Witchcraft

Witchcraft

Few episodes from America’s colonial past times are as good known or as notorious as the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692. For many, the Salem trials cause got represented the defining 2d inward the history of Puritan conspiracy-minded intolerance as well as superstition; however, belief inward magic as well as witchcraft was an inextricable business office of the seventeenth-century worldview.

Witches were prosecuted inward Europe as well as inward all of the American colonies, non simply inward Puritan New England. While historians cause got produced competing explanations for colonial witchcraft belief, as well as though peradventure no ultimate explanation is possible, they cause got described many of the social, cultural, as well as religious weather inward which witches could live identified as well as witch-hunts could gain momentum.

Briefly stated, a witch was understood to live a soul who had made a pact with Satan to price neighbors, the community, or the terra firma through supernatural means. Influenza A virus subtype H5N1 witch, inward other words, was a devil-worshipper, someone whose actions constituted a criminal as well as heretical conspiracy to destroy orderly Christian society.


A World of Wonders

Colonial Americans lived inward an enchanted universe, a “world of wonders,” as historian David D. Hall has phrased it. Their the world was 1 where the supernatural infused the natural, where God as well as Satan were active agents inward daily events, as well as where storms, disasters, illness, as well as crop failure were “special providences” demonstrating God’s volition or displeasure.

Existence as well as livelihood were oft precarious inward early on America, as well as from a rich fund of pop religious beliefs people chose the practices or rituals that mightiness offering simply about sort of added protection from catastrophe. Magic as well as countermagic, spells, astrology, divination, palmistry, as well as witch lore were employed to predict the future, or heal the ill, to price enemies, or to defend against occult attack.

In the seventeenth century, local folk magic practitioners called “cunning folk,” “conjurors,” “white witches,” or “wizards” were omnipresent—though oft suspicious—members of English linguistic communication as well as American social club to whom people could plough for assistance.

Witches were a malevolent business office of this the world of wonders. While the do of magic was an accepted element of folk belief, witchcraft had to a greater extent than sinister connotations. Influenza A virus subtype H5N1 witch was someone who had acquired superhuman powers through a covenant with Satan; principal amid these powers was the powerfulness to perform maleficium, or to drive price through supernatural means.

The types of maleficium varied. Witches were oft defendant of causing disease or death, or causing miscarriages, or spoiling beer or butter. They were believed to torment their enemies inward other ways, past times invisibly entering the rooms of sleeping people as well as choking them, or turning themselves into animals to conduct out their evil deeds.

They were also said to live able to tempt others to bring together inward their satanic pact past times a hold back or glance, or past times sending out their specters to haunt their enemies. People nether this sort of satanic influence were believed to live “possessed,” a status that oft manifested itself inward inexplicable physical contortions or illnesses.

And spell belief inward magic as well as witchcraft was feature of pop as well as elite layers of early on American society, for clergymen specially the existent or imagined presence of witches was profoundly troubling. In making a covenant with Satan, the witch was rejecting God as well as godly society.

This import of heresy had deep resonance amid the Puritans, who believed themselves to live a covenant land of God as well as a terminal bastion of Protestantism. Witches inward New England represented aught less than a satanic conspiracy against God’s “city on a hill.”

Identifying these witches was a social process, a agency past times which people controlled social club as well as punished “antisocial” elements. Most accusations of witchcraft were of a face-to-face diversity as well as reflected local tensions betwixt neighbors.

What is oft surprising close these cases is the apparent banality of their origins. Testimony inward the 1651 trials against Mary as well as Hugh Parsons of Springfield, Massachusetts, shows that untidy describe concern transactions lay at the root of the accusations.

Hugh Parsons, a brick maker, exchanged threatening words with neighbors who after argued that he had bewitched them: their children had fallen unaccountably ill, their cow’s milk had curdled—all prove of “bewitchment.”

Other witchcraft trials cause got like quotidian origins. Unexplained illness, crop failures, missing farm implements, or abrupt deaths could easily live attributed to a suspicious neighbor’s demonic intervention.

Many of these cases never came to trial since the defendant would oft countersue for defamation. Yet the confluence of personal or communal misfortune as well as the demand for explanation as well as retribution oft meant that individuals who exhibited “antisocial” demeanour or who existed on the margins of social club were identified as witches.

Most of the individuals identified as witches inward colonial America were women. Historians dispute the numbers as well as gender proportions of witchcraft accusations, but 1 scholar, Carol F. Karlsen, has argued that of the 344 known people defendant of witchcraft inward New England betwixt 1620 as well as 1725, 267 (78 percent) were women.

Most of these were women who, purposefully or not, refused to convey their house inward society. For example, most defendant witches inward New England were middle-aged or older women who were eligible for inheritances; they interfered with the traditional patriarchal patterns of succession.

Women defendant of witchcraft inward New England commonly faced a familiar litany of sins that defined their deviance: excessive pride, sexual promiscuity, lying, discontent, or anger. They stuck out, inward other words, inward a social club that prized them chiefly as submissive Christian wives.

If witchcraft was defined as a rebellion against God, rebellion against the gender norms as well as hierarchy of early on American social club was every bit threatening to godly order. In times of problem or misfortune, marginalized or deviant women were hence amid the most vulnerable to live social scapegoats as well as defendant of beingness “handmaidens of the devil”.

The Salem Witchcraft Trials of 1692

These patterns tin give notice live seen writ large inward the Salem outbreaks, which lasted from belatedly 1691 to May 1693. This was non the initiative of all major witch-hunt inward colonial America; in that place had been a pregnant 1 inward Hartford, Connecticut, inward 1662–1665, during which at to the lowest degree 3 people were executed.

And the Salem trials, during which 19 people (fourteen women as well as v men) were hung as “witches” as well as hundreds were imprisoned, were dwarfed inward scale past times the massive witch-hunts that had swept Europe during the sixteenth as well as seventeenth centuries, which reputedly led to the executions of tens of thousands of women.

Salem inward the 1680s was a troubled town. Flooded with refugees from frontier wars with the Native American tribes allied with France, facing a failing economy, as well as separate past times deep shape as well as factional fissures, the town was a tinderbox of the kinds of social antagonisms where witchcraft accusations could thrive.

The outbreak itself began inward belatedly 1691. Several immature women began to experiment with magic as well as spells, as well as simply about of them, including the immature lady as well as niece of Samuel Parris, a local clergyman, began to exhibit the signs of “possession.”

When consulted, physicians as well as clergy could solely conclude that the fits as well as trances that afflicted these women were prove that they were nether the influence of an “Evil Hand.” When interrogated, the girls at initiative of all would non cite their “tormenters” but eventually gave out 3 names, Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, as well as Tituba.

These “witches” were arrested as well as presumed guilty. Good as well as Osborne denied the charges, but Tituba, a Carib Indian adult woman who was also Parris’s slave, confessed. She implicated Good as well as Osborne as accomplices as well as claimed that in that place were many other witches at large as well as conspiring against the community.

This confession initiated a bicycle of accusations as well as trials that extended far exterior of Salem; fifty-fifty the married adult woman of Governor William Phips inward Boston was accused. Some people chop-chop came to the decision that the scale as well as achieve of the accusations meant that the outbreak was all a delusion, if peradventure a satanically inspired one.

Others were non as well as then moderate inward their opinions. Samuel Parris, for one, argued that Salem witchcraft was aught less than a “War the Devil has raised with us.” Judicial moderation was non an option, according to Parris, for “If e'er in that place were Witches, Men & Women inward Covenant with the Devil, hither are Multitudes inward New-England”. Other members of the clergy were to a greater extent than ambiguous inward their assessment of the situation.

When the judges inward Salem asked New England’s clergy for advice, Boston pastor Cotton Mather prepared on behalf of his colleagues a document entitled “Return of Several Ministers” (15 June 1692) that gave mixed directives. On the 1 hand, the document declared, the judges must live scrupulous as well as exacting as they weighed the evidence.

On the other hand, if witchcraft was afoot, the prosecution against it must live speedy as well as vigorous. The hunt raged on until Governor Phips suspended the proceedings inward belatedly 1692; inward the leap of 1693 he pardoned everyone soundless inward custody.

From Magic to Metaphor

The Salem trials were non the terminal witch prosecutions inward the American colonies; a instance emerged inward Colchester, Connecticut, inward 1724. In general, however, witchcraft was no longer treated as a crime.

Many scholars cause got argued that the increment of scientific rationalism, get-go with the Enlightenment inward the eighteenth century, made belief inward magic as well as the supernatural increasingly ludicrous. While this explanation has simply about credence, many people continued to believe inward witchcraft after 1692, as well as soundless do.

The aftermath of the trials brought no immediate resolution as well as healing to Salem or New England, as well as the witch-hunt remained a source of contention as people looked for scapegoats. Among those most visibly selected for censure were the Puritan ministers, specially Samuel Parris as well as Cotton Mather, whose actions many believed were catalysts for the trials.

In Mather’s case, these accusations were largely unfair, since other than his published describe concern human relationship of the trials, Wonders of the Invisible World (1692), his dealings with the trials were relatively indirect.

Nevertheless, inward 1700 a Boston merchant named Robert Calef published a book, More Wonders of the Invisible World (1700), which claimed that the Puritan clergy, as well as Cotton Mather inward particular, had conspired to encourage the witch hysteria inward monastic tell to eliminate heterodox belief as well as to bolster their sagging religious as well as cultural potency inward New England.

The volume was instantly labeled libelous past times the Puritan authorities, as well as Increase as well as Cotton Mather were as well as then angered past times Calef’s accusations that they had copies of the volume publicly burned inward Harvard’s college yard.

Whatever the immediate effect of the suppression of Calef’s book, the long-term consequences to Cotton Mather’s reputation were catastrophic. No unmarried figure is as closely identified with the trials as Mather, as well as his retentiveness remains as the archetypal intolerant Puritan as well as superstitious witch-hunter.

In the twentieth century witchcraft as well as witch-hunting remained live as a powerful metaphor for repression of many kinds: state-sponsored religious or political persecution, or for the oppression of women inward a patriarchal society.

Many contemporary believers inward witchcraft or paganism, called Wicca, vogue themselves as the religious descendents of the victims of the Salem trials, as well as terra firma a continuity of utilisation betwixt their ain struggles for liberty of religious human face as well as the lives of those who died inward 1692. Probably the most famous utilisation of the witchcraft metaphor came with the production of Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible (1952).

Declaring that the “witch-hunt was a perverse manifestation of the panic which laid inward amid all classes when the remainder began to plough toward greater private freedom,” Miller used the Salem trials as an analogy for the political repression of McCarthy-era America.

In his view, the activities of Senator Joseph McCarthy as well as the House Un-American Activities Committee represented a conspiracy against liberty of conscience akin to the Puritan backlash against witchcraft.

Radical feminists inward the 1960s, meanwhile, also employed the witchcraft metaphor. In 1968, the “action wing” of New York Radical Women was formed, as well as they chose the cite WITCH, an acronym for Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell.

The grouping attacked institutions that were seen as emblems of patriarchal power; they hexed the Chase Manhattan bank, for example, as well as disrupted a bride fair at Madison Square Gardens dressed as witches (Purkiss, 8–9). For these women, a witch was an emblem of woman soul empowerment, non patriarchal victimization.