Reverend Parris Quotes

On November 26, 1694, more than two years after the witchcraft court had fallen, Parris read a scathing condemnation of his ministry from the pulpit, Francis Nurse following along with the original on his lap to make sure that his reverend omitted nothing. Parris had fostered a climate of accusation. The girls made prayer impossible; the aggrieved families preferred to attend meeting where they might actually hear the sermon. Given the reckless allegations, they had feared for their lives. They refused to accept communion from the hand of a man so at odds with accepted doctrine, one who expressed no charity and who pursued unfounded methods with the “bewitched or possessed persons.” (They made Parris seem like a bit of a madman, out of step with the rest of the clergy. They nowhere accused him of having manufactured a crisis, however.) He had testified against the accused. His court accounts were faulty, his doctrine unsound, his self-justifications offensive. When he had finished,

As accused Lancashire woman Margaret Johnson explained in 1633, whenever Witches desired to be somewhere, they would be transported in spirit upon a rod, dog, or other such item.69 The meeting itself often took place outside and in liminal settings such as churchyards (between the living and dead), mountaintops (between the land and sky), and fields (between one property and another). In many cases, these settings appeared as Otherworldly parallels to locations in the Midworld. It was claimed, for instance, that the accused Witches of Salem, Massachusetts, convened for their Sabbath in the Reverend Samuel Parris’s pasture.70 Meanwhile, the Witches of German folklore were said to gather on the Brocken, which is the highest peak of the Harz Mountains.71