This is lecture 13; we’re going to talk about the Salem Witch Crisis.
This takes place in the late 17th century.
It lasts about a year, from January 1692 to January 1693.
I’m not going to go into a lot of details about the witch crisis because we’ve supplied
you with an excellent website here that has just a multitude of information.
You have indictments.
You have the proceedings, transcriptions from the court testimony.
Arrest records.
Just a variety of good, primary sources.
This website gives you biographies of the major characters, both on the prosecution
side and the victims’.
So as far as chronology, things like that, I’m going to let you use this website to
fill in those blanks.
But I want to talk more generally about the witch crisis.
I want to talk about its significance and its context, I want to talk about the type
of evidence that’s used in the witch crisis, and then I want to talk about some of the
explanations provided to us by historians for the Salem Witch Crisis.
This is an incredibly juicy topic for historians.
The reason is that we have all these primary sources.
When you have a crisis that’s limited in time, like this, to about 1 year, and we have
transcriptions and arrest records and all of these primary sources that fill in the
blanks for historians.
So you have the archival information there, and of course, historians take these primary
sources and bring their own interpretation to it, and we’ll talk about these different
interpretations when we talk about explanations for the witch crisis.
During this 1 year of the crisis, we have over 144 people arrested.
I’m just going to give you a few statistics here.
Of these 144, only 38 are male, the rest are female; 14 women and 5 men are hung for witchcraft.
Some other people died in jail while awaiting trial or execution.
Let’s talk about context first.
Where do we fit the witch crisis into the broader scope of history?
One historian said that it’s part of King William’s War.
King William’s War is fought on the frontier north of Salem, between the British colonists
and the Indians, and the witch crisis is a part of this larger conflict, in that some
of the people who are living in Salem, some of the young girls who make accusations of
witchcraft, had actually lived on the frontier during King William’s War.
On the frontier, these people who have since moved back to Salem, they saw atrocities committed
– rapes and murders and kidnapping and homes burnt and the everyday events of war – and
one historian has made the argument that it is the memory, the nightmares, of these atrocities
which is going to help provoke the witch crisis.
So King William’s War, Salem is a part of that.
Another context is trade.
The Wabanakis, the Indians, and the British colonists have an uneasy relationship, in
that they’re both somewhat dependent on the other.
Yet, they do not trust each other, and relationships built on dependency can also often be troublesome,
as you probably know in your own personal lives.
So this larger trade relationship keeps the Indians the Europeans in contact with one
another, yet it is a fairly unwelcome contact.
Other contexts for the witch crisis – The Puritan cosmos, or the Puritan cosmology,
how the Puritans see themselves working in the wider universe.
This is probably the most important of the historical contexts.
The Puritans believed themselves to be the manifestation of God’s will here on Earth.
Quite often the Puritans have convinced themselves that the Indians are manifestations of Satan
here on Earth.
For the Puritans, God is an imminent deity.
He’s here in the village, here in the church house, here in our home.
The Puritans have a genuine relationship with God.
If you look at Genesis 1 and 2, you can see the differences in these Christian Gods.
Genesis 1, the God of creation, let there be, let there be, and He saw it was good.
You’re familiar with this.
This is a transcendent God; this is not the God you pray to, this is not the God you have
a personal relationship with.
Look at the deity in Genesis 2 however, He walks in the garden with Adam and Eve, He
gets angry like a human being, He’s jealous; He makes man by forming him out of the clay
of the Earth and then blowing the breath of life into him.
This is an imminent God; this is the God that the Puritans respond to.
The Puritans believe that all that happens is God’s will, and that is their task to
interpret God’s will.
They believe that God is all powerful and that He uses Satan to work mischief in the
lives of themselves, their neighbors, and of the Puritan colony.
The Puritans believe that they have to interpret God’s will – if a tragedy strikes a family;
an infant dies; or someone is killed in a farming accident – it is the Puritan’s
task to divine why God did this.
If good fortune happens, it’s also their task to divine why God favored them.
So the Puritan cosmos, this cosmology, this way of understanding the universe, lies really
at the heart of this crisis.
Let me talk about a couple of significances here.
The significance that jumps out at me, the first, comes directly from this cosmology,
and that is – otherwise sensible adults are hanging their neighbors on the accusations
of adolescent girls.
Why has everybody gone crazy, you would ask.
Well this Puritan cosmology makes this very – I don’t know that it’s predictable
– but it makes it possible.
The Puritan cosmology says that the world is alive with mischief created by Satan, demons,
witches, agents of Satan, and that when these little girls make accusations that such-and-such
neighbor is a witch, that such-and-such neighbor came through their window at night and pressed
their bodies down upon them, pulled their hair, contorted their bodies, strangled them,
pinched them; this is quite believable because it fulfills the arguments of the Puritan cosmology.
Another significance emerges from Salem and that is the inversion of gender order.
Let’s face it, in the Salem colony or in the Salem village and Salem town, adolescent
girls are at the bottom of the social hierarchy; they are to be seen and not heard.
Yet here, during this Salem witch crisis, adolescent girls are given top priority; they’re
elevated to the top of the hierarchy.
We are hanging our neighbors on the word, on the accusation of these little girls.
So suddenly there’s an inversion of gender order.
Women’s role is in the house, in the domestic sphere; men govern the public sphere, where
commerce and politics take place.
Yet here at Salem, women are in the public sphere in court, making accusations; accusations
that are followed through with execution.
So there is a definite inversion of gendered order here in Salem.
What kind of evidence was used in Salem to accuse somebody of being a witch and then
to convict them?
I’m going to quote here from one of the documents recorded here in the Salem court
proceedings – The children were (quote) “bitten and pinched by invisible agents;
their arms, necks, and backs turned this way and that and returned back again so that it
was impossible for them to do this of themselves and beyond the power of any epileptic fit
or natural disease to cause.”
So what we have here are these young girls showing evidence of being bitten or pinched,
showing evidence of contorting their bodies in ways it’s not physically possible.
Other evidence would be to speak in a language that you do not know.
You can see this in our own time.
You can simply Google, or go to YouTube, and look at people speaking in tongues in church,
and you can see how you can construct what might sound like a legitimate language, when
it’s actually mumbo jumbo.
Other evidence – If you knew things from the past that you should not know, or if you
could anticipate and predict the future, if you showed unusual strength – these are
all evidence of witchcraft.
I mentioned earlier that most of the witches are women, and we need to ask why.
For one thing, women are less physically able to protect themselves than men.
But it goes deeper than that.
The Christian archetypes for women center around 2 historic figures, or 2 mythological
figures, Eve and Mary.
Mary, of course, is perfect; Eve is obviously a troublemaker, causing the fall of man in
Christian mythology.
So we have these 2 old Christian archetypes.
Here, the Eve archetype is brought forward to help explain the mischief created by these
women.
And these Puritan women in the crisis are viewed as incomplete men; they’re not as
smart as men; they’re physically incomplete; they’re viewed as empty vessels with which
the devil can fill with his mischief, gossipy and vain.
So women have the odds kind of stacked against them here.
Another sign of witchcraft, another way you might be accused of practicing witchcraft,
is that if you laugh during prayer, or if you did anything unusual during prayer.
There is evidence of one gentleman returning home from a tavern, where he had gotten drunk,
and as he’s walking through the village square he falls to his knees and begins to
retch.
Now he was viewed by some of the Puritans there, listening to him and watching him as
he did this.
Now there’s only one thing that a Puritan should be doing on his knees and that is praying;
yet this man is on his knees retching.
That horrible sound coming from this man on his knees is prayer, obviously, but it must
be prayer to the devil and not to God.
So these are some of the things that could cause you to be arrested.
Another one is guilt by association.
If you knew a witch, you may have consorted with her.
If your husband of wife is accused of witchcraft, then perhaps you, too, are practicing witchcraft.
If you exhibited character flaws of some sort, again, you might be accused of witchcraft.
If you transgress gender, in other words, if a woman was a widow and she was running
her family’s estate or running her family’s business, that’s gendered masculine; so
a woman that transgresses gender could be accused of witchcraft.
And this quite often happens to widows.
Now what about explanations?
Like I said, historians love this topic and they’ve devised a number of explanations.
I’m going to mention them for you here.
One is ergot or ergot poisoning; I’ve heard it pronounced both ways; it looks French.
Ergot poisoning refers to the mildew that grows on rye that is stored over the winter.
Of course, the Puritans store rye so they can make bread with it, and of course, feed
it to their livestock.
If this rye gets wet, this mildew will grow on it, and then the ingestion of this ergot
in bread will cause people to hallucinate.
So one author put forth the idea that Salem, the whole town is on a trip, a hallucinogenic
trip.
Another author said that this was a conflict between Salem town and Salem village.
Salem town lies on the coast; it’s much more cosmopolitan, seeing the effects of modernity
as people come and go, ships with sailors come and go.
Salem village is to the west of Salem town and it’s dominated by farming, obviously.
This argument says that the people in Salem village resented the encroachment of modernity
upon their way of life, and they tracked the direction of the accusations and found that
most of the accusations originated in Salem village toward people who lived in Salem town.
This is a complicated social argument; it has a lot to it.
You have a sense of the Enlightenment ideas encroaching upon this traditional society
and the traditional society fighting back by accusing people in Salem town of witchcraft.
Again, a complicated but interesting explanation.
And then we have another explanation that associates witches with Indians.
This goes back to the horrors that take place on the frontier, where the young girls saw
atrocities committed by the Indians and now have resurrected these bad dreams, and these
dreams have manifested themselves in the appearance of witches.
Two more, the last two explanations – One is fraud, the girls are making it up; the
girls knew they had done something wrong and in order to distract their parents from that,
they create the witch crisis.
And then the final one, perhaps it is real, perhaps the witch crisis is genuine.
One of the central figures in the witch crisis, Ann Putnam, later – about 10 years later,
or 15 years later – she admitted in 1706 (quote) – “I desire to be humbled before
God; it was a great delusion of Satan that deceived me in that sad time.
I did not do it out of anger, malice, or ill will.”
Even this apology sounds like it’s blaming everything on the devil again, doesn’t it?
It’s kind of a half apology, at best.
At any rate, the Salem witch crisis is a bizarre episode in Western history that demonstrates
modernity, the Enlightenment, gender; all these large factors being mixed up in this
Puritan society.
Thank you.