Salem: Torturing the Facts

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Colonial America, Cotton Mather, Increase Mather, Legal Stuff, McMartin Preschool Trial, Salem, Salem Witch Trials, The Enlightenment, Torture, Witchcraft

One of the things that the average person knows about witch trials is that they involved a lot of torture. Innocent women and men were tortured to force them to confess to crimes they didn’t and couldn’t possibly have committed, and so we look at the witch trials as a massive exercise in human irrationality, because things like that couldn’t happen today.

Salem fully embraces this idea. Cotton Mather (Seth Gabel) harasses Mercy Lewis (Elise Eberle), hacks her hair off, locks her in bondage gear, and later literally hangs her up in a church. He tortures Giles Quarry to force him to plead in court. Later, he catches an actual witch and hangs her from a tree. Then Increase Mather (Steven Lang) shows up and kicks the torture into high gear. He ducks the witch Mab in an effort to force her to confess. He captures Mercy’s pack of female wannabe witches and tortures them to throwing boiling hot water on them and strapping them down to various bondage chairs and tables. Then when Mercy accuses Tituba (Ashley Madekwe), he straps her down and goes full inquisition on her. He has a steamer trunk filled with all sorts of torture instruments that he lovingly shows her—various knives and other edged tools, the Pear of Anguish, a vicious ‘breast-puller’ (at least, that’s what I think he calls it), and so on. He clearly uses them on her, because she gets bloodier as the episode goes on.

The Reality

The series, and the general audience, is very confused on these issues, because the reality was much more complex. The first issue of confusion is who tortured and who didn’t. Across most of Continental Europe, torture was generally a legally-accepted practice in at least some situations. The use of torture on witches was permissible, but generally quite regulated. If a suspected witch refused to confess, she (or perhaps he) would be warned that they could be tortured, and then they would be returned to their cell to contemplate this. A day or two later, they would be shown torture implements and urged to confess, and then returned to the cells. A day or two later, they were tied down for torture, but usually not actually tortured, before again being urged to confess and then returned to their cell. It was generally only on the third or fourth session that they might actually be tortured. So the authorities generally employed torture only as a last resort, whereas in popular imagination it’s the first resort. And in most jurisdictions there were legal rules about when and how torture could be used, just the way that today there are rules about when and how police can question a suspect. So torture was never the legal-free-for-all that it’s nearly always presented as (as in Salem, for example).

More importantly for the show, Salem was under English common law, and English common law forbade torture, except in the case of treason against the monarch. As English jurists understood torture, it was never legally applied against any witch either in England or in the American colonies. (Scotland, while ruled by the English monarchs, followed Scottish law, which did allow torture, so accused Scottish witches were tortured.)

The tricky thing here is that some things that most modern Americans would regard as torture were not considered torture at American facilities at Iraq and Guantanamo under English common law. Sleep deprivation, for example, was entirely legal, so accused witches were sometimes kept awake for several days as a way to extract a confession. Accused witches could be strip searched for the ‘Witch’s Tit’, any unusual mole or skin tag or wart that could be interpreted as a supernatural nipple that witches used to suckle their demonic familiar, especially if it was near their breasts, genitals, or anus. Ducking (not ‘dunking’), which involved tying an accused witch into a chair and lowering her into the water, was not an attempt to torture a witch into confession but rather a test to see if the witch floated, because it was widely believed that witches were supernaturally light or that water would reject them. So the above scene in which Increase ducks Mab, is entirely wrong; he’s breaking the law by ducking a confessed witch because, since she’s confessed, he doesn’t need to get more evidence that she’s a witch.

If we disregard the mistakes in the way Mab is ducked, her ducking itself is plausible (it was actually something that was done in the American colonies); however no one was ducked at Salem during the Witch Trials. But the other things he does to Tituba and Mercy’s posse would have been blatantly illegal and would have forced the Salem authorities to arrest him as a criminal. But, as I’ve already pointed out, the show has literally no legal framework for the trials and interrogations; the rules vary from episode to episode and Increase Mather just makes up the law as he goes, even when he contradicts himself.

But the Search for Witches was Irrational, So Who Cares?

While witch-hunting looks irrational to us, it was less unmoored from reality than it’s generally presented. For most of the Middle Ages, scholars and clergy maintained that while miracles were real, magic wasn’t. In the 10^th century, a document known today as the Canon Episcopi declared that belief in magic was false, because Satan had no power to influence the physical world. The best that Satan and his demons could do was trick people into thinking magic had happened. So if someone thought they had flown through the air magically, this was impossible and what had actually happened was they had experienced an illusion or a dream. Although the Canon Episcopi was probably authored in the 10th century, it was later mistakenly ascribed to an important 4th century ecclesiastical council, and as a result it was taken to be binding on the entire Western church. So from the 10th to the 14th century, the official position of Western bishops and theologians was that magic and witchcraft did not actually exist; as a result, very few witchcraft trials occurred during the period, because church law refused to consider it a possible crime.

The text of the Canon Episcopi

But in the later 14^th century, this idea began to be challenged by scholars who maintained that the Devil actually could affect the physical world. Modern scholars are still unsure exactly why beliefs changed, so I won’t go into that complicated question, but by the later 15^th century, both religious and secular authorities were much more willing to consider the possibility that magic had actually happened when something inexplicable occurred. (When physicians were unable to explain what was happening to Betty Parris, her father Samuel began to consider the possibility of witchcraft.) So witchcraft was used as an explanation when other explanations seemed unconvincing or unavailable. That in itself is not irrational based on the level of scientific understanding at the time.

More importantly, most legal systems in Europe and the New World recognized that simple accusations of witchcraft were insufficient to prove a charge. It was not enough for someone to say that they had been bewitched or had seen a neighbor do something suspicious. Everyone recognized the possibility of false accusation driven by ulterior motives like spite or personal quarrels.Following Biblical precepts, moral crimes like witchcraft required the eyewitness testimony of at least two witnesses. But the nature of witchcraft as it was understood was such that it was unlikely to be corroborated by witnesses, because the witnesses to witchcraft were generally thought to be restricted to other witches. So law courts across Western society had the same problem that modern law courts do; how do you prove an accusation of a serious crime without witnesses to the crime?

Modern law courts have recourse to a wide variety of forensic tools such as taking fingerprints, blood spatter analysis, DNA evidence, and ballistics. But early modern courts did not have such tools. Instead, they turned to the expert testimony of the day, scholars and manuals that explained how to identify witches. So they searched the accused’s body for a Witch’s Tit (or, on the Continent, for the Devil’s Mark) and ducked her in hopes they could find evidence of the crime. They searched her house for poppets or other tools of witchcraft. They questioned neighbors and heard accusations of different examples of witchcraft. In other words, they sought hard evidence. Again, this is perfectly rational based on their understanding of how the universe worked.

A man holding two early 20th century poppets, made from clay, nails, and thorns

But in many cases, the evidence they found was insufficient. Was that wart actually a Witch’s Tit, or just an ordinary wart? Was the witch starting to sink just as she was pulled out during the ducking? Was that actually a poppet, or just a child’s toy? The judges weren’t always convinced that the scraps of evidence they had located was enough to justify convicting someone of a very serious crime.

In a situation like that, the best evidence would be a confession by the accused that she had actually committed the crimes, because a confession was considered solid proof of guilt. And that’s where torture came in. The idea of torture was that if it could extract a confession, the need for further evidence was moot, because the witch would have implicated herself and told who her accomplices were. In other words, torturers were interrogating accused witches for exactly the same reason that cops on CSI and Law & Order do, because getting a confession makes proving guilt in a court of law much easier. These shows rarely show the cops coercing false confessions out of innocent people for the same reason that judges were comfortable with torture in the 17^th century, because they were sure that innocence was a powerful protection and that only the guilty had anything to fear. The notion of false confession as a common matter was not seriously contemplated because it would undermine the sense that the legal system generally worked to achieve real justice. (Although there are no hard studies of the rate of false confession in the modern American legal system, the Innocent Project has found that fully 25% of people convicted and then exonerated by later DNA evidence had made a false confession. That suggests that false confession may be a far larger problem in the American system than people generally recognize.)

So the desire for confession stemmed for an entirely rational concern that in the absence of compelling evidence, it was hard to prove the truth of an accusation without a confession. Many 17^th century judges had a lower threshold of proof than modern courts do, but they still recognized the same problems.

The rationality of the Salem judges is shown by the debate over the admissibility of spectral evidence. Betty Parris, Abigail Williams, Mercy Lewis, and other girls claimed that they could see invisible witches torturing them, but no one else could see these spirits. The judges who presided over the trials recognized that the testimony of teenage girls was not entirely reliable, especially given the rather outlandish nature of the testimony), so they asked Cotton and Increase Mather for their opinion on the issue. Both men responded by cautioning them to not put too much weight on the evidence, because the Devil could be causing the girls to see the images of innocent people in order to destroy the innocent. But Cotton’s letter admitted that God would certainly protect the innocent, and that equivocation seems to have persuaded most of the judges that spectral evidence was acceptable. Perhaps the judges were just looking for a reason to accept evidence they already wanted to accept. But at least one judge, Nathaniel Saltonstall, was sufficiently uncomfortable that he resigned from his appointment. Again, the standards these judges were using are rather lower than those of modern judges, but the issues are not entirely dissimilar.

A 19th century depiction of the Salem trials

In fact, one historian, Walter Stephens, has argued that among some early modern theologians, the interest in witchcraft arose not from an overabundance of credulity, but the growth of skepticism about the supernatural and the existence of God. Stephens’ argument, briefly put, is that the desire to find and interrogate witches and prove that they were employing magic stems from anxiety about the inability of theologians to prove the existence of God. If women could be found who would admit to having sex with the Devil (an activity that some witch-hunting manuals dwelt on at considerable length), then that would prove the existence of Satan and by extension the existence of God. In other words, Stephens suggests that many witch-hunters were trying to prove to themselves that God existed precisely because they were scared to acknowledge their own doubt, the way that many vocal homophobes are closeted homosexuals trying to persuade themselves that they’re straight. (George Rekers, I’m looking at you. You too, Pat Robertson.)

So if witch-hunting was more rational than it looks on the surface, why do we so strongly associate it with irrationality? For that, we can thank the major intellectual movement of the 18^th century, the Enlightenment. Enlightenment intellectuals, like Voltaire, Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson, saw themselves as helping lead European society out of the darkness of irrationality and superstition into the light of science and rationality. These men emphasized that the Christianity of their day was irrational, superstitious, and anti-intellectual. Emphasizing the irrationality of the witch hunting of the previous two centuries was a perfect way of highlighting how backward the previous centuries had been in comparison to their contemporary drive for science and rationality, the way that American films often flatter the democratic impulses of modern Americans by showing that medieval and early modern society was autocratic.

Well, It Still Couldn’t Happen Today because We’re Too Rational Now

I’ve got three words for you: McMartin Preschool Trial. In 1983, a mother in Manhattan Beach, California reported to police that her daycare-aged son had been anally raped by a staffer at the McMartin Preschool, basing her claim on the fact that her son had been suffering from painful bowel movements. Initially, the police refused to investigate, but she sent out a letter to the 200 other families at the preschool warning them that their children might have been abused as well, and mounting public pressure led to the police questioning several hundred children from the McMartin Preschool.

The McMartin Preschool, where the alleged atrocities supposedly took place

They hired an organization named Children’s Institute International to do the questioning, since the police had not been trained to question such young witnesses. CII employed a range of novel and untested methods,  inviting children to speculate about “what might have happened”, to play pretend, and to use anatomically correct dolls to show what might have been done to them. Children were sometimes told what other children had already said. Children who supported the accusations were praised for “telling the truth”, while those who denied anything had happened were sometimes badgered into changing their testimony.

The resulting testimony was often bizarre. The staffers didn’t just have anal sex with the children, they also had sex with animals, used power drills on the children, flew through the air (sometimes in hot air balloons), maintained a network of secret tunnels, flushed children down the toilet into secret rooms, sacrificed animals in secret rituals at an Episcopal church, forced the children to dig up coffins in cemeteries, and engaged in orgies in car-washes, circuses, and airports. One child reported that movie star Chuck Norris had participated in the abuse. A group of concerned parents began digging at a lot next door to the preschool in an effort to find the tunnels; an archaeological organization eventually got involved in the effort.

Digging for the secret tunnels next to the preschool building

Despite the absurd and logically impossible nature of much of the testimony, and despite the fact that even the prosecutor admitted that the children had “embellished and exaggerated” their stories, six women and one man were charged with 321 counts of child abuse; Virginia McMartin was in her mid-70s at the time. The trial began in 1984 and lasted two years, involving testimony from “experts” who claimed that there was a nation-wide organization of Satanists who conspired to sexually molest children and sacrifice them to Satan; a key piece of their evidence was the supposedly scientific notion of ‘repressed memories’, which has subsequently been largely debunked. Eventually in 1996, a new prosecutor dropped all charges against five of the defendants, admitting that the evidence was “incredibly weak”. Peggy McMartin Buckey and her son Ray Buckey were subject to a new trial that ended in acquittal for Peggy in 1990; Ray was found not guilty on 52 out of 65 charges but two jurors refused to believe he was innocent of 13 charges of child abuse. He was tried again on six of the 13 charges and the result was a hung jury. He spent 5 years in jail during the process. The McMartin trials were the longest and most expensive case in US legal history.

Peggy McMartin Buckey during the trial

Although the McMartin case was the most famous example of fears of daycare child abuse rings, it was not unique. In the later 1980s, there were at least 21 similar trials. Despite a near-total lack of actual evidence, at least 22 daycare employees were convicted, and 3 are still in prison today, although most have had their convictions overturned.

The parallels between the McMartin case and the Salem Witch Trials are fairly clear. The accused were mostly women while the accusers and victims were children. The charges depended on what even at the time was seen as dubious evidence, and involved shocking stories of highly sexualized activities and devil-worship. Charges of flying through the air and engaging in secret meetings to do abominable things were common to both. In both cases, some of the charges seem to be literally impossible without magic.

The fact is that both the Salem Witch Trials and the McMartin Preschool Trials are examples of what scholars call a “moral panic”, a widespread fear among society that something is threatening the moral order, in which shocking charges create intense pressure for authorities to act. In the McMartin case, those who have studied it have sometimes argued that it reflects a deep but unspoken fear that leaving children at a daycare is somehow morally wrong, because rather than working, their mothers ought to be taking care of the children. The charges of intense sexual abuse acted to dramatize the fear without directly expressing it, and created a situation in which the authorities are reluctant to simply ignore the problem. But once authorities began treating the charges seriously, that legitimized the fears and intensified the panic. So the McMartin case may reflect anxieties about working mothers and proper forms of child-rearing. But what about Salem? What was driving the charges there? I’ll start looking at that next time.

Want to Know More?

SALEM SEASON 1is available through Amazon.

I don’t know of any studies that focus specifically on the use of torture in the Salem trials, but many general studies of the Witch Hunts discuss the subject. Robert Thurston’s The Witch Hunts: A History of the Witch Persecutions in Europe and North Americahas section on both the Salem Trials and torture as it was generally used in witch trials. Joseph Klaits’ Servants of Satan: The Age of the Witch Hunts (Midland Book, Mb 422)has a very good chapter on the legal and psychological issues involved with the torture of accused witches.

Finally, Walter Stephens’ Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Beliefmakes a very interesting argument that one of the core texts of witch hunting, the infamous Malleus Maleficarum, has been badly misunderstood and is a reflection of its author’s doubts about the existence of God rather than an irrational credulity in the existence of witches. It’s a bold thesis and I’m not sure that he’s convinced all the scholars, but it certainly influenced my understanding of witch hunting. If you’re interested in witch hunting, or specifically in the Malleus, it’s well worth the read.

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Salem: Who’s Real and Who’s Not

Tags

Ashley Madekwe, Cotton Mather, Elise Eberle, Increase Mather, Janet Montgomery, John Alden, Mary Sibley, Mercy Lewis, Salem, Salem Witch Trials, Seth Gabel, Shane West, Stephen Lang, Tituba, Witchcraft, Xander Berkeley

As I mentioned last time, WGN’s Salem show is based on historical reality a bit the way that surumi is based on crab legs. There’s so much wrong with the main characters that I decided they needed a whole post to themselves. The show’s central characters are Mary Sibley, Tituba, John Alden, Magistrate Hale and his daughter Anne, Cotton Mather, Mercy Lewis, and Isaac Walton. Of these, George Sibley, Anne Hale, and Isaac Walton are entirely fictitious. It’s a bit sad, because Iddo Goldberg’s Isaac is probably the best character on the show; he’s well (and consistently) written, wonderfully acted, and the only character in the whole damn lot I actually care about.

 

Mary Sibley

Mary Sibley (Janet Montgomery) was a real person, but an extremely minor figure in the Witch Trials, and little is known about her. Her husband’s name was Samuel, not George, and her social status is unclear. She was the aunt of one of the first girls to be afflicted at Salem, and when her niece fell ill, Mary instructed the slave woman Tituba how to bake a “witch cake” that would reveal who had afflicted the girl. So Mary Sibley had at least a modicum of knowledge about folk magic; her action got her suspended from communion, but she was later restored when she confessed to the church that her purpose in advising Tituba was entirely innocent. So the character Montgomery plays is essentially an entirely fictitious one, apart from the name. Her Sibley is one of the dominant figures in town government, quite wealthy, a slave-owner (she is the owner of Tituba), and the most important witch in Salem. Of those details, the first and third are entirely false, the second pure conjecture, and the last bares only a faint resemblance to fact.

Janet Montgomery as Mary Sibley

Montgomery’s Sibley is one of the few interesting characters in the show. She’s the lead villain of the show, bent on leading an ominous Grand Rite that requires the death of a dozen innocent people before it can happen. But her motivations are remarkably complex. She’s in love with John Alden, but angry that he abandoned her. She feels angry and guilty that she had to dispose of her unborn child. She hates the Puritans of Salem and in particular her husband and wants to see them all ruined, but after she starts the witch panic, she begins to realize that it could turn against her. Her feelings for Alden lead her to begin reconsidering her plans. She has to deal with the fractious coven of witches, many of whom are beginning to lose faith in her and plot against her. Montgomery handles the character’s conflicting feelings, motives, and goals about as well as the rather inconsistent script allows.

 

Tituba

Tituba (Ashley Madekwe) was a slave owned by Samuel Parris, a key figure in the witch panic who is omitted from the series; I’ll talk about him in later posts. There is considerable debate about Tituba’s ethnicity. Popular imagination, spurred on by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Giles Corey of the Salem Farms, has tended to depict her as a black woman on the grounds that she was a slave, but all the contemporary sources describe her as an Indian, and her husband, John Indian, was clearly understood to be Indian. Her name, however, is Yoruba, so there is at least one firm piece of evidence pointing to African descent. Parris purchased both Tituba and John Indian in Barbados in the 1670s, and at least one scholar has argued that she was, in fact, an Arawak from modern Venezuela. Beyond that, most of what you’ll find on the internet about her is wild conjecture. Because she came from Barbados, she has often been associated with voodoo, but there’s no actual evidence that Tituba ever actually practiced any magic. She was the first person to be accused of being a witch during the Salem Witch Panic, and she was also the first to confess, probably because Parris physically beat her into confessing, but the details of her confession conform entirely to English notions of witchcraft and show no evidence of influence from either Yoruba or Arawak belief or practice.

Ashley Madekwe as Tituba

In the series, Tituba is the witch who recruited Mary Sibley into the coven, and throughout the first season, she works to keep Mary, her owner, true to the witches’ original plan. She only falls under suspicion fairly late in the season. The series is fairly canny about her ethnicity. Madakwe is half Nigerian, but fair-skinned, so she conforms visually to popular ideas about slaves from the Caribbean, but late in the season she says that she is an Arawak taken as a slave while a young girl. That’s pretty much the most accurate detail about her character; on this issue the show’s writers have at least been making an effort to fit current scholarly thinking.

 

John Alden

John Alden (Shane West) was the oldest son of John and Priscilla Alden (not Sarah Alden, as we see on her tombstone in one episode), two of the original Mayflower colonists. As this suggests, John Alden Jr was almost 70 years old at the time of the Witch Trials. He was a wealthy, powerful Puritan who had a distinguished record serving in the first French and Indian War; in 1690, he had served as a negotiator with the Native Americans. In 1692, he was living in Boston. After the trials had gotten underway, the girls who acted as the chief accusers, probably prompted by the magistrates overseeing the trial, named Alden as one of the attendees of the witch’s sabbat, as a result of which he was jailed. After the first executions, he escaped from jail, fled to Duxbury (a suburb of modern Boston), and remained there until after the panic had resolved itself. He wrote a narrative of his experiences that became one of the important sources for the Witch Trials.

Shane West as John Alden

Again, it’s clear that West’s version of Alden is essentially fictitious in almost every regard except for his military experience. He’s young, a resident of Salem and a selectman, a former lover of Mary Sibley, skeptical to the verge of agnosticism (he’s not sure if people have souls, and he initially doesn’t believe in witchcraft). He’s the main opponent of the Witch Trials and basically the hero of the series. He does get arrested, but his arrest leads to an abortive trial and a magical escape from prison. The show also claims that he lived with the Native Americans for several years and helped them slaughter at least one large group of colonial militiamen. There’s no evidence for this claim. (And can I just say that West’s John Alden looks like he would be more comfortable in a biker gang than old Salem?)

Magistrate Hale

Magistrate Hale (Xander Berkeley) is a rather distorted version of Rev. John Hale. Rev. Hale was the Puritan minister of Beverly (another former portion of Salem Town). Hale was one of the first men to support the accusations of the afflicted girls and played an important role in the trials until November, 1692, when his second wife, Sarah Noyes Hale, was accused of being a witch. This persuaded him that spectral evidence was unreliable, and he was one of many who by this time were beginning to doubt the validity of the trials. He died in 1700. The series’ version of Hale, however is not a minister, but rather one of the Salem selectmen and one of the witches. Like Sibley, he’s a somewhat ambivalent villain, being motivated chiefly by love of his daughter. One of the few facts that the series gets right about Hale is that he witnessed the execution of a witch when he was a child, Margaret Jones, the first person executed in Massachusetts as a witch (in 1648).

Xander Berkeley as Magistrate Hale

 

Mercy Lewis

Mercy Lewis (Elise Eberle) was an orphan, her parents dying in an attack by Native Americans on a settlement in Maine. She was eventually offered a position as a servant in the household of Thomas Putnam, the father of Ann Putnam. Ann and Mercy  were among the second group of girls to be afflicted and bring accusations of being a witch; other members of their household, including Ann’s mother, Ann Sr, and a cousin, Mary Walcott, were also afflicted, as were four other members of the household, though less so. This cluster of people from the Putnam household were probably the most important accusers during the Witch Panic, targeting a total of 46 people with charges of witchcraft. As typical of the afflicted girls, Mercy saw “spectral” (invisible) people plaguing her, reported various pains on her body, suffered periodic seizures, and sometimes lost the ability to speak. In the series’ pilot, Mercy is already afflicted by Mary Sibley, and three people have already been executed. The only conclusion for the viewers is that Mercy was the first girl to be afflicted and was responsible for the first three executions. That’s historically wrong, as I’ll explain in the next post; she was neither the first accuser, nor were the first people executed ones she identified. In the show, she sees a spectral hag and shows bite marks across her body, but she also attacks people, flies up the ceiling, and  on one occasion vomits a massive shower of blood onto someone. She’s put in chains and, bizarrely, hung on the wall of the Salem church like she’s being crucified. Cotton Mather puts her into bondage gear and leads her through town like a bloodhound when she can’t speak. All of that is invented. Later in the series, three girls approach Mercy and persuade her to start making accusations against an innocent man; she seems to enjoy the power this gives her. That’s possibly true; the motives for the accusations are unclear; we’ll look at that in a later post. By the end of the season, Mercy has become a witch under Mary Sibley’s guidance. That’s false, but, as I’ll explain, has at least a smidgen of scholarly value to it. Overall, the show’s Mercy bares little relationship to the person she’s based on.

Mercy literally hanging around in church

 

The Mathers The historical Cotton Mather (Seth Gabel) was the son of the well-known minister and president of Harvard Increase Mather. Cotton (named with his mother’s surname) was something of a prodigy, graduating from Harvard at 15 and soon assisting his father at Boston’s North Church, where he eventually became the pastor. He was an important intellectual and author, although his reputation at the time never lived up to his father’s. He wrote scientific, mathematical, and religious treatises, and after the Witch Trials became a prominent proponent of smallpox inoculation, a then-controversial practice. Despite being deeply interested in science, Mather also believed in the reality of witches.

Cotton Mather

As prominent ministers and intellectuals, the magistrates asked both Cotton and Increase to advise them about how to proceed after the trials began. A particular question of concern to them was how to handle ‘spectral evidence’. Spectral evidence was the term used for the mysterious visions that the girl accusers claimed to have; they insisted they could see witches tormenting them when no one else could. The magistrates were hesitant, unsure of how to regard such claims. In two letters, Cotton replied that such evidence should be used with extreme caution; he points out that it is entirely possible that the Devil could use images of innocent and virtuous people in order to ruin them. However, he also says that in such situations, God ordinarily provides a way to vindicate them. What the magistrates took from that letter was essentially a go-ahead to accept spectral evidence as proof of guilt. He played no direct role in the trials themselves, although he did attend and speak at several of the executions. Whereas Mather was skeptical of spectral evidence, he regarded confessions of guilt as solid proof that an accused witch was guilty. In this he followed the best thinking of early modern European legal experts, who were generally reluctant to convict accused witches without some form of solid evidence. A confession was ideal evidence, since the accused her- or himself was admitting the crime. While we can obviously see flaws in that line of thinking, the impulse to find actual evidence of the crime demonstrates that there was a degree of rational thinking about witch trials; they were conducted according to legal principles and not just free-for-alls as they are normally imagined to be. There was comparatively little fear of false confessions, since the crime of witchcraft seemed too horrible for one to confess falsely. There was also a sense that God would protect the innocent from the pressure to confess.

Seth Gabel as Cotton Mather

 

Gabel’s portrayal of Mather is a hot mess. At the start of the series, he’s portrayed as an expert on witchcraft who was brought into Salem by Mary Sibley to help root out witches, and he seems to have entirely taken over both as minister of the local church and as lead prosecutor in the Witch Trials. He’s entirely convinced that witches exist, and he shows no hesitation whatsoever to accept the spectral evidence offered by Mercy Lewis. Despite this, he’s sort of frenemies with John Alden, who used to beat him up when they were children together, and as the show progresses, Cotton teams up with Alden to investigate the witches.

The real problem with Mather in the series, however, is the fact that he regularly consorts with a whore named Gloriana at Salem’s public brothel. First, there certainly was prostitution in colonial America, but there weren’t open brothels where the prostitutes hung around outside to attract customers; it’s obvious in the show that they’re whores because they’re the only people in brightly-colored clothing. It’s unlikely that Salem was large enough to support such a business, and highly improbable that the more religious residents of the community would have tolerated the existence of such a place; colonists occasionally burned down brothels in major cities. Second, Mather openly frequents this place; Alden runs into him coming out of it in one episode, and in later episodes, his relationship with Gloriana seems widely known. A Puritan minister who was known to be committing adultery with prostitutes or other women (since Mather was a married man) would immediately have lost all moral credibility; even modern televangelists can’t pull that off, despite numerous attempts. And then, part way through the series he suddenly becomes a rationalist skeptic and starts defending people against charges of witchcraft, despite having personally interrogated one obvious witch and seen her perform explicitly supernatural feats. Gabel’s Mather represents several of the worst clichés of American culture all rolled together. He is ridiculed for being an educated intellectual; Alden once mockingly calls him “Harvard”. Despite being highly educated and sporadically interested in science (in one episode he wields a 19^th century hypodermic needle), he’s anti-intellectual and irrational; Alden serves as his rationalist foil. He’s also a venal clergyman whose external pieties mask a sexually corrupt personal life. He’s emotionally tormented by his unspecified sins, but fails to learn the lesson of mercy toward other sinners, and seems to be ok with the prospect of executing a few innocent people to purge the town of witches. Despite being a minister, none of his choices actually seem influenced by Christianity. In one episode he rapes Gloriana; in the next episode he offers to pay her to be his exclusive mistress. There’s literally nothing likable or admirable about him at all. He’s a religious fanatic who’s not actually religious.

Increase Mather

His father Increase Mather (Steven Lang) is played as a ruthless witch hunter who sometimes just executes people regardless of evidence or trial and on other occasions insists on a trial. That’s just made up. While he was a noted expert on witches, he was not a witch hunter. He didn’t track witches across Europe and the Atlantic Ocean. He wasn’t a ruthless torturer. And he wasn’t murdered by his own son; he died of bladder failure at age 84. It’s a shame that the character is written so poorly, because Lang does a bang-up job with the crappy material the show gives him. I would have loved to see what Lang could do with actually good material.

Stephen Lang as Increase Mather

 

Want to Know More? SALEM SEASON 1is available through Amazon. If you want to know what actually happened during the Salem Witch Trials, Bryan Le Beau’s The Story of the Salem Witch Trials (2nd Edition)is a decent place to start. It’s a straight-forward narrative of events, with only minimal analysis (which means it gets a bit dry in places), but it does a good job of laying out the facts in chronological order. (When it was revised for the 2nd edition, apparently they didn’t revise the index, which makes it very hard to use.)