocent. Were they not saying the same thing? An early death no longer appealed.

Ayear after the trials, Cotton Mather treated two newly afflicted girls. A seventeen-year-old servant began to convulse after insulting a woman who had been imprisoned in 1692. The girl interrupted sermons and fell into trances. She went twelve days without food. She discoursed with spectres who tempted her with diabolical pacts; she shrieked so loudly that well-wishers fled the room; she tore a leaf from Mather’s Bible. He followed the same protocol he had with the Goodwins, four years and nineteen executions earlier, assembling groups to pray and to sing Psalms at her bedside.

Both girls eventually recovered. Mather devoted thirty-eight pages to the initial case but left them unpublished. Given the tenor of the times, he wrote, “No man in his wits would fully expose his thoughts unto them, till the charms which enrage the people are a little better dissipated.” He did not care in 1693 to cultivate what, centuries later, would be termed the paranoid strain in American politics, with its “sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.” Political stability remained paramount. Mather did, however, retail the teen-ager’s report that Frenchmen and Indians—“horrid sorcerers and hellish conjurers”—had colluded in Salem witchcraft. He insisted on it for years.

“There is no public calamity,” Mather noted, in “Wonders,” “but some ill people will serve themselves of the sad providence, and make use of it for their own ends, as thieves when a house or town is on fire, will steal what they can.” Twenty-eight years later, a smallpox epidemic raged through Boston. Cotton Mather faced down the entire medical establishment to advocate something that seemed every bit as dubious as spectral evidence: inoculation. He had studied medicine at Harvard. Over the decades, he had come better to understand infectious disease. Moving from imps and witches to germs and viruses, he at last located the devils we inhale with every breath. The battle turned so vitriolic that it dragged Salem out of hiding; Mather was bludgeoned for lunacy on two counts. Yet again, Massachusetts seemed to be in the grip of distemper. The people talked, he huffed in his diary, “not only like idiots but also like fanaticks.” He remained as steadfast on the subject of inoculation as he had been equivocal on witchcraft. In November, 1721, a homemade bomb came sailing in his window at 3 a.m . His reputation never recovered. ♦

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Salem Witch Trials

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The Salem Witch Trials were a series of legal proceedings in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692-1693 resulting in the deaths of 20 innocent people accused of witchcraft and the vilification of over 200 others based, initially, on the reports of young girls who claimed to have been harmed by the spells of certain women they accused of witchcraft.

The initial accusers were Betty Parris (age 9) and her cousin Abigail Williams (age 11) who were supported in their claims by Ann Putnam the Younger (age 12) and Elisabeth Hubbard (age 17), but once those accusations were made, many others not only supported the girls but brought charges against their fellow citizens, sparking a witch hunt in Salem and the surrounding communities.

At the heart of the trials and later executions were religion and superstition in Colonial America . The Bible , in the Book of Exodus 22:18, states "Thou shalt not suffer a witch live," and this was adhered to as closely as any other biblical injunction and encouraged by the Salem Village minister of the time, the Reverend Samuel Parris (l. 1653-1720). Parris was the fourth minister called by the Salem Village congregation. Earlier ministers had left after relatively brief stays, and Parris was faring little better in his ability to mediate disputes between neighbors until he managed to focus their energies on accusing each other of witchcraft. The underlying tensions of the community found expression in the persecution of marginalized members – and then those well-respected – in the community which resulted in the execution of 20, self-exile, loss of status, or death in jail while awaiting a court appearance.

As early as 1695, criticism was leveled against the magistrates of Salem for the deaths and persecution of the innocent and this opinion only gained ground afterwards. Between 1700-1703, petitions were filed to have the convictions reversed and the accused exonerated, and in 1711, compensation was authorized for the families of those unjustly executed. Since that time, the Salem Witch Trials have been referenced simply as "witch trials" or "witch hunts" in connection with any unfounded, unfair, and baseless claim against a person or the ideals that person stands for and the event has been given iconic status in the USA and elsewhere.

Colonial Belief in Witchcraft

Legal documents and testimonies of the time establish that there were a number of citizens who did not believe in witchcraft, but the majority – in the New England Colonies as well as the Middle and Southern English Colonies – certainly did. This belief was encouraged by the Bible through stories such as the Witch of Endor (I Samuel 28:3-25) and the line from the Book of Exodus mentioned above. The Bible was understood as the inerrant word of God and made clear that witches were as much of a reality as anything else; questioning the existence of witches meant questioning the divine authority of the Bible.

A belief in witchcraft was further encouraged by the need to explain the seemingly unexplainable. If a pious person or a child or young bride should suddenly fall ill or die, it might be attributed to God’s mysterious will but could as easily be explained by witchcraft and the workings of the devil. Although it may seem strange and irrational to a modern-day audience, the belief was also supported by colonists’ interpretation of everyday experience. If Neighbor A asked to borrow some candles from Neighbor B and Neighbor B refused the request, and if Neighbor B later became ill or their house caught fire or their horse died for no apparent reason, Neighbor A might be accused of having cast a spell to cause the otherwise inexplicable misfortune.

A belief in witches did not originate in the colonies, however, as England – and Europe overall – had been persecuting those accused of witchcraft for centuries. One of the most famous witch trials in English history was that of the Pendle Witches in 1612 in Lancashire which resulted in the execution by hanging of ten people convicted of witchcraft. The records of the proceedings were published in 1613 and widely read, and the case was popularized again in 1634 when one of the accusers was herself accused of witchcraft. The 1634 case was further popularized by the melodrama The Late Lancashire Witches by Thomas Heywood (l. c. 1570-1641) and Richard Brome (l. c. 1590-1652), which ends with a supposition of the guilt of the accused.

This was almost always the foregone conclusion of an accusation of witchcraft since it was understood that no one would bring such a serious charge against another without good reason. Accusers seem to always have believed that their word and anecdotal evidence was all the proof a court needed to convict, and while this may have been true of popular opinion, courts did try to weigh objective evidence before handing down a conviction, even if the paradigm of guilty-until-proven-innocent was largely adhered to. This was certainly the case with the Salem Witch Trials of 1692-1693 during which over 200 people were accused of witchcraft in Salem Village, Salem Town, Andover, Ipswich, and Topsfield; 30 were found guilty and 20 executed, most by hanging.

Social & Religious Context

Tensions were already high in both Salem Town and Salem Village in 1692 and had been for some time. The citizens of Salem Village resented the greater affluence of Salem Town as well as its presumption in controlling the village’s affairs. Salem Village had no civil government of its own and was under the jurisdiction of Salem Town. All citizens of both were required to attend Sunday worship services, but Salem Town refused to allow Salem Village to have its own meeting house and so villagers had to travel to the town on Sundays, no matter the weather, which they came to resent.

Salem Village eventually hired their own minister but refused to pay him and so he left. The second minister, George Burroughs, experienced the same problems and resigned but remained in the village. A third minister also resigned, and this contributed to Salem Village’s reputation, as held by Salem Town, as contentious and petty. The fourth minister was Samuel Parris, a failed merchant who had attended Harvard University but never completed his course of study. He seems to have become a minister as a second career choice. In 1689, Salem Village was allowed to form its own church with Parris as their pastor. Scholar Brian P. Levack comments:

Parris proved to be an unfortunate choice: a failed and bitter merchant who resented those who succeeded in the world of commerce, he fueled local hostilities. Parris gave a series of inflammatory sermons that translated faction division into a cosmic struggle between the forces of good and evil. In the minds of his supporters, Salem Town became the symbol of an alien, corrupt, and even diabolical world that threatened the welfare of Salem Village. Because supporters of Samuel Parris perceived their enemies as nothing less than evil, it was but a short step for them to become convinced that those aligned with the town and its interests were servants of Satan. (403)

Tensions increased further with the arrival of immigrants in the area who were members of minority Christian sects, such as the Quakers, who were considered threats to the Puritan vision of the Salem community. Perpetual fear of unseen and unexpected danger had been present in the communities since the outbreak of King Philip's War (1675-1678) when King Philip (also known as Metacomet , l. 1638-1676) of the Native American Wampanoag Confederacy launched an assault on the settlements of New England that killed hundreds and destroyed a number of settlements.

In the midst of these various tensions, in February 1692, Samuel Parris’ daughter Betty and his niece Abigail Williams, began exhibiting strange behavior – crawling around the floor, hiding under furniture, contorting themselves, screaming, and hurling objects – which, lacking any other explanation after they were examined by a physician, was blamed on witchcraft. Shortly afterwards, Ann Putnam the Younger and Elizabeth Hubbard, then Mary Walcott, Mercy Lewis, and Mary Warren – all friends of Betty Parris and Abigail Williams – began exhibiting the same signs. When Samuel Parris asked his daughter and niece who had cast the spell that was tormenting them, they named three women – Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and the Parris’ house-slave Tituba – and Salem Village was plunged into a witch-hunting frenzy.

Sarah Good was a homeless woman who often begged for charity and had been taken in by Samuel Parris for a short time until he threw her out for "malicious behavior" and ingratitude. Sarah Osborne was a wealthy landowner who had not attended church in over three years, claiming a recurring illness, making her as much of an outcast as Good. Tituba was possibly an Arawak of Caribbean origin who was kidnapped, enslaved, and sold to Samuel Parris in Barbados, where his family had a plantation. She was the family’s house-slave and looked after the children, often entertaining them with ghost stories and tales of demons and magic.

Tituba confessed (later revealing Samuel Parris had beaten the confession out of her) and supported the girls’ accusation of Good and Osborne. Good, as noted, was already despised by the Parris family and Osborne, due to her land deals, had adversely affected the finances of Ann Putnam the Younger’s father. Tituba popularized the concept of witches riding on broomsticks and conversing with 'familiars' – spirits in animal form – as well as associating with demonic figures and casting malicious spells. Osborne was hanged as a witch in May and Good in July of 1692, maintaining their innocence to the end; Tituba, since she had confessed, was left in jail because Parris refused to pay the fees which would have released her. She was finally sold for the price of the jail fees and disappears from history.

The accusations against the three marginalized women in February 1692 were only the beginning, however, as more people were accused in March. Two of them, Martha Corey and Rebecca Nurse, were members in good standing in the church. Corey had questioned the validity of the girls’ accusations, insinuating they were lying for personal reasons, and so was charged as a witch for denying the existence of witches. Nurse was accused by the Putnams who claimed her 'specter' was harassing them. The use of 'spectral evidence' was admissible in court as the concept had been addressed by the well-respected Puritan theologian Cotton Mather (l. 1663-1728) whose works were especially popular among the citizens of Massachusetts.

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Spectral evidence was simply accepting the word of an accuser over that of the accused as in the case of Martha Corey where the girls cried out in court that her specter was tormenting them and a yellow bird, invisible to everyone but them, was feeding at her hand. Nurse and Corey, both in their early 70s, were hanged. Their convictions heightened the hysteria further in that, if two elderly church-going women in good standing could be witches, anyone could. Corey’s husband, Giles, was accused when he defended her. He refused to stand trial and was executed by pressing – crushed to death by weights – in order to extract a confession of guilt. As he never confessed and was never convicted, his last will was honored and his lands went to his heirs, as he intended, instead of being taken by the Putnam family who had accused him.

Once spectral testimony came under attack and once confessors began to recant, the court found itself in an extremely awkward position…As the eagerness of the court to convict collided with a growing chorus of opposition to its proceedings, the governor felt that he had no choice but to suspend the trials and reassess the situation. (407)

The trials were stopped and pardons issued for those still in jail in May 1693. Although it is well-documented that 19 people were hanged and Giles Corey crushed to death, others died in jail awaiting trial, and over 200 had their reputations damaged if not irreparably ruined. The accusers were never called to account because no one involved doubted the reality of witches and their power to harm nor of Satan and his ability to deceive in order to destroy. After the hysteria died down, the accusers went on with their lives as before.

Those who had been accused and pardoned, as noted, were not as lucky and lived on with the stigma of the event or moved elsewhere. Three years later, in 1696, the General Court mandated a day of fasting and repentance for the trials on 14 January 1697. Judges who had taken part in the trials publicly repented and asked forgiveness of the community. Beginning in 1700, petitions were filed by family members with the colonial government of Massachusetts to have the convictions overturned, and in 1711, 22 people were exonerated and financial compensation authorized. This pattern continued over the next ten years but not all who had been convicted were cleared even then. The names of all the people convicted were not cleared, in fact, until 2001.

The Salem Witch Trials, as the most infamous event of its kind, has generated a number of myths from the time people began writing about it c. 1700 to the present. Among the most persistent is that "witches" were burned at Salem even though there is no evidence to support this claim. No "witches" were burned at Salem; they were all hanged. Until recently, those convicted were thought to have been hanged on Gallows Hill, conjuring images of a somber death march up the hill to the place of execution, but the Gallows Hill Project of 2017 debunked this myth, establishing that the hangings took place at the bottom of the hill at the far less dramatic area known as Proctor’s Ledge.

It has also been claimed that the majority of those accused were poor, marginalized women, but this has also been challenged and debunked. People of all social classes were accused and convicted, women and men – and, actually, two dogs – for any reason at all. George Burroughs, the second minister to resign at Salem Village, was accused and convicted because he seemed to possess unnatural strength, another woman was convicted because she was able to walk the dusty streets of Salem Village without dirtying her clothing, and Martha Corey, as noted, was executed as a witch for denying witchcraft even existed.

Over the years, many theories have been suggested to explain the Salem witch hysteria and trials. One theory, popularized in the 1970s, is that the colonists were poisoned by ergot fungus on their rye crop in 1692 which caused them to hallucinate, but this does not explain the continuing hysteria throughout 1693 nor the fact that there were many who still believed in witches and the justice of the trials afterwards. Witch trials had been conducted prior to 1692 and would be afterwards throughout the colonies. Class frictions between Salem Village and Salem Town have also been cited as a possible cause, but, although these added to the tensions of the time, they did not actually cause the hysteria. Of the first people accused, only Osborne had connections to Salem Town, the other two were firmly of Salem Village.

The most likely cause of the witch hysteria of 1692-1693 at Salem was religious belief coupled with societal tensions. No one will ever know what caused the girls to make the accusations which started the panic, but once made, they confirmed what was already believed by the colonists. American playwright Arthur Miller’s The Crucible cast the Salem Witch Trials as an allegory of the McCarthy hearings of the 1950s which sought to root out communism in the United States. In this play, Miller was drawing attention to the dangers of ideologies which depend on confirmation bias in order to thrive. In both cases, the accusers were operating on a belief in threatening agents in their midst they needed to defend themselves against. The people of Massachusetts already believed in witches because religion in Colonial America encouraged it – they did not need ergot or anything else – all that was required was a physical manifestation of what they feared to confirm what they already knew to be true and act upon it.

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Bibliography

• Drake, J. D. King Philip's War: Civil War in New England 1675-1676. University of Massachusetts Press, 2000.
• Earle, A. M. Home Life in Colonial Days. The British Library, 2010.
• Hall, D. D. Puritans in the New World: A Critical Anthology. Princeton University Press, 2004.
• Hawke, D. F. Everyday Life in Early America. Harper & Row, 1989.
• Levack, B. P. The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America . Oxford University Press, 2015.
• Mann, C. C. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Vintage Books, 2012.
• Philbrick, N. Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War. Viking Press, 2007.
• Taylor, A. American Colonies: The Settling of North America. Penguin Books, 2002.

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What Caused the Salem Witch Trials?

The exact cause of the Salem Witch Trials has long remained a mystery. Like many historical events, figuring out what happened is one thing but trying to figure out why it happened is much harder.

Most historians agree though that there were probably many causes behind the Salem Witch Trials, according to Emerson W. Baker in his book A Storm of Witchcraft:

“What happened in Salem likely had many causes, and as many responses to those causes…While each book puts forward its own theories, most historians agree that there was no single cause for the witchcraft that started in Salem and spread across the region. To borrow a phrase from another tragic chapter of Essex County history, Salem offered a ‘perfect storm’ a unique convergence of conditions and events that produced what was by far the largest and most lethal witchcraft episode in American history.”

When it comes to the possible causes of the trials, two questions come to mind: what caused the “afflicted girls” initial symptoms and, also, what caused the witch trials to escalate the way that they did?

Although colonists had been accused of witchcraft before in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, it had never escalated to the level that Salem did, with hundreds of people locked up in jail and dozens executed. Why did Salem get so bad?

What we do know is that witches and the Devil were a very real concern to the Salem Villagers, as they were to many colonists.

But since Salem had been experiencing a number of hardships at the time, such as disease epidemics, war and political strife, it wasn’t hard to convince some of the villagers that witches were to blame for their misfortune. Once the idea took hold in the colony, things seemed to quickly got out of hand.

The following is a list of these theories and possible causes of the Salem Witch Trials:

Conversion Disorder:

Conversion disorder is a mental condition in which the sufferer experiences neurological symptoms which may occur due to a psychological conflict. Conversion disorder is also collectively known as mass hysteria.

Medical sociologist Dr. Robert Bartholomew states, in an article on Boston.com, that the Salem Witch Trials were “undoubtedly” a case of conversion disorder, during which “psychological conflict and distress are converted into aches and pains that have no physical origin.”

Trial of George Jacobs of Salem for Witchcraft, painting by Tompkins Harrison Matteson, circa 1855

Bartholomew believes what happened in Salem was most likely an example of a “motor-based hysteria” which is one of the two main forms of conversion disorder.

Professor Emerson W. Baker also suggests conversion disorder as a possibility in his book A Story of Witchcraft:

“Conversion disorder, one of several psychological conditions that Abigail Hobbs and other afflicted people might have suffered from in 1692, shows heightened awareness of one’s surroundings. Scholars have long noted the connections between the witchcraft outbreak and King William’s War , which raged on Massachusetts’s northern frontier and was responsible for the war hysteria that seems to have been present in Salem Village and throughout Essex County.”

Baker goes on to explain that many of the afflicted girls, such as Abigail Hobbs, Mercy Lewis, Susannah Sheldon and Sarah Churchwell, were all war refugees who had previously lived in Maine and had been personally affected by the war to the point were some of them may have been experiencing post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Ergot Poisoning:

In 1976, in an article in the scientific journal Science, Linda R. Caporael proposed that ergot may have caused the symptoms that the “afflicted girls” and other accusers suffered from.

Ergot is a fungus (Claviceps purpurea) that infects rye and other cereal grains and contains a byproduct known as ergotamine, which is related to LSD.

Ingesting ergotamine is known to cause a number of cardiovascular and/or neurological effects, such as convulsions, vomiting, crawling sensations on the skin, hallucinations, gangrene and etc.

Ergot tends to grow in warm, damp weather and those conditions were present in the 1691 growing season. In the fall, the infected rye would have been harvested and used to bake bread during the winter months, which is when the afflicted girl’s symptoms began.

Not everyone agrees with this theory though. Later in 1976, another article was published in the same journal refuting Caporeal’s claims, arguing that epidemics of convulsive ergotism have occurred almost exclusively in settlements where the locals suffered from severe vitamin A deficiencies and there was no evidence that Salem residents suffered from such a deficiency, especially since they lived in a small farming and fishing village with plenty of access to vitamin A rich foods like fish and dairy products.

The article also argued that the absence of any symptoms of gangrene in the “afflicted girls” further debunked this theory as did the lack of convulsive ergotism symptoms in other children in the village, especially given that young children under 10 years of age are particularly susceptible to convulsive ergotism and most of the “afflicted girls” were teens or pre-teens.

Other similar medical conditions that historians have proposed could have caused the afflicted girls symptoms include Encephalitis Lethargica, epilepsy, Lyme disease and a toxic weed called Devil’s Trumpet or locoweed but there is little evidence to support these theories either, according to Baker:

“Several other diseases have been put forward as possible culprits, ranging from encephalitis and lyme disease to what is known as ‘artic hysteria,’ yet none of these seem to fit, either. Many experts question the very existence of Artic hysteria, which results in such behavior as people stripping off their clothes and running naked across the wild tundra. The accounts mention no such streaking in Salem, and while the supposed symptoms of witchcraft began in January, more people showed symptoms in the spring and summer…Encephalitis, the result of an infection transmitted by mosquito bite, does not really seem plausible, given that the first symptoms of bewitchment appeared during winter. And while the bull’s-eye rash often produced on the skin by Lyme disease might explain the devil’s mark or witch’s teat, it falls short of accounting for the behavior of the afflicted. None of these suggested diseases fit because a close reading of the testimony suggests that the symptoms were intermittent. The afflicted had stretches when they acted perfectly normal, intersperse with acute fits.”

Cold Weather:

Historical records indicate that witch hunts occur more frequently during cold periods. This was the theory cited in economist Emily Oster’s senior thesis at Harvard University in 2004.

The theory states that the most active era of witchcraft trials in Europe coincided with a 400-year-long cold period known as the “little ice age.”

In her paper, Oster explains that as the climate varied from year to year during this cold period, the higher numbers of witchcraft accusations occurred during the coldest temperatures.

Baker also discusses this theory in his book A Storm of Witchcraft:

“The 1680s and 1690s were part of the Maunder Minimum, the most extreme weather of the Little Ice Age, a period of colder temperatures occurring roughly from 1400 to 1800. Strikingly cold winters and dry summers were common in these decades. The result was not just personal discomfort but increasing crop failures. Starting in the 1680s, many towns that had once produced an agricultural surplus no longer did so. Mixed farming began to give way to pastures and orchards. Once Massachusetts had exported foodstuffs; by the 1690s it was an importer of corn, wheat, and other cereal crops. Several scholars have noted the high correlation between eras of extreme weather in the Little Ice Age and outbreaks of witchcraft in Europe; Salem continues this pattern.”

Factionalism, Politics and Socio-Economics:

Salem was very divided due to disagreements between the villagers about local politics, religion and economics.

One of the many issues that divided the villagers was who should be the Salem Village minister. Salem Village had gone through three ministers in sixteen years, due to disputes over who was deemed qualified enough to have the position, and at the time of the trials they were arguing about the current minister Samuel Parris.

Rivalries between different families in Salem had also begun to sprout up in the town as did land disputes and other disagreements which was all coupled with the fact that many colonists were also uneasy because the Massachusetts Bay Colony had its charter revoked and then replaced in 1691 with a new charter that gave the crown much more control over the colony.

In their book Salem Possessed, Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum attribute the witch trials to this political, economic, and religious discord in Salem Village:

“Predictably enough, the witchcraft accusations of 1692 moved in channels which were determined by years of factional strife in Salem Village.”

Boyer and Nissenbaum go on to provide examples, such as the fact that Daniel Andrew and Philip English were accused shortly after they defeated one of the Putnams in an election for Salem Town selectmen.

They also point out that Rebecca Nurse was accused shortly after her husband, Francis, became a member of a village committee that took office in October of 1691 that was vehemently against Salem Village minister Samuel Parris, whom the Putnams were supporters of.

Although this theory seems plausible, other historians such as Elaine Breslaw in her book Tituba, the Reluctant Witch of Salem, points out that other towns in Massachusetts were going through similar difficult times but didn’t experience any witch hunts or mass hysteria:

“There is no doubt that a peculiar combination of social tensions, exacerbated by the factional conflict within the community of Salem Village, contributed to the atmosphere of fear so necessary for the advent of a witchscare. Charles Upham suggested this as a major cause and Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum have provided a brilliant analysis of the Salem community to support that argument. Indian warfare and the uncertainties related to the arrival of a new charter and new Governor in the two years before the witchhunt also added to the level of social stress. But other towns in frontier Massachusetts that experienced the same socio-economic-political difficulties did not spark a similar witchscare. Several communities suffering from less stress did suffer from contact with Salem as the witchscare virus spread. This contagion too was a unique aspect of the 1692 episode.”

There is a small possibility and some evidence to back up the theory that some of the accusers were lying and faking their symptoms, although historians don’t believe this was the case with all of the accusers.

Baker suggests though that fraud may have been a bigger problem in the witch trials than we realize:

“Ultimately, the question is whether the afflictions, and therefore the accusations, were genuine or deliberate acts of fraud. Not surprisingly, there is no agreement on the answer. Most historians acknowledge that some fakery took place at Salem. A close reading of the surviving court records and related documents suggests that more fraud took place than many cared to admit after the trials ended.”

In Charles W. Upham’s book, Salem Witchcraft, Upham also suggests it was fraud, describing the afflicted girls as liars and performers but also admits that he doesn’t know how much of it was fake and how much of it was real:

“For myself, I am unable to determine how much may be attributed to credulity, hallucination, and the delirium of excitement, or to deliberate malice and falsehood. There is too much evidence of guile and conspiracy to attribute all their actions and deliberations to delusion; and their conduct throughout was stamped with a bold assurance and audacious bearing…It will be seen that other persons were drawn to act with these ‘afflicted children,’ as they were called, some from contagious delusion, and some, as quite well proved, from a false, mischievous, and malignant spirit.”

Many of the accused also stated that they believed that the afflicted girls were lying or only pretending to be ill. One of the accused, John Alden, later gave an account of his trial during which he described a moment that he believed to reveal fraud:

“those wenches being present, who plaid their jugling tricks, falling down, crying out, and staring in peoples faces. The magistrates demanded of them several times, who it was of all the people in the room that hurt them? One of these accusers pointed several times at one Captain Hill, there present, but spake nothing; the same accuser had a man standing at her back to hold her up; he stooped down to her ear, then she cried out. Aldin, Aldin afflicted her; one of the magistrates asked her if she had ever seen Aldin, she answered no, he asked her how she knew it was Aldin? She said, the man told her so.”

Another girl, who was not identified in the court records, was actually caught lying in court during Sarah Good’s trial when she claimed Good’s spirit stabbed her with a knife, which she said broke during the attack, and then presented the broken blade from her clothing where Good allegedly stabbed her.

After the girl made this claim though, a young man stood up in the court and explained that the knife was actually his and that he broke it himself the day before, according Winfield S. Nevins in his book Witchcraft in Salem Village in 1692:

“There-upon a young man arose in the court and stated that he broke that very knife the previous day and threw away the point. He produced the remaining part of the knife. It was then apparent that the girl had picked up the point which he threw and put it in the bosom of her dress, whence she drew it to corroborate her statement that some one had stabbed her. She had deliberately falsified, and used the knife-point to reinforce the falsehood. If she was false in this statement, why not all of it? If one girl falsified, how do we know whom to believe?”

Bernard Rosenthal also points out in his book, Salem Story, several incidents where the afflicted girls appeared to be lying or faking their symptoms, such as when both Ann Putnam and Abigail Williams claimed George Jacobs was sticking them with pins and then presented pins as evidence or when both girls testified that they were together when they saw the apparition of Mary Easty, which makes it unlikely that the vision was a result of a hallucination or psychological disorder since they both claimed to have seen it at the same time.

Witch Pins, Court House, Salem. Photo published in New England Magazine, vol. 12, circa 1892

Another example is various instances when the afflicted girls hands were found to be tied with rope while in court or when they were sometimes found bound and tied to hooks, according to Rosenthal:

“Whether the ‘afflicted’ worked these shows out among themselves or had help from others cannot be determined; but there is little doubt that such calculated action was deliberately conceived to perpetuate the fraud in which the afflicted were involved, and that the theories of hysteria or hallucination cannot account for people being bound, whether on the courtroom floor or on hooks.”

Reverend Samuel Parris:

Not only did some of the villagers believe the afflicted girls were lying, but they also felt that the Salem village minister, Reverend Samuel Parris , lied during the trials in order to punish his dissenters and critics.

Some historians have also blamed Reverend Samuel Parris for the witch trials, claiming he was the one who suggested to the Salem villagers that there were witches in Salem during a series of foreboding sermons in the winter of 1692, according to Samuel P. Fowler in his book An Account of the Life of Rev. Samuel Parris:

“We have been thus particular in relation to the settlement of Mr. Parris at Salem Village, it being one of the causes, which led to the most bitter parochial quarrel, that ever existed in New-England, and in the opinion of some persons, was the chief or primary cause of that world-wide famous delusion, the Salem Witchcraft.”

Parris, who was the latest in a series of Salem Village ministers that got caught in the middle of an ongoing dispute between the villagers, started to preach about infiltration and internal subversion of the church immediately after starting his new job, as can be seen in his very first sermon in which he preached “Cursed be he that doeth the work of the Lord deceitfully.”

Parris went on to preach to the villagers that the preservation of the church was “worth an hundred lives” and, during a sermon about Jehovah’s command to Samuel to destroy the Amalekites, he preached “a curse there is on such as shed not blood when they have a commission from God.”

Yet, Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, the authors of the book Salem Possessed, don’t agree that Parris started the witch hunt. They argue that while Parris had a significant role in the witch hysteria, he didn’t intentionally start a witch hunt:

“Samuel Parris did not deliberately provoke the Salem witchcraft episode. Nor, certainly, was he responsible for the factional conflict which underlay it. Nevertheless, his was a crucial role. He had a keen mind and a way with words, and Sunday after Sunday, in the little village meetinghouse, by the alchemy of typology and allegory, he took the nagging fears and conflicting impulses of his hearers and wove them into a pattern overwhelming in its scope, a universal drama in which Christ and Satan, Heaven and Hell, struggled for supremacy.”

After the trials were over, many of the Salem villagers felt Parris was responsible and some even protested by refusing to attend church while Parris was still minister there.

In February of 1693, these dissenters even presented a list of reasons they refused to attend the church, in which they accused Parris of dishonest and deceitful behavior during the trials and criticized his unchristian-like sermons:

“We found so frequent and positive preaching up some principles and practices by Mr. Parris, referring to the dark and dismal miseries of inquity, working amongst us, was not profitable but offensive…His approving and practicising unwarrantable and ungrounded methods, for discovering what he was desirous to know, referring to the bewitched or possessed persons, as in bringing some to others, and by and from them pretending to inform himself and others, who were the devil’s instruments to afflict the sick and pained…Sundry, unsafe, if sound, points of doctrine, delivered in his preaching, which we esteem not warrantable (if christian)…”

After two years of quarreling with parishioners, Parris was eventually dismissed sometime around 1696.

Although he was dismissed from his position, Parris refused to leave the Salem Village parsonage and after nine months the congregation sued him. During the lawsuit, the villagers again accused Parris of lying during the Salem Witch Trials, according to court records:

“We humbly conceive that he swears to more than he is certain of, is equally guilty of perjury with him that swears to what is false. And though they did fall at such a time, yet it could not be known that they did it, much less be certain of it; yet he did swear positively against the lives of such as he could not have any knowledge but they might be innocent. His believing the Devil’s accusations, and readily departing from all charity to persons, though of blameless and godly lives, upon such suggestions; his promoting such accusations; as also his partiality therein in stifling the accusations of some, and, at the same time, vigilantly promoting others, – as we conceive, are just causes for our refusal, & c.”

Parris responded by counter suing for the back pay the villagers had refused to pay him while he was minister. He eventually won the lawsuit and left Salem village shortly after.

Folk Magic:

English folk magic, which was the use of spells, ointments and potions to cure everyday ailments or solve problems, was often practiced in the Massachusetts Bay Colony even though it was frowned upon by most Puritans.

According to Beverly minister John Hale, in his book A Modest Enquiry Into the Nature of Witchcraft, the afflicted girls symptoms began after one of them reportedly dabbled in a folk magic technique used to predict the future, known as the “Venus glass”:

“Anno 1692. I knew one of the afflicted persons, who (as I was credibly informed) did try with an egg and a glass to find her future husbands calling; till there came up a coffin, that is, a spectre in likeness of a coffin. And she was afterward followed with diabolical molestation to her death; and so died a single person. A just warning to others, to take heed of handling the Devils weapons, lest they get a wound nearby. Another I was called to pray with, being under some fits and vexations of Satan. And upon examination I found she had tried the same charm: and after her confession of it and manifestation of repentance for it, and our prayers to God for her, she was speedily released from those bonds of Satan.”

Cotton Mather, in his book Wonders of the Invisible World, also blamed folk magic as the cause of the Salem Witch Trials, stating that these practices invited the Devil into Salem:

“It is the general concession of all men that the invitation of witchcraft is the thing that has now introduced the Devil into the midst of us. The children of New England have secretly done many things that have been pleasing to the Devil. They say that in some towns it has been a usual thing for people to cure hurts with spells, or to use detestable conjurations with sieves, keys, peas, and nails, to learn the things for which they have an impious curiosity. ‘Tis in the Devil’s name that such things are done. By these courses ’tis that people play upon the hole of the asp, till that cruelly venomous asp has pulled many of them into the deep hole of witchcraft itself.”

Even though most colonists thought of folk magic as harmless, many well-known folk magic practitioners were quickly accused during the Salem Witch Trials, such as Roger Toothaker and his family who were self-proclaimed “witch killers” who used counter-magic to detect and kill witches.

Another accused witch who had dabbled in folk magic was Tituba, a slave of Samuel Parris who worked with her husband John and a neighbor named Mary Sibley to bake a witch cake, a cake made from rye meal and the afflicted girl’s urine, and then fed it to a dog in February of 1692 hoping it would reveal the name of whoever was bewitching the girls.

The girl’s symptoms took a turn for the worse after the incident and just a few weeks later, they named Tituba as a witch.

Tituba’s Confession:

The legal proceedings of the Salem Witch Trials began with the arrest of three women on March 1, 1692: Tituba, Sarah Good and Sarah Osbourne. After Tituba’s arrest, she was examined and tortured before confessing to the crime on March 5, 1692.

Although her confession doesn’t explain the afflicted girls initial symptoms, which is what led to her arrest in the first place, some historians believe that if it had not been for Tituba’s dramatic confession, during which she stated that she worked for the Devil and said that there were other witches like her in Salem, that the trials would have simply ended with the arrests of these three women.

When Tituba made her confession, the afflicted girls’ symptoms began to spread to other people and the accusations continued as the villagers began to seek out the other witches Tituba mentioned. According to Elaine G. Breslaw in her book Tituba, the Reluctant Witch of Salem, this was a pivotal moment in the trials:

“How she and her supposed conspirators, Sarah Osbourne and Sarah Good, responded to the accusations of the girls was of even greater importance to the course of events in March and the following months. Tituba’s confession is the key to understanding why the events of 1692 took on such epic significance.”

To learn more about the Salem Witch Trials, check out this article on the best books about the Salem Witch Trials .

Sources: Rosenthal, Bernard. Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of 1692. Cambridge University Press, 1993. Nevins, Winfield S. Witchcraft in Salem Village in 1692: Together With Some Account of Other Witchcraft Prosecutions in New England and Elsewhere. Salem: North Shore Publishing Company, 1892. Breslaw, Elaine G. Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem: Devilish Indians and Puritan Fantasies. New York University Press, 1997 Upham, Charles W. Salem Witchcraft: With an Account of Salem Village and a History of Opinions on Witchcraft and Kindred Spirits. Wiggin and Lunt, 1867. 2 vols. Fowler, Samuel P. An Account of the Life, Character, & c. of the Rev. Samuel Parris, of Salem Village and Of His Connection With the Witchcraft Delusion of 1692. Salem: William Ives and George W. Pease, 1857. Baker, Emerson W. A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience. Oxford University Press, 2014. Boyer, Paul and Stephen Nissenbaum. Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft. Harvard University Press, 1974. Spanos, Nicholas P. and Jack Gottlieb. “Ergotism and the Salem Witch Trials.” Science, 24 Dec. 1976, Vol. 194, Issue 4272, pp. 1390-1394. Edwards, Phil and Estelle Caswell. “The hallucinogens that might have sparked the Salem Witch Trials.” Vox, 29 Oct. 2015, www.vox.com/2015/10/29/9620542/salem-witch-trials-ergotism Sullivan, Walter. “New Study Backs Thesis on Witches.” New York Times, 29 Aug. 1992, www.nytimes.com/1982/08/29/us/new-study-backs-thesis-on-witches.html Mason, Robin. “Why Not Ergot and the Salem Witch Trials?” Witches of Massachusetts Bay, 23 April 2018, www.witchesmassbay.com/2018/04/23/why-not-ergot-and-the-salem-witch-trials/ “Witchcraft and the Indians.” Hawthorne in Salem, www.hawthorneinsalem.org/Literature/NativeAmericans&Blacks/HannahDuston/MMD2137.html Wolchover, Natalie. “Did Cold Weather Cause the Salem Witch Trials?” Live Science, 20 April 2012, www.livescience.com/19820-salem-witch-trials.html Norton, Mary Beth. In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. Vintage Books, 2003. Saxon, Victoria. “What Caused the Salem Witch Trials?” Jstor Daily, Jstor, 27 Oct. 2015, daily.jstor.org/caused-salem-witch-trials/

4 thoughts on “ What Caused the Salem Witch Trials? ”

I am a curious kid about the Salem Witch Trials, I’ve read many articles, and they mostly came from you, at least since 2011 until now. It’s impressive that you are still working really hard on this, I hope my comment can give you some more courage to keep this topic up.

aw how sweet.

Hello I think this is really informational. I do have a question though. Is there anyway the trials could of been caused by the fear of women?

Now that’s a proper article! I thought I’d never see such well-researched and well-written article!

And I don’t think it was the fear of women. I think it was the fear of unknown that caused this. The problem is that most of the actual witchcraft happened behind the scenes, so it’s hard to know what was really going on.

Comments are closed.

In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692

Award-winning historian Mary Beth Norton reexamines the Salem witch trials in this   startlingly original, meticulously researched, and utterly riveting study. 

In 1692 the people of Massachusetts were living in fear, and not solely of satanic afflictions. Horrifyingly violent Indian attacks had all but emptied the northern frontier of settlers, and many traumatized refugees—including the main accusers of witches—had fled to communities like Salem. Meanwhile the colony’s leaders, defensive about their own failure to protect the frontier, pondered how God’s people could be suffering at the hands of savages. Struck by the similarities between what the refugees had witnessed and what the witchcraft “victims” described, many were quick to see a vast conspiracy of the Devil (in league with the French and the Indians) threatening New England on all sides. By providing this essential context to the famous events, and by casting her net well beyond the borders of Salem itself, Norton sheds new light on one of the most perplexing and fascinating periods in our history.

In the Devil's Snare

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Salem Witch Trials: What Caused the Hysteria?

By: Elizabeth Yuko

Published: September 26, 2023

Though the Salem witch trials were far from the only persecutions over witchcraft in 17th-century colonial America, they loom the largest in public consciousness and popular culture today. Over the course of several months in 1692, a total of between 144 and 185 women, children and men were accused of witchcraft, and 19 were executed after local courts found them guilty.

As the witch panic spread throughout the region that year, increasing numbers of people became involved with the trials—as accusers, the accused, local government officials, clergymen, and members of the courts. 

What was happening in late 17th-century Massachusetts that prompted widespread community participation, and set the stage for the trials? Here are five factors behind how accusations of witchcraft escalated to the point of mass hysteria, resulting in the Salem witch trials.

1. Idea of Witchcraft as a Threat Was Brought From England

By the time the Salem witch trials began in 1692, the legal tradition of trying people suspected of practicing witchcraft had been well-established in Europe, where the persecution of witches took place from roughly the 15th through 17th centuries.

“Salem came at the tail end of a period of witch persecutions in Europe , just as the Enlightenment took hold,” says Lucile Scott , journalist and author of An American Covenant: A Story of Women, Mysticism and the Making of Modern America . “The English colonists imported these ideas of a witch to America with them, and prior to the events in Salem , [many] people had been indicted for witchcraft in [other parts of] New England .”

The accusations in Salem began in early 1692, when two girls , ages nine and 11, came down with a mysterious illness. “They were sick for about a month before their parents brought in a doctor, who concluded that it looked like witchcraft,” says Rachel Christ-Doane, the director of education at the Salem Witch Museum .

Looking back from the 21st century, it may seem unthinkable that a doctor would point to witchcraft as the cause of a patient’s illness, but Scott says that it was considered a legitimate diagnosis at the time. 

“It’s hard for us to understand how real the devil and witches and the threat they posed were to the Puritans—or how important,” she explains. “Witchcraft was the second capital crime listed in the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s criminal code .” 

2. Puritan Worldview Was Mainstream

When the Puritans founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, the first governor, John Winthrop, delivered a sermon famously proclaiming the colony “a Citty [sic] upon a Hill” —in this case, meaning a model Christian society with no separation of church and state. But as growing numbers of Quakers and Christians of other denominations arrived in Massachusetts, it became more religiously diverse .

“By the 1690s, God-fearing Puritans represented a smaller proportion of the population of New England than at any point in the 17th century,” says Kathleen M. Brown, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Good Wives, Nasty Wenches and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia . “Even though percentage-wise, the Puritan influence was weaker than it had been earlier in the century, it was still leaving a big imprint on society.”

This included mainstream acceptance of Providence: the Puritans’ belief that the events of everyday life on Earth happened in accordance with God’s will. 

“This was particularly true when they were talking about the fate of colonial settlements in the land grab, or disease epidemics that would sweep through and kill people, or a terrible storm,” Brown explains. “Providence, along with the notion that there was evil at work through Satan—[including] through the activities of witches who might turn to the devil to exert supernatural power—informed the way Puritans understood the natural world and the spiritual world.” 

Similarly, despite their waning power, the Puritans’ societal structure remained firmly in place when the Salem witch trials began. “The Puritan colony was a very patriarchal and hierarchical place,” Scott says, noting that this included the view that people, particularly women, who stepped outside of their prescribed roles in society were looked upon with suspicion. 

3. Accusations Didn’t Follow the Usual Patterns

Though accusations of witchcraft themselves weren’t out of the ordinary in colonial New England, those made in Salem in 1692 stood out, likely contributing to the panic that spread throughout the community. 

“Witchcraft accusations normally happened quite sporadically and in some isolation,” Brown explains. “They rarely snowballed into a mass accusation with increasing numbers of people accusing and being accused.” 

“If you look at the larger history of witchcraft, not just in North America, but in England and Scotland, usually men are the accusers of witches, especially in an outbreak,” says Brown, whose latest book Undoing Slavery: Bodies, Race, and Rights in the Age of Abolition was published in February 2023. “You don't really ever get girls and young women doing the accusations: that's actually anomalous for Salem.” 

Though theories abound, there is still no consensus as to why girls and young women became the central accusers , she notes.

When a rare witchcraft outbreak did occur, Brown says that it broadened the scope of who might qualify as a potential witch. “More people would fall into the category of ‘accused witch,’ and more people jumped on the bandwagon of accusation,” she notes. 

As the trials wore on, no one was exempt from suspicion. “At a certain point, accusations in Salem flew so freely, anyone, no matter their Puritan purity, might find themselves facing the gallows,” Scott says. 

HISTORY Vault: Salem Witch Trials

Experts, historians, authors, and behavioral psychologists offer an in-depth examination of the facts and the mysteries surrounding the court room trials of suspected witches in Salem Village, Massachusetts in 1692.

4. Decades of Ongoing Violence Had Taken a Toll

When the Salem witch trials began in 1692, King Philip’s War , also known as Metacom’s Rebellion, was still fresh in the minds of the colonial settlers. The Native Americans’ last-ditch attempt to stop English colonization of their land officially concluded in 1676 , but the violent conflict and bloodshed had never ended on the northern border of the Massachusetts colony. 

“The colonial settlers were still encroaching on land that had been in the hands of Native Americans for thousands of years, and Native peoples were hitting back,” Brown explains. “It wasn’t hard for Massachusetts Puritans to think about the devil embodied in what the Native Americans were doing, because they're not Christian, they’re in a mortal combat with Puritan Christianity and the whole colonial settler enterprise, and the Massachusetts Puritans really believed in their own divine mission.” 

Along the same lines, when the colony’s leaders reflected on the poor job they had done defending its northern boundary, Brown says that it’s not much of a stretch to think that they understood it all to mean that God was trying to tell them something, and “doesn't seem to be very happy.”

5. Accusations Came at Time of Political Uncertainty

It would have been one thing for the Puritans to view the contagion of both the mysterious illness spreading amongst the young women of Salem, and the subsequent accusations of witchcraft, as a sign that God is angry and the devil is at work. However, as Brown points out, in order for those accusations to gain the kind of traction they had in Salem—making it to trial, and, eventually, imprisoning and executing people—there had to be widespread buy-in from public officials. 

“You need ministers saying, ‘Yes, these are signs of the devil in our midst,’” Brown explains. “You need magistrates doing interrogations and deciding to lock people up in jail and put them on trial. You need judges who are willing to believe the spectral evidence. You need all of the official apparatus of government and of justice to be on board with it to produce the kind of outcome you get at Salem.”

According to some scholars, most notably, historian Mary Beth Norton , local leaders in Salem were so receptive to the accusations of witchcraft, and on board with implementing draconian laws and policies in part because of the precariousness of the Massachusetts colonial settlement at that time.

High-ranking Puritans were concerned about their church’s dwindling numbers. “By the time [the Salem witch trials] take place, the Puritans are less dominant politically, religiously [and] culturally,” Brown explains.

The final decades of the 17th century were a time of political uncertainty in Salem as well. In 1684, King Charles II of England revoked the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s charter . Seven years later, the new ruling monarchs, King William III and Queen Mary II, issued a new charter establishing the Province of Massachusetts Bay, and, at the urging of influential Puritan clergyman Increase Mather , appointed Maine-born William Phips governor of the colony.

By the time Mather and Phips returned to Massachusetts with the new charter in May 1692, Salem’s jails were already filled with people accused of practicing witchcraft. 

“You can make the argument that the legal system [in place prior to May 1692 ] made it possible for the witch trials to happen,” says Christ-Doane. “They [didn’t] have a charter, and their courts were dysfunctional, and that allows them to make unusual procedural decisions that lead to so many people being convicted of witchcraft.” 

This included relying heavily, and sometimes exclusively, on spectral evidence —or, testimony from witnesses claiming that the accused person appeared to them and caused them harm in a vision or dream—even though it was widely considered unacceptable in legal practice at the time.

According to Brown, the legal situation didn’t improve when Phips took over. “Phipps, as governor, was a gatekeeper for certain judicial processes,” she explains. This included establishing the Court of Oyer and Terminer on May 27, 1692, specifically to try people accused of witchcraft. “That was the beginning of the convictions and the executions ,” Brown adds. 

On June 2, Bridget Bishop became the first person convicted of practicing witchcraft during the Salem witch trials; eight days later, she was the first to be executed .

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The Salem Witch Trials: A legal bibliography

The law of the Salem Witch Trials is a fascinating mix of biblical passages and colonial statutes.  According to Mark Podvia (see Timeline , PDF), the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony adopted the following statute in 1641:  “If any man or woman be a WITCH, that is, hath or consulteth with a familiar spirit, they shall be put to death. Exod . 22. 18. Levit . 20. 27. Deut . 18. 10. 11.”  The statute encompasses passages from the Bible written circa 700 B.C. Exodus states:  “Thou shall not suffer a witch to live.” Leviticus prescribes the punishment.  Witches and wizards “shall surely be put to death:  they shall stone them with stones:   their blood shall be upon them.”  And Deuteronomy states:  “There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch.  Or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer.”

In Salem, the accusers and alleged victims came from a small group of girls aged nine to 19, including Betty Parris and Abigail Williams.  In January 1692, Betty and Abigail had strange fits. Rumors spread through the village attributing the fits to the devil and the work of his evil hands.  The accusers claimed the witchcraft came mostly from women, with the notable exception of four-year old Dorcas Good.

The colony created the Court of Oyer and Terminer especially for the witchcraft trials.  The law did not then use the principle of “innocent until proven guilty” – if you made it to trial, the law presumed guilt.  If the colony imprisoned you, you had to pay for your stay.  Courts relied on three kinds of evidence:  1) confession, 2) testimony of two eyewitnesses to acts of witchcraft, or  3) spectral evidence (when the afflicted girls were having their fits, they would interact with an unseen assailant – the apparition of the witch tormenting them).  According to Wendel Craker, no court ever convicted an accused of witchcraft on the basis of spectral evidence alone, but other forms of evidence were needed to corroborate the charge of witchcraft. Courts allowed “causal relationship” evidence, for example, to prove that the accused possessed or controlled an afflicted girl.  Prior conflicts, bad acts by the accused, possession of materials used in spells, greater than average strength, and witch’s marks also counted as evidence of witchcraft.  If the accused was female, a jury of women examined her body for “witch’s marks” which supposedly showed that a familiar had bitten or fed on the accused.  Other evidence included the “touching test” (afficted girls tortured by fits became calm after touching the accused).  Courts could not base convictions on confessions obtained through torture unless the accused reaffirmed the confession afterward, but if the accused recanted the confession, authorities usually tortured the accused further to obtain the confession again.  If you recited the Lord’s Prayer, you were not a witch.   The colony did not burn witches, it hanged them.

The Salem Witch Trials divided the community.  Neighbor testified against neighbor.  Children against parents.  Husband against wife.  Children died in prisons.  Familes were destroyed.  Churches removed from their congregations some of the persons accused of witchcraft.  After the Court of Oyer and Terminer was dissolved, the Superior Court of Judicature took over the witchcraft cases.  They disallowed spectral evidence.  Most accusations of witchcraft then resulted in acquittals.  An essay by Increase Mather, a prominent minister, may have helped stop the witch trials craze in Salem.

Researching the Salem Witch Trials is easier than it used to be.  Most of the primary source materials (statutes, transcripts of court records, contemporary accounts) are available electronically.  Useful databases include HeinOnline Legal Classics Library (see  Trials for Witchcraft before the Special Court of Oyer and Terminer, Salem, Massachusetts, 1692 ;   The Salem Witchcraft  (Clair, Henry St., 1840); and “ Witch Trials ,”  1 Curious Cases and Amusing Actions at Law including Some Trials of Witches in the Seventeenth Century (1916) ), HeinOnline World Trials Library, HeinOnline Law Journal Library (also JSTOR, America:  History & Life, Google Scholar, and the LexisNexis and Westlaw journal databases),  Gale Encyclopedia of American Law (“ Salem Witch Trials “), Google Books, Hathi Trust, and the Internet Archive.  For books and articles on the Salem Witch Trials and witchcraft and the law generally, Library of Congress subject headings include:

• Trials (Witchcraft) — History
• Trials (Witchcraft) — Massachusetts — Salem
• Witch hunting — Massachusetts — Salem
• Witchcraft — Massachusetts — Salem — History — 17th century
• Witchcraft — New England
• Witches — Crimes against

• Salem Witch Trials:  Documentary Archive & Transcription Project (University of Virginia)(includes online searchable text of the transcription of court records as published in Boyer/Nissenbaum’s The Salem Witchcraft Papers , revised 2011, and e-versions of contemporary books)
• Famous American Trials:  Salem Witch Trials, 1692 (Prof. Douglas O. Linder, University of Missouri-Kansas City Law School)

Bibliography

Adams, Gretchen A. The Specter of Salem:  Remembering the Witch Trials in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Chicago Press, BF1576.A33 2008).

Boyer, Paul & Stephen Nissenbaum, eds. The Salem Witchcraft Papers:  Verbatim Transcripts of the Legal Documents of the Salem Witchcraft Outbreak of 1692  (Da Capo Press, XXKFM2478.8.W5S240 1977 )( digital edition , revised and augmented, 2011).  3v.

___________________________. Salem Possessed:  The Social Origins of Witchcraf t (Harvard University Press, BF1576.B79 1974 ).  See especially pages 1-59.

___________________________, eds. Salem Village Witchcraft:  A Documentary Record of Local Conflict in Colonial New England  (Wadsworth Pub. Co., KA653.B75 1972 LawAnxS ).

Brown, David C.  “The Case of Giles Corey.” EIHC ( Essex Institute Historical Collections , F72.E7E81 ) 121 (1985): 282-299.

___________.  “ The Forfeitures of Salem, 1692 .” The William and Mary Quarterly 50 (1993): 85-111.

Burns, William E. Witch Hunts in Europe and America:  An Encyclopedia (Greenwood Press, BF1584.E9B87 2003 ).  Includes a Chronology (1307-1793), “Salem Witch Trials” at pages 257-261, and a bibliography at pages 333-347.

Burr, George Lincoln. Narratives of the Witchcraft Cases, 1648-1706 (Barnes & Noble, BF1573.B6901 1963 ).

Calef, Robert. More Wonders of the Invisible World (1700).

Craker, Wendel D.  “Spectral Evidence, Non-Spectral Acts of Witchcraft, and Confession at Salem in 1692. ” Historical Journal 40 (1997):  331-358.

Demos, John. Entertaining Satan:  Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (Oxford University Press, BF1576.D38 1982 ).

Francis, Richard. Judge Sewall’s Apology:  The Salem Witch Trials and the Forming of the American Conscience (Fourth Estate, F67.S525 2005 ).

Godbeer, Richard. The Salem Witch Hunt:  A Brief History with Documents (Bedford/St. Martin’s, XXKFM2478.8.W5G63 2011 ).

Hansen, Chadwick. Witchcraft at Salem (G. Braziller, BF1576.H25 1969 ).

Hill, Frances. The Salem Witch Trials Reader (Da Capo Press, BF1576.H55 2000 ).

Hoffer, Peter Charles. The Salem Witchcraft Trials:  A Legal History (University Press of Kansas, XXKFM2478.8.W5H645 1997 )(Landmark Law Cases & American Society).

______________. The Devil’s Disciples:  Makers of the Salem Witchcraft Trials (Johns Hopkins University Press, XXKFM2478.8.W5H646 1996 ).

Karlsen, Carol F. The Devil in the Shape of a Woman:  Witchcraft in Colonial New England (Norton, BF1576.K370 1987 ).

Le Beau, Bryan F. The Story of the Salem Witch Trials:  “We Walked in Clouds and We Could Not See Our Way” (Prentice Hall, 2d ed., XXKFM2478.8.W5L43 2010 )(DLL has 1998).

Levin, David. What Happened in Salem? (2d ed.  Harcourt, Brace & Co. BF1575.L40 1960 ) (Documents Pertaining to the Seventeenth-Century Witchcraft Trials).  Compiles trial evidence documents, contemporary comments, and legal redress.

Mather, Cotton. The Wonders of the Invisible World:  Being an Account of the Tryals of Several Witches Lately Executed in New England, and Of Several Remarkable Curiosities Therein Occurring (1693) .

Mather, Increase. Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits Personating Men, Witchcrafts, Infallible Proofs of Guilt in Such As Are Accused with That Crime  (1693).

Nevins, Winfield S. Witchcraft in Salem Village in 1692 (North Shore Pub. Co., BF1576.N5 1892 ).

Norton, Mary Beth. In the Devil’s Snare:  The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692  ( BF1575.N67 2002 )(legal analysis, with appendixes).

Powers, Edwin. Crime and Punishment in Early Massachusetts, 1620-1692  A Documentary History (Beacon Press, KB4537.P39C8 1966 LawAnxN ).

Rosenthal, Bernard ed. Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt (Cambridge University Press, XXKFM2478.8.W5R43 2009 )(includes Richard B. Trask, “Legal Procedures Used During the Salem Witch Trials and a Brief History of the Published Versions of the Records” at pages 44-63).

Ross, Lawrence J., Mark W. Podvia, & Karen Wahl. The Law of the Salem Witch Trials .  American Association of Law Library, Annual Meeting, Boston, Massachusetts, July 23, 2012 (AALL2go – password needed to access .mp3 and program handout).

Starkey, Marion. The Devil in Massachusetts:  A Modern Inquiry into the Salem Witch Trials (A.A. Knopf, XXKFM2478.8.W5S73 1949 ).

Upham, Charles W. Salem Witchcraft:  with an Account of Salem Village and a History of Witchcraft and Opinions on Kindred Subjects   (Wiggin & Lunt, 1867).  2v.

Weisman, Richard. Witchcraft, Magic, and Religion in 17th-Century Massachusetts (The University of Massachusetts Press, XXKFM2478.8.W5W4440 1984 ).  Includes a chapter on “The Crime of Witchcraft in Massachusetts Bay  Historical Background and Pattern of Prosecution.”  Appendixes includes lists of legal actions against witchcraft prior to the Salem prosecutions, Massachusetts Bay witchcraft defamation suits, persons accused of witchcraft in Salem, confessors, allegations of ordinary witchcrafts by case, afflicted persons.

Young, Martha M.  “ The Salem Witch Trials 300 Years Later:  How Far Has the American Legal System Come?  How Much Further Does It Need to Go? ”   Tulane Law Review 64 (1989): 235-258.

General Resources

Mackay, Christopher S., trans. & ed.   The Hammer of Witches:  A Complete Translation of the Malleus Maleficarum (authored by Heinrich Institoris & Jacobus Sprenger in 1487 – Dominican friars, who were both Inquistors and professors of theology at the University of Cologne)(Cambridge University Press, BF1569.M33 2009 ).  This medieval text ( Der Hexenhammer in German) prescribes judicial procedures in cases of alleged witchcraft.  In question-and-answer format.  The judge should appoint as an advocate for the accused “an upright person who is not suspected of being fussy about legal niceties” as opposed to appointing “a litigious, evil-spirited person who could easily be corrupted by money” (p. 530).

“Judgment of a Witch.” The Fugger News-Letters 259-262 (The Bodley Head, Ltd., 1924).  Also reprinted in The Portable Renaissance Reader .

Pagel, Scott B. The Literature of Witchcraft Trials:  Books & Manuscripts from the Jacob Burns Law Library (University of Texas at Austin, BF1566.P243 2008 ) (Tarlton Law Library, Legal History Series, No. 9).

Witchcraft and the Law:  A Selected Bibliography of Recent Publications (Christine Corcos, LSU Law)(includes mostly pre-2000 works).

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Did Cold Weather Cause the Salem Witch Trials?

Historical records indicate that, worldwide, witch hunts occur more often during cold periods, possibly because people look for scapegoats to blame for crop failures and general economic hardship. Fitting the pattern, scholars argue that cold weather may have spurred the infamous Salem witch trials in 1692.

The theory, first laid out by the economist Emily Oster in her senior thesis at Harvard University eight years ago, holds that the most active era of witchcraft trials in Europe coincided with a 400- year period of lower-than-average temperature known to climatologists as the  "little ice age." Oster, now an associate professor of economics at the University of Chicago, showed that as the climate varied from year to year during this cold period, lower temperatures correlated with higher numbers of witchcraft accusations.

The correlation may not be surprising, Oster argued, in light of textual evidence from the period: popes and scholars alike clearly believed witches were capable of controlling the weather, and therefore, crippling food production.

The Salem witch trials fell within an extreme cold spell that lasted from 1680 and 1730 — one of the chilliest segments of the little ice age. The notion that weather may have instigated those trials is being revived by Salem State University historian Tad Baker in his forthcoming book, "A Storm of Witchcraft" (Oxford University Press, 2013). Building on Oster's thesis, Baker has found clues in diaries and sermons that suggest a harsh New England winter really may have set the stage for accusations of witchcraft.

According to the  Salem News , one clue is a document that mentions a key player in the Salem drama, Rev. Samuel Parris, whose daughter Betty was the first to become ill in the winter of 1691-1692 because of supposed witchcraft. In that document, "Rev. Parris is arguing with his parish over the wood supply," Baker said. A winter fuel shortage would have made for a fairly miserable colonial home, and "the higher the misery quotient, the more likely you are to be seeing witches."

Psychology obviously played an important role in the Salem events; the young girls who accused their fellow townsfolk of witchcraft are believed to have been suffering from a strange psychological condition known as  mass hysteria . However, the new theory suggests the hysteria may have sprung from dire economic conditions. "The witchcraft trials suggest that even when considering events and circumstances thought to be psychological or cultural, key underlying motivations can be closely related to economic circumstances," Oster wrote.

Weather patterns continue to trigger witchcraft accusations in many parts of Africa, where witch killings persist. According to a 2003 analysis by the Berkeley economist Edward Miguel, extreme rainfall — either too much or too little — coincides with a significant increase in the number of witch killings in Tanzania. The victim is typically the oldest woman in a household, killed by her own family.

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Natalie Wolchover was a staff writer for Live Science from 2010 to 2012 and is currently a senior physics writer and editor for Quanta Magazine. She holds a bachelor's degree in physics from Tufts University and has studied physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Along with the staff of Quanta, Wolchover won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory writing for her work on the building of the James Webb Space Telescope. Her work has also appeared in the The Best American Science and Nature Writing and The Best Writing on Mathematics, Nature, The New Yorker and Popular Science. She was the 2016 winner of the  Evert Clark/Seth Payne Award, an annual prize for young science journalists, as well as the winner of the 2017 Science Communication Award for the American Institute of Physics. 

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what was the Salem Witch Trials about?

The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. More than two hundred people were accused. Thirty were found guilty, nineteen of whom were executed by hanging

The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. More than two hundred people were accused. Thirty were found guilty, nineteen of whom were executed by hanging (fourteen women and five men).

Explanation:

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Related Questions

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Hope this helps! :)

The collective and various practices and traditions of art, architecture, music, literature, lifestyle, philosophy, politics, and religion that have been practiced and perpetuated by the different ethnic groups of Asia throughout prehistory are referred to as Asian culture.

Explain how a provision of the northwest ordinance established a precedent for governing the united states

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Will give brainliest

What were some procedures, rights protected, and basic principles contained in the north west ordnance’s that will be kept in the us constitution

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George Washington felt strongly about the need for freedom for the colonies.

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I'm pretty sure the answer to that is money maybe during that time they were more wealthy

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i really need help asap, thanks in advance! what are the lessons that we can learn from the encounter jesus had with the "good thief"?​​ (you can also write things about "the second word" by bishop fulton sheen from the book, the cross and the beatitudes. the second chapter was from fr. James Martin's book, seven last words)​​

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Jesus hears his repentance and promises the "Good Thief" that he will be with Him today in paradise.  This shows again as Jesus said before that sinners can still enter into the kingdom of heaven.  It also showed that He was  able to forgive worldly sins as the Son of Man.

It also relates to a passage Jesus says to Thomas after the resurrection.  Thomas refuses to believe until he can touch the wounds of Jesus.  Jesus says to him you believe because you have seen me.  Blessed are those who have not seen and yet still believe.  As far as anyone knows, these thieves did not know of the miracles or the work of Jesus but yet one shows his belief.

It may also be connected to what Jesus says to Simon Peter when He asks Peter who he believes He is.   Peter replies that He is the Christ, the Son of the living God.  Jesus replied, "Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven."  One must also wonder if Jesus felt the same about this thief.  As he hangs dying, he only asks that Jesus remember him but he adds "when you come into your kingdom.  This man not only admits his guilt and agrees to the punishment he is getting but he also has indirectly is says he believes Jesus is who He says He is.  Is this also why Jesus promises that he will be with Him in paradise?  Did he recognize that this person not only admits his guilt but also has repented and shows a sign that he also believes he is in the presence of the Christ?  Did He believe that this was also revealed to him by His Father in heaven?

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the british passed new taxes on glass paper and tea

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A) Abuse of power justifies a separation from one's government.

The preamble is literally like the thesis statement of the constitution, and if you know the constitution or have any idea of what it is, then you would know that nowhere in it states that god is more powerful than the government. Sure that was in much older times, but when the constitution was made it was to protect people's rights including freedom of religion.

Not to mention option C was the complete opposite of what the people wanted. They just broke away from a government that had more power than the people, why would they want to create another government like that?

Hope this answer satisfies you :D

3. pleasseeeeeeeeeeee

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En la actualidad cómo se presentan los enfrentamientos de los partidos políticos¿?

Una mesa para dos, por favor.

What is meant by “push-pull” factors for immigration? Give 2 examples of each. What must steerage immigrants do when they first arrive?At first sight, what impressions of America do you think this building (Ellis Island) gives new Immigrants? Search the internet for the list of questions immigrants had to answer to get through Ellis Island. Write down 3 that made and impression on you. What is the biggest challenge to await these new immigrants? Explain the difference between ”Old” and “New” Immigrants. Be very specific. Copy the Immigration chart 1860-1920 Did ethnic neighborhoods help of hurt assimilation? Explain Should child labor be illegal? Explain your answer What was unique about the “Immigrant Experience” for those who immigrated from China?

push factors: war in the home country, weak economy pushing people away

pull factors: strong economy with many jobs, strong state with good welfare for the poor.

What Internet development has changed political communication in the United States and around the world?

Face Book Insta gram SMS Phone

hope this helps :)

ASAPPPPPPPPPPPP FAST ANSWERRRRRRRR Which shows a change in trade from early villages to complex societies? Skilled villagers were able to trade their goods and services with other villages. Clans focused on their own survival, using the environment to hunt and fish from place to place. Early villages developed temporary shelters to follow herds, competing with other villages for food. Villages were expected to meet the needs of their own people through farming and hunting in seasonal locations.

Help 8th grade American history!!!!

Answer: Answer in file below hope this will help!!!!!

Answer: Northern Colonies

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Social Structure: small towns

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Southern Colonies

Religious Influence: Anglican

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Economic Activity: cash crops farming

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What factors influenced the different economic activities of the three colonial regions ?

I assume you are talking about the 13 colonies.

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Need help on that question and I’m done ASAP

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Climatic and ecological instability in the southeastern United States between AD 1300 and 1400 have been cited as the possible cause for soil depletion, particularly in Tennessee's Little River Valley. Maize agriculture provided an important food source for large Mississippian settlements and populations.

I hope it helps

carryonlearning

How Locke saw thing differently

Answer: These rights, according to Locke, are not granted to humans; people are born with them. People learn and grow in different ways, according to him, since they are exposed to diverse things. The one thing that all individuals have in common is that they are human and have a human essence that is universal.

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Answer on why i would ive in the southern colonies

   The Southern Colonies occupants settled there in search of economic prosperity. They were the land of opportunities for them because of its:

   Geographical conditions:

   Region: Coastal region with tidelands

   Climate: Warm and moist

   Soil: Highly fertile due to mineral-rich tideland, most suited for growing cash crops like tobacco, indigo, cotton, pine forests etc.

   Plantations: The plantation owners were wealthy and the workers were African slaves

   Navigation: Rivers

   Government: British Colonial Government

   Religion: Free to follow their religion like Catholics, Methodists, Baptists etc

   Housing: The rich plantation owners and others stayed in posh houses in Charles Town but the slaves had to settle in the plantations

   Food: They had a variety of food like fruits, vegetable, fishes, rice, bread, wild game, and other animals which they reared

   Children: Well mannered and cultured; well educated with reading, writing, and arithmetic and prayers; had tutors, schools, and colleges. The children of slaves were not sent to school.

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What are two Northern and Italian Renaissance similarities

They both believed in the power of education, individualism, and cultivated knowledge of the classics, scriptures, and writings from early Christianity.

10 What rules did James Oglethorpe require all Georgian colonists to follow? A no enslaved people, no liquor, and limited landownership B no missing church or disobeying religious doctrine C no discrimination based on one's religious beliefs D no trading with the Spanish and no attacks on Florida

the answer is A

He had laws passed that banned slavery, limited land ownership to 50 acres, and outlawed hard liquor. On February 12, 1733, Oglethorpe and the first colonists established the city of Savannah.

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2. Ancient Greece where best known for inventing mathematics and philosophy

3. Maya Civilization they where best known for there architecture as they made many temples.

If you where asking for one civilization with three Best known facts then here's this

Ancient Egypt was best known for its  Pyramids as they where the tallest and biggest man made structures at the time. Secondly they where known for there Sahara Desert as it acted as a natural barrier against anyone trying to attack them. Lastly is the Nile rivers as it supplied them with water for drinking and watering crops.

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cual es el ambiente físico y el ambiente psicológico. de los tres estudiantes

El entorno físico se refiere al entorno externo y tangible en el que existe un organismo y que puede influir en su comportamiento y desarrollo. ... Los entornos sociales son dinámicos y cambian con el tiempo como resultado de fuerzas internas y externas.

The Resolution of Witch Hunts in the United States

This essay is about how the witch hunts in the United States, particularly the Salem witch trials of 1692, were resolved. It discusses the role of rational and skeptical voices, such as those of Increase and Cotton Mather, who began to question the legitimacy of the trials. Political intervention by Governor William Phips, who established a new court with stricter evidence requirements, also contributed to ending the hysteria. Additionally, public opinion shifted as the consequences of the wrongful accusations became clear. The essay concludes by noting the legislative efforts made to address the injustices and restore the rights of the accused, highlighting the importance of rationality and justice.

How it works

Alright, let’s dive into a tricky chapter of American history—those infamous witch hunts! The Salem witch trials of 1692 are often the poster child for this dark period, full of hysteria, fear, and downright injustice. The end of these trials wasn’t a sudden shift but a mix of smarter thinking, political moves, and changing public views. Here’s how it all came to a head.

The whole mess kicked off in Salem, Massachusetts, where folks went from zero to panic in no time.

Fueled by superstitions, religious zeal, and personal grudges, over 200 people found themselves accused of witchcraft. Of those, 20 were executed, and many others were left to suffer in jail. As fear took over, reason took a backseat, and the town spiraled into chaos.

So, what turned the tide? For starters, some cooler heads started speaking up. As accusations piled up and the evidence started looking shaky, important figures began questioning the whole ordeal. Reverend Increase Mather and his son, Cotton Mather, initially backed the trials but later pushed for higher standards of proof. They started doubting the “spectral evidence”—the idea that ghosts could be testifying against people. Their shift in perspective mirrored a growing unease among the educated and religious leaders about what was really going on.

Politics also played a big part. Governor William Phips, who took over as the royal governor in 1692, got increasingly worried about how the trials were affecting the colony. To make matters personal, his wife was even accused of witchcraft. Trying to get things back on track, Phips set up a special court called the Court of Oyer and Terminer to handle the cases. But as doubts swirled, he shut it down in October 1692 and replaced it with the Superior Court of Judicature. This new court tossed out spectral evidence and demanded solid proof of guilt, which helped cool things down and led to fewer convictions and executions.

Public opinion was another game-changer. As it became clear that innocent people had been wrongly accused and executed, folks started pushing back. Families of the accused, along with other community members, began to speak out against the injustices. This growing outcry played a crucial role in ending the trials and getting people to think about what had happened.

After the dust settled, steps were taken to right the wrongs. In 1697, the Massachusetts General Court called for a day of fasting and soul-searching to reflect on the trials. Then in 1702, they officially declared the trials unlawful. By 1711, the colony had passed a bill to restore the good names and rights of those wronged and provide financial restitution to their families. This was a big step in admitting the mistakes and trying to make amends.

In the end, the resolution of the witch hunts came down to a mix of clear-headed intervention, political action, and a shift in public sentiment. The Salem witch trials are a stark reminder of how dangerous mass hysteria and scapegoating can be. They highlight the need for critical thinking, legal reforms, and the bravery to stand up against injustice.

So, in a nutshell, the witch hunts were put to rest thanks to a blend of skepticism, political action, and evolving public opinion. The Salem trials, in particular, wrapped up when reason and justice finally trumped fear and superstition. This tough period in American history reminds us to stay vigilant against similar injustices and always strive to uphold fairness and rationality, no matter the pressure.

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Original Ones

School of the Gods

A Message From The Departed Ones From The Salem Witch Trials

July 20, 2024 by Rogier 15 Comments

Introduction by The Seer

Today is the very auspicious day of the rising of the feminine for the planet and all creatures. The groundless persecution of thousands of women and children worldwide during the witch burning trials of years gone by caused a tear in the etheric body of the earth, manifesting likewise at a soul level in both men and women – but felt particularly in women.

The etheric body of the earth is her higher self, or the soul realms, to where departed souls transition to after death. The damage sustained by everyone's inner feminine, can therefore not be healed unless the trauma of the witch burnings and atrocities committed against so many is addressed.

Because it is uncomfortable to look at the cruel barbarism man is capable of, even the name witch burnings is slanted towards the fact that grandmothers and little children and housewives healing headaches and other innocents continue to be called 'witches' and all that it denotes.

The prejudicial injuries therefore continue against parts of the divine feminine that remain an elusive mystery. Because it is the nature of the masculine to define, analyze, and label, the feminine mystique remains a source of suspicion and discomfort. Once accentuated, this masculine suspicion of the mystery of the feminine remains to a smaller measure hidden under a veneer of civilized reasoning. In households everywhere, her exuberance is suppressed and controlled.

A Message From The Departed Victims of Witch Burnings

'My name is Henrietta Cornelia Bradworth. I am one of the first victims of the witch burnings in the new world. My crime was to successfully treat young Henry Bradworth's festering boil on his leg with poultices. He died with me.'

'Although there is no time where I now abide, such so-called tragedy is carried forward as a genetic memory for seven generations, and our progeny still suffers. My lineage was carried on after my death and that of my son by fire, through my beautiful daughter Susanna Hermanson.'

'My parents originally came from the English countryside of Nottinghamshire. They wanted to escape a life of rogues and vagabonds wandering the foul-smelling streets of the city. I was but a child when we arrived in what is now known as Plymouth. I wish that I could have held my daughter through the travail when she birthed her first child.'

'Long have those and others like myself pondered the meaning of life and the dichotomy of good and bad. It is so that the earth's fields will be healed when this tragedy is properly understood and the opposites of good and bad join in forgiveness and are integrated into a union. We have come to believe that they are simply separated by a matter of perspective.'

'There is a hill outside the town where I lived with Mr. Bradworth, called 'The Hogshead.' I used to go there to find solace from what at that time I saw as the pettiness and jealousy of my neighbours. The smallness of their lives seemed to vanish if I broadened my gaze over the large vista below.'

'The concept of bad exists because our vision is too narrow and we see only the heartache. But life is eternal and cannot be quelled. And all things work together for good for those who love life. Thus, do not live as I did, in fear and conformity: it did not stand me in good stead.'

'To my daughter and her children, I would have said from the perspective I now have: live unafraid. Do not allow others' judgments of your actions to dictate your course. Remember, that which seems bad, becomes good when you broaden your vision and expand your mind. Life is too precious to waste, and although time is eternal, moments are not. Live them fully, from the depth of your inner knowing.'

'Women have always been misunderstood, whether chained up in chastity belts in their castles or struggling to tend to their children in the poverty of a peasant's hut. To them, my words are thus: take joy in your duties. It changes them from drudgery to poetry. Sing your songs to the meadows and comfort your husband by the balm of your forgiveness, that your own soul may not be poisoned by bitterness and resentment. Be aware that he too chafes under the burdens of expectations that have sought to extinguish his flames of tenderness and gentleness. Find the artistry of his soul, that by seeing it, you might help bring it forth.'

'Mr. Bradworth silenced his desire to protect me and our son, and for the sake of our other children, stood stoically during the trial that was a travesty of justice and the terrified screams of our little boy. This too is great strength of character. I see it now.'

'Fear not the condemnation of self judging men. For, their desire to control all that is magical, mystical, and good stems too from the fear of the unknown. The wounds that we speak of in the fields of the feminine must be healed by our daughters today, as they throw off the yoke of trying to live up to the erroneous teachings of their ancestors and the expectations of those around them.'

'Let your feet be fleet and free, as you run through meadow flowers. Let your hair flow freely upon the wind, and your song sound gaily over the dell. It is a holy calling to be a woman. Do not let bitterness or pain marr this sacred responsibility. It is your destiny to create heaven on earth wherever you may be. We thank you and remind you that decisions in the present change events in the past, and that time is not linear but flows like a wagon wheel behind the plow of the fields in which you sow the events of today.'

'Remember. Remember. Remember…'

Reader Interactions

July 22, 2024 at 2:07 am

I have been feeling all day how special it was to receive the messages yesterday from Henrietta. Thank you, dear sister for sharing your story, and insights. I already feel the change inside me as I was joyfully doing laundry today. I would like to make clear, you of course, were a victim of the witch hunt, and my use of the term, witch in my post was not intended to condemn you further. I apologize dear sister. My connotation toward the term was not ill- intended, but was a mistake to use. Your courage, and ability to inspire healing is truly remarkable. I am so grateful to you for your willingness to share.

July 21, 2024 at 5:11 pm

Beautiful and moving 💕

July 21, 2024 at 3:15 pm

Oh my goodness! Such wisdom , so clearly thought out remains high above all else. Thank you dear lady for reaching out to us at this time. May you find peace at last. We did gather for our Zoom session this day and experienced Spirit clearings of old matrices. May peace come to all in the wake of this healing song of the Earth's Soul sister.

July 21, 2024 at 8:28 am

Im truly struggling with integrating the full message of this post because I just feel super triggered, to a level I cant explain. Maybe its worse because I have little boys or that Im absolutely terrified of fire, I just think its absolutely horrible and cannot understand the good in it. I cannot feel it. I will continue to try and understand it. Thank you for the messages reguardless ❤️.

July 21, 2024 at 1:05 am

Today was quite remarkable with the synchronicity of these posts. I have been at a Festival Of Love today and a fellow Lightworker was wearing a hoodie with Salem Massachusetts emblazoned on the front. She had just come back from a 5 week trip to the US and had spent a week in Salem. She is a medium. After discussing her trip and what she had seen, I went to have lunch and browsed the latest posts here on the OO site. It seemed like the transmission from Dearest Henrietta had just been posted. Upon reading it I immediately went back to my colleague and showed her Henrietta's message. How wonderful and timely!

Thank You Beloved for these messages and Thank You Henrietta for Your lesson in Divine compassion. We Hear You. Be at Peace.

July 20, 2024 at 7:55 pm

Thank you, Rogier for posting this. Your reply earlier today under the Self- Sovereignty post was an important reminder for an invitation to show support. I appreciate your transparency over the past few days, and agree there are no sides to choose, as the only side is retaining the purity of Almine's teachings.

It seems like there might be an crusade- type movement in regards to going forward with continuing to present Almine's teachings regardless of her wishes. It feels like some of the concern might be in part ( I could be mistaken) that some of her teachings have been intermingled with presentation of religiosity or undertones of religion that were not originally included in the material, and being presented in a way that she was dictating it. I appreciate the fact that it was time for this to come to light as someone that was not exposed in depth to some of her teachings from many, many years ago.

The messages from the witches today was so valuable and also serves as a reminder of how religiosity and egoic mind can corrupt and distort even the most precious of potential realities when given full reign. My hope and my wish, and glad expectations are a resolution of this situation. That Almine's teachings are shared as are intended, to be pure and a blessing to everyone that encounters them. I appreciate your presence and devotion, and I am with you, Almine and the board in your decisions.

July 20, 2024 at 6:47 pm

Just to gain more clarity: I am a direct descendant of Salem, MA My grandmother was Sarah Cloyse and my aunt was Rebecca Nurse of Salem. They did not burn the victims accused of witchcraft- they were hung. This is common knowledge…

July 21, 2024 at 12:58 am

Hey Edward, The witch hunts also included drownings and being thrown from cliffs. There are many ways to eliminate the Divine Feminine, so it may seem.

July 21, 2024 at 4:42 pm

No, I'm just saying in New England victims accused of being witches were hung , not burned alive. They did not want to spill blood , they did not do burnings.

July 21, 2024 at 4:47 pm

New England , Salem, MA, were witch hangings. It's important to note if we are going to take this seriously.

July 20, 2024 at 2:52 pm

Having known torture in the past, I'm well aware and fully determined in this life to overcome all of it and to assist many other women and girls to do the same. It is you Presence Beloved Almine that stays with me every moment and I have moved through and beyond it all and lovingly work with others✨💞🙏

July 20, 2024 at 3:35 pm

I concur Beautiful Kathleen.

July 20, 2024 at 1:31 pm

Tears… How incredible ..

Impeccable Timing….

Deeply Moved,…

The clouds earlier this evening parted today and revealed a witch to Me in the sky.. I also got strange smells it may have been burning ..

My deep Gratitude

July 20, 2024 at 1:10 pm

This is a powerful message that resonated tremendously and evoked tears from the depth of my being. My Cherokee Great-grandmother aka Black-Eyed Granny Skates died in an asylum after many years of living there, where she faced continual abuse and neglect. She was placed there by her husband and a group of male doctors for refusing to stop practicing as a Shaman. Her alleged crime was practicing medicine without a license and refusal to denounce her heritage of being a powerful and wise healer and also refusal to take a Christian name.

Gratitude for giving us this message. May we heal this trauma and atrocity through living each moment in full expression of authenticity through our Song of Self. May we heed the words of dear Henrietta Cornelia Bradworth in deepest reverence and remembrance of her testimony given to us by our Beloved Almine.

Thank you Rogier for your dedication in every publication gifted to us on behalf of our Holy Mother.

July 20, 2024 at 1:03 pm

Very moving.

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Salem Witch Trials Memorial Tours

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Boston Day Tour by Ferry: Salem Witch Trials Past to Present

• 7 hours 30 minutes (approx.)
• Offered in: English

What's Included

• Entrance to one museum, determined by the tour departure time
• Included only on 9:30am tour, Entrance to Salem Witch Museum
• Included only on 9:25am tour, Entrance to Real Pirates Museum
• Round-trip Ferry tickets from Boston-Salem
• Local English-speaking guide
• Guided walking tour
• 9:25 am tour does not include entrance to the Salem Witch Museum.
• 9:30 am tour does not include entrance to the Real Pirates Museum
• Hotel Pick-up/Drop-off

Meeting and Pickup

Meeting point.

This tour meets at City Cruises Boston, GATE 5 - 200 Atlantic Ave. Boston, MA 02110. From Tia's walk towards the water (Marriot on the right, Christopher Columbus park on the left) to Gate 5. Your guide will be holding a green Walks sign.

What To Expect

Additional info.

• Confirmation will be received at time of booking
• Wheelchair accessible
• Stroller accessible
• Near public transportation
• Infants must sit on laps
• Transportation is wheelchair accessible
• Surfaces are wheelchair accessible
• Most travelers can participate
• This is a walking tour. Guests should be able to walk at a moderate pace without difficulty.
• This tour can accept wheelchairs/strollers. Please note that sections of this tour cover busy areas of the city & areas with brick/ cobbled roads.
• Walks / Devour complies with all local government regulations. Please refer to local government guidelines for the most up-to-date information.
• 9:30 am tour only: Entrance to the Salem Witch Museum
• 9:25 am tour only: Entrance to the Real Pirates Museum
• This tour/activity will have a maximum of 20 travelers

Cancellation Policy

Visit the Viator Help Centre for any further questions.

Product code: 7167P80

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From $107.10.

Free cancellation up to 24 hours before the experience starts (local time)

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