The Endless Usefulness

Of Salem

Every now and again in a social situation, I ask people about the Salem Witch Trials. The answers are always interesting, mostly because they are so very wrong. It's actually comic, in a horrifying sort of way. Educated people cannot place Salem in a time context, and have absolutely no idea what actually happened, how many people were tried and executed, or how.

The events of 1692 and 1693 fascinate me, and it appears that it fascinates a lot of other people, too. When I conducted an Amazon search this afternoon, using "Witchcraft at Salem" the page listed 5,766 hits. Many of these will be repeats of other listings; still, that's an impressive return.

This is not the place to attempt to explain Salem - that's why I linked the chronology above. Nor shall I go into the many theories about Salem - here is a very brief summary link for some of the current top contenders. My personal library contains a number of Salem books,  some of which I consider better than others. That, too, is not my focus.

Salem and its explanations provide immensely useful analogies.

An early, hardy, perennial favorite is the notion that Salem was a project of religious leaders, whipped up to bolster their flagging prestige. The particular culprits in this scenario are the Reverends Mather, Increase and Cotton. In fiction and conspiracy theory, this is satisfying, and manageable. The analogy it provides works well when vilifying some political figure.

Truthfully, Cotton Mather put himself in a bad situation with his book, Wonders of the Invisible World. For a modern, reading his book is a surreal experience; he believed, in a way I cannot, in a very present invisible world, and he believed in witchcraft. Worse, Cotton Mather wrote as an advocate for his friends, the judges of the trials, after witnessing only a minority of them; this led him into intemperate language. But Cotton Mather absolutely did not "whip up" the witch-hunt.

Fiction allows an actor to set events in motion and manipulate them. Real life does not permit any such thing. Test this statement against your own life - then multiply it by at least ten to picture how this would bolix any effort to manipulate large events. However satisfying the theory, however much it simplifies the explanation, it fails the test of truth.

Another theory is that Salem Village suffered from an outbreak of ergot poisoning. The beauty of this theory, in our therapeutic culture, is that ergot excuses both the "witch bitches" and their victims. Ergot causes hallucinations and convulsions; ah, that explains it! This reduces Salem from a tragic drama to a sad event. Oh, that's terrible, but...no one's at fault, no one's to blame, it's sad, but we shrug and move on.

Ergot never struck me as all that great an explanation. The symptoms and consequences seem to me more violent and clearly the product of poisoning than something that would lead to people believing that "an invisible hand" rested on the young women accusers. It also assumes that because people in 1692 lacked much of our scientific and medical knowledge, they were stupid. This never struck me as likely; after all, people knew that a cool, wet spring caused many problems with the grain. Why should we assume the men and women of that era could not connect A to B?

The appeal in some political circumstances of absolving the actors of blame allows people to dismiss the actions, and concentrate on "healing." My reaction to this notion cannot be described as balanced. Illness does not excuse Salem. Pretending it does is simply dodging responsibility.

Then there are what can best be characterized as the "mixed" theories. Essentially, this argument says that social tensions, combined with a literal belief in the power of the Devil, interpreted the strange behavior of the girls as witchcraft. There is a great deal to be said for variations on this theory - as a background to the series of accusations, and the reaction of the community. For instance, Salem Possessed by Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum sets out a  long, subterranean conflict between those in Salem Village whose economic and social standings were rising, and those falling. While this explains the pattern of accusation, once the witch-hunt was rolling, it doesn't explain the initial accusations, or what caused the behavior of the accusers.

However, each of the "mixed" theories posits a different anxiety cause. We have Mary Beth Norton's In the Devil's Snare, which makes the cause of underlying anxiety the Second Indian War. Or Chadwick Hanson's argument that one major cause of anxiety was the renewal of the colony's charter. There are many others, of course, including the constant anxiety attendant upon being a Puritan.

The political consequences of this theory, naturally, serve as a warning that, when people are anxious they may be willing to strike out in ways that cannot be controlled, and may lead the populace to demonize a whole group. This makes Salem a cautionary tale, a sermon on public morality. In some ways, though less used than the sermons implicit in the other theories, this is a better moral message than others, which are evasions of responsibility.

Curiously, though, the keeper of our public morality - the press - is selective in its use of this sermon. While rightly decrying any "witch-hunt" against large groups of inhabitants of this country, the press cheerfully instigates persecutions against those it has decided do not deserve protection from witch-hunts. Fundamentalist Christians spring forcefully to mind.

The popularity of theories about Salem, and their subtexts, ebbs and flows. The interesting thing is to watch when competing sermons are proffered by the same actors to justify their actions. We live in an era where, at one and the same time, the press cautions against witch-hunts, while ginning one up.

How fascinating, and how sad.

At the end, will any of them stand up , as did Ann Putnam, the leading witch bitch herself, and admit their wrongdoing?

Posted by Squishy 7/11/2005 at 9:30 p.m. PDT