Putting the Pieces Together... The Puzzle of Salem

Copyright © 1994 Eric Miller. All Rights Reserved

If ever there were witches, men and women in covenant with the Devil, here are multitudes in New England. - Rev. Samuel Parris,-1692.1

      Looking back at Seventeenth Century colonial America, several key events grab the imagination. The founding of Jamestown, the voyage of the Pilgrims, the first Thanksgiving, Bacon's Rebellion, and the establishment of slavery all call great attention to themselves. One occurrence, however, lurks in the dark days of the early 1690s. That event is the Salem witch trials of 1692. This episode stands out among the others as a brutal and backward looking mistake in course of American history. The history of this period is indeed tragic, but, nevertheless, it still inspires great interest. How an event like this could happen less than one hundred years before the Revolution is a fascinating but elusive question. Medieval witchcraft beliefs, powerful sexism, Village rivalries, and a society in flux are all partial answers to the question, but none of them alone can answer it. To find the true cause of the Salem witch trials, one must fit all these strands together like a jigsaw puzzle. In doing this, it becomes obvious that this unfortunate episode is one of the most complex in colonial American history.

     Going back to the medieval period, witchcraft was traditionally defined as misfortune caused by a magical adult agency, overwhelmingly women. The types of misfortunes a witch could cause, collectively called "maleficium," could range from such things as causing beer or cheese to spoil, the family cow drying up, to actually causing the deaths of people.2 Many people believed that witches made a covenant with the Devil, from whom they acquired their magic powers. It was possible, however, for common folk to find some sort of mark on a witches body which indicated her alliance with the Devil. Very often, this mark would be the so-called "witch's teat," which was some sort of extra nipple from which familiars of the witch could nurse. It is important to remember that the common view of the witch, the one who caused your baby to die or your cheese to spoil, was subtly different from the theological witch, who signed a contract with the Devil, possibly slept with him, and participated in Witch's Sabbaths. In the English tradition, while the definitions often blurred, the malefic witch stood out far more than the theological witch.3 After the Reformation, fear of the Devil tremendously increased in England. Most Englishmen believed in a physical, tangible Devil. One Englishman believed that the Devil was the "prince and God of this world."4 This historical tradition of witchcraft beliefs is the first piece of our puzzle.

     While witchcraft was both a traditional concept and a theological concept, it was also a legal concept. In the English tradition, the first statute against witchcraft was implemented in 1542. However this statute was repealed in 1547, only to see a new statute issued in 1563, called an "Act agaynst Conjuracions Inchantments and Witchcraftes." This act, too, was repealed in 1604, when a new and more brutal act against witchcraft was passed. The 1604 act remained in force until 1736. If found guilty under the 1604 statute, the sentence was death, unlike under some of the earlier statutes, where more lenient punishments could have been granted.5 The legal background of witchcraft is a very important piece of the puzzle of Salem.

     Before we move on to New England and Salem, we must see the episode in perspective. While ultimately twenty people were killed in Salem, over ten thousand people were executed for witchcraft in Europe during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries alone. In looking back at the Salem episode, it is sobering to remember that the Salem affair was only the "tip of the iceberg."6

      With the English background in mind, we must now examine the attributes of witchcraft in New England. As in England, the typical witch was female, but there were many other characteristics that went into the making up of a witch. A New England witch tended to be a woman who was middle aged and of "humble" social status. She was either married or widowed, and they often were "somewhat less fecund" than other women. Added to this was the fact that most accused witches, male and female, had disagreeable or self-assertive personalities.7 It was this type of person who was first accused of witchcraft in Salem.

    One of the most important aspects of the woman-witch, one that would figure prominently in the Salem trials, had to do with property. Despite several New England laws that clearly specified male inheritance of property, several women in Salem owned property or stood to own property. The female property owner upset the Puritan social order, and made these women vulnerable to witchcraft accusations.8 All over New England, but in Salem in particular, conflicts between sons who believed that the real property of their deceased fathers was theirs, and widows who held that property (or whose new husbands held it) could and often did cause a great deal of resentment. These conflicts only contributed to the witch craze in Salem.9

     While the events in Salem are familiar, a brief review of the episode is in order. It began quietly in the kitchen of the Reverend Samuel Parris, in Salem Village, Massachusetts; a group of young girls and a slave from the Caribbean named Tituba, were trying to determine what their future husbands would be like. Utilizing a primitive crystal ball, the girls saw something that terrified them: "a specter in the likeness of a coffin." Soon the girls began to experience "odd postures," "foolish, ridiculous speeches," "distempers," and "fits." While at first Parris and others sought medical explanations, they soon determined that the girls were under the spells of witches. The girls initially gave up three names, Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osbourne, all of whom roughly corresponded to the usual conception of a witch. While the others denied the charges, Tituba soon confessed, and the women were locked up. However, the girls' fits did not stop. Ministers came to examine the situation, which appeared to cause the girls even more fits.

     As the Spring went on, more people became afflicted, and more people were accused of witchcraft. The Salem jail began to fill with witches, and the social status of the witches began to increase. With the growing number of prisoners, the accusations began to move out of Salem Village, and into surrounding communities. It became clear that it was no longer a local affair. When the new governor, Sir William Phips, arrived on May 14, 1692 (with a new charter for the colony of Massachusetts), he implemented the Court of Oyer and Terminer to try the witchcraft cases. The first trial it conducted, that of Bridget Bishop, returned a guilty verdict, and on June 10, Bishop was hanged. The trials dragged on throughout the summer, and when they finally ended in September, due to the direct intervention of several Massachusetts ministers, and Governor Phips, there had been 141 accusations, and twenty people were dead.10 Part of the reason that the trials were eventually stopped was that the accusers began to accuse people whose status and piety was so firmly established that people no longer believed them.11

     To begin to fit together the pieces of Salem's puzzle, we will start with the afflicted people. What exactly was happening to them? They were believed to be possessed. The question of what was happening to the afflicted people was just as perplexing to contemporaries as it is to modern historians. The Reverend Deodat Lawson, who had previously been the minister at Salem Village, described how the afflicted girls would claim to be tempted to sign the Devil's "Book," they asserted that the touch of the accused witch would halt their fits, they said that they could see the witches "suckling their familiars," when no one else could, and other typical accusations.12 Lawson also claimed that the accused did not need to use puppets and other traditional charms to invoke their magic.13

     It is possible that the afflicted were experiencing some type of mental aberration which caused their Seventeenth Century contemporaries to deduce witchcraft. However, this conclusion leads to a conclusion of a "mass psychopathology." The problem certainly had to do with inner conflicts within the afflicted, but the idea of a mass mental illness not only ignores previous witchcraft trials, but witchcraft outbreaks in other societies.14

    Ergotism is another explanation of exactly what the afflicted persons were going through in 1692. Briefly, ergotism is a disorder which comes from eating contaminated rye bread, which was prevalent in Salem. Ergot contains some elements of lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, and it is alleged that this element caused very vivid hallucinations which were interpreted as possession.15 Indeed, it is alleged that the spectral evidence (the vision of a witch appearing to a possessed person) bears great similarity to ergot inspired hallucinations (although the author of this idea admits "there can never be hard proof for the presence of ergot in Salem....").16 While the idea of ergotism holds a certain appeal, it is an unsatisfactory answer to what was happening. In fact, when one remembers the thousands of accused witches in Europe, and the witchcraft cases in New England before Salem, the idea of ergotism cannot stand.17 Joseph Klaits, an historian of European witchcraft, states that the claims of ergotism rest on "a long chain of unlikely assumptions."18

    A more plausible explanation has to do with psychology and physiology. Very often people do things for reasons unknown, even to themselves. The world of Salem was a world in which the existence and powers of demons and devils was rarely questioned. Events that were, at the time, unexplainable were often attributed to witchcraft. Anthropologists have observed similar possession behavior is many different cultures. Clinical hysteria exhibits many of the same kinds of behavior reported by the people of Salem. These kinds of behaviors (feelings of choking, being bitten, strange postures) can emerge in times of severe stress, which Salem Village was experiencing in 1692 (as will be discussed below). "If the ordinary means of coping [with emotions and stress] fail,... the unconscious takes over." Very often, neurotic stress can produce strange symptoms which cannot be traced to physical causes. It was the society that interpreted this behavior as possession. Approximately fifty years later, very similar behavior would be interpreted as a conversion experience.19

     While it is true that what was happening to the afflicted people is an important piece of the puzzle, a more important piece has to do with those who interpreted what was happening. We have already seen that Rev. Lawson believed that the girls were possessed and that the accused had considerable magic power. He was not alone in this belief. The adults observing the afflicted people assumed witchcraft almost from the beginning. It is possible that if those adults had given a different interpretation of these events, the whole episode might never have happened.20