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In some cases, it seems to be okay to get rid of something or someone as long as those doing the removal believe that the individual was indeed involved in witchcraft.
Throughout the past few hundred years, witchcraft has been prevalent in many cultures. What we do know today is that witches do exist in some manner. They may not be flying through the air on a broomstick or creating fire from their fingertips, but there are people in the world who believe in magic. Those individuals use spells and rituals to try to charm people and fate into going in the direction they choose. Whether or not this is truly a bad thing remains to be seen, but some people feel it is bad and once they set out to rid the world of this evil that they believe is there, they get many followers. If this happens, hysteria begins and life can get very ugly for a lot of people.
Witchcraft as a religion may be different from culture to culture, but the reaction to it that non-believers and those...
Some cultures, like the Asian and Native American cultures, embrace supernatural beliefs as a whole, but for many others, it is simply not dabbled with.
References
Bar, a.M. (1839). Celebrated Trials of All Countries and Remarkable Cases of Criminal Jurisprudence. New York, NY E.L. Carey & a. Hart.
Barstow, a.L. (1994). Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts. Our Legacy of Violence Against Women. Hammersmith: Pandora.
Haviland, W.A., Mcbride, B., Prins, H.E., & Walrath, D. (2008). Spirtuality, Religion and the Supernatural. Cultural Anthropology: The Human Challenge (12 ed., pp. 314-317). Mason, OH: Cengage Learning.
Offiong, D. (1983). Social Relations and Witch Beliefs among the Ibibio. Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 53(3), 73-82.
In this sense, the only category of convicts which were burned to death was that of the so-called "satanic Blacks" as this was considered to be the only way of destroying their 'evilness.' In Puritan New England ideology, Blacks were associated with Satan. This belief was the remnant of an old European image of Satan as a black man which dated back to long before the contact between Africans
Salem Witch Trials The event of Salem witch trials happened in the year 1692 in the Suffolk and Middlesex counties of Massachusetts. The case was highlighted due to property disagreements, hysteria and jealousy. All because of personal vendettas, a dozen or more people were hanged even though there was no evidence but only stories and assumptions by the town's women and girls. The case was stretched for more than a year
Witchcraft The Salem witch trials of the late 1600's have become legendary through the centuries and have been the subject of much research. Accounts of various testimonies, along with scholarly studies, seem to indicate that the phenomenon of the trials can linked to both cultural and historical context. In 1692, a witch panic that escalated to epidemic proportions swept through the county of Essex, Massachusetts, resulting in formal charges of witchcraft being
The children described, each one of them separately, seeing Sarah and the other women flying as specters through the night. The children, despite the threats they must have received from the women, they were brave and told the truth about what had happened. Other townspeople came forward with evidence I hadn't even heard of -- milk and cheese going rotten after a visit from one of the witches; animals
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
The trial began March 1, 1692, all but Tituba pleaded innocent. Tituba confessed and claimed there were other witches within the community. This cascaded a series of accusations, people like Martha Corey, Sarah Good's 4-year-old daughter, and eventually, Bridget Bishop. Bishop was known for her gossip and promiscuity and despite her pleas of innocence, she was found guilty and on June 10th, was the first person hanged on Gallows