Witch is a word that has been used in history to refer to various kind of sorceresses, with
various meanings, depending on the time
period and the cultural sphere it was used in. Today we usually use it to refer
to a generic evil female magician, like the female antagonists in many fairy
tales.
This way of seeing the witches come from
the Middle Ages when, because of the centrality of the Christian religion in
Europe, those who were considered capable of doing impossible things were
called witches (or wizards if they were men) and considered followers of the
Devil and, usually, sentenced to be burnt at the stake. Today we use the
expression witch trials to refer to
the enormous number of trials led against the ones who were supposed to practice witchcraft over the
course of time.
Speaking of frequency and intensity, these
trials reached, surprisingly, their peak not in the Medieval ages but rather in
the Early Modern Period, especially between 1580 and 1630, in the period of the
Counter-Reformation and the late Europeans Wars of Religion. Over 50,000 people
died because of witch trails in those years, and hundreds of thousands were
accused but, for various reasons, not sentenced.
Later in the 17th century there
was a new (but less relevant, in terms of the number of people involved)
peak. Among all of those trials the most
famous were probably the ones carried out between 1692 and 1693 against the now-infamous
Witches of Salem.
Remember that, since the topic is very vast
and complex, we are going to summarize it and to skip over various elements in order to make the reading as fluid as
possible .
Salem was at the time a small town with
around 1, 000 inhabitants under the rule of England. Although the citizens of Salem were
considered “quarrelsome” by the
inhabitants of the near villages, nothing out of the ordinary had ever happened
up to that point.
But on February 1692 everything changed:
three young girls (the most famous of which is now Abigail Williams) started to
act in an extremely strange way, having sudden epilepsy-like convulsions,
speaking apparently an unknown language and assuming weird positions meanwhile. Worried
for their daughters, the three’s parents called a doctor (whose name today we
believe was William Griggs) who affirmed the three were physically healthy, and
therefore suggesting that the cause of their strange behaviour may be some kind
of demonic presence.
It
was just a supposition, but it was enough to generate true mass hysteria in the
citizen, who started to think that the strange events must be the work of some
witches who were hiding in the town. And thus the Salem witch-hunt began. The
hunt was based on the accusations made by the three girls, especially Abigail,
since they were considered, thanks to their bond with the Devil, capable of
recognizing the witches.
The
first person accused by the three and then arrested was Tituba (a South
American Indian slave), followed by Sarah Good (a destitute housewife) and Sarah
Osborne (previously involved in various illegal issues with her first husband’s
sons). Other arrests followed in March, when also a small, unofficial court
made of local magistrate was formed, but only in May an official court, with the Lieutenant Governor William Stoughton as Chief Magistrate, was
formed.
The first case analyzed by the new-formed
court was Bridget Bishop’s, a housewife accused of luring young men in her
house during the night in order to use them for some kind of demonic rituals.
The court concluded that the women, along with an irregular and “non-puritan” lifestyle, something used
as a proof of her guilt, was at fault for the crimes she was accused of too,
and thus was sentenced to be executed by hanging. Her execution took place on
the 10th of June, making her the first, official victim of the
trials.
With the increase of the hysteria caused by
the statements of Tituba (who, after being tortured, affirmed not only that her
along with Good and Osborne were all witches, but also that they weren’t the
only ones) and by the fact that among the indicted there were members of the
church/people related to it somehow, many other people were accused and/or
executed after Bishop. Some worth-remembering are: John Willard, a constable who refused to continue arresting people which
he believed were all innocent, executed on the 12th of August 1692, Giles Corey, an old farmer who didn’t recognized
the authority of the court and thus refused to speak, tortured to death on 17th
of September 1692, and George Borroughs, a minister who, during his
execution, recited the Lord's Prayer in Latin,
something that people believed wizards (and witches) weren’t able to do.
On
the 22nd of September the last execution was carried out with eight
people hanged. According to a local
legend, while the accused were on their way to the gallows the cart they were
on suddenly lost one of its wheels, and Abigail and two other girls, who had
seen the scene, then said that it was “the Devil’s work, who was trying to save
his followers”. After September there were other trials, but no more
executions, mainly because may people (even some ministers) started criticizing
the way the trials had been carried out up to that moment.
Even after the end of April, when the court
officially ended the trials against the supposed witches, the critics
continued: they were especially focused on the proof used during the trials to
prove the guilt of the accused, such as the results of the “touch test”, in
which the accused had to touch one of the girls supposedly afflicted by their
“curse” while they had a fit, in order to see if the fit stops, confirming
eventually that the accused was the one who casted the curse. Moreover, many people also thought that the girls were
not trustworthy, either because they were lying or because they had some kind
of mental illness (which is a theory that now many people support).
Independently
from what the truth was (something we will probably never know for sure), the Salem witches trials
were (and many people recognized it at the time) and still are a glaring proof
of how ignorance and unjustified fear could be truly
dangerous and destructive phenomena, if left untreated,.
YURI
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