Salem Witch Trials the Entirety

Salem Witch Trials

The entirety of the Salem witchcraft hysteria centered upon the needs of the males to both assert and maintain their dominance within every element of their community. For the Puritans, evil and the evidence of evil was as real and as visible as the evidence of God. While the concept of devils, demons, demonic possession, and witches have long since gone out of our religious discourse, at one time in the New World, they were part of the daily lives of the Puritan communities. Using these beliefs to their benefit, the male community leaders of Salem and other Puritan settlements in Massachusetts asserted their control over the local economy, the social order, the behavior of the people, and reinforced their superior positions through the manipulation of their religious faith.

In essence, the Salem witch-hysteria was a directed and calculated effort on the part of the patriarchal power structure to remain in place and in control.

The idea of the witch was one that found roots deep within Puritan religious practice. "Colonial New Englanders drew from a long tradition of tales an witchcraft rituals that described Satan's temptations and crafty ways," (Reis 61). One of the core precepts of religious life during the time of the witch trials, was the idea that conversion to Good could only truly occur during youth, and that becoming a true follower of God could only happen to the young. Otherwise, sinners who remained in sin for too long would find it nearly impossible to truly leave behind their devilish ways. To Increase Mather, this concept formed the philosophical basis for trying witches rather than attempting to "convert" or "heal" them (Reis, 31). By establishing that the young were capable of making the choice to avoid evil and thus could truly decide which path to follow, Mather established an early control over the future leaders of the community. This had the secondary benefit of creating a social system that looked at the adult sinner as being irredeemable and thus allowing Mather and his like to rid their community of adults who challenged the status quo.

Witches became the popular excuse for personal, financial, or other failings - when a married man found himself sexually attracted to a young single woman, he blamed his resulting feelings upon the woman and attributed her power over him to witch craft. This was necessary, because admitting that feeling attracted to a woman resulted in feelings of sexual desire and desire felt outside of the wedding bond must certainly have been caused by the Devil (Ehrenreich, 32).

What we now know as the biochemistry of attraction was then considered to be the work of Satan. If a farm failed, cattle became sick, a baby was born stillborn, all of these misfortunes were attributed to Satan. "But most misfortunes were undoubtedly caused by accident, disease, and mistakes," (Hill 32). With ministerial support for these views however, it became possible for the Puritans to lay blame on earthly representatives of Satan for all of their life's woes. The result? A man or a woman could lay blame on another citizen through simple conjecture, an established history of conflict, or some perceived slight as evidence of witchcraft (Hill 98, 163, 197).

This level of control over others forced two different cultural dynamics into play - the immediate suspicion of anyone and anything that fell outside of the norm, and the power to further separate out those who defied the status quo.

Using this power, the community leaders (all men) were able to maintain the validity of their positions by first establishing themselves as authorities on witchcraft and evidence thereof, and of the final arbiters of whether or not a person was simply possessed for malicious purpose, or was in fact a witch.

Ultimately, this allowed the community leadership to single out any citizen that acted in any way different than others. These leaders also determined the criteria for the "evidence" of Witchcraft. These included not being able to say the Lord's prayer without a mistake (Hill 179).

The Puritan economy was controlled absolutely by the social elite - the ministers and officials of the towns would set the prices for crops, for labor, for commodities and would maintain these controls with an iron fist (Leplante 8). As the Puritan leadership took the stand that their decisions were made directly from the scripture (indeed there was an absolute marriage of Church and State within these communities) any challenge to their processes (such as a newcomer objecting to the financial controls placed upon them) could be then perceived as evidence of a person who is not in alignment with God. Newcomers were more likely to propose challenges to the status quo, thus risking the leadership's stature within the community. As everyone within the community was expected to produce and demonstrate their purity through labor and production, this level of economic control had the benefit of insuring that individuals would contribute to the overall prosperity of the community. People who did not work, who took up occupations considered to be in alignment with evil. Women who took up occupations more commonly associated with men (such as Bridget Bishop who was an innkeeper), taking up opposing religious standards (as happened with George Burroughs who believed in a greater level of free will), and criminal occupations (such as Giles Corey who had committed murder). People who opposed the trials, who spoke out against the establishment or in support of the accused could easily be interpreted as being in support of the witches and, thus by extension, witches themselves (Lindley 17).