Word: salem
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...debonair, Freudianized study of the Salem witch trials, Marion L. Starkey analyzes the maidenly affliction as hysteria. She sees the girls as partly possessed and partly calculating, weighed down by the rigors of Calvinism, depressed by the lack of an outlet for their high spirits, and finding in their seizures a way both to draw attention to themselves and to wreak an incredibly malicious revenge on the adult world...
...Massachusetts magistrates sent to Salem Village for preliminary examinations faced a difficult problem: what constituted evidence of witchcraft? The Bible mentioned it in the same breath with sodomy and idolatry, but neglected to define it. After due deliberation the magistrates declared that a devil's "teat" or "devil's mark" on the body of the accused was proof of guilt, that mischief following anger between neighbors was ground for suspicion, and, most important of all, that "the devil could not assume the shape of an innocent person." This last meant that hallucinations would be accepted not as evidence...
Suckle a Bird. Stimulated by a thrashing from her master, Tituba quickly confessed to witchcraft and spun a richly embroidered tale that held Salem spellbound. Red cats and red rats had come to her one by one and said, "Serve me." Though as an earthly creature she could not read, she had in her spectral phase seen nine Salem names in the devil's book...
Walk in the Clouds. With a kind of perverse logic, those who "confessed" were set free while those courageous enough to deny the accusations were almost all sent to the gallows. Scores of people were jailed, but a few hardy souls began to speak up against the hysteria; a Salem Quaker, a few clergymen, a Boston merchant. Those still in jail were quietly set free-on condition they pay the expense of their imprisonment...
...witches: "We walked in clouds and could not see our way. And we have most cause to be humble for error . . . which cannot be retrieved." And indeed it could not be retrieved, for before the nine months' hysteria spent itself 20 innocent men & women had been executed in Salem...