What Caused the Salem Witch Hunts?

In the year 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts almost 150 people were arrested and at least 20 people were executed as witches. It all started with a group of young, unmarried women between the ages of nine and twenty who began visiting a slave named Tituba at the home of Reverend Samuel Parris and listened to her stories of West Indian lore. Two of the younger girls became very emotionally excited by these stories and began having convulsions and crying fits, and their behavior became mischievous. After this, the eight older girls followed suit.
            The climate was ripe for such hysterics, and the town officials took these matters very seriously. "The Puritan New England mind was alerted to devils and to their agents on earth, witches. Belief in the supernatural was unquestioned. The Bible told about witches and demoniacal possession; the Mosaic codes of Massachusetts turned legend into law. Witchcraft was part of the Weltanschauung [world view] of the colonists, [which was] especially strong since Massachusetts was not a monarchy or a republic, but a theocracy. The party line of the church ministers became both the law of God and the law of the colony. This religious control of the state accounts in part for the panic in Massachusetts at a time when elsewhere the witchcraft delusion was waning (the last witch had been executed in England in 1685)."[1]
            The girls may have just been rebellious adolescents seeking attention or independence by way of a prank but the local physician and the local ministers decided that they were possessed and that witchcraft was responsible. "It may be—motives are very elusive—they [the girls] initially hit upon the idea of specters haunting them in order to escape punishment for their fantastic behavior. When the question `Who torments you?' failed to produce names, suggestive questions followed, and answers had to be given. So the girls named first the obvious scapegoats of the community, the vulnerable and weak—Tituba, the Negro slave; Sarah Good, the pipe-smoking beggar; and Sarah Osbourne, a thrice-wedded cripple. Martha Cory, the fourth to be accused, had an illegitimate half-caste son. Having taken the first steps in accusing people and having seen their horrifying effects, the girls still more feared to reveal the truth."[2] On June 10, 1692 Bridget Bishop became the first of those accused at Salem to be executed as a witch. This illustrates how fear was employed both by the girls and the authorities to control the other people. This also tells us of how the deviants in their society were singled out, labeled as witches, and ostracized.
            The reasons and causes for the witch-hunts in Europe as well as Salem are still unclear, but there are many different theories. It is, for example, generally agreed upon that the witch trials were "born out of hysteria and the church's bloody drive to root out all oppression and gain complete obedience through persecution."[3] Although this may sound somewhat severe, it is justified since, "the church, seeking to convert all the peoples of Europe to Christianity, was particularly hostile to witchcraft. This attitude, however, resulted in the spread of witch lore and in an explosion of fear and mass hysteria. An accusation of witchcraft became at times a means of destroying an enemy or of confiscating an estate."[4] This fanaticism found its way to Salem.
            A slightly different line of reasoning is given in Erikson's study of the Salem witch craze, which shows that "the punishment of suspected witches served as a defense against the weakening of Puritan society. By casting out the `witches', the Puritans were reaffirming their community values: strict adherence to religious devotion, fear of God, abstinence from the pleasures of secular society (drink, sex, music, dance), and the like. The trial and punishment of the so-called witches illustrates Emile Durkheim's earlier discovery that every society creates its own forms of deviance and in fact needs those deviant acts. The punishment of deviant acts reaffirms the commitment of a society's members to its norms and values and thereby reinforces social solidarity. By Durkheim's reasoning, the stark images of punishment—the guillotine, the electric chair, the syringe, the wretched life behind bars—become opportunities to let the population know that those who threaten the social order will be severely judged."[5]
            It can be seen that the church needed a method of bringing the straying people back and a scapegoat to fight against so that the people may turn to God for protection. In Salem, however, there was no protection since the girls were in the habit of making indiscriminate accusations whereby anyone may be branded a witch, tried, and executed.
            An interesting fact about the Salem witch trials which may be worth making a note of is that "those who beat the gun by confessing were the only accused against whom the girls did not testify at length. The Salem victims were hanged not because they admitted to being witches, but because they denied it. A confession meant a reprieve, for then the accusers did not make a scene."[6] Those that did confess and were thus reprieved were most likely ostracized and fled the town. The paradoxical logic behind this method of freeing the confessors and executing those that denied the accusations was probably the fear of not knowing whether or not those accused were guilty. The inquisitors probably reasoned that the "witches" who confessed would stop their witchery because people now knew who they were and would automatically accuse them should anything happen. The people who denied the accusations were probably killed because it was better to be safe than sorry.
            In respect to Salem as a whole, "the actual behavior a crowd or mass generates depends largely on the emotions evoked by particular situations, and Salem developed out of fear and hysteria among the mass of Puritan New Englanders."[7]
            According to Freud, "a group is extraordinarily credulous and open to influence; it has no critical faculty, and the improbable does not exist for it. The feelings of a group are always very simple and very exaggerated, so that it knows neither doubt nor uncertainty. What it demands of its heros is strength or even violence. It wants to be ruled and oppressed and to fear its masters."[8] This was certainly accomplished by the authorities of Salem in 1692 with its population condoning the executions while still in fear of being accused of practicing witchcraft.
            Fear and the personal motivations of its town's people aren't the only possible explanations for what happened in Salem. According to Relethford's The Human Species the Salem witch trials "raise several interesting questions. For one thing, the timing of the accusations was strange, for the last `epidemic' of witch-hunts had occurred in England 47 years earlier. Moreover, the New England witchcraft persecutions remained confined to a rather small geographic area—Essex County, Massachusetts, and Fairfield County, Connecticut. What factors, social or otherwise, could explain this limited distribution in time and space?
            "Matossian (1982) suggests that food poisoning played a major role in 1692. She notes that the symptoms of `witchcraft' match those of a disease known as convulsive ergotism, which is caused by the ingestion of a fungus known as ergot (also a source of the hallucinogenic drug LSD). This fungus grows on rye, particularly when a cold winter is followed by a cool and moist growing season. Matossian notes that the majority of recorded witchcraft victims had the typical convulsions and prickly feelings characteristic of ergot poisoning. She further notes that all the affected households in Salem were located on or near the type of soil most conducive to ergot growth.
            "Starting in 1590, the usual source of bread in England and North America was wheat. During the 1660's, however, the spread of wheat disease in New England led many farmers to substitute rye. Furthermore, climatic analysis shows that the winters of 1690 to 1692 were cooler than average in New England. Rye grows better than wheat in cool weather, so many farmers became more dependent on the crop. Because of ecological factors, then, ingestion of rye was more common during those years. The chances for convulsive ergotism therefore increased.
            "What does this have to do with the witchcraft accusations? Keep in mind that the colonists did not interpret the symptoms of ergot poisoning as poisoning. Given their cultural beliefs in witchcraft, they often interpreted convulsions and other symptoms as possession or some other form of sorcery. An outbreak of possessed individuals was seen as the work of witches, who were found and punished. The hallucinations may have also led the affected individuals themselves to believe they were witches."[9]
            The effects of ergot poisoning would explain the many various accounts of possession (although mental disorders, neurological disorders, suggestion, and repressed thoughts and feelings manifesting themselves in a violent and physical manner may also be responsible).
            While it is virtually impossible to determine the absolute cause(s) of the witchcraft hysteria in Massachusetts, it is my opinion—based on the data that I have compiled—that fear and the desire to control others against their wills is ultimately the main cause of the witchcraft hysteria in Salem or any other form of oppression, hostility, and violence on one group of people by another. In the case of the witch-hunts at Salem, fear was certainly an important factor, but it was not the only one. As I have stated before, mental disorders and ergot poisoning may have also played a part in spreading and/or initiating the hysteria.
            It is my conviction that the people were manipulated by fear perpetuated by the girls who made the accusations, the judges and ministers of the Puritans who tried and executed the victims, their own beliefs in witchcraft and, possibly, ergot poisoning which would have deluded the minds of the people into believing such impossibilities. There is no evidence that the hysteria was caused by people with mental disorders, although that theory can't be discounted since it can neither be proven nor disproven. However, "Schoenman (1984), in a thorough review of the literature, points out that `the typical accused witch was not a mentally ill person, but an impoverished woman with a sharp tongue and a bad temper....'"[10]

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

1. Carson, Butcher and Coleman. Abnormal Psychology and Modern Life. 8th Ed. Scott, Foresman and Co. 1988.
2. Freud, Sigmund. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Standard Editions. 1960.
3. The New Columbia Encyclopedia. 4th Ed. Columbia University Press. 1975.
4. Haining, Peter. The Warlock's Book. University Books Inc.
5. Kornblum, William. Sociology in a Changing World 2nd Ed. Holt, Reinhart, Winston, Inc. 1991.
6. Relethford, John. The Human Species. Mayfield Publishing Company. 1990.
7. Robbins, Rossell Hope. The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology. Crown. 1959.

[1] Robbins, Rossell Hope. The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology. Crown. 1959.
[2] Robbins, Rossell Hope. The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology. Crown. 1959.
[3] Haining, Peter. The Warlock's Book. University Books Inc., p. 16
[4] The New Columbia Encyclopedia. 4th Ed. Columbia University Press. 1975.
[5] Kornblum, William. Sociology in a Changing World 2nd Ed. Holt, Reinhart, Winston, Inc. 1991.
[6] Robbins, Rossell Hope. The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology. Crown. 1959.
[7] Kornblum, William. Sociology in a Changing World 2nd Ed. Holt, Reinhart, Winston, Inc. 1991.
[8] Freud, Sigmund. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Standard Editions. 1960.
[9] Relethford, John. The Human Species. Mayfield Publishing Company. 1990. p. 444
[10] Carson, Butcher and Coleman. Abnormal Psychology and Modern Life. 8th Ed. Scott, Foresman and Co. 1988.