Word: witchcraft
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...WITCHCRAFT AT SALEM by Chadwick Hansen. 252 pages. Braziller...
...death beneath large rocks for refusing to plead. The tradition holds that the executions were the result of a repressive fanaticism in the Puritan character. Underlying this modern attitude toward the Salem trials is a smug belief that since we do not now believe in the power of witchcraft, the existence of witchcraft is a delusion, as impossible and unscientific, say, as the Ptolemaic notion that the sun revolved around the earth...
Clearing the Clergy. Such judgments, according to Chadwick Hansen, professor of American Studies at Penn State, are remarkably misleading. Beyond the fact that witchcraft trials resulted in 20 executions, he says, everything in the popular tradition is false. Far from inciting tragedy, the clergy "acted throughout as a restraint upon the proceedings and it was their misgivings which finally brought the trials to an end." (Clergymen had much influence but no office; the Bay 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...
...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 in witchcraft as strongly as the ignorant; Hansen notes that the British chemist...
Charms and Nail-Parings. Hansen spells out the point: "If you believe in witchcraft and you discover that someone has been melting your wax image over a slow fire or muttering charms over your nail-parings, the probability is that you will get extremely sick. To be sure, your symptoms will be psychosomatic rather than organic. But the fact that they are obviously not organic will make them only more terrible, since they will seem the result of malefic and demonic power...