Salem Witch Trials as Fact and Symbol

Associated Play (Suggested that you read or watch as a video, available at most video stores): Arthur Miller, The Crucible

If  you read or watch The Crucible, you should visit this website. Unlike the National Geographic website, this one is to be surfed, not studied. The idea is to get a sense of the flavour of the times in which this play was written, so you can appreciate why Miller thought the Salem witchcraft trials an appropriate analogy for the times in which he was living (he is, by the way, still very much alive and writing.)

The Salem witchcraft trials of 1692, which resulted in 19 executions, and 150 accusations of witchcraft, are one of the historical events almost everyone has heard of. They began when three young girls, Betty Parris, Abigail Williams and Ann Putnam began to have hysterical fits, after being discovered engaging in forbidden fortune-telling (not dancing naked in the woods) to learn what sorts of men they would marry. Betty's father, the Reverend Samuel Parris, called in more senior authorities to determine if the girls' affliction was caused by witchcraft. Although Betty was sent away fairly soon, and did not participate in the trials, the other girls were joined by other young and mature women in staging public demonstrations of their affliction when in the presence of accused "witches." The events in Salem have been used as a theme in many literary works, including the play by Arthur Miller. They are interesting to anthropologists because they display some of the characteristics of "village" witchcraft and some of the features of the European witch craze. Many commentators have seen the Salem witch craze as the last outbreak of the European witch craze, transported to North America. As in African and New Guinea villages, the original accusations in Salem were made against people who, in one way or another, the accusers had reason to fear or resent. Moreover, the first few of the accused fit the definition of "marginal" persons, likely to arouse suspicion. However, as in Europe, the accusations spread, and came to encompass people not involved in any of Salem's local grudges. As in Europe there was a belief that the accused were in league with the Devil and "experts" employed "scientific" ways of diagnosing witchcraft.

Interestingly, during the colonial period in Africa, shortly after World War II, there were a number of witch finding movements in Africa, which resembled the Salem episode in some ways, and had a similar status "in between" the sort of witch hunt found in Europe and the typical African pattern. Typically, in these movements, "witch finders" would come in from outside a village and claim to be able to rid the village of witchcraft. At this period there was great dislocation, with people moving around because of government employment, appropriation of farmland, and other causes. Some people were improving their economic status as a result of these changes, and some were doing much worse than before. Whereas in the past everyone in a locality had followed the same religion, people were now exposed to Christianity and the local religions of people who had moved to their region, or whose regions they had moved to. In the cities of central and southern Africa, many local religions and Christian sects could be found, as well as Islam. Belief in witchcraft tended to unite people across religious differences. Typically, the names brought to witch finders were those of the same sort of local enemies we have become familiar with in reading about the Azande. As the frenzy increased, people began to be accused who had not aroused any particular jealousies, possibly because they possessed a peculiar bag or horn, which might be said to contain "medicine" - in one reported case, such a container did indeed contain "medicine" but ordinary physical medicine, not magical substances. These crazes tended to die down, often after considerable conflict and property damage, and the witch finders would then move on to the next town. As witchcraft accusations still occur in the area, we can conclude that the movements did not get rid of witches forever, nor, unlike the situation Salem or Europe, did belief in witchcraft itself actually end with the witch crazes.
 

The actual execution of witches was not usually a feature in African witchcraft, so there was probably less to repent in the end, though there was certainly social disruption and property damage. Despite these differences, these African witch movements are evidence that events like the Salem witch trials, where village witchcraft accusations blossom into something larger, while still remaining relatively localized, have happened elsewhere under particular social conditions. These social conditions include fairly rapid social change, a distrusted outside political authority (the British government in Africa, Salem town council in Salem village), and new opportunities for betterment which are not evenly distributed throughout the population, causing increased social inequality.

There have been three basic approaches taken to the analysis of the Salem witch trials. Scholars have sought psychological and biological explanations for the symptoms displayed by the bewitched girls. Sexual repression in Puritan New England, the low status of women, especially young women, in the community, and lack of opportunity for any sort of entertainment are among the psychological explanations which have been offered. "Group psychology," or the tendency for out of control behaviours to spread in crowds, has also been mentioned. Various dietary deficiencies at the end of a New England winter have also been blamed for the symptoms. My colleague, Anne Zeller, has written an excellent article suggesting that the diet of Salem villagers at that time might well have led to calcium deficiency, which is known to cause spasms and "hysterical" states. It has also been suggested that some of the "spectral evidence" (claims to have been visited or actually sat upon, choked, etc. by the "spectres" of accused witches) might have been the result of a condition known as sleep paralysis. (Click here to visit a site maintained by a University of Waterloo psychology professor, in which sleep paralysis is compared to both beliefs in demons and beliefs in alien invasion.) While some of these psychological and biochemical factors were undoubtedly present, we need to look further to explain why the symptoms were interpreted in the precise way they were, why so many people were accused and convicted, and why certain people were accused and not others.

The reasons why "witchcraft" was blamed for the symptoms, rather than psychological disturbance, physical illness, or even religious conversion (the experience of receiving Christ and being saved) have often been sought in the theology of the Puritan inhabitants of Salem. Another generation of New England Puritans, a little over fifty years later, did interpret a similar outbreak of spasms and hysterias in young girls as "salvation," an event which led to The Great Awakening, a series of mass conversion experiences throughout New England.

A core belief held by New England Puritans, which may have led to both interpersonal suspicion and conceptions of a secret world, hidden from living humans, was the notion of predestination, the belief that God had already determined who was to be saved and who was to be damned. As He had not made his choices known, however, believers had to rely on clues as to who was among the elect, the souls destined for salvation. Only these people could become full church members and receive communion. Adherence to strict codes of conduct was necessary, but not sufficient, evidence of salvation. A "feeling" of being saved, and, above all, the ability to convince others of one's status, were important. To some degree, wealth and status in the community counted as evidence of salvation, but there were relatively poor church members and relatively rich non-members. Whether a member or not, everyone was expected to attend Sunday meeting, and failure to do so, as we shall see in The Crucible, could count against one if one were accused of witchcraft.

Both church members and non-members were accused and convicted of witchcraft. Indeed, a sincere church member would be most likely to have difficulty issuing a false confession to save his or her life, since to lie was evidence (at least to oneself) that one might not, after all, be saved. For a true believer, a decision to make a false confession might really appear to be sacrificing a hope of eternal life for a few extra years of life on earth.
 

During the century after the Salem witch trials, the New England Congregationalist church struggled to reconcile the notion of predestination with a culture which placed strong emphasis on individual ambition and responsibility. (I notice, by the way, that many Distance Education students have indicated on the Web Board that you blame yourselves for your own misfortunes -- that is a very modern notion, which was just in the process of being born in 1692.) The experience of being converted, or born again, began to be actively sought and to become the main requirement for church membership, though one was expected to verify the conversion experience by living a virtuous life. The Great Awakening, referred to above, was one of the evidences of this new opportunity for individuals to actively seek evidence of salvation, but even then there was dispute as to how open church membership should be. Jonathan Edwards, the minister who diagnosed the Northampton, Massachusetts girls as being visited by divine spirit, rather than bewitched, eventually was dismissed from his pulpit for insisting that only those who had experienced conversion, and not those who simply awaited it with sincerity, might take communion. Early in the eighteenth century, Cotton Mather, a rather complex Massachusetts theologian, who, during his life, both wrote a manual for the prosecution of witches, which was used in the Salem trials, and encouraged smallpox vaccination in Massachusetts, prepared advice for those who wished to be saved. You may read that advice at this website. Mather placed great emphasis on fear of God and an acute sense of one's own sinfulness - only by feeling truly bad could one have hope of avoiding damnation.

In a world where God was seen as giving clues, at best, to His intentions, it was also credible that another secret force was at work: God's enemy, the Devil. Witchcraft confessions were incomplete without reference to attendance at secret meetings to worship Satan, and acknowledgments that oneself and others had signed documents enrolling in Satan's service. Belief in a secret world, where the forces of good warred with the forces of evil, both acting out of human sight, prompted a search for visible "clues" that some people were involved in a Satanic plot. This search might be seen as a kind of negative mirror of the search for clues that one was saved. Cotton Mather's guide to the prosecution of witches described some of these clues, including ones familiar to us from the film The Burning Times. They included strange marks on the body (e.g. birthmarks, and extra nipples, which many women have, and which were considered "witches' teats" used to suckle demons). More controversial was "spectral evidence." The afflicted girls and some male witnesses said that they saw "spectres" (normally invisible spirits) of the accused, either in the courtroom or at other times, and that these "spectres" choked them, frightened them, and otherwise tormented them. No doubt some of those who confessed, and were spared, were able to justify confessing on the ground that their spectres might have done things of which they were not aware, rather like confessing Azande witches who say that mangu may have acted without their knowledge. Although some authorities, including Increase Mather, Cotton Mather's father, were dubious about the use of spectral evidence, the fact that it was used is evidence of how deep was the belief among Salem residents in an unseen world, peopled by malign forces.

A belief in an ongoing battle between the forces of good and the forces of evil can quickly become an excuse for scapegoating in times of real or perceived crisis. And demons need not always be spirits. As we shall see, Arthur Miller's play, The Crucible, uses the Salem witch trials as a metaphor for the obsession, in the U.S. during the 1950s, with a vast, hidden communist conspiracy, threatening all that was good in America.

This excursion into theology, I hope, helps to explain why the girls' symptoms were interpreted as they were, and why certain kinds of evidence were used at the trial. To understand why certain people were accused and certain others accused them, we require an analysis in terms of social relationships, just as we did in the case of the Azande. The selection in your text, from a well-known book on Salem, Salem Possessed, attempts to explain the witch craze primarily in sociological, political and economic terms, though it does not neglect psychology or theology.

Boyer and Nissenbaum suggest that Salem was in a state of some flux at the time of the witch trials. Several ministers had left Salem as a result of factionalism in the village. The minister in 1692, Samuel Parris, was involved in several disputes over his salary, his supply of firewood, and the ownership of his house, among other things. Boyer and Nissenbaum believe that the core of the trouble was tension between Salem town, the larger entity of which Salem village was a part, and the village of Salem. Salem town, which was a prosperous seaport, received taxes from the residents of Salem village and until 1689, the year Parris was appointed, controlled the "Church" in the sense of those covenanted members who had been saved. Until then, although some Church members lived in Salem village, one could only become a covenanted member and receive communion through the Salem town church. Salem village had been given permission to build a meeting house because of the inconvenience of travelling several miles to meeting, but the local committee which hired Salem village ministers did not really have legitimacy. It was simply a committee of townsmen, with shifting membership, rather than the group of covenanted elders who would normally have the authority to elect a minister. Salem village had repeatedly asked for permission to form its own "Church" in the proper sense, but been denied. This meant the status of Salem village's minister was never secure. This, along with town factionalism, may have accounted for the fact that several ministers before Parris had either been dismissed or left voluntarily when they saw the hopelessness of their situation. One of them, George Burroughs, was called back to be executed as a witch. Although Salem Village finally obtained a covenanted Church in 1689, which hired Parris as its first minister, the tensions and factionalism of the preceding period did not disappear overnight. Authority was further compromised by the fact that there had recently been a bloodless revolution in England, and the king had been deposed, leaving weakened authority in that quarter. Moreover, the Governor was away fighting Indians during much of the furor, giving the judges more power than they otherwise would have had. The trials, in fact, were stopped shortly after the Governor's return.
 

In general, Boyer and Nissenbaum argue, Salem town was richer than Salem village. Salem village was particularly pressed for land, being hemmed in on all sides. Salem town also was more open to the outside influences one would expect in a wealthy seaport, while Salem village was more strictly agrarian. The Puritan religion forbade most forms of entertainment, but Boyer and Nissenbaum suggest that Salem town offered more possibilities than Salem village. One of the earliest people to be accused (and ultimately hanged) was Bridget Bishop, who ran an unlicenced cider-shop in her home in Salem village.

Boyer and Nissenbaum argue that there were personal enmities, based on land ownership and inheritance, in Salem village and neighbouring towns. There was also general potential for schism between those parts of the village near to Salem town and those further away from it. The authors note that most of the accused witches lived in the Salem town side of the village, and most of the accusers lived in the side of the village further from the town. The meeting house was in the part of the village where most of the accusers lived. Those who accused their neighbours tended to be supporters of Rev. Parris. The accused and their relatives and supporters tended to belong to the faction that opposed Parris. In general, the opposition to Parris represented the better-off residents. The anti-Parris faction clustered around Israel Porter, a member of Salem town church, and the pro-Parris faction centered around Thomas Putnam, Jr., whose daughter was one of the afflicted girls and whose wife was one of the other accusers. Thomas Putnam believed that he had been cheated out of his inheritance by Joseph Putnam, his half brother, who had connections to the Porters, and who was the child of Thomas Putnam Sr.'s second marriage to a woman in Salem town. Elisabeth and Thomas Very were related to Thomas Putnam Jr.'s stepmother, Mary Very, whom he probably blamed for his father's will. On the chart on p. 268 you can see some of the links between the accused.

Boyer and Nissnbaum suggest that it would have been unremarkable, at the time, for the first three who were denounced, including a rather bad-tempered beggar, Sarah Good, and the Parris's West Indian slave, Tituba, to be the target of accusations (Tituba confessed and survived.) Such marginal individuals frequently become scapegoats for social tensions. What they believe needs explanation was the way in which the witchcraft accusations spread, so that many respectable people were accused and hanged, including a former minister of the village, George Burroughs. This is what takes the Salem witchcraft episode beyond the range of the Azande-type pattern, though it never achieved the scope of the European witchcraft trials. Boyer and Nissenbaum suggest that Parris used the theological assumption of a hidden battle between good and evil to force villagers to take sides between himself (whom he identified as on the side of God) and those who opposed him (whom he identified with the Devil).

The witchcraft craze in Salem began when Parris's daughter Betty, his relative and ward Abigail Williams, and his slave Tituba, were found to be using magical practices to predict the fortunes, particularly the marriages, of Betty, Abigail, Ann Putnam Jr. and a number of other girls in the community. Because they were practicing magic, these people could all have been accused of witchcraft themselves, or they could have been seen as wayward women and children and punished accordingly, or simply ignored. That only Tituba was accused, while the others became accusers of many of Parris's enemies, proved to be very opportunistic for him. As the town minister it was Parris, of course, who first had to make the decision to treat the strange symptoms of Betty and Abigail as bewitchment and call in the relevant experts.

Boyer and Nissenbaum make the relevant point that although many respectable people were tried and convicted, the leaders of the anti-Parris faction, who were among the politically and economically strongest men in the village, were not accused, though their friends, wives and kin were. Moreover, what finally stopped the witchcraft craze was its spread beyond Salem, so that important people in Boston, the capital of Massachusetts Bay Colony began to be accused. Even Cotton Mather himself was named at one point, though he was never formally charged. It should remembered that Increase Mather, along with Judge Sewall, one of the trial judges, began to question spectral evidence. At any rate, when the Governor's wife was accused, the Governor called an end to the trial. Eventually, everyone who was still in jail was released, and some compensation was paid to the survivors. Parris was removed from his pulpit some years later, and replaced with a man whom Boyer and Nissenbaum (elsewhere in their book) characterize as more interested in hunting and fishing than in seeking out evidences of the Devil's work. He also established a school and a charitable organization in the town, to take charge of two elements of the population who had been heavily involved in the start of the trials, as accusers and the earliest accused: young people and beggars.

The Salem witch trials represent an instance of theology being wed to politics, with tragic results. In the play, The Crucible, Arthur Miller uses the trials to draw attention to a secular theology of fear (substitute "Communism" for "Satan") which he believed was involved in a similar marriage in 1950s America.

Before reading my comments on the play, you ought (if you have not done so already) to visit this website, where the liberties which Miller has taken with the play are spelled out. Apart from the changes which obviously are made for theatrical convenience (giving Ann Putnam, Jr. a different name from her mother, reducing the number of locales, and therefore the number of required stage settings), Miller's alterations tell us something about the nature of recent "witch hunts," as compared with those of the 17^th Century.

Senator Joseph McCarthy, who gave his name to an era, led the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee in seeking out real and imagined Communists, who were widely believed to be infiltrating the U.S. government, spying and spreading propaganda on behalf of the Soviet Union. Because of this fear of propaganda, the media and entertainment industries were also subject to scrutiny. Indeed, many people who worked in these industries, including Miller himself, did have left-wing sympathies, but it is unlikely in the extreme that many (or any) of them were actively working for the Soviet Union. People suspected of Communist sympathies were summoned to testify in front of the House of Representatives Committee, and asked to name any "accomplices" who had ever been members of the Communist party or "Communist front" organizations. The penalty for not confessing and naming one's associates could be anything from arrest to "blacklisting." Pressure was put on publishers, film studios, etc. not to allow suspected "Communists" to work. If you visit this website, you will find a list of writers who had to work under false names in order to write for the movies during this period, along with the movies for which they have only recently been given credit. It might be added that similar, though less extreme, pressure was brought to bear on people with left-wing sympathies elsewhere in the "free world," including Canada. To be fair, much more deadly and extensive purges of people suspected of anti-Communist sympathies were being conducted in the Soviet Union, and these too can be profitably compared to witch hunts.

Arthur Miller himself, already a famous playwright, was at least partly blacklisted until he proved that he was a "normal" American male by marrying Marilyn Monroe! This fact is symptomatic of another aspect of McCarthy era America, one which undoubtedly influenced some of the changes Miller made to the historical record. The 1950s were the era of Leave it To Beaver (a television show whose passing our own Mike Harrisonce publicly mourned!). It was a time when women were being encouraged to return to the kitchen, after being encouraged to leave it during the war years. Recently returned soldiers scrambled to acquire an education under the G.I. Bill, which paid their tuition, and to buy houses in the new suburbs growing up all over North America, and to get jobs in a rapidly expanding economy to support large families, and buy unprecedented quantities of cars and household appliances. Deviation from such "family values" made one suspect. For a time, "homosexual" was a word that was almost synonymous with "Communist" in the United States. Moreover, Jewish intellectuals like Miller were automatically suspect, and Miller's history of divorces would also have stood against him. I believe it was this emphasis on sexual conformity during the McCarthy era that led Miller to exaggerate the sexual aspects of the Salem story, changing the ages of some of the characters to make sexual interpretations more credible. Sexual innuendoes were certainly not absent in Salem, but sexual politics were certainly bubbling closer to the surface during the McCarthy era, to boil over a decade later, in the so-called "sexual revolution." Recent politics in the U.S. teach us that sexuality is still a lodestar for political suspicion in the U.S.. To each age its own demons!

The other theme which is very important to Miller, and concerning which he alters the record somewhat, is the pressure on accused witches to confess. Certainly, the accused could save their lives by confessing, just as writers, actors and civil servants in the 50s could try to save their careers by confessing and naming others. Of course, in both cases, they paid a price, other than that exacted by their consciences - many of their friends no longer trusted them. This was likely to be a more acute problem in the U.S., since the people who were named by those who cooperated with the Committee weren't hanged and put out of the way, just fired and left to try to lead the resistance to McCarthyism. Namers of names sometimes found themselves with no friends at all, since anti-Communists often still failed to trust them. The issue of resisting collaboration with the witch hunters was important enough to Miller that he altered history, and portrayed the trials as stopping when more people refused to confess when, in fact, a significant increase in confessions probably served to cast some doubt on the validity of individual confessions.
 

Taking liberties with the text is one of the characteristics of the interaction between humans and their myths. And a charter myth is certainly what the witch hunts in Europe and Salem have become, though they have more basis in fact than most myths. The stories of the witch hunts are charter myths for our time, to be told by feminists, left-wing intellectuals, and lawyers for President Clinton, each taking what he or she needs from the story, adding or subtracting as seems fit.