Lord Larehip

The Malleus Maleficarum [cont]

The 17th Century

Matthew Hopkins, England’s own “Witch-Finder Generall,” of the 17th century had established criteria for how the witch was to be discovered. He would walk a “witch” up and down the length of a room without food or sleep until they confessed. Should this not work, a witch would find her thumbs tied to her toes and then she was thrown into a river or lake. Since water was holy (e.g. used in baptisms), if she sank, she was innocent of the charge. If she floated, the water was rejecting her and she was therefore unholy. Hopkins had even accused a clergyman of being a witch and accused him of causing a ship at sea to sink. The clergyman was bound and thrown into the water but did not sink whereupon he was dragged out of the water and hung.

Hopkins hung several young women said to be descended from witches. He hung a woman accused by her own daughter of witchcraft in order to explain her own absence from home late at night. He charged twenty shillings per case. Eventually, a group of angry people bound Hopkins and flung him into the water. He did not sink. He was fished out and disgraced and died sometime later of tuberculosis.

There were famous cases of out and out Satanism and black magic such as those of Marie Bosse and Catherine Deshayes Monvoisin a.k.a. La Voisin, both of whom specialized in the manufacture of poisons and had many clients from the upper crust of French society including Louis XIV’s own mistress Marquise de Montespan, whom it was believed may have been plotting to poison him. She and La Voisin were believed to have also sacrificed infants to Ashtaroth and Asmodeus. Louis hushed the whole thing up but still ordered a complete investigation which resulted in the largest single legal proceeding of his reign where, between 1679 and 1682, 34 people were executed, and many more were fined, exiled or sent to dungeons to spend the rest of their lives chained to walls. About 70 were acquitted. Louis’s abolition of witch persecution laws in 1672 likely avoided a huge persecution.

The Salem Witch Trials

In 1692, several young girls caused a witch hysteria that ensued in Salem Village in the Massachusetts colony. Over 300 years in the past, the details of the afflictions that assailed the girls and the cause of them has been perhaps overdone.

The story goes that in the household of Reverend Samuel Parris of Salem Village, a slave woman from the West Indies, Tituba, was regaling Parris’s daughter, Elizabeth, and her cousin, Abigail Williams, and other friends of the girls with tales and stories to pass a dreary New England winter. At one point, Tituba showed the girls how to divine the future by breaking an egg in a glass and staring into the albumen. The girls were quite taken with this method of divination—which comes from England (and really a form of skrying) and is not a practice of Caribbean Indians or blacks. The girls would stare into egg albumen trying to see their future husbands, something we would expect young ladies approaching puberty to be interested in, although some of the girls were in their late teens and one, Mary Warren, was twenty. The other girls were Ann Putnam, Jr., 12, Mercy Lewis, 19, Mary Walcott, 16, and Elizabeth Hubbard, 17.

At one point, Reverend Parris came home and found the girls engaging in this heathen practice and became very angry. The girls, fearing punishment, began to exhibit bizarre symptoms such as falling into swoons from which they could not be awoken, convulsive fits, loss of memory, sight and hearing. Whether the girls were acting in order to avoid punishment for their foray into the occult by an overzealous Puritan clergyman or whether they convinced themselves that they were indeed possessed to subconsciously avoid punishment is open to question. Author Chadwick Hansen believes the girls were legitimately suffering from a type of hysteria because they exhibited many of the same symptoms diagnosed in legitimate hysteria patients.

Naturally, the girls were assumed to have been bewitched by someone. To find by whom, the mother of one of the girls made a “witch cake” from meal and the urine of the girls. This was baked over a fire and fed to the Parris family dog, presumably a familiar. The girls now named their bewitchers: Tituba and two eccentric women named Sarah Good and Sarah Osburn.

At this, Joseph Hutchinson, Thomas Putnam, Edward Putnam and Thomas Preston appeared before the magistrates and swore out warrants of witchcraft against the accused. The three women were brought before two magistrates, John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin. Hathorne assumed the guilt of the women from the very beginning. Sarah Good, probably verging on the brink bipolar illness or perhaps simple madness, behaved strangely before the magistrates and accused Sarah Osburn. Good’s own husband and daughter, four-year-old Dorcas, accused her of being a witch and an enemy to all that is good (although the testimony of Dorcas was most unconscionably gained). They also accused her of having imps.

Sarah Osburn denied all wrongdoing against the girls who, being present, immediately and conveniently fell into fits. Tituba, being Afro-Latino likely sensed the whole episode would be solely attributed to her in the end, made some fifty detailed confessions implicating others. Her willingness to confess so prolifically was no doubt facilitated by the fact that Reverend Parris had literally beaten her into her first confession.

Before long, others were accused of witchcraft: Rebecca Nurse, John Procter, Susannah Martin, Giles Corey, Elizabeth Howe, Sarah Wildes, Bridget Bishop, Martha Corey, Mary Easty, Alice Parker, Ann Pudeator, Margaret Scott, Wilmot Redd, Samuel Wardwell, Mary Parker, George Burroughs, Martha Carrier, John Willard, Elizabeth Procter, George Jacobs, Sr., Sarah Cloyse, Roger Toothaker, Lyndia Dustin, Elizabeth Johnson, Abigail Hobbes, Sarah Wardwell, Ann Foster, Abigail Faulkner and many others. Some, such as Rebecca Nurse, were simply accused of appearing in spirit form at someone’s bedside. Abigail Hobbes was arrested simply for being too demonstrably angry over the arrest of her cousin, Elizabeth Johnson.

The trials were not shining examples of American justice. Perhaps the worst aspect of the trials was the accused were initially found innocent due to lack of corroborating evidence but upon hearing this verdict, the girls supposedly afflicted began to swoon or fall to the floor writhing and screaming. The verdict was rescinded and now “spectral evidence” was accepted, that is, the accused appearing to the afflicted as apparitions or spirits would be acceptable evidence of guilt. Many of the accused were now found guilty and their death warrants signed by William Stoughton.

On Gallows Hill, June 10, 1692, Bridget Bishop was hung. People were convinced that Rebecca Nurse would somehow be spared. She was upstanding and convicted on nothing but this spectral evidence. On June 19, however, she went to the gallows along with Sarah Good, Susannah Martin, Elizabeth Howe and Sarah Wildes.

The problem with the witch-hunt is that it is self-perpetuating as long as the accused can provide more names. To loosen tongues a little more, the authorities added the incentive of confiscating the property of all accused, leaving them and their families homeless unless they provided worthy information. Neighbors, in desperation, accused one another. To prevent a great outcry against the proceedings, those who came to the assistance of the accused or issued complaints were likewise accused. As a result, family members were often forced to stay silent when another family member was accused. This caused great rifts between neighbors and within families and served to widen the already wide rift between residents of Salem Village and nearby Salem Town. And the witch-hunt continued.

August 19, 1692 was a busy day on Gallows Hill as John Proctor, George Burroughs, Martha Carrier, John Willard, and George Jacobs, Sr. were executed. The common belief of the time was that a witch in service to the devil could not recite the Lord’s Prayer all the way through without making a mistake. With the rope looped about his neck, Proctor recited the Lord’s Prayer flawlessly and was hung.

On September 19, Giles Corey, accused of witchcraft, was being induced to confess. Corey had already accused his wife, Martha, for which she now sat in prison waiting for her turn on Gallows Hill. Corey now retracted his accusation against his wife but did so by denying that he had said things that other witnesses had testified to hearing him say. He was outnumbered and therefore judged to be lying. He was placed beneath large stones with more weight gradually added until he reinstated his accusation. Instead, Corey only begged for “more weight.” His request was granted and he finally expired from his treatment.

Three days later, Corey’s wife, Martha, along with Mary Easty. Ann Pudeator, Alice Parker, Mary Parker, Wilmot Redd, Margaret Scott, and Samuel Wardwell met their fates on Gallows Hill.

The accusers enjoyed great fame in the colonies. One can only wonder what effect this had on the minds of such young girls. As females, they should have enjoyed little standing but were now celebrities. Their simple accusations could destroy a reputation, ruin a family, seize another’s property, throw away another’s freedom, end another’s life. And who were they to judge their own actions? Adults around them took them so seriously.

Surely they must be doing the will of God and surely must have been assaulted by the devil and by his witches or why would everyone place so much weight on their mere word? How were they to know that they were being used by people like Sheriff George Corwin to seize property for the gain of town officials? In a very real way, the girls were the most innocent victims of all. They were simply too young to understand the consequences of their actions. They were being encouraged to accuse, accuse, accuse and so accuse they did—all the way up to the wife of the governor of Massachusetts. And then abruptly, the witch-hunt unceremoniously ended.

Osburn, Toothaker, Dustin, Foster and approximately thirteen others would spend the rest of their lives in prison. Elizabeth Proctor, John Proctor’s widow, would never be sentenced. She was pregnant and, by the time she had her child, the witch trials had ended. But other families were not so lucky. Rebecca Nurse and Mary Easty had been sisters and Sarah Cloyse was another sister of the two who barely avoided execution. Virtually the entire family had been wiped out.

People began to speak out and condemn the actions of the Salem court. Not the least of these being the influential clergyman Increase Mather. With the ice broken, survivors and families of the executed began to demand justice for the wrongs done them and their kin.

Families and individuals spent years trying to recoup their losses, both financially and to their reputations. Many of the accused who survived over a decade after the trials as well as their dead kin had their attainders reversed such as Samuel and Sarah Wardwell, Abigail Faulkner, and John and Elizabeth Proctor, for example (even though John had been executed). Others never had their attainders reversed and they stand to this day: Bridget Bishop, Elizabeth Johnson, Susanna Martin, Alice Parker, Ann Pudeator, Wilmot “Mammy” Redd and Margaret Scott. Of them, only Bishop and Redd were actual witches.

Poor Tituba, who had unwittingly and innocently started the whole thing simply for trying to keep young, restless girls in her master’s house entertained, was sold off into slavery along with her husband and never heard from again. She could count herself lucky for in Europe she’d have gone to the stake.

Many families could never be recompensed for what they had undergone. Sarah Good’s daughter, Dorcas, was manipulated into confessing herself a witch (which would have sent her to the stake in Europe) and was chained up in prison for about eight months when she was no more than five and subjected to terrible treatment (which was how she was induced to testify against her mother) such that she was not normal the rest of her life. Sarah had also had an infant child and forced to suckle it in prison but the child died from the terrible environment just before its mother’s execution. The relationships within the family of George Burroughs degenerated down through the years into violent feuds—each side bitterly blaming the other for what had happened to George.

There were, needless to say, extremely bitter feelings in Salem Village and Salem Town. These hatreds and resentments carried on for generations. Even into the nineteenth century, Judge John Hathorne’s great-great-grandson, a customs inspector in Salem (a major seaport by that time) found success as a novelist and, to escape the stigma of the Hathorne name, called himself Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Samuel Parris never apologized for his role. He was the main cause of the entire debacle and blamed by both Village and Town more than anyone else but never fully admitted to wrongdoing, never expressed any real remorse. By 1695, his congregation in the Village refused to come to his sermons and refused to make donations to his church. By 1697, the quarrel ended up in court and was decided by paying off Parris who then left town to nobody’s disappointment. He was replaced by Reverend Joseph Green who deserves credit for appeasing bad feelings in the Village. In 1699, he brought Rebecca Good’s family back into the church where they were welcomed by the congregation.

In 1706, Salem Village accepted the apology of Ann Putnam who sought to explain her role in the hysteria. Reverend Green brought her into the church and read her statement aloud to the congregation as she stood silently, head bowed. She wrote:

“I desire to be humbled before God for that sad and humbling Providence that befell my father’s family in the year about ’92; that I, being in my childhood, should by such a Providence of God be made an instrument for the accusing of several persons of a grievous crime, whereby their lives were taken away from them, whom I now have just grounds and good reason to believe they were innocent persons; and that it was a great delusion of Satan that deceived me in that sad time, whereby I justly fear I have been instrumental with others, though ignorantly and unwittingly, to bring upon myself and this land the guilt of innocent blood; though what was said or done by me against any person I can truly and uprightly say before God and man, I did it not out of any anger, malice, or ill-will to any person, for I had no such thing against any of them; but what I did was ignorantly, being deluded by Satan.”

The other girls never issued such an apology or sought to explain themselves and were more or less ostracized for the rest of their days.

Salem Village appeared to be more willing to resolve and redress issues of the accused and the executed and their families than Salem Town. The Village began lifting the excommunication of many of the victims years before the Town did. This only served to deepen the resentments between Village and Town. Unable to come to any true reconciliation, Salem Village marked itself off from Salem Town by officially changing its name to Danvers by which it is known to this day. Salem Town is now simply Salem.

Perhaps the most fitting statement of wrongdoing came from the investigators of the witch-hunt—the jurors who heard the cases—who had been wrestling with their own brand of demons. The statement, which follows, was a most fitting way to bring an end to an era of darkness and superstition and usher in the light of the eighteenth century:

“We whose names are underwritten, being in the year 1692 called to serve as jurors in court at Salem, on trial of many who were by some suspected guilty of doing acts of witchcraft upon the bodies of sundry persons,

“We confess that we ourselves were not capable to understand nor able to withstand the mysterious delusions of the Powers of Darkness and Prince of the Air, but were, for want of knowledge in ourselves and better information from others, prevailed with to take up with such evidence against the accused as on further consideration and better information we justly fear was insufficient for the touching the lives of any (Deuteronomy 17.6), whereby we fear we have been instrumental with others, though ignorantly and unwittingly, to bring upon ourselves and this People of the Lord the guilt of innocent blood, which sin the Lord saith in scripture he would not pardon (2 Kings 24.4), that is, we suppose, in regard of his temporal judgments.

“We do therefore hereby signify to all in general (and to the surviving sufferers in especial) our deep sense of and sorrow for our errors in acting on such evidence to the condemning of any person, and do hereby declare that we justly fear that we were sadly deluded and mistaken, for which we are much disquieted and distressed in our minds, and do therefore humbly beg forgiveness, first of God for Christ’s sake for this our error, and pray that God would not impute the guilt of it to ourselves nor others. And we also pray that we may be considered candidly and aright by the living sufferers as being then under the power of a strong and general delusion, utterly unacquainted with and not experienced in matters of that nature.

“We do heartily ask forgiveness of you all, whom we have justly offended, and do declare according to our present minds, we would none of us do such things again on such grounds for the whole world, praying you to accept of this in way of satisfaction for our offense, and that you would bless the inheritance of the Lord, that He may be entreated for the Land.”

FOREMAN, Thomas Fisk,
William Fisk, John Batcheler, Thomas Fisk, Junior, John Dane, Joseph Evelith, Thomas Perly, Senior, John Peabody, Thomas Perkins, Samuel Sayer, Andrew Eliot, Henry Herrick, Senior