Recreating the tinderbox that sparked mass hysteria
How lack of tolerance and poor leadership helped sustain systemic tyranny
For women and poor farmers who resided in the Puritan settlement of Salem, Mass., 1692 was a terrifying year.
Historian Stacy Schiff has brilliantly portrayed late 17th-century New England in The Witches: Salem, 1692. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the biographies Véra and Cleopatra conducted exhaustive research then impeccably recreated historical events.
Frontier settlers within America shared a fear of Aboriginal attacks and French invaders, yet the infamous Salem witch trials distinguished late 17th-century New England from other English colonies.
The insular population of superstitious peasants became the emblem of Americanized religious persecution when19 of its innocent residents were tried and hung for witchcraft.
Stacy Schiff’s analysis of Salem’s mass hysteria was that “the devil needs conscious human collusion to work evil.”
The real evil, or the devil, was the community’s lack of Christian tolerance and their quickness to accuse, prosecute and hang the innocent. Satan’s helpers took the form of a zealous religious leader, the judiciary, some prominent New England clergy and an indifferent governor.
Rev. Samuel Parris oversaw the spiritual guidance of the tight-knit Puritan settlement of 2,000 souls. Parris, who did nothing to quell the hysteria of the “witchcraft epidemic,” was stymied, thanks to the fractious nature of his parish.
His parishioners fought with him, disrespected his position and were uncooperative. The community also owed Parris a back-salary and they were slow to replenish his woodpile.
Two young girls, Elizabeth Parris and Abigail Williams (Samuel Parris’ daughter and niece) first raised the spectre of a demonic infestation when they were “bewitched” by the family’s West Indian slave Tituba and community members Sarah Osborne and Sarah Good. Parris set things in motion when he called on another reverend to confirm the girl’s fits. This later expanded to finger 150 resident “witches.” The girls had fits and suffered pinpricks and pinches; they also claimed to be bewitched by Satan’s minion, Bridget Bishop, who was a local widow.
If branded a witch, you were presumed guilty in the Court of Oyer and Terminer (Latin for “to hear and decide”). A witch’s ally risked the same accusation since “not to believe in witchcraft is the greatest of heresies.”
The tireless persecution of innocents finally ended in October when the court was dissolved, yet the anguish of that frightening year of systemic tyranny, more than 300 years ago will resonate with modern readers.
The Witches is a must-read for progressive readers who want to understand the social and moral costs of an unbridled theocracy. Pair it up with Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale in your book club. Patricia Dawn Robertson majored in Women’s Studies and now lives in a Cathedral Town in rural Saskatchewan.