In 1692, writes Stacy Schiff in her penetrating new book on the Salem witch trials, “New Englanders lived very much in the dark.” Their days were filled with hard work and prayer, their sky “crow black, pitch-black, Bible black, so black it could be difficult at night to keep to the path.” When the interrogations of suspected witches began, Salem villagers were dazzled by accounts of the devil in a red hat, carrying a yellow bird, carrying a red book and serving red bread to his coven at a woodland feast. Anger and hatred flourished in the darkness of Puritan religious extremism, and people lived bleak lives of monotony and piety; they were also “starved for color.”
Witchcraft was certainly colorful. It was also dramatic and exciting, and the witch panic kept people distracted from their quarrels over property and firewood, their fears of Indian raids and massacres, and their squabbles about local politics. Men and children were accused, but the star witches of Salem were women, from respectable housewives to itinerant beggars. Prepubescent girls — “traditionally a vulnerable, mute, and disenfranchised cohort” — came to the center of the stage as the posse of afflicted accusers, and their theatrical outbursts of repressed emotion led to the execution of 19 people and the imprisonment of almost 200 more, and a season of superstition, fanaticism, malice and cruelty that became the Inquisition of Puritan New England.
Salem witchcraft has obsessed writers from Hawthorne and Longfellow to Shirley Jackson and Arthur Miller, as well as scores of historians, and it takes a writer of Schiff’s confidence and brilliance to tackle it anew. As in her Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Cleopatra, Schiff excels at finding fresh angles on familiar stories, carries out massive research and then weaves it into a dazzling social panorama.
In “The Witches,” she captures the atmosphere in which the protagonists lived. Salem was a tiny community of 550 people and 90 families, crowded into small rooms and dwellings. Rumor and gossip were their only entertainment. Puritans did not even celebrate holidays such as Christmas and Easter; sermons and Sunday church meetings were their “sole regular means of shared communication.” New England children were harshly treated, chastised and punished. A third of them were sent away as early as age 6 to serve or apprentice with other families — a practice called “binding out” in which girls risked beatings and sexual abuse. New England children abducted by Indians often chose to stay with their more affectionate captors.
Two preadolescent girls in the household of the village minister Samuel Parris were the first to be afflicted with fits, speak gibberish and complain of prickling, pinching and choking. In February, first the ambitious Parris, then other ministers, magistrates and scholars in the region, rushed to attribute their mysterious symptoms to witchcraft, and thus gave the attacks legitimacy. In their merciless interrogations, always assuming guilt, the magistrates provided scripts of demonic possession and pressured the accused to confess, often with threats and torture. The inquisitors could find evidence of guilt in everything, including the all-purpose “muttering.” Dependence on “spectral evidence” — the unprovable reporting of sightings of witches, wizards, devils, ghosts and the dead — became a legal controversy but was never excluded.
The legal system was primitive; informing was encouraged and was rampant, especially within families. The villagers packed the courtrooms and joined in the chorus of accusation. Stories of atrocity and brutality abound; prisoners, including children as young as 4, were held for months in 8-pound chains in freezing, stinking jails. In the summer, when the executions of the condemned began, locals swarmed to see the hangings with their offspring: “It was the kind of thing to which you took the children.” As Schiff shows, it takes a village to hang a witch.
The Salem terror didn’t so much end as burn itself out, “as if all simply, suddenly awoke, shaking off their strange tales, from a collective preternatural dream.” The accused were released from prisons, emerging crippled or mad. There was some show of repentance, a fast day, some small financial reparations. But New England Puritans did not question or give up their faith in witchcraft. In the treatises that followed the Salem trials, by such authorities as Cotton Mather, much was written about the existence of witchcraft and little about the errors of the judges.
Why did it happen? Schiff does not give a new solution to an old case, but she concludes that the panic began with a hysterical conversion disorder in which the girls were driven by the monotony, drudgery and pain of their environment to express emotional conflict through their skins and bodies. Unconscious in the beginning, hysteria escalated into fakery, collusion and the staging of synchronized attacks in the courtroom. And life for the girls improved; “never before had they been so cosseted.” What no one can explain is the sociopathic ferocity of the girls’ rampage. The eager participation of the magistrates and judges compounded the fury of the epidemic. Indeed, there were 25 other neighboring towns with witchcraft panics; Andover, about 15 miles to the north, brought more prosecutions than Salem. But without newspapers or mass communication, the spread was slow.
If we take witchcraft to be an evil mania that infects a whole community, Schiff shows it is buried in the dark unconscious of a society, a nightmare waiting to re-emerge.
