Word: witchcrafts
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Sunning in a Bikini. Theories of sex, drug and witchcraft cults spread quickly in Hollywood, fed by the fact that Sharon and Polanski circulated in one of the film world's more offbeat crowds. Says London Celebrity Tailor Douglas Hayward, "They were both enormously popular in a trendy, fashionable, hippie world." They also habitually picked up odd and unsavory people indiscriminately, and invited them home for parties. "Roman and Sharon had as much idea about security as idiots," says Publicist Don Prince. "They lived like gypsies. You were likely to find anyone sleeping there...
...statement completes the matter: a society that believes in witchcraft will produce innocent people who are mistaken for witches, fools who idly pretend to be witches, and guilty souls who, actually believing themselves to be in league with the devil, practiced the forms and rituals of witchcraft...
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...
...other hand, Hansen says, old Bridget Bishop, whose revelations of witchcraft panicked Salem, "in all probability" was a practicing witch. That was her reputation, and apparently she had not denied it before the trials. Dolls with pins stuck in them had been found in the cellar wall of a house she had lived in. A local dyer testified that she had asked him to dye pieces of lace too small for human use-bits intended for use in image magic, Hansen thinks...
Leading the Leaders. The clergy were nearly powerless until the neurosis had run its course. Cotton Mather, highly respected and a believer in witchcraft, warned repeatedly against the use of spectral evidence, saying it was not to be trusted. His great failure in the matter was in trusting too much in the steadiness and good sense of the judges who, on the record, seemed to be honest and sensible citizens...