Salem: The Real Problem with the Show

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Janet Montgomery, Mary Sibley, Salem, Salem Witch Trials, WGN, Witchcraft

Over the past several weeks, I’ve been using WGN’s Salem as an entry point into the Salem Witch Trials. I’ve pointed out problems with the show’s treatment of its putative location, its inaccurate depiction of the people involved, its misrepresentation of torture, and its failure to address the community tensions that probably played a large role in the Trials, as well as its probably accidental identification of factors that might have led to Mercy Lewis and other young women making their accusations. But for all the serious errors the show makes, I think the real problem lies elsewhere, with the very concept of the show.

Women and Witchcraft Accusations

For anyone who studies witch trials, one of the first things they notice is how disproportionately the charges tended to target women. From the 1960s, when quality scholarship about witch trials first started, down through the 1980s, it was generally said that virtually all accused witches were women. Authors in that period, often feminists who were not actually scholars, asserted that witch trials were explicitly about misogyny, and that the witch trials were a women’s Holocaust.

By the 1990s, detailed statistical studies had modified that perception a little; across all of Europe in the 16^th through 18^th centuries, roughly 80% of defendants in witch trials were women. But there was some variation. In some regions nearly all defendants were women: Basel, Switzerland: 95%; Essex, England and Namur, Belgium, about 92%.But elsewhere numbers were somewhat lower; in parts of Scotland, Germany, and France, the figure is between 72 and 82%, and in Spain it was 71%.Even more strikingly, in Freiburg, Switzerland, it was 64% and in Waadtland, Switzerland, it was 58%. In Normandy, France, only one of four defendants was a woman, and in Iceland, all defendants were male. Assertions that witch hunting was about nothing more complex than male hatred of women can’t be supported in face of such statistics, but clearly gender was an extremely important factor in European beliefs about who witches were.

Not all women were equally vulnerable to charges of witchcraft. While there are always some outliers in the data, the typical accused witch was an older woman, between 50 and 70. She was also likely to be either a widow or an unmarried woman (termed a singlewoman by scholars). In one French trial 58% of all the accused were widows. Poverty was a third common characteristic, although to some extent that was a common quality that older widows and unmarried women tended to share. A less-commonly accused group were younger women with a reputation for sexual promiscuity. It is not uncommon to see an older unmarried woman and her younger illegitimate daughter both accused. Patterns mean something, and historians have devoted much energy to trying to make sense of these patterns around witchcraft accusations. What was it that made older, unmarried, poor, and sexually promiscuous women more likely to be accused of witchcraft than men or married women?

The literature on this is truly enormous, and if you really want to dig into it, take my class on witchcraft sometime. Some theories, such as the idea that witches were mostly female medical practitioners, have been exploded because there is little factual basis for them. Some scholars have theorized that accusations had a ‘social function’ of keeping women in line with community standards, but Social Function Theory sees social functions are being almost mechanical; to work it needs to happen regularly and constantly, the way that ‘fag jokes’ and student aggression against less masculine boys in high school serve to reinforce behavioral gender norms. But witchcraft accusations were neither constant not regular; communities could go decades without seeing a witch trial and then suddenly experience a surge of them, only to see the trials fade away a few months or a year later.

The late historian Christina Larner argued that witchcraft accusations were not sex-specific, but sex-related. In other words, witch-hunters were seeking out witches, not women, but their ideas about witches were so intimately tied into ideas about women that far more women than men were likely to be accused. That doesn’t explain places like Normandy and Iceland, where most accused were men, but it provides a helpful handle on the problem to explain at least some of the issues.

Going back at least as far as Classical Greece and Roman, there was a strong tendency to associate women with witchcraft, because the things that tended to be considered witchcraft were things that women were thought to use to circumvent male control. Love potions and love curses were seen as ways that women tried to control male desire, and poison was understood to be a woman’s weapon because they were not strong enough to physically confront their opponents. Abortifacients enabled a woman to cover up an illicit affair, and thereby evade male control over women’s bodies. The stereotype of the witch as an old hag was already deeply embedded in Western thought by the end of the Roman period. So notice how major elements of this begin to explain why some women were being accused in the 17^th century.

Both Classical and Medieval authors tended to assume that women were morally weaker than men, and therefore more liable to succumb to temptation. Early Christian theologians like Tertullian and St. Jerome strongly linked women to lust and vanity, two sins that Tertullian explicitly associated with witchcraft. Tertullian established the notion that all women were inheritors of the moral guilt of Eve, who had given in to Satan’s temptation (in fact, the Bible never claims that Satan was present at Eve’s fall, but Tertullian gave Latin theology a pretty strong shove in that direction, which is why people tend to read Genesis 3 as involving Satan). Medieval authors like Andreas Capellanus accused women of being inherently envious, given to slander, and rebellious against male authority. And in the 15^th century, we start to see ideas about witches engaged in sexual relationships with the Devil.

An early 16th century image of Adam and Eve. Note the focus on Eve’s sexuality.

So by the end of the 15^th century, a picture of witches had emerged as primarily being people who were envious of others, given to arguing and slander, insufficiently submissive to both divine and male authority, lustful, promiscuous, and manipulative. While all of these qualities could be applied to men, they were all most typically associated with women.

One consequence of this pattern is that women who tended to be quarrelsome or litigious toward their neighbors or family, instead of being properly submissive, might find eventually themselves eventually being accused of witchcraft, not by their opponents, but by other members of the community who saw their quarrels and lawsuits as the sort of behavior that witches typically engaged in. In other words, women who failed to fit the demure, submissive role expected of women in this period might open themselves up to accusations of witchcraft. Carol Karlsen found considerable evidence for this in New England; a sizeable number of those accused of witchcraft in colonial New England as a whole had at some point been involved in an inheritance dispute, for example.

So modern scholarship has emphasized that the women who were accused of witchcraft were not in fact guilty of any activity related to witchcraft, although some may have engaged in folk magic of various kinds. Instead, these women fell victim to deeply misogynistic ideas about women as naturally given to certain forms of evil and sinful behavior, such as lust; rebellion against husbandly, paternal, or religious authority; and envy. The only thing the accused women had done was fail to confirm to their society’s rules about proper female behavior.

A Moral Trainwreck in Slow-Motion

Unfortunately, Salem has serious problems with the way it navigates this issue. At the start of the show, it makes a big point of saying that the people getting executed for witchcraft are innocent. Mary Sibley (Janet Montgomery) explicitly says that the witches’ plot requires the death of a number of innocent people. So when the pilot opens, three people have already been hung for witchcraft and Giles Quarry is pressed to death unjustly. In the next episode, the innocent Bridget Bishop is executed when Mary uses her magic to deform an already dead fetus that Bridget is trying to birth. Then Mercy Lewis and her posse orchestrate the accusation against the innocent but horrible father of one of the girls. Then Mary and Mercy orchestrate the execution of the innocent Barkers.

Janet Montgomery as Mary Sibley

So the show initially seemed to be aware of the problem of saying that the people executed at Salem were actually guilty. With the exception of the first three anonymous victims, all those executed were actual historical people, although historically the Barkers dodged execution by confessing to being witches.

But then the real witches start getting caught up in the search. The brothel-keeper Mab gets caught and commits suicide, and Mary’s evil mentor Rose gets caught, although it’s Mercy who finally kills her. Mercy’s gang of girls gets captured and tortured, and then Mercy accuses Tituba, who is tortured by Increase Mather. So by the end of the season, the show has forgotten to only orchestrate accusations against innocents. Although most of these women are fictional, other than Tituba, the show shows that some of those who were apprehended, tortured, and killed were actually guilty.

Tituba being tortured

Even worse, the actual witches in the series conform quite well to the 17^th century stereotypes of witches. With the exception of Magistrate Hale (Xander Berkeley), all the real witches are women. Rose is an old woman, and there is a group of elderly and hideously deformed witch women who live out in the forest. Mary Sibley is rebellion personified; she wishes to overthrow the Puritans of Salem, she has cast a magical spell on her husband to render him a total invalid, she commits adultery against him (as well as fornication and abortion during the pilot), and she has seized control of the Salem government. Mercy similarly craves power, knowingly accuses an innocent man, grows envious of Tituba, and by the end of the season is plotting some sort of rebellion of the disaffected youth of Salem. In other words, Salem actually affirms that Puritan fear that there were witches around, and it affirms that witches were exactly the way that the Puritans thought they were. If the women of Salem were all properly submissive, the show would literally have no plot.

Given that the Salem Witch Trials were one of the most notorious miscarriages of justice in American history, the idea that the witch hunters were actually right about everything except who their targets were is incredibly offensive. Imagine, if you will, a TV show in which the Nazis were somehow right that there actually was an international conspiracy of Jews to destroy Germany, and that Hitler and his cronies were actually unwitting dupes of the sinister Jews who sent them after other, innocent Jews as part of some grand scheme for the Jews to seize power, and that those tragically misguided Nazi were sometimes killing evil Jews as well as innocent ones. That’s basically the plot of Salem. Put in those terms, it’s an appalling show. Pretty much the only thing that keeps the show for descending into total moral putridity is that it emphasizes that Bishop, Quarry, and the Barkers were actually innocent.

The show is trying to pursue too many shades of grey. It wants Mary Sibley, the main character of the show, to be both a villain and a good guy at the same time. It has her leading a plot that, if properly pulled off, will apparently kill an appalling number of people. It has her orchestrating the deaths of innocent men and women to advance that plot. And yet she’s conflicted because she truly loves John Alden and so she starts having second thoughts, causing the other witches to start turning against her in various ways.

Perhaps the most obvious place where the show can’t figure out how to handle Mary is the episode with Bridget Bishop. One of the town prostitutes is pregnant and in labor, and Mary wants to use this situation to ruin Bridget. So she casts a spell to horribly deform the fetus, which is already dead. So orchestrating an innocent woman’s death is acceptable, but aborting a live fetus or causing a stillbirth is too heinous an action for the show. She needs to be evil, but not that evil. It’s interesting that killing a live woman is ok, but killing an unborn child is beyond the pale. What’s particularly interesting is that at this point in the show, Mary and the viewers falsely think that she’s aborted her own illicit child. Right at the end of the season, that turns out to not be the case. I guess a villain can abort her child, but not someone else’s, but in order to redeem her, her baby has to get un-aborted.

Bridget Bishop

Similarly, Magistrate Hale is an evil man who’s actually sort of good. He’s a willing participant in this plot that will killed lots of people. But he’s also a loving family man whose primary motive is that he saw witch hunters kill his parents and now he wants to create a place where his people (that it, the witches) can live free and in the open. That’s all well and good, but the show has already established that his people are evil murderers. Again, it’s sort of as if his goal is to create a state in which the Nazis can murder Jews in peace. I’m not against moral nuance; I love well-written morally grey characters, because most human beings are morally grey in different ways. I love morally complex villains and heroes who have moral flaws. The problem is that the show isn’t doing morally grey characters; it’s trying to make explicitly evil people the good guys.

In other words, the show is actually a total mess morally. It can’t resist the temptation to lionize characters who are doing genuinely evil actions. It validates some of the worst misogynistic stereotypes of Western Civilization, and comes perilously close to suggesting that some of the people who died at Salem actually deserved their deaths. Pardon me while I sit over here in the corner and be quietly appalled.

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. If you only read one book on New England Witch Trials, make it this book.

The late Christina Larner’s most important work is probably Enemies Of God: The Witch-Hunt In Scotland. 

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Salem: The Tensions Beneath the Accusations

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Paul Boyer, Religious Issues, Salem, Salem Witch Trials, Stephen Nissenbaum, Witchcraft

When I first started discussing Salem, I looked at the way the series misunderstood Salem as a place. I’ve also mentioned how Salem omits one of the key figures in the Witch Panic, Rev. Samuel Parris. After a lot of intervening posts, it’s time to tackle why those omissions are such a big deal.

A House Divided

I’ve already explained that Salem was actually two communities, the larger, more prosperous Salem Town and the smaller, more agricultural Salem Village. Salem Town had reluctantly allowed Salem Village to have its own church (or ‘meeting place’), reluctantly because the church and its minister were supported by taxes, so a new church meant that Salem Town would be losing tax revenue from Salem Village. The Town had only done this because the Massachusetts Legislature had authorized the new church. So this new church was a focus on considerable tension with the wider Salem community.

And, in fact, the question of who was to serve as the minister of Salem Village’s new church was extremely contentious. In 1673, Rev. James Bayley was appointed minister, but left 7 years later, amid accusations that he wasn’t praying enough and that church members had not been allowed to participate in his selection. He was replaced with Rev. George Burroughs, who was ousted in 1683 and ultimately wound up moving to the Maine frontier. Burroughs was succeeded by Rev. Deodat Lawson. He stayed for four very turbulent years before departing in 1688. His successor was Rev. Samuel Parris, who was eventually forced out in 1696 because members of the church who opposed him were refusing to pay the taxes for his salary. The constant disputes are not entirely understood, but it is clear that Salem Village was split into two factions, those who supported Bayley and Burroughs and those who supported Lawson and Parris, which each side opposing and complaining about the other.

Samuel Parris

In 1974, historians Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum published a very important work, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft. In it, they worked to untangle the religious politics of Salem in the 1680s and 90s, and what they found is that during the Witch Trials those Villagers who supported Lawson and Parris tended to be bringing accusations of witchcraft against those who supported Bayley and Burroughs. Indeed, Rev. Burroughs was himself accused of being the leader of the witches, initially by Abigail Williams and then later by Mary Walcott, Susannah Sheldon, and Mercy Lewis. He was forcibly brought back from the Maine frontier to stand trial, and was eventually found guilty and executed that August. But the supporters of Bayley and Burroughs were not bringing accusations against the supporters of Lawson and Parris. This suggests that there was something distinct about the former group that was leading them to fear witchcraft.

Boyer and Nissenbaum mapped out the residences of those involved, and found that a majority of the accusers came from the western half of the Village, which was the more rural side, while a majority of those accused, as well as those who spoke in defense of them at the trials, lived on the eastern half of the Village, closer to Salem Town. Furthermore, the accusers mostly tended to be farmers by occupation, whereas large numbers of the accused witches were tradesmen and craftsmen, including a carpenter, a shoe-maker, a miller, and a sawmill operator. Several of them, such as Bridget Bishop, ran taverns. In other words, the accused tended to be somewhat better off economically, enjoy more social and commercial contacts with Salem Town, and engage in occupations directly tied to the growing commercial world of Boston and Salem Town, while the accused tended to struggling members of a more traditional rural economy. Puritans in particular considered taverns highly suspect places where immoral activity went on.

Boyer and Nissenbaum’s map. A for ‘accuser’, D for defender of an accused witch, W in a circle for an accused witch

Since that pattern tended to also manifest in the question of who supported which ministers, Boyer and Nissenbaum suggested that Salem Village was a community divided between those who were suspicious of the economic transformation taking place in late 17^th century Massachusetts and those who had found it a source of economic opportunities. The ‘traditionalists’ had been uncomfortable with Bayley and Burroughs and succeeded in forcing them out and installing first Lawson and then Parris because they suspected the first two ministers because they seemed insufficiently traditional in some way, perhaps because their supporters were too ready to embrace economic change.

The Problem of the Quakers

Another thing that troubled the Puritans of Salem Village was that they and their ancestors had come to New England to get away from what they considered the ungodly society of England. Not only was England wealthy, it was home to numerous different brands of Christianity. The Puritans were strict Congregationalists who felt that the Anglicans were too moderate and willing to compromise on religious matters. They also loathed the much more religiously liberal Quakers, who maintained that every person possessed an inner divine light, which to the Puritans seemed dangerously close to saying that God was in all people and might therefore speak through anyone. The Quakers had earned their derisive nickname by a tendency of some members to ‘quake’ when they felt the Holy Spirit within them. Such religious shaking looked rather like the seizures that those afflicted by witchcraft sometimes experienced.

The oldest Quaker Meeting House in the US, in Flushing, NY

As a result, the Massachusetts Colony had initially been extremely hostile to Quakers, arresting them, ordering them whipped, and in the 1650s and 60s, hanging them. The Puritans were determined to keep out what they saw as the diabolical Quakers. But when Massachusetts received a new charter from James II in the mid-1680s, it granted religious toleration to all Protestants, meaning that Quakers now enjoyed legal protection and could not be violently forced out of the community. By 1692, the largest community of Quakers in Essex County was located in Salem Town, and Quaker communities had sprung up in neighboring communities as well. Accused witches frequently had Quaker connections, but were not generally Quakers themselves. For example, Rebecca Nurse had taken in an orphaned Quaker child, while Elizabeth Proctor had numerous Quaker relatives. And, as one historian has demonstrated, Quakers tended to live in the eastern half of Salem Village.

So if we pull all of this together, what we see is that Salem Village had a significant faction of traditionalist Puritans who saw themselves struggling economically as farmers; increasing settlement meant that the farmers had fewer opportunities to expand their farms. Even if the stormy weather of 1692 didn’t cause ergotism, it may well have caused poor harvests and similar problems. These traditionalists saw themselves losing their social position to people whose occupations and economic activities seemed religiously suspect. They were seeing rising numbers of Quakers appearing in the colony, and could no longer keep them out or express their distaste for Quakers through legal persecution. They saw these religious and economic changes as signs they were losing ‘their’ Salem to the forces of Satan, and because the two sides of Salem Village were geographically and socially quite distinct, they had fewer chances to interact and see their opponents as human beings. They had won a few victories over the issue of which minister would lead them, but their preferred candidates were being contested by their opponents. And then, in 1692, a group of teenage girls began to experience strange symptoms and claimed that some of the non-traditionalists were witches. Seen in that context, the Witch Panic makes a lot more sense.

To appreciate the anxiety the Quakers caused, one only has to think about the considerable anxiety that the spread of Islamic immigrants has caused in some sections of contemporary American society. Like Salem, modern America is experiencing a growth of religious pluralism and some traditionalists are extremely uncomfortable with that development. Some traditionalists call directly for the restriction of religious rights to Christians, but others express their anxiety a bit more indirectly through worries about ‘terrorism’. While there are certainly many differences between witches and terrorists (not least of which is that terrorists actually exist), they are both easily demonizable figures who cannot be compromised with because of the danger they are seen to pose.

The Salem Witch Trials are a fascinating set of events. They have engaged the attention of many serious scholars and enthusiastic amateurs for generations, and hopefully these posts have given you a sense of why they are so compelling and worthy of study. The work of scholars like Walter Stephens, Carol Karlsen, Paul Boyer, and Stephen Nissenbaum have reveled a truly complex set of social, economic, religious, and cultural forces (and I’ve only scratched the surface of the issues).

And yet, WGN’s Salem ignores most of this in favor of an entirely fabricated, historically inaccurate, lurid tale of actual witches plotting evil and working actual magic. The show runner and writers have taken a rich, fascinating story and replaced it with juvenile pabulum. In a few places they’ve gotten bits right; there’s a passing line in one episode about how the Puritans are losing control of the town and are afraid, but that’s a throwaway line that goes nowhere. And while they’ve managed to replicate part of what’s going on with the teenage girls of Salem, I think that was basically blind luck.

I entirely understand that in order to succeed, a television show has to be interesting and engaging to its audience. It has to give them a reason to turn in week after week. But the actual Salem Witch Trials are interesting and engaging. The unembellished facts have held people’s attention for 3 centuries now and show no signs of becoming boring. Instead of throwing out the facts and making a new story out of whole cloth, Salem could have woven its lurid intrigues around the real characters and events. They didn’t have to lead Mercy Lewis through town in bondage gear to make her seizures and accusations shocking.

The past is a fascinating place. It would be nice of American television actually went there occasionally.

Want to Know More?

SALEM SEASON 1is available through Amazon.

When I was a first semester freshman, I took a course in American History before the Civil War. It was my first college history course, and one of the textbooks was After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection. Its various chapters are dedicated to introducing various interesting historical issues to college students, and its second chapter, on Salem, introduced me to the work of Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum. That chapter is probably what I remember most clearly from that class (apart from everyone humming the Preamble to the Constitution when we had to write it on an exam). If you’re looking for an easy introduction to historical methods and American history, this is an excellent book.

Or you could buy Boyer and Nissenbaum’s Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft.

Salem: One Thing the Show Gets Right

Tags

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.

Salem: What the Problem Wasn’t

Tags

Ann Putnam, Colonial America, Ergotism, Linnda R. Caporael, Rev. Samuel Parris, Salem, Salem Witch Trials, Thomas Putnam, Witchcraft

In my last post, I said I would start exploring what caused the moral panic that underlay in the Witch Trials in this post. But then a reader asked a question on my Facebook page (which you should Like) and it’s prompted me to make a slight detour to address one of the common ideas about the Salem trials that circulates among the general public but which historians mostly reject: the idea that the trials were caused by ergot poisoning or ergotism.

Ergotism is a condition caused by, among other things, the accidental consumption of ergot rot, the fungus Claviceps purpurea, which grows on rye and other grains (including wheat and barley) in warm, moist weather. Ergot produces alkaloids that are precursors to LSD, so ergotism can produce hallucinations similar to those caused by LSD (in fact, Albert Hoffman first isolated LSD from ergot). It is also a vasoconstrictor (meaning that it narrows the arteries and restricts blood flow), which is the reason it is sometimes used in modern pharmacology.

Ergot fungus growing on barley

Ergotism has three types of symptoms. It produces a variety of convulsive effects, include seizures, diarrhea, itching, nausea, headaches, vomiting, and mental issues like confusion, mania and psychosis. Because it is a vasoconstrictor, it also produces dry gangrene in poorly-vascularized body parts, chiefly the digits and the hands and feet, causing skin discoloration, peeling skin, neuropathy (pain or numbness in body parts), formication (the feeling of bugs crawling on or under the skin), edema (the retention of fluid in body parts, leading to swelling), the rotting of affected body parts, and in some cases death. Finally, because it contains LSD precursors, those affected sometimes see hallucinations such as halos or auras.

Ergot poisoning was a recurrent problem in Western society down into the 19^th century. In parts of medieval Europe, it was known as St. Anthony’s Fire, although that term can also refer to erysipelas as well (especially in the British Isles). If the ergot rot is not noticed when grain is harvested, it can sometimes be inadvertently ground up when the grain is milled into flour, and may survive cooking. As a result, an outbreak of ergotism can affect a whole community. It is a particular issue with rye grain, because the dark color of rye can mask the presence of the dark-colored fungus, whereas in lighter grains it can often be spotted.

Advanced gangrenous ergotism

 

So What Does This Have to Do With Salem?

In 1976, Linnda R. Caporael, a graduate student working on a PhD in psychology, wrote an article for Science in which she argued that the possible causes of the moral panic of the Salem trial fell into three broad categories: fraud (basically, the accusers were intentionally faking their symptoms), psychological issues (essentially, mass hysteria), or physiological issues (physical medical problems). Since very little research had been devoted to the third category, Caporael devoted 2 ½ pages to proposing the novel theory that ergotism was an important factor in the Witch Trials.

Dr. Linnda R. Caporael

She points out that ergotism was an issue in New England, where rye was an important element of the diet, and that the spring and summer weather in 1692 was hot and rainy, ideal conditions for the growth of ergot rot; in 1693, however, a drought set in, which would have prevented the growth of the fungus. This, she feels, perfectly coincided with the outbreak of the Witch Trials.

She then notes that four of the afflicted girls (including one adult), Ann Putnam Sr., Ann Putnam Jr., Mercy Lewis, and Mary Walcott, all lived on the very large Putnam farm, so they could easily have been affected by eating ergot-tainted rye grown on their farm. Two other girls, Betty Parris and Abigail Williams, lived at the home of Rev. Samuel Parris; two-thirds of Rev. Parris’ salary was paid in produce, and as a major supporter of Parris, Thomas Putnam would have given grain to the Parris household. Another afflicted girl, Elizabeth Hubbard, lived at the home of Dr. Griggs, the physician who treated the afflicted girls; he too would have been paid at least partially in grain. Sarah Churchill, another afflicted girl, lived on a farm that Caporael thinks could have had its own problem with ergot, but Caporael dismisses her accusations as fraud. The only accuser Caporael is puzzled about is Mary Warren, who lived with the Proctors, who were accused of witchcraft. The Proctors were well-off farmers and would probably not have received grain from anyone. Thus Caporael argues that ergot-tainted grain spread through a social network, causing young girls to develop symptoms they understood as magical affliction.

Salem Village in 1692

Caporael then examines the testimony. She notes that when the crisis started, Mary Sibley give instructions for making a witch cake out of rye, which was then fed to the dog. How the dog acted after eating the cake is unknown, but Caporael speculates that it may have suffered convulsions, and she argues that it was the dog’s reaction that started the accusations.

Then she moves into the heart of her argument, arguing that the symptoms described in the trial records are consistent with ergotism. The accusers were stricken with convulsive fits, and the spectral images they saw Caporael attributes to the hallucinations produced by ergotism. The girls reported numerous pains, including pinching, pricking by pins, and biting, which Caporael considers ergotic neuropathy or formication. She says that references to vomiting and “bowels almost pulled out” were common. She mentions the case of John Londer, who awoke in the middle of the night to see an apparition of a witch sitting on his chest; she attributes this to the mental confusion sometimes caused by ergotism. A visitor who “probably spent the night at the Putnams”, Joseph Bailey, experienced a strange encounter while traveling with his wife, in which the Proctors appeared, struck him in the chest, and then turned into a cow; he subsequently experienced pricking sensations. Another man saw strange quivering objects, which Caporael suggests were like LSD hallucinations.

Convulsive fits were a common symptom among the Salem girls

 

So It Was Ergotism that Caused the Accusations?

Nope. There are a lot of problems with Caporael’s theory. To start with, although Caporael is today a respected expert on the relationships between culture and biology, she was at the time only a graduate student in psychology; she is neither an historian nor a medical doctor. So she’s writing well outside her field of study, without expertise either in reading old documents or diagnosing medical symptoms, and only part-way through her professional training. In and of itself, that doesn’t invalidate her argument, but it does force us to consider it with caution.

Caporael’s article was the subject of an immediate refutation by Nicholas P. Spanos and Jack Gottlieb, who responded with their own article in Science later the same year. They noted numerous flaws in her analysis. Convulsive ergotism typically occurs in populations that are deficient in vitamin A; Salem, however, consumed a lot of fish, which means that vitamin A deficiency was unlikely to be a serious problem. Additionally, those most likely to suffer from ergotism are small children, whereas the youngest accuser was 9, and most were in their teens; Ann Putnam Sr. was a married woman with children. Even if these older females were affected by ergotism, there should have been a much larger number of younger children affected.

They also ask why there are no references to ergotism’s gangreneous symptoms such as discoloration, peeling skin, and rotting of digits. Ergotism is more likely to strike livestock than humans, and yet there is little reference to livestock dying. Additionally, they note that it is extremely unlikely that the ergotism would selectively strike only the girls in a household, given that the whole family would be eating the same food; why weren’t Samuel Parris, Thomas Putnam, or the Proctors sickened? Why didn’t the girls manifest the ravenous hunger that typically followS ergotic convulsions? And if the ergot rot was more widely spread in the farmland, why wasn’t it occurring in more households?

John Proctor’s stone at the Salem Memorial

Spanos and Gottlieb also challenged Caporael’s claim that gastrointestinal issues were widespread. They found no explicit mention of vomiting in the sources, and the three girls who mentioned issues with their innards all mentioned only a single attack, rather than recurrent problems. So they feel that Caporael was exaggerating the degree to which gastrointestinal problems occurred among the afflicted girls.

They also note that the symptoms displayed by the afflicted girls behaved differently than ergotism would. The girls’ symptoms were sometimes resolved entirely by reading the Scriptures and in other times aggravated by it, suggesting that the issue was more psychological than medical. During the court sessions, the girls would appear to be fine until they encountered the defendants, and would then suffer sudden attacks that cleared up after the encounter ended. LSD hallucinations typically involve auras, halos, shimmering colors, and the like, but generally don’t involve seeing people who aren’t there. Finally, there is no record that any of the girls continued to have symptoms after May of 1693, but substantial incidents of ergotism cause long-term neurological damage that would probably have stayed with the girls throughout their lives.

Finally, they challenged Caporael’s explanation for why the panic subsided so quickly. Far from requiring the onset of a drought, Spanos and Gottlieb pointed out that most witch panics in Europe ended quite suddenly. So the drought would be irrelevant as an explanation.

Spanos and Gottlieb demonstrated that Caporael had read the evidence very selectively, mischaracterized the way some ergotic symptoms operate, and failed to account for the absence of key symptoms of ergotism. In other words, it is highly unlikely that ergotism was the issue because the reported evidence doesn’t actually match up with ergotism.

There are other issues that Spanos and Gottlieb don’t address. Why were there no young boys among those afflicted? There is no obvious reason that the ergotism would spread among teenage girls but not affect teenage boys. Caporael attributes the starting of the hysteria not to the initial affliction of Betty Parris and Abigail Williams but to the dog’s reaction after eating the witch cake. Yet she admits that we have no record of the dog’s reaction. She is theorizing that the dog had a seizure or died, and yet it is just as likely that the dog had no reaction at all. She also seems to think that Tituba played a role in the initial magical activities of the girls, which is wrong; it suggests to me that Caporael wasn’t reading that primary sources closely enough to realize that Betty and Abigail were employing English folk magic and not just following Tituba’s lead. It’s also been pointed out that what John Londer described is most easily explained as a case of sleep paralysis.

In regard to Joseph Bayley’s strange experience, Caporael notes that “it is a moot point, of course, what or how much Bailey ate at the Putnams’, or that he even really stayed there.” In fact, it matters a great deal, because the heart of her theory is that ergotism was being spread through social contacts; if Bayley didn’t contract ergotism from his visit to the Putnams, then his testimony actually works against her argument, because he would have been experiencing symptoms without a clear route of transmission. Similarly, her failure to account for Mary Warren’s connection to the Putnams is a problem. (But see Correction at the bottom of the article.)

Her brief treatment of Sarah Churchill is also a small problem. She first comments that Churchill lived on a farm next to a river, which would have been ideal conditions for the growth of ergotism. She seems to mean that the soil or air would have been moister there and therefore more conducive to the growth of ergot. But her model is that ergot was spreading from the Putnam’s farm, not that ergot was popping up in various areas across Salem, so she’s being a little inconsistent in her explanation. Then she dismisses Churchill’s case as probably being fraudulent. If that’s so, why mention the farm and the river at all? This is a small point, but it makes me feel like she wasn’t thinking through her argument very well.

Another flaw in Caporael’s argument is that she doesn’t account for all the girls doing the accusing. She connects the girls of the Parris, Putnam, and Gibbs households to the grain distribution network that she theorizes was spreading ergot-tainted grain, but admits she cannot connect Mary Walcott to that network at all. She also fails to connect Sarah Churchill, but discounts her. More seriously, she also entirely omits three afflicted girls: Bathsheba Pope, Elizabeth Booth, and Susannah Sheldon. Perhaps Caporael didn’t know about these three girls; Pope played a lesser role in the accusations, but Sheldon was an accuser of the Proctors and Rev. George Burroughs, three of the more important cases, and Booth also accused the Proctors. Given Caporael’s tendency to cherry-pick her facts, the omission of these girls might be due to her inability to find any connection at all with the grain-distribution network.

Furthermore, Caporael focuses her analysis only on the girls whose charges started the panic. In a short article, limiting the focus of research that way is not unreasonable. But she never says that’s what she’s doing, and in fact she includes analysis of two men outside that group, John Londer and Joseph Bayley. This creates the assumption that the accusations came largely from the girls she focused on, when in reality there were dozens of accusers. The girls tended to bring the initial accusations, but once a particular person was on trial, more accusers tended to come forward. For example, during Sarah Good’s trial, her six-year-old daughter Dorcas claimed to have seen her mother with strange birds and her husband William testified that she had a Witch’s Tit. Some secondary accusers brought fresh charges, claims that the accused had afflicted them years before in some fashion. In fact, if we limit ourselves purely to those who lived in Salem Village (as opposed to the other communities in the area) and factor out the non-adult accusers like Abigail Williams, Mercy Lewis, and so on, a total of 32 people brought accusations. Caporael only mentions two adult accusers, Londer and Bayley. She makes no effort to connect Londer to the grain distribution network and first connects Bayley and then says that his connection is irrelevant. The other 30 accusers go largely unmentioned. Again, given her tendency to read the documents selectively, it seems possible that she omitted the other accusers because she couldn’t find any way to connect their testimony to the symptoms of ergotism.

So after we dig into Caporael’s argument, we find that it really doesn’t stand up to serious scrutiny. Unfortunately, as often happens, Caporael’s theory began to circulate in the wider public, and Spanos and Gottlieb’s refutation got overlooked outside of academia. A few other scholars have attempted to salvage Caporael’s theory. In 1982, historian Mary Matossian suggested that perhaps those in Salem did not think to record symptoms such as gangrene as being relevant because not all the symptoms fitted into current notions of witchcraft affliction. That’s certainly possible, but it’s hard to see how a major symptom like toes rotting off wouldn’t be remarked on. Furthermore, witches were routinely accused of killing livestock, and yet there is no mention of livestock being afflicted (although one dog was identified as acting strangely, and another was accused of trying to bewitch a girl). It’s also been pointed out that different strands of ergotism can cause either convulsive ergotism or gangrenous ergotism. That would explain the absence of reports of gangrene, but it then it can’t explain the presence of the other neuropathic symptoms that Caporael relies on, since those are associated with gangrenous ergotism, not convulsive ergotism. So, in my opinion and, I think, the opinion of most scholars who have studied witchcraft trials, the ergotism theory is too weak to act as a useful explanation of what was going on in Salem.

Medicalizing the Past

A wider problem here is that Caporael’s theory is an example of the tendency of some non-historians to medicalize the past. Medicalization is the tendency to attribute unusual behavior to an underlying medical problem rather than to social forces, the supernatural, or other possible factors. For example, modern psychiatry has to considerable extent persuaded Western society that certain forms of unstable behavior are the result of medical problems such as schizophrenia rather than, for example, demonic possession. In and of itself, medicalization is not wrong. A person who eats ergot-tainted rye bread and subsequently develops neuropathy and gangrene is probably legitimately suffering from ergotism, and may well be curable through modern medical techniques, whereas simply reading the Bible over them is unlikely to heal them. And I just medicalized John Londer’s experience when I said it is more easily explained by sleep paralysis.

Medicalizing the past occurs when someone attempts to explain unusual behavior in the past by resorting to the claim that the underlying issue was an undiagnosed medical problem rather than whatever contemporaries saw the issue to be. Enlightenment intellectuals often sought to explain away Biblical miracles by seeking what they saw as a more scientific justification for something. It wasn’t God who parted the Red Sea; it was a powerful windstorm. Jesus didn’t die on the cross; he fell unconscious from pain and blood loss and revived three days later. This is a common subject for modern news items and internet articles. People have been using this technique ever since the 17^th century to explain away all sorts of things they don’t understand about the past, and Caporael’s article is a perfect example of this.

An uncorrupted saint’s body: miracle, or saponification?

The problem with medicalizing the past is two-fold. First, it encourages us to feel superior to the people of the past because we know something they didn’t, and therefore we wouldn’t make the same mistakes they made. If only the residents of 17^th century Salem had understood ergotism better, all those innocent people wouldn’t have died! Rather than truly explaining the past, medicalization often serves to make us feel better about ourselves; we’re not at risk of accusing daycare workers of raping children unpopular women of witchcraft because we’re smarter than that.

I sometimes see this with my students. Their thought process often seems to be as follows. “Accusing people of witchcraft is weird, because believing in witchcraft is irrational. No rational person would ever actually believe in witchcraft. I know that ergotism is real but witchcraft isn’t. Witchcraft can’t be the cause of the Witch Trials, but ergotism could be. So the Witch Trials were caused because the residents of Salem were ignorant of science. Therefore, they were irrational and weird. But I’m smarter than that.” Notice how that argument makes a spurious connection between lack of scientific knowledge and irrational behavior, and that the argument is founded on a sense of superiority over the people of the past. And it’s not just witchcraft that triggers this thought process. I’ve frequently seen students fall into this mode of thinking when discussing monarchy, the Crusades, or any religion they don’t personally follow. I’ve even seen students resort to this when talking about the Nazis, labor unions and progressive taxation. It’s a very useful mode of thinking because it is so ego-stroking. We’re smarter than our ancestors; we’ve made “progress”.

The other major flaw in medicalizing the past is that, even when it’s right or plausible, it fails to fully explore the issues at hand. Once the problem has been medicalized, it’s generally assumed there’s no need to explore the social and intellectual world around the problem. For example, let’s assume that Caporael’s theory is right and ergot really was at the root of the accusations at Salem. That would explain why the afflicted girls were suffering. What it wouldn’t explain is why the girls and those around them interpreted their symptoms as signs of witchcraft rather than, for example, divine testing or conventional illness. It wouldn’t explain why only some girls made accusations, or why some healthy girls might have chosen to join in the accusations like Sarah Churchill. It wouldn’t explain why the adults around them found teenage girls making outrageous claims to be credible witnesses. It wouldn’t explain why the girls chose to focus their accusations on certain people like older women rather than healthy young men or Native Americans. It wouldn’t explain why the town elders regarded these accusations as issues for a law court or why they considered them serious enough to merit public execution. In other words, by medicalizing Salem, we’re missing most of the interesting social, economic, religious, and political dynamics operating in Salem, because we assume that the medical element of the problem is sufficient to explain everything that happened. Again, note how this links lack of scientific knowledge with extreme or irrational behavior.

Almost all historians who work on witch trials agree that the underlying issues are social, not physiological in nature. There has been enormous effort devoted to understanding the social psychology of witchcraft accusations, the social networks that manifested themselves in patterns of accusation, and so on. To me, the most interesting part of Caporael’s argument is not the ergotism, but her brief analysis of the social network that linked the Putnams, the Parrises, and Dr. Griggs. Ergotism led her to find a piece of a much bigger puzzle, but her theory caused her to stop her research once she found the specific link she was looking for. The social psychology and the social networks at play in Salem is what I’m going to look at in my next two posts.

Want to Know More?

Caporael’s article was published as “Ergotism: The Satan Loose in Salem” Science 192 (4234): 21–6. Spanos and Gottlieb’s response was published as “Ergotism and the Salem Village Witch Trials”, Science 194 (4272): 1390–4. Mary Matossian’s attempt to defend the Ergotism thesis was published as “Ergot and the Salem Witchcraft Affair”. American Scientist 70 (4): 355–7.

Correction: A reader pointed out to me that I may have misinterpreted Caporael’s use of the term ‘moot point’. If she uses the phrase in its strict sense as “a question to which no satisfactory answer is available,” then she is simply acknowledging that we can’t know whether Bayley ate with the Putnams or not. I still think she’s dodging the issue a little though.

Salem: Torturing the Facts

Tags

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.

Salem: Let’s Look at What Actually Happened

Tags

Bridget Bishop, Colonial America, Salem, Salem Witch Trials, Samuel Parris, Tituba, Witchcraft

I’ve already looked at the problems with Salem’s understanding of Salem as a place, and at the main characters in the show. Today, I’m going to lay out the problem with the series’ chronology. So, as usual, I’m going to lay out what actually happened, and then look at the series’ version of those events.

The Beginning of the Problems

The trigger for the Salem Witch Trials happened at the house of Samuel Parris, the controversial new minister of Salem Village’s church, who isn’t even a character in the show. I’ll talk about Parris and why he was so important in a later post.

Although New England colonists believed in the reality of witchcraft and witches, many of them also believed in and practiced what modern scholars call folk magic, small magical rituals or practices that were believed to have some use. This folk magic include charms for good luck (the wishbones of chickens were kept for that reason, and later evolved into breaking a wishbone to make a wish come true), to ward off evil, to heal or avert illness, or to keep away evil spells and witches (a horseshoe nailed to a door would prevent a witch from entering through that door). Fortune-telling was another popular practice. And folk magic could be used maliciously. Poppets were dolls that might be stabbed with pins to inflict pain or illness on a target.

Countermagic were rituals to undo a curse or detect a witch. For example, a witch bottle was a bottle filled with nails, broken glass, and the urine of an ensorcelled victim, and then buried in the yard; it was variously believed to either break an evil spell or torment the witch who sent the spell, thus revealing her; this practice was widespread enough that many examples have been dug up by archaeologists in both England and New England. Burning the hair of a bespelled child either injured the witch or caused her to present her in a state of a confusion. Witch balls were glass globes hung in an eastern window to trap the spirit of a witch when she tried to enter the house invisibly. All these practices and others played a role in colonial culture, offering a sense of protection from misfortunes, control over uncontrollable things like the weather and illness, and certainty about the future.

The Essington Witch Bottle (found in Pennsylvania)

The problem was that there was no consensus about the moral status of folk magic. Those who practiced such magic were certain that what they were doing was distinct from witchcraft, which was universally agreed to be malicious. Some colonists made extra money by performing folk magic, and even non-practitioners might know about some rituals. But Puritans often considered folk magic, even countermagic, to either be forms of witchcraft or sort of ‘gateway drugs’ to real witchcraft.

The Essington Bottle had pins in it and was buried with a potsherd and a bird bone

In Salem, the folk magic that started the problem was a Venus glass, a glass of water into which an egg was cracked; it was thought to reveal the face of the person the performed would marry. Betty Parris, the 9-year-old daughter of Samuel, a friend named Abigail Williams, and a group of older girls performed this ritual one day but one of the girls saw a coffin instead of her husband. Betty soon began to feel strange prickling pains and the sensation of being choked. Over the course of the next several weeks, three of the other girls began to experience the same thing. Rev. Parris was baffled by these strange symptoms and consulted a number of physicians and ministers until one of them suggested that witchcraft might be involved. (Note that witchcraft seems to have only been suggested when other medical explanations had already been considered and failed to resolve the problem.) When the girls were prayed over, they reacted violently. Betty threw a Bible across the room, and Abigail covered her ears and screamed. Soon a half-dozen other girls were afflicted, including Mercy Lewis, an orphaned servant who lived with the Putnams, the most afflicted household (both Ann Putnam Sr and her daughter Ann Jr were both afflicted).

At that point, Mary Sibley, a relative of the Parrises, spoke with two of Parris’ slaves, John Indian and his wife Tituba, and taught them how to make a ‘witch cake’, a mixture of rye flour and Betty’s urine. The cake was then fed to a dog; exactly what the purpose of the ritual was; it might have been an attempt to confirm that witchcraft was involved, or it might have been countermagic meant to break the spell or to harm the witch involved. Instead, the ritual made things worse, because the girls began to complain that the pains were getting worse; as one of the ministers, Rev. Hale, described it,

“These children were bitten and pinched by invisible agents, their arms, necks and backs turned this way and that way, and returned back again, so as it was impossible for them to do of themselves, and beyond the power of any epileptic fits or natural disease to effect. Sometimes they were taken dumb, their mouths stopped, their throats choked, their limbs wracked and tormented… “(John Hale, A Modest Enquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft)

Samuel Parris

Rev. Parris was furious when he learned about the witch cake, and began pressing the girls to say who was afflicting them, based on a widespread belief that the victims of witches somehow knew who was cursing them. At that point, Betty named Tituba and then fainted, while Abigail Williams and several other girls named Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne. Good was a homeless beggar, while Osborne was elderly, frequently sick, and had not attended church in three years. Both women had been involved in legal disputes (Osborne with her own sons) and Good was notoriously quarrelsome. The three women were formally accused of witchcraft and imprisoned in the town jail.

The three women were questioned in court. Good and Osborne both denied the charges, but when the afflicted girls were brought into court, they fell into fits at the site of the two women. Tituba, on the other hand, having been beaten by Rev. Parris, confessed to being a witch and admitted to having practiced witchcraft with Good and Osborne. She insisted that Good and Osborne had forced her to harm Betty Parris against her will.

At first it looked like things would end here, since the court now had solid evidence to indict the three women. But this did not calm the town’s anxieties, and a week later, two of the afflicted girls, Ann Putnam Jr, and Mercy Lewis, accused Martha Corey of afflicting them. The girls disrupted church the next day, claiming that Corey had sent an invisible yellow bird into the church. She was arrested the next day, and her husband George a few days later. Unlike the first three victims, the Coreys were not marginal figures at Salem; they were church-goers in good standing and well-regarded but this was not enough to protect them. This was followed by an accusation against Rebecca Nurse, a wealthy, prominent Puritan who was 71. After that the accusations came more rapidly and a full-fledged witch panic developed. By May, 27 people had been charged and imprisoned, but trials had not happened because the colony was without a charter, as I explained in my first post.

It was at this point that the new governor, William Phips, arrived with the new charter issued by William III. Phips was soon persuaded to order the establishment of a Court of Oyer and Terminer with authority to hear the charges. He appointed 7 men to hear the case. The first woman tried was Bridget Bishop, an elderly widow and tavern-keeper who had repeatedly been in court over various issues, including fighting with her late husband; her stepson and his wife, another tavern-keeper, were also arrested. Numerous accusers came forward with various charges against Bishop, including the murder of a young girl two years previously and attacking people in spectral form. Poppets with pins in them were found in the cellar of her tavern. When her body was searched, they found a strange mole near her anus that suggested a witch’s teat, a supernatural nipple that was used to nurse a familiar spirit. In the absence of a confession, the court relied on the spectral evidence given by the afflicted girls. Bishop was convicted and hanged on June 10^th.

A 19th Century depiction of the Salem Trials

The court consulted Increase and Cotton Mather, who warned them against accepting spectral evidence, but a majority on the court decided to do so anyway; one judge resigned in protest and began drinking heavily. For his troubles, he too was accused of being a witch by the girls, but the accusation was ignored.

On June 28^th, Rebecca Nurse, Sarah Good, and three other women were tried and convicted (Osborne had died in prison). William Phips attempted to pardon Nurse because of her social prominence, but it caused an uproar and the girls fell into fits, forcing him to withdraw the pardon. On July 19^th, the five women were hanged.

That summary, detailed as it is, gives a general sense of how the trials proceeded, so I won’t go into details about the rest of the cases, as fascinating as they are, simply because there are too many cases to survey.

Execution of witches at Salem

The Trials in the Series

When the series starts with John Alden’s return to Salem, the panic has already started, because three men have already been hung as witches, so already we have a problem, since the first six people convicted and executed were women. This signals that the series is not interested in an accurate recounting of the panic.

Alden seeing the first three victims

It’s not clear how the panic started in the series, but Mary Sibley has already invited Increase Mather to come and lead the investigation; he has sent his son Cotton, who appears to have led the trials. This too is wrong; the Mathers were never actually involved in the trials themselves, and were only asked to offer advice on the question of spectral evidence.

There’s no mention of Betty Parris or Abigail Williams; instead, in the pilot, Mercy Lewis is being tormented by Mary’s spirit. But it seems that Mercy is not the original accuser; it’s only just becoming known after Alden returns that she’s being afflicted. So the panic apparently just starts, with no specific person bringing accusations. When Mercy can’t speak, Mather hitches her up in bondage gear and leads her through the town, at which point, under Mary’s direction, she accused Giles Corey (or Quarry, as they show spells it) of being a witch, with no reference to his wife at all.

Cotton demands that Giles enter a plea, but he refuses to. In order to force him to bring a plea, he is slowly crushed under rocks, but refuses to plead and is crushed to death. This is actually what happened to Corey, although scholars have not entirely figured out why it happened. The best argument is that Corey pleaded not guilty to the charges but then ‘stood mute’ and refused to ask for a trial, making a stand on a point of legal procedure. In an attempt to force him to agree to trial, the judges ordered him to undergo peine forte et dure (Law French for ‘pain strong and hard’). In this rare procedure, he was tied down and rocks were slowly added to his chest over the course of two died. But he refused to agree to trial and was crushed by the weights over the course of two days. Why Corey did this is also unclear, but the usual argument is that because he refused to go to trial, his property could not be confiscated and so would pass to his two sons rather than being confiscated. All of this happened in September, whereas in the series, it’s one of the first things that happens after Alden’s return.

A modern memorial for Giles Corey

In the second episode, Mary Sibley uses Mercy to engineer an accusation against Bridget Bishop. Instead of being a tavern-keeper, she’s a midwife and head of the Salem orphanage. She’s tried not by the Commission of Oyer and Terminer, but apparently by the selectmen, with Cotton acting as the prosecutor. She’s found guilty and hung, making her the fifth victim of the panic, not the first.

Then Mercy breaks free from Mary’s control and, goaded by a group of three fan girls, accuses the father of one of the girls of being a witch, because he’s a bad man who drinks too much and wants to sell his daughter to the whorehouse. It’s not clear who these three girls are, except that the abused girl is Emily Hopkins, and her father is Henry; both of them are fictitious. The accused man is later freed by Increase, who recognizes that he is not a witch.

Mercy ‘sniffing out’ witches

In the next episode, Mercy leads the girls, one of whom is named Dolly, in the Venus glass ritual because Mary wants to engineer an accusation against the Barkers. The Barker family was in fact accused of being witches, but they were residents of Andover, a nearby community to which the accusations spread; almost 50 people were arrested there. The Barkers confessed, but were not executed. However, in the show, a mob starts to form, and Cotton talks them into taking the Barkers to jail so they can be tried the next. But then Increase Mather shows up and summarily burns the Barkers at the stake without benefit of trial. In the next episode, he argues for the importance of trying witches in court, and then later makes a summary judgment against Gloriana ordering her banished from town. This is just inconsistent. Does Increase believe in trials or not? More seriously, it completely violates what actually happened to the Barkers. They weren’t executed at all, and, contrary to popular imagination, all the executed men and women were hung; there were no witches ever burned at Salem.

In the next episode, Increase finds evidence that Mab, the madame of the whorehouse, is a witch, so he puts her in a dunking stool and ducks her to get a confession. She later takes poison to avoid a trial. Mab is a fictitious character, so her fate is entirely made up. So too is the use of the dunking stool. Although you’ll find lots of references to the Salem witches being ducked or ‘swum”, that seems to be an ‘Internet fact’ rather than actual fact. One colonial woman, Mercy Desborough, was ducked as a witch and then executed, but that happened in Connecticut, not in Salem, and was not directly connected to the accusations at Salem.

In the next episode, Mercy accuses Tituba of being a witch. This is the first time that any degree of suspicion has fallen on her, even though she was the first person accused and it was the charge against her and the two Sarahs that started the whole panic. And there is no sign of either Sarah.

Cotton Mather cross-examining accusers during Alden’s trial

I could go on; Tituba’s interrogation is a serious problem I’ll look at in a later post, and the series totally misrepresents John Alden’s trial. But that would just be adding unnecessary proof. It’s already clear that the show pays no regard to any of the facts of the trials. The order in which people were accused is wrong. The wrong people are accusing various witches. The fate of some of the accused is wrong. There’s no Commission of Oyer and Terminer trying the cases. The Mathers are given entirely too much importance in the story. In fact, given that we’ve only seen two trials in the series (three if we count whatever happened to the first three people executed), it’s hard to square the series with a historical event generally known as the Salem Witch Trials.

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.)

If you’d like to read some of the original documents from the Salem Witch Trials, there’s a nice short sourcebook, The Salem Witch Hunt: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford Cultural Editions Series), by Richard Goober, that follows the trials from start to finish, but which concentrates on documents related to a number of the most important trials (Sarah Good, Bridget Bishop, John Proctor, and so on). As I emphasize to my students, there’s no substitute for actually reading the original documents.

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.)

Salem: Where to Start?

Tags

Bad Clothing, Mary Sibley, Puritans, Salem, Salem Witch Trials, WGN, Witchcraft

In 2014, WGN debuted a new television show, Salem, based, predictably enough, on the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. When I say “based on”, I mean “faintly suggested by”, because the series bares hardly any relationship to the actual events, people, or places. There’s so much wrong with the series, and the historical Salem Witch Trials (and the scholarship on them) are so complex that it’s going to take a number of posts to unpack everything.

The basic premise of the series is that there actually were witches at Salem, and that they intentionally caused the witch panic for their own reasons. (I’ll comment on that in a later post.) But the coven is rife with interpersonal conflicts in good night-time soap opera fashion. John Alden, Cotton Mather, and his father Increase are all hunting the witches, but the head witch, Mary Sibley, is in love with Alden, which seriously complicates her evil plans.

The series has lots of problems, chief among them the lurid and erratic writing. Characters regularly contradict themselves. Early on, John Alden becomes a selectman, but that gets forgotten almost immediately after he’s done it. Increase Mather can’t decide whether trials are important or if summary justice is ok. Mary Sibley gets upset because one of her fellow witches arranges for an occult artifact to be delivered to Salem, but the next episode she says the artifact is critical to the plan she’s been pursuing all along. Early on, Mercy is terrified of Mary and has a perfect opportunity to denounce her in public as a witch, but chooses not to for no apparent reason. Cotton Mather is trying to find the witches of Salem, but when he questions an actual witch in a situation where she can’t lie, it never occurs to him to ask her who the other witches are. The witches have whatever random collection of powers the script calls for them to have; sometimes their magic requires chants and ingredients, but other times it can be performed silently. Cotton veers from religious fanatic to lust-driven emotional cripple and alcoholic. The whole community is supposed to be deeply religious, and yet no one ever seems shocked by immoral actions like fornication and adultery. But that’s script stuff, and this blog is about history stuff, so let’s start looking into the details.

The Physical Setting

In 1692, Salem was about 60 years old, a prosperous town on the Naumkeag River. But Salem at the time was really two communities, Salem Town and Salem Village. Salem Town was on the river and was the larger, more prosperous region, with a comparatively developed economy based on fishing, shipbuilding, and maritime commerce, with a population of around 2000. It had a thriving system of taverns and inns for travelers, merchants were able to borrow money on credit, and it was quite wealthy; residents of the town seem to have owned roughly 10x the wealth that residents of Salem Village did. Salem Village (today known as Danvers) was located on the northwest side of Salem Town, about 7 miles west. It was smaller and more rural, with its economy focused more on farming, and a population of perhaps 600.

The House of Seven Gables at Salem

Modern scholars agree that this division was fundamental to understanding the dynamics that produced the Witch Trials. Salem Village was a rather contentious place, with numerous internal quarrels over property rights, as well as disputes with Salem Town; the tensions with Salem Town primarily took the form of disagreements about taxation and church governance. Salem Town had already lost three outlying regions to political independence, and its leaders worried about its declining tax base, so they were reluctant to permit Salem Village to separate completely. In particular, the residents of Salem Village had voted in 1672 to establish a separate church from that of Salem Town. This allowed them to allocate their local church taxes to their own church and select a minister who was more to their liking. It also greatly reduced the distance they had to travel for church. But the Town had refused to allow them to establish a full church; sermons could be preached there, but communion could not be offered in the Salem Village church, and new members could only be admitted through the Salem Town church.

The Salem Town Square from the series; note how rural it seems

The series can’t seem to decide how large Salem is. The woods seem to be just beyond every house we see, and the set looks a lot like the colonial version of a Renaissance Faire where the whole cast dresses in black instead of chainmail and doesn’t sing and dance at the drop of a hat. So the town is shown to be quite small and rather rural. But the town has a large brothel with at least a half-dozen women working there. (Highly unlikely.) It has a public orphanage where unwed girls regularly give birth. (Wrong. Orphans were routinely taken in by private families as an act of Christian charity; most were employed as servants rather than adopted.) There is a nearby ravine filled with the dozens of corpses of everyone who is not a good Christian when they die. (This last disgusting detail is absurd; the colonists knew that unburied bodies were a health risk. Even the executed witches were buried, just not in Christian cemeteries.) It has considerable numbers of very ugly or physically deformed men and women who somehow avoid attracting notice despite having no eyes, or being covered with boils, and people can be kidnapped off the street with no risk of anyone seeing it. All this suggests a much larger community.

Just the local brothel at the Renaissance Faire Salem

The series also has no understanding of the geographic division between the Town and the Village. All the major characters seem to live very close to the river, placing them all in Salem Town. There’s no sign that any of the characters are farmers. Most of the characters have no discernible source of income, although George and Mary Sibley’s wealth is based on maritime commerce. Salem appears to have only one church attended by everyone, with Cotton Mather as the minister. The church also seems to serve as the courthouse, which is roughly correct; the trials became too crowded to meet in their original venue and so were moved to the Salem Village church

 

The Political Situation

Massachusetts was a Crown colony, meaning that its government was based on a charter issued by the English monarch. Its governor was appointed by the Crown. In 1685, King James II voided the original charter, issued an unpopular new one, and appointed a new governor, but in 1688, James was deposed during the Glorious Revolution, which led to the ouster of his appointee and the return to office of the previous governor, whose legal authority was uncertain, because there was no charter in force until the new king, William III, issued a new one. As a result, the courts had no authority to deal with major crimes. A new governor, William Phips, arrived with a new charter early in 1692. Phips immediately established county justices of the peace, sheriffs, and a Court of Oyer and Terminer (Law French for “To hear and determine” [legal accusations]) that had authority to deal with the backlog of cases that had occurred since James II’s charter had been voided. But the series never mentions the colonial government at all. Salem seems to be entirely autonomous.

Under the charter, the colony had a bicameral legislature; the lower house was representative, although only those colonists who qualified as “freemen” could vote in elections, and the franchise seems to have been rather restricted; among other things, only full church members were permitted to vote and churches restricted membership. Town government was based on open town meetings in which anyone could speak and all males (including non-church members) could vote. The community was administered by a committee of elected ‘selectmen’. In other words, the towns and Massachusetts colony as a whole enjoyed a substantial degree of democracy, although, as with all democracies, there were limits to who was includde and there were problems in how government was administered in practice; over the course of the 17^th century the system drifted toward oligarchy.

In the series, the town government is based on a committee of 14 selectmen, who seem to hold their office by hereditary right, because John Alden claims what he says is the “Alden seat” among the selectmen, and no one challenges his right to do this, nor is there an election. George Sibley has been incapacitated by sorcery, so his wife Mary exercises his authority for him and no one seems to object to this. George Sibley appears to outrank the other selectmen, because Mary is described as controlling the town. The selectmen of the series seem to have complete authority. In the pilot, George Sibley has the power to impose punishment on fornicators, and at various points later in the series the selectmen have the authority to quarantine ships, order people arrested, decide who will be charged with crimes, and more. There is no clear division between the political system and the legal system.

Magistrate Hale and Mary Sibley, the town’s major leaders

So as usual with historical films and shows, there’s a sense that colonial Salem was undemocratic, governed by officials of almost absolute authority who were not in any clear fashion responsible to their communities or limited either by law or by higher authorities such as the colonial governor, the English Parliament, or the English king. There’s no notion that American democracy began its evolution during the colonial period. In part, the choice to gloss over the complexities of town government and law is surely to allow easier storytelling; the more vague the political and legal details, the more freedom the writers have to plot their stories.

But this also fits into the American tendency to both represent the past as less free than the present and to allow bad guys to demonstrate their villainy through their autocratic tendencies. George and Mary Sibley and Magistrate Hale all show their evil side by imposing arbitrary punishments, refusing to show mercy or kindness, and giving orders, whereas John Alden demonstrates his heroic status by speaking out boldly in different situations, by interrupting Cotton Mather’s sermons and the trial proceedings, and generally displaying the independent streak that good guys usually have in film and television.

A Word about Clothing

In the first half of the season, nearly all the characters and extras dress in black, although Alden is normally clothed in brown leather, and a few extras are shown in dark green or burlap brown. Mary Sibley occasionally wears red dresses, but usually in private. The women sometimes wear white or tan shifts under their dresses.

This plays into the widespread notion that the Puritans only dressed in black with white ruffs or aprons. This overlooks two things. First, not all of the residents of Salem were Puritans, since many were Anglicans or even Quakers, and in some cases no specific Christian creed at all.

Second, and more importantly, the Puritans did not dress all in black. That’s simply a myth. Black was actually a fairly expensive color for clothing and tended to be restricted to those wealthy enough to afford it. Puritan clothing favored modesty over expense and fashion, and dressing all in black would have struck many Puritans as being immodest because it represented a claim to wealth and high status. One 16^th century Puritan author, William Perkins, maintained that clothing ought to reflect the social hierarchy so that the wealthy could be distinguished from the workers, artisans, and other lower classes. Thus George and Mary Sibley and Magistrate Hale could have dressed in black as a status symbol. Black or grey would also have been suitable for church, since one wanted to look somber and respectable.

Instead, Puritans dressed in a wide range of colors: blue, brown, tawny, green, murrey (a reddish purple), and burgundy being very common. The dyes were generally vegetable dyes, so the color tones would have been softer rather than brighter.

A wealthy Puritan woman and her baby; note the number of different colors in the clothing

Late 17^th century fashion called for lots of lace on both men and women’s clothing, wide collars, and for women, off-the shoulder styles with low necklines that allowed some cleavage. Puritans found such clothing immodest, so they favored narrow collars, high necklines, and only small amounts of lace if at all. Shiny fabrics were avoided in favor of wool or linen. If a woman’s dress had a lower neckline, she wore a shift underneath with a high neckline; exposing the sternum or cleavage was unacceptable. Jewelry was small and modest when it was worn at all, although on special occasions pearls were acceptable, especially in the hair. Women tended to wear a white apron over their dress.

Look at all the slutty Puritans

Men’s hair was longer than is fashionable today, and women’s hair was expected to be shoulder-length. But it was unacceptable for Puritan women to have their heads uncovered, so hair was worn under a simple cap.

Fortunately, at the start, the show avoids another cliché, the false idea that everyone wear enormous buckles on their shoes and hats. Buckles were an expensive accessory, and so only the wealthiest people would have worn them on hats or shoes, and even then probably only on fancy occasions, sort of the way that American men wear tuxedos.

So the series generally gets the clothing wrong. In addition to way too much black, the women nearly always have exposed cleavage and exposed hair. Most of the women wear jewelry. John Alden wears entirely too much leather, just like the guys in Reign.

I’m a little conflicted about Mary Sibley’s clothing. She is the wife of a Puritan and so ought to follow Puritan dress codes, but she’s also apparently the richest person in town and the wife of a selectman. In public she typically dresses in black with some cleavage showing, her hair uncovered, and adorned with a necklace and dangly ear-rings. Sometimes she wears rather silly hats with ostrich feathers on them. By Puritan standards she is dressing very immodestly, calling attention to her social status, which is acceptable, but also exposing her breasts, throat, and hair in an inappropriate way. So the Puritans ought to be offended by her clothing. However, an argument could be made that by dressing her this way, the show is subtly revealing her immorality to the viewer. But that would require the show to actually understand how men and women in the period actually dressed, and there’s no sign the show knows this. Instead, they’re just trying to make her look fashionable in an olde timey way.

In the second half of the series, however, a shipment of colored fabric must have arrived, because the extras and lower class characters start wearing greens, dark blues, and browns. But the ship that brought all the colored fabric also apparently had a big crate full of buckles, because suddenly everyone’s got buckles on their hats. One step forward, one step back, I guess.

Tituba and Mary Sibley, after the colored fabric arrived

And One More Thing

The Sibleys have Botticelli’s Primavera over their bedroom fireplace.

Want to Know More?

SALEM SEASON 1 is available through Amazon.