Salem: One Thing the Show Gets Right

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Carol F. Karlsen, Colonial America, Linnda R. Caporael, Mary Warren, Mercy Lewis, Salem, Salem Witch Trials, Sarah Churchill, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman, Witchcraft

The Salem Witch Trials are one of the great historical puzzles. What led a group of mostly teenaged girls to accuse their neighbors of having bewitched them? The problem is a remarkably complex one, and one worth looking at.

In the Salem series, the first accuser that we see is Mercy Lewis (Elise Eberle), who in the pilot is being tormented by Mary Sibley (Janet Montgomery). Mary has magical control over Mercy, so when Cotton Mather tries to use Mercy to sniff out witches, Mercy accuses the innocent Giles Quarry. Later, Mercy breaks free of Mary’s control and a group of young girls ask her to accuse on of their fathers, who is a drunk who abuses his daughter; this time Mercy makes the accusation freely and with full knowledge that the man is not a witch. Then Mary approaches Mercy and offers to train her a witch, which Mercy agrees to. Later, Mercy recruits several other girls to become witches in training. The season ends with her recruiting a small army of disaffected youth. But, as I’ve shown, the series gets almost everything wrong. So let’s turn to the actual accusations and how historians have tried to make sense of them.

The first histories of the Salem Witch trials were written in the middle of the 18^th century, and although they were only two to three generations removed from the events, an enormous shift had taken place in the colonial mindset. Whereas a majority of colonists accepted the reality of witchcraft in 1692, by the 1750s, very few people still seriously believed in witches. This left the historians of the day with a problem; if witches were not real, why did Betty Parris, Abigail Williams, Ann Putnam Jr. and the other girls bring the accusations in the first place? Some scholars adopted an early version of Linnda R. Caporael’s theory that the problem was medical in nature; the girls were suffering from some illness that made them imagine they were being tormented by witches.

But Thomas Hutchinson took a different approach. He argued that the girls were guilty of intentional fraud. He suggested that they had initially just wanted some sympathy from the community, and that adults had started bringing charges to avoid becoming the targets of accusation. In other words, it was a sort of game that got out of hand. 19^th century historians, steeped in the rationalism of the day, followed Hutchinson’s line of argument and attributed the accusations to fraud, attention seeking, and similar factors. Basically, they felt that the afflicted were just naughty girls who let things get disastrously out of hand and found themselves riding a tiger that eventually turned and bit some of them.

There is definitely good reason to see fraud as an element in the accusations. On one occasion, Susannah Sheldon was found with her wrists tied tightly. Rev. Deodat Lawson’s account says that a couple of girls were found with their wrists tied and hanging from hooks such that they had to be lifted. It’s hard to see how this could be anything except an intentional act of deception. Mary Warren, one of the afflicted girls, at one point claimed that the other girls were faking their symptoms; when the other girls began to accuse Warren of witchcraft, she withdrew her claim and resumed her role as accuser. Similarly, Sarah Churchill told a friend that she had been lying, but that she couldn’t change her story after such a long time, because the authorities would not believe her.

However, in the 20^th century, the growth of modern psychology, particularly Freud’s argument that humans are not fully rational beings, has led many historians to consider the possibility that the girls were suffering from some form of mass psychopathology, such as mass hysteria. (This is not the same thing as being mentally ill; if a society recognizes a concept such as demonic possession, it is rational and sane for some members of that society to demonstrate the symptoms of possession.) Some of their symptoms were so extreme that they astounded those who saw them. Many of the girls experienced convulsions so extreme that they seemed to defy anatomical possibility, and on some occasions, several men were required to physically restrain the violent thrashings of teenage girls. Many of the girls were periodically rendered incapable of speaking or experienced a choking sensation, while fits of blindness are also sometimes mentioned. These symptoms—physical contortions, violent thrashing, the inability to speak, the sensation of choking or a lump rising in the throat, temporary blindness—are all recognized symptoms of hysteria today.

A 19th century drawing of a patient with hysterical convulsions

So we are left with a situation in which some of the symptoms the girls displayed may well be legitimate symptoms of a temporary psychopathology, while other evidence points to willful fraud. When Mary Warren broke away from the group of accusers and began to recant, the other girls seem to have pressured her into returning to the fold. That would seem a paint a picture of the girls as being at least partly conscious of their performance as afflicted victims of witchcraft and partly genuine victims of some condition they could not fully understand or control.

Let’s Look at the Accusers

Historian Carol F. Karlsen, in her impressive witchcraft study The Devil in the Shape of a Woman, surveys all known cases of witchcraft accusation in colonial New England, and focuses considerable attention on the demographics of those accusers who were considered possessed. Out of 78 such people, 67 of them (86%) were women. In contrast, non-possessed accusers (what I referred to in a previous post as ‘secondary accusers’) had a much more even gender ratio. So that suggests that something was different or special about the possessed or afflicted accusers.

Carol F. Karlsen

Looking at them more closely, Karlsen noticed that they tended to be clustered in the 16 to 25 year-old range, and tended to be unmarried. (In this and my other posts on Salem, I collectively refer to the afflicted as ‘girls’ for simplicity’s sake. Many of them were legally adults but lacked the chief social marker of womanhood of the day, namely marriage.) This pattern holds true at Salem. Only a few of them, chiefly Betty Parris, Abigail Williams, and Ann Putnam Jr., were below that age range, and only Ann Putnam Sr was substantially older or married. Among non-possessed accusers, there was a tendency for accuser and accused witch to have had a prior antagonistic interaction, but among possessed accusers, the social relationship seems to have been minimal. In other words, while it is possible that non-possessed accusers were influenced by previous negative encounters with those they accused, possessed accusers do not show any signs of playing out an established hostility to those they accused.

When Karlsen narrowed her focus specifically to the Salem trials, she noticed something even more interesting about afflicted girls there. Of the 24 afflicted girls over 16 but still unmarried, 13 had lost their father and 4 others had lost their mother, whereas among all non-possessed accusers in that age group, only 25% had lost a parent. Most of the afflicted girls at Salem had originally come from small settlements in Maine territory that had been attacked by Native Americans. As orphaned refugees they had come to Salem and were therefore socially newcomers. Some were living with relatives, but many had been taken in by strangers out of Christian charity. Most of them were being employed as servants by the families that had taken them in.

A few examples demonstrate this pattern. Sarah Churchill had come from a wealthy Maine family and was now living as a servant to George Jacobs Sr (whom she accused of witchcraft); her wealthy grandfather had been killed in an attack by Wabanakis, and her father had been forced to become a refugee. She was living in Salem because she had relatives there, but she was not living with them. Mercy Lewis was not, as Salem depicts, the daughter of a local minister; rather she was the daughter of a poor family from Falmouth, Maine, who was now living as a servant in the household of Rev. George Burroughs; she was the only survivor among her whole family of a Wabanaki attack. Later, she was a servant to the Putnams. Elizabeth Hubbard was living as a servant in the household of her great-aunt, Rachel Griggs, whose husband was the town physician. Mary Warren was a servant of John and Elizabeth Proctor. Mary Watkins apparently came from a wealthier family, but was living as a servant at the time of the Witch panic. After she was jailed during the trial (having at one point accused herself of witchcraft), she struggled to claim her inheritance from her father and a brother because her family would not provide her bail; she eventually filed a petition asking to be sold as an indentured servant.

Note how close Wabanaki territory was to colonial Massachusetts and Salem

As Karlsen demonstrates, one of the common characteristics that many of the possessed accusers shared was that they were economically vulnerable; they were orphans, unmarried, and poor, and therefore probably quite worried about their future work and marriage prospects. The influx of refugees into Salem and other nearby communities meant that sex ratios in the area had skewed; there were more women of marrying age than men, which meant that some women were unlikely to ever get married. In a society in which marriage was the main respectable ‘occupation’ for women, and unmarried servants did not make enough to live independently, many of the afflicted girsl at Salem were looking at a future in which they could expect to remain low-status domestic servants for the foreseeable future. For a girl like Sarah Churchill, who had apparently come from wealth, that was surely a very difficult prospect to contemplate. In this context, the fact that Betty Parris and Abigail Williams performed a Venus Glass ritual to see the face of their future husbands takes on a very different significance.

In at least some cases, there is evidence that the afflicted girls resented their position as servants. John Proctor initially refused to believe that Mary Warren had been possessed, and warned her that she would be beaten if her symptoms interfered with her spinning work. He told her that if her seizures threw her into the fire or water, that she would not be pulled out. Sarah Churchill claimed that her 80-year-old employer had regularly beaten her with his cane when he was not satisfied with her work. Although I haven’t found any reference to Lewis claiming she had been beaten by George Burroughs, she did accuse him of being a witch. What these cases suggest is that the possessed girls at Salem may have felt a powerful sense of discontent and resentment at their current social situation.

The Last Temptation of Elizabeth Knapp

Karlsen then turns her attention to the case of Elizabeth Knapp, who experienced possession in 1672. Her minister employer, Rev. Samuel Willard, wrote a detailed account of her case. Knapp’s symptoms sound quite like the Salem cases; she experienced seizures and uncontrollable screaming, and attempted to accuse an elderly woman of bewitching her. Willard, however, refused to accept the accusation and pressured her to reveal the true cause of her fits. Knapp then declared that the Devil had appeared to her several times, tempting her to become a witch, in return for which he promised her money, fine clothes, release from chores, and the like. She admitted that he had come to her because she was discontented with her situation and that his appearances had become more numerous after she had become a domestic servant for Willard. As her fits went on, she alternated between claiming to have become a witch and denying that she given into that temptation. Sometimes she lost her voice entirely. When Willard essentially blamed her for having called the Devil to her by her discontent, she attempted suicide, began striking people, and then had a severe seizure in which the Devil spoke through her, calling Willard a rogue and a liar. Ultimately, Willard helped Knapp reject the Devil and accept the social situation that God had led her to. Knapp went on to marry and become a model of Christian womanhood.

Rev. Samuel Willard

For Karlsen, Willard’s narrative is about the psychological struggle that Elizabeth Knapp experienced. She was unhappy with her situation as a servant, and understood her discontent to be a form of diabolical temptation, because discontent was sinful. Knapp believed that her dissatisfaction was a doorway through which Satan had attempted to recruit her into the ranks of his witches, but ultimately, she was able to overcome her temptations, reject Satan and witchcraft, and embrace God’s will and her social situation. Karlsen feels that Knapp’s extreme symptoms were a physical acting out of her emotional distress, channeled into a culturally-acceptable experience of demonic possession. Karlsen argues that for Puritans, the experience of “possession was not itself witchcraft, only the potential for witchcraft.” In other words, girls who experienced seizures and similar symptoms had been targeted for recruitment into the ranks of the witches but did not truly want to join that evil sisterhood.

None of the possessed girls at Salem was the subject of so detailed a spiritual account as Elizabeth Knapp, but Karlsen argues that Knapp’s experiences are the key to understanding what drove the accusations of the possessed girls at Salem. She argues that they were young women struggling with feelings of fear, resentment, and anger over their lowly status. She points out that Rev. Hale commented that several of them were worried about their marriage prospects. Some may have been emotionally traumatized by the violence they saw in Maine. They may have experienced feelings of anger toward their employers, and then possibly a sense of guilt over being angry at men and women who were ostensibly offering them Christian charity through employment. Some may also have been experiencing the awaking of sexual desire, feelings that Puritan society considered sinful. Discontent was itself understood to be sinful, a form of rebellion against both God and the male head of the household. Rebellion against any social authority was seen as one of the worst sins a woman could commit. Since witches were classically understood to be envious, rebellious, and overtly sexual, these girls may well have understood their feelings to be signs of being tempted to engage in witchcraft. Both Sarah Churchill and Mary Warren did, at different moments, confess to having become witches, only to later recant (a pattern we have already seen with Elizabeth Knapp).

In addition to serving as an explanation for their sinful feelings, possession appears to have had two other benefits for the possessed. First, it elevated their social status by making them the objects of attention and sympathy, and granting them a form of social power. Their mysterious symptoms brought them a good deal of concern and the sympathy of their employers and friends. As people began to take their accusations of witchcraft seriously, the possessed experienced a sense of social empowerment and importance, whereas previously they felt disempowered and unimportant. People were listening to them and arresting the women and men they accused. Thus possession relieved at least some of their social anxieties.

At the same time, possession gave them exemption from the conventions of Puritan behavior. Seizures and fits gave them an acceptable way of avoiding work without being seen as lazy, although not in Mary Warren’s case. More importantly, it allowed them to say and do things that would have been utterly sinful and blasphemous for normal girls. They swore, they cursed their elders, and they spit on their employers. They shrieked and writhed instead of being demure and quiet in public. They uttered blasphemies, threw Bibles across the room, refused to listen to prayers or Scripture readings, and disrupted church services. So possession gave the possessed a chance to violate proper Christian behavior without being personally guilty of misbehavior. Thus it allowed them to dramatize their spiritual crisis and give vent to that crisis at the same time.

However, the benefits of possession could only continue as long the girls could display their symptoms. As Karlsen points out, possession is often a social phenomenon; it occurs in groups more than in isolated individuals, and the victims often learn their behavior from watching other victims. As one girl ‘discovered’ a new symptom, it could spread to other girls. They policed each other, so that when Mary Warren began to recant, the other girls forced her back into a more proper performance of victimhood. And sometimes it was necessary to counterfeit symptoms, for example when Susannah Sheldon was found with her wrists tied, and then later when several girls were found with their wrists tied and hanging from hooks. On one occasion, Mary Warren and other girls were found with pins stuck in their bodies. It seems likely that these were voluntary symptoms, but ones which the girls may have genuinely believed in, since they felt that they were being tempted to act as witches. Thus the girls were not exactly ‘faking’ their symptoms so much as seeking ways to perform the role they had found themselves in.

To me, Karlsen’s explanation of what was driving the afflicted girls’ experiences is far more persuasive than Linnda Caporael’s ideas that they were simply sick with ergotism. Karlsen’s theory accounts for a far widely range of behaviors than Caporael’s, and takes into account many more of the common features of the girls, such as why it was mostly young female servants who were afflicted and why so many of the girls were orphans. It offers us a window into the social, religious, and economic dynamics of Salem and gives us an interpretative tool for making sense of Puritan society more generally. It takes account of the wider context of the accusations, such as the attacks on the Maine settlements and the skewing of the colonial marriage market. And it connects the accusations at Salem to the many other witchcraft accusations in colonial New England.

So What Does the Show Get Right?

Salem unintentionally replicates the connection between possession, social rebellion, and witchcraft that lies at the heart of Karlsen’s interpretation. Although we don’t see the beginning of Mercy Warren’s affliction, and although Mercy is not depicted as being economically vulnerable or a servant, Mary Sibley does in fact approach Mercy to become a witch. Initially, Mercy is Mary’s puppet pure and simple, but early in the season, Mercy throws off Mary’s control, and at that point, Mary approaches her and offers to end the torture and teach her witchcraft if she will support Mary’s plans. In other words, Mary offers Mercy exactly the deal that Elizabeth Knapp thought that Satan was offering her.

Mary begins teaching Mercy to be a witch

At the same time, Mercy is approached by a group of young girls who point out to Mercy that she has become one of the most powerful women in Salem; when Mercy speaks, people listen to her. This sense of empowerment is presented as being a major reason why Mercy decides to accept Mary’s offer. This too is exactly in line with Karlsen’s reading of the possessed girls. Although Mercy is not shown as resenting her social disempowerment, the moment her empowerment is pointed out to her, it becomes something she craves.

In the same episode, Mercy and her coterie intentionally fabricate an accusation against one of the girl’s fathers, a drunk who beats her and takes the money she makes from singing, and who is planning to sell her to the whorehouse. In doing this they are essentially rebelling against authority, although it’s presented as a corrupt paternal authority that deserves rebelling against. Later in the season, Mercy uses the Venus Glass ritual to trigger more false accusations, this time against the Barkers, an entirely innocent family. Increase Mather burns the Barkers in an action that literally subverts justice, although only the witches understand this. In fact, the series makes the point that, for the witches’ plan to work, they must engineer the executions of a dozen innocent people, so the witches are intentionally working to rebel against justice.

Mary Sibley is also in a state of literal rebellion against her husband, having taken control of him by means of a toad familiar that she feeds to George against his will. Her witchcraft has made her the wealthiest woman in Salem, just as the Devil promised Elizabeth Knapp. She engages in both premarital and later adulterous sex with John Alden. In fact, by being so powerful in Salem, Mary is an exact match for the Puritan notion of the witch as a woman who cannot accept the ‘natural’ submission of women to male authority. Even Magistrate Hale, her fellow witch, is unable to control her.

Finally, Mercy becomes the focus for all the discontented youth of Salem. She lures her coterie into practicing magic and worshipping the Devil, and in the final episode she issues a call for all the disaffected teens of Salem, male and female, to rally to her cause. As Puritans saw it, that is exactly why people became witches.

Mercy and her coterie worshipping the Devil

So while Salem gets nearly everything about the Salem Witch Trials wrong, the show has, I think entirely by accident, managed to dramatize precisely what Puritans thought caused people to turn to witchcraft. As the saying goes, even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Want to Know More?

SALEM SEASON 1is available through Amazon.

Carol Karlsen’s book The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New Englandabsolutely dazzled me when I first read it. Her argument is so well-constructed and draws off so much evidence that I immediately found myself persuaded. If you only read one book on New England Witch Trials, make it this book.

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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.)