Just in the nick of time!
Bumped because the article is back on the SD front page.
My high school American History teacher in the mid-Eighties discussed the ergot theory, which was somewhat recent at that point, but did not say it was proved, just interesting. Another analysis at the time suggested that the families whose members were leveling witchcraft accusations were often then beneficiaries of the lands and property forfeited by convicted witches’ families. Money talks.
So in talking to a local Bible-thumping Christian, I asked why he wasn’t out killing witches instead of harassing women going into a local women’s health clinic. He claimed that the “witches” the Bible was talking about were a local group that were burning babies alive as a human sacrifice.
Of course, nothing in Exodus backs this up.
I’ve come across all these theories at one time or another, perhaps a combination of all of them is true:
- The accused were generally speaking women who were good at herbal medicine.
- The accused were women who were old and single.
- The main reason the hysteria continued was due to a small group of girls who where seeking attention.
Let’s not overlook the obvious: people really believed in witches back then.
I’m not saying witches existed, then or now. But we shouldn’t struggle so hard to explain why people were making accusations of witchcraft. There doesn’t have to be hidden motives.
Well, yes, but assuming that you’re talking about Salem, there are still some mysteries remaining even after you allow for that. Why this sudden witch hunt when witch hunts had been long lost in the past? And why did all the judges, etc., say only a year later that they were so very, very sorry, and had no idea what ever could have come over them like that?
Local politics or animosities could be at the root of it, the fantasies of the young girls used as a tool to further the designs of some particular people. Perhaps the relevant question here is cui bono?, who stood to gain from the trials?
Actually, their do have to be hidden motives. (Hidden in the sense that they are unknown, not in the sense of plots or conspiracies.)
The witch trials of the Renaissance, (they were never a Medieval phenomenon), tended to be social outbreaks that occurred in specific locations, for limited times. While there were occasional individual “witches” tried and executed in that period, it was rather more common for a community to have a frenzied outbreak resulting in a number of convictions and executions over a short period of time, followed by a restoration of something resembling sanity and the ending of the outbreak.
Given that phenomenon, a simple belief in witches does not really explain the Salem outbreak.
The Salem Witch craze occurred in 1692. Burning witches was not some long forgotten practice. Thousands of people (mostly women) were executed for witchcraft during the seventeenth century.
Granted, an outbreak of witch hunting didn’t happen for no reason. But it wasn’t a rare event that required an extraordinary reason. If a town had a bad harvest, they might decide to burn some witches.
A year later, the townspeople might feel some regrets. But it was more like “Yeah, we went a little overboard” rather than “My God, what did we do?”
This witch hunt episode became famous because of something very strange and unusual happened: Society and those in charge admitted they was at fault.
Almost as soon as the trials began, the use of spectral evidence was questioned (something that was allowed in previous witch trials). By the next year, spectral evidence was banned and most of those accused were acquitted. By 1695, there were calls to compensate those who were falsely accused and either jailed or executed. By around 1710, the relatives of those executed were compensated.
This to me is truly the most amazing this about the Salem Witch Trials. If society did not show remorse, it’s very likely that the trials would have become a mere footnote in our history much like The Red Summer when hundreds of Blacks were killed in race riots across the United States.
It worries me that if we had a similar incident, would society be so quick to admit fault, or just hope it goes away and never mention it again.
One of the biggest reasons for the witch hysteria was the political climate in 1691. This was the midst of King William’s War when the French encouraged their Indian allies to attack English settlements throughout New England. There were food shortages, disease, war refugees, and fear of attack throughout the 1690s. It wouldn’t take too much effort to bring the panic to a full boil.
Having quoted me, I am not sure whether you were attempting to rebut my post.
The Salem witch trials were very much a part of the general Renaissance era witch hunts. (Wikipedia dates witch hunts from 1450 to 1750.) It also occurred in a time of social upheavals that tend to correspond to witch hunt outbreaks, (war with native peoples, threatened famine, the Williamite War in Britain casting political shadows over communications from “home”, etc.). While there were occasional accusations witchcraft, (there were a total of 12 in the 50 years prior to the Salem hysteria), the Salem outbreak resulted in over 200 prosecutions, (including religious leaders and prominent citizens), 20 executions, and a handful of sick and elderly people dying in prison. That sort of event does call for more of an explanation that that people in those days feared witches.
(And while it is true the Britain seemed to have a penchant for identifying women as witches, that is also a phenomenon that could use a better explanation. The numbers of witches prosecuted in Europe were not nearly tilted against women to the degree that women in Britain and its colonies were attacked.)