[On March 1st,
1692, authorities in Salem, MA questioned Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and
the slave known as Tituba over allegations of witchcraft, the first event in
what would become the
Salem Witch Trials. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Salem
Witch Trials contexts and legacies.]
On three (of the
many) stages to how we’ve tried to explain a seemingly inexplicable event.
1)
Youthful (female) hysteria: Those initial
accusations of Good, Osborne, and Tituba were leveled by two young cousins, Abigail
Williams (age 11) and Elizabeth
Parris (9). In January and February of 1692 they began to suffer various
mysterious ailments, and when pressed for explanations eventually accused the
three women—all to one degree or another outsiders—of bewitching them. While
community members of every age, gender, and station would eventually level
witchcraft accusations before the Trials ended, it was these young women who
most directly set the events in motion, and other young women would
continue to level
similar accusations over subsequent months. So explanations that have
focused on hysterical young girls are not without historical contexts—but nonetheless
play into broader social
and cultural narratives of female hysteria that are, at best, reductive and
problematic (and frankly far too often contribute to witch hunts and the like).
2)
Wheat: For that reason among others, historians
began to search for other explanations for the frenzy and horrors in Salem. In
the 1970s, an enterprising college student (and future behavioral psychologist)
named Linnda
Caporeal discovered one promising possibility: ergot
poisoning (or ergotism). As that second hyperlinked article notes, the
ergot fungus affects rye grain, and could easily have contaminated Salem’s
grain during the winter of 1691-1692; LSD
is a derivative of ergot, and so ergot poisoning has many of the same
physical and psychological symptoms as that hallucinogenic drug. Given that no
one (not in their own era and not in the centuries since) had ever been able to
diagnose the ailment that undoubtedly was affecting those young girls (and
eventually many other community members) in early 1692, and given that a dry
summer would likely eliminate the ergot and thus lead to an amelioration of
those symptoms, Caporeal’s explanation for what was happening to Salemites
remains a convincing one.
3)
Fear of others: But while ergotism might well
explain what the residents were suffering from, I don’t know that it goes very
far toward explaining why so many Salemites chose to accuse one another of
witchcraft; even the concept of hallucinations wouldn’t mean they necessarily
all hallucinated this particular cause, after all. If we don’t want to return
to youthful female hysteria or fantasies or cliquish antagonisms (and I really
don’t), we still need to explain why so many affected residents became
accusers. And for this AmericanStudier, one likely factor would have to be the
fear of those different from the Anglo settlers. As Tituba (on whom more
tomorrow) indicates, by the late 17th century Salem
(like every New England community) included slaves, who comprised one clear
group of “others” to English Puritans. Nearby Native Americans of course
comprised another (and witchcraft was often associated with the forests and the
natives, as Hawthorne’s
Scarlet Letter reminds us).
Moreover, Salem was a very small community, and its residents likely felt the
fragility of their town and lives on a relatively constant basis. Which is to
say, unique as they were in many ways, the Salem Witch Trials might also be an
early moment in the battle
between exclusion and inclusion in American history.
Next Witch
Trials context tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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