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WITCHCRAFT AT SALEM by Chadwick Hansen. 252 pages. Braziller...
...year 1692 was a very bad year for the town of Salem, Mass. During a summer of superstitious hysteria, grim events took place there that have permanently tarnished the popular American memory of its Puritan past. According to widely accepted tradition, the whole thing was whipped up by Cotton Mather and the lesser clergymen of a frowning theocracy. Before it was over, the story goes, 19 men and women were convicted and hanged as witches, and one man was pressed to death beneath large rocks for refusing to plead. The tradition holds that the executions were the result...
...Colony was no theocracy.) The afflicted girls, whose courtroom convulsions at the sight of the accused convinced the judges, were not spiteful exhibitionists, but felt themselves to be truly afflicted. In fact, writes Hansen, the girls had good reason for their hysterical terror of witchcraft. "There was witchcraft at Salem, and it worked. It did real harm to its victims and there was every reason to regard it as a criminal offense...
Hansen, naturally, does not believe that the witches had actual power derived from an alliance with the devil. His assertion instead is based on a reading of the religious, psychological and historic conditions existing at the time. Like other historians, he points out that the Salem trials were anything but unique. In the 17th century people not only still believed in witchcraft but passionately persecuted witches. There were witch burnings in Scotland and hangings in England, and on the Continent incomplete records tell of the burning of 5,000 witches in the province of Alsace alone. The learned believed...
Other cases are less clear. The Rev. George Burroughs, says Hansen, enjoyed pretending to be a witch, puffed his reputation by such tricks as overhearing conversations and then repeating them, letting his listeners assume that black magic gave him the knowledge. When the witchcraft frenzy struck Salem, this vain foolishness was remembered, and Burroughs was executed...