Thursday, September 10, 2009

A Solution for Social Ills -- Hang the Witches!


Imagine you are a Puritan living in Massachusetts at the end of the 17th Century. You are majorly bummed, because your colony has lost its charter (which means even Quakers can vote), you're being attacked by Indians regularly, and people just aren't as pious as they used to be. To make matters worse, your daughter has been having fits -- fainting, screaming, crawling around on the floor. What the devil is going on?
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In one of her more lucid moments, the kid tells you that she's bewitched, and that her tormentor is none other than the pastor's servant, Tituba. The light comes on! That's what's wrong with the world -- there are witches among us! If we just get rid of them, then we'll get our charter back, the Indians will leave us alone, and possibly the Quakers will all evaporate, too.
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Okay, so it's not this cut-and-dried. Before we make fun of the Salem judges, and the people who allowed the trials to happen, we have to really imagine that we're Puritans in 17th C. New England. First of all, like nearly every educated person in America and Europe, we believe that witches exist. We also believe strongly in spiritual warfare, and we know that the devil walks among us. We also know that every year sees outbreaks of witchcraft in Europe, and recently in Sweden hundreds of people have been arrested for it. (If you thought this was a Monty Python-esque medieval issue, you're off by several hundred years.)
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Second, we have zero outlets for adolescent angst, and have been having regular trouble with teenaged girls. Boys are no problem, because they are allowed to go outside the house and work -- hard -- with tools and guns. Girls must focus their energies on sewing and baking, neither of which use up much of their imagination or physical strength.
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Thirdly, we believe that the invisible, spiritual world is as real as the material world, and can directly influence it. We are worried by Descartes, who has said that natural phenomena have natural causes, and have embraced Newton, because we regard gravity as a supernatural force. We are not stupid; we have a particular world view that says that evil can intervene directly in the lives of humans, and that people can wholly give themselves over to it. Is that wrong?
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Cotton Mather has gotten a bad rap when it comes to the witch trials -- yes, he was a credulous, pompous, bombastic, uber-Puritan. In his defense, though, he urged caution in believing the afflicted, when they named others as witches, and he ultimately decided spectral evidence was inaccurate. He was also an empiricist, a member of the Royal Society, and responsible for smallpox innoculations in Boston and the surrounding area.
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Like most people, he's complex. Too bad he can't write for squat. His prose is full of quotations from Greek and Latin, and his phrases and word choices all have an ornate, Latinate flair. Even people in his own time found him hard to follow, and subsequent generations find him almost unreadable. His Magnalia Christi Americana, however, influenced people from Benjamin Franklin to Nathaniel Hawthorne to Harriet Beecher Stowe, and it still has a lot to tell us about those early Puritans in America.

5 comments:

  1. While I think that a lot of people just got caught up in the hysteria of everything going on, I think that these people were very truly afraid - afraid for their lives. If you believe that there is a spiritual world as well as a physical world, and that there is such a thing as spiritual warfare involving the devil himself, that is some pretty scary stuff that you don't want to mess with. I think that they were really fighting a "holy battle," in that they were not only fighting for their lives, but actually fighting against the devil in order to preserve the good in the world. If THEY were the city on a hill, and even they were getting beat down by the devil, then certainly all of mankind must be in a whole mess of trouble.

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  2. This is exactly right. Imagine the fear that people must have felt, and it intensified the insecurity of salvation. What if I am not only not saved, but an instrument of evil personified? How can I know? What if my own sinful nature brings down the whole society we were trying to create? The Puritans had a huge responsibility, and it was crystal clear to them that *something* demonic was going on. And it was, but perhaps not in the way they thought.

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  3. This was another crazy idea that the puritans had during the 17th century. Hang the witches and we will gain our charter back and the indians will be friendly with us...first off, most of the evidence used against the so called witches was extremely out of line and false. The people of this time to me had completely lost their minds. If one person was believe something and convince a few others, why wouldnt you be a believer as well? If I lived back then, I have a hard time believing that I would have participated in this nonsense

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  4. It depends on how ingrained you were in the culture. If you lived then, and you were a typical member of a typical Puritan household, you wouldn't have a lot of other ideas about the world. Of course, a number of Puritans did object to the trials. That doesn't necessarily make them more like us than the ones who bought the witch theory. We have absolutely got to understand that their culture is not ours, and just because it's different from ours doesn't mean it was delusional or invalid for the time period. Our own culture has idiots screaming at each other about lies and misinformation in the health care debate, and where is reason in all that? We'd burn our own witches, if we could.

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  5. I can't imagine what this time mush have been like for them. I would have been so afraid of being accused of witchery. If only they had turned to the Lord in this time for help instead of trying to take matters into their own hands.
    -Katy Simpkiins

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