Salem Witch Trials Quotes

He have his goodness now. God forbid I take it from him!

When change cometh, she will bring peace at her back. She will not bend to your will; you must bend to hers.

- L, did you know we’re reenacting the Salem witch trials in English tomorrow? - Haven’t been memorizing your case file? Do you even look in your backpack anymore? - Did you know my dad is videotaping it? I do. Because I walked in on his lunch date with Mrs. English. - Ewww. - What should we do? - I guess we should start calling her Ms. English? - Not funny, L.

...if you come across someone sad and you do not try to make them smile, then you have disgraced your own humanity.

He wondered at the atrocities human kind was capable of committing. The majority of those housed below were ill, mentally or physically, not witches. Most were poor victims--the outcasts of society; or the opposite, people so blessed, others coveted their lives.

All lives are stories, and history is made of stories.

She had never heard of a female magician. (‘Why are there so few of us?’ she asked Ilya once. ‘For one thing,’ he said, ‘the Inquisition. For two more, the Reformation and the Salem Witch Trials. What’s more, the clothing. You ever try to hide a dove in an evening gown?’)

If I do not do this thing, then it may go on and on. Nothing of the greater good comes without struggle and sacrifice in equal measure, be you man or woman, and in this way are we freed from tyranny.

I will stand by you. You must not be afraid. This is a brave land, Susanna, founded by brave people who never shrank from their duty or their vision of freedom. But this land has a future only if each of us stands up for what is right when it is given us to do so.

Sometime the witch hunting takes on atrocious dimensions — the Nazi persecution of Jews, the Salem witch trials, the Ku Klux Klan scapegoating of blacks. Notice, however, that in all such cases the persecutor hates the persecuted for precisely those traits that the persecutor displays with a glaringly uncivilized fury. At other times, the witch hunt appears in less terrifying proportions—the cold war fear of a "Commie under every bed," for instance. And often, it appears in comic form—the interminable gossip about everybody else that tells you much more about the gossiper than about the object of gossip. But all of these are instances of individuals desperate to prove that their own shadows belong to other people. Many men and women will launch into tirades about how disgusting homosexuals are. Despite how decent and rational they otherwise try to behave, they find themselves seized with a loathing of any homosexual, and in an emotional outrage will advocate such things as suspending gay civil rights (or worse). But why does such an individual hate homosexuals so passionately? Oddly, he doesn’t hate the homosexual because he is homosexual; he hates him because he sees in the homosexual what he secretly fears he himself might become. He is most uncomfortable with his own natural, unavoidable, but minor homosexual tendencies, and so projects them. He thus comes to hate the homosexual inclinations in other people—but only because he first hates them in himself. And so, in one form or another, the witch hunt goes. We hate people "because," we say, they are dirty, stupid, perverted, immoral.... They might be exactly what we say they are. Or they might not. That is totally irrelevent, however, because we hate them only if we ourselves unknowingly possess the despised traits ascribed to them. We hate them because they are a constant reminder of aspects of ourselves that we are loathe to admit. We are starting to see an important indicator of projection. Those items in the environment (people or things) that strongly affect us instead of just informing us are usually our own projections. Items that bother us, upset us, repulse us, or at the other extreme, attract us, compel us, obsess us—these are usually reflections of the shadow. As an old proverb has it, I looked, and looked, and this I came to see: That what I thought was you and you, Was really me and me.

Hard to imagine that the man who made the Gilded Age according to his whims and who died on the cusp of the twentieth century had a great-grandfather born the same year as the Salem witch trials, but such are the long spans of generations.

We see witchcraft, finally, as a deeply ambivalent but violent struggle /within/ women as well as an equally ambivalent but violent struggle /against/ women.

The Lord works in mysterious ways. What's true to one man, a wonder and a marvel, might not seem so to another, as God didn't intend it for him.

When change cometh, she will bring peace at her back. She will not bend to your will; you must bend to heres.

Like any other human activity, religion can be abused and made to exacerbate our frightened egoism instead of helping us to transcend it.

Two days after Christmas I stood in the shower thinking about the Salem witch trials.

place in Massachusetts from the Salem witch trials onward. Secondly, humans die, and their brains

We’ll join the trial already in progress; Bridget has just been asked by Judge Hathorne to talk about how she bewitched the girls of Salem: Bridget: I know nothing of it. I am innocent to a Witch. I know not what a Witch is. Hathorne: How do you know then that you are not a Witch? On June 10, 1692, Bridget Bishop became the first person to be hanged for witchcraft in Salem.

There are forces in the world that we cannot see, and they are for good as well as for evil. And I sensed, with an inner certainty, that the forces of good were far more powerful than the forces of evil.

..Abigail's singing while I painted. How we laughed so when no one was watching. And how finding a black-eyed Susan tucked into my business contracts reminded me of why I was doing that business in the first place. To really care for another is a reason to live.

She had never heard of a female magician. (“Why are there so few of us?” she asked Ilya once. “For one thing,” he said, “the Inquisition. For two more, the Reformation and the Salem Witch Trials. What’s more, the clothing. You ever try to hide a dove in an evening gown?”)

This is outrageous and demonstrates the danger of permitting religion in the public square,” Liebowitz said. “History teaches us, or should have by now, that wars caused by religion, and especially Christianity, have killed more people than all other causes, combined.” “I'm afraid that's not accurate. Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot each killed millions and they were all confirmed atheists,” Cardinal Guzetti replied. “Remember the Great Peoples Cultural Revolution? Over twenty million died before it was over. The killing fields in Cambodia claimed the lives of unknown millions, but some estimates suggest twenty five percent of the country's population died at the hands of the Camere Rouge. Joseph Stalin starved ten to twelve million Russian peasant farmers to death and killed another two million building the great Canal outside of Moscow. All three of these monsters were confirmed atheists . . . Probably five thousand people were killed during the Inquisition. In America, thirteen were put on trial during the Salem witch trials. Horrible and indefensible, no doubt. But millions of human beings were slaughtered by Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao. I'm afraid we Christians are amateurs compared to you atheists.

When Tetlock was asked at a public lecture to forecast the nature of forecasting, he said, “When the audience of 2515 looks back on the audience of 2015, their level of contempt for how we go about judging political debate will be roughly comparable to the level of contempt we have for the 1692 Salem witch trials.

When Tetlock was asked at a public lecture to forecast the future of forecasting, he said, “When the audience of 2515 looks back on the audience of 2015, their level of contempt for how we go about judging political debate will be roughly comparable to the level of contempt we have for the 1692 Salem witch trials.”49

In language reminiscent of that used to condemn witches, they quickly identified the Indigenous populations as inherently children of Satan and “servants of the devil” who deserved to be killed.7 Later the Salem authorities would justify witch trials by claiming that the English settlers were inhabiting land controlled by the devil.

The world he thought he knew had become an odd thing, twisting time and purpose. But it had remained an unfair universe in the end.

We proved there is no match in this world for fear and superstition. No match for the power of a word.

The one professional school, Harvard, had been founded to provide training for one profession only, the ministry; recently

No one has ever satisfactorily explained why witches have mostly been women. Since witch accusers have also often been women—probably more often than men—the explanation cannot simply be man's fear and hatred of females.

He peered into the night-dark windows of the afflicted girls, whispering names and stirring fits into their dreams until their own screams awakened them. The girls concocted fantastic stories of witches and curses and torture at the hands of specters. More accusers joined their ranks without his nurturing, puppets of their own envy. Such imagination, such dedication to the destruction of their own. And all in his name. It touched his dark soul.

But then, not long after, in another article, Loftus writes, "We live in a strange and precarious time that resembles at its heart the hysteria and superstitious fervor of the witch trials." She took rifle lessons and to this day keeps the firing instruction sheets and targets posted above her desk. In 1996, when Psychology Today interviewed her, she burst into tears twice within the first twenty minutes, labile, lubricated, theatrical, still whip smart, talking about the blurry boundaries between fact and fiction while she herself lived in another blurry boundary, between conviction and compulsion, passion and hyperbole. "The witch hunts," she said, but the analogy is wrong, and provides us with perhaps a more accurate window into Loftus's stretched psyche than into our own times, for the witch hunts were predicated on utter nonsense, and the abuse scandals were predicated on something all too real, which Loftus seemed to forget: Women are abused. Memories do matter. Talking to her, feeling her high-flying energy the zeal that burns up the center of her life, you have to wonder, why. You are forced to ask the very kind of question Loftus most abhors: did something bad happen to her? For she herself seems driven by dissociated demons, and so I ask. What happened to you? Turns out, a lot. (refers to Dr. Elizabeth F. Loftus)

Your Alex.He's selfish too.He could have left you alone, but he didn't. The difference is he's always known the consequences." "And what are the consequences? What did you see?" "You really should learn your history better Rowan." She slid the book across the table to me. The book was open and her finger was pointed to a list of names. I took a deep breath and began to read aloud. "A list of the accused witches hung at Gallows Hill." I let my eyes wander down until they froze on one name. "Alexander William Foster." The words sucked the life from me, leaving me limp and broken. My eyes met hers. "What does this mean?" She pulled the book back and grabbed my hand. "It means that Alex is from a very different place. A place where is no free will.When they find out what he is, he'll hang for it, Rowan.And they will find out.It's all here. His future is our history.You can't change that." She tapped on the book as she folded the cover closed. I caught a glimpse of the title. The Salem Witch Trials.

Deprived of my shackles, I was unable to find my balance and I tottered like a woman drunk on cheap liquor. I had to learn how to speak again, how to communicate with my fellow creatures, and no longer be content with a word here and there. I had to learn how to look them in the eyes again. I had to learn how to do my hair again now that it had become a tangle of untidy snakes hissing around my head. I had to rub ointments on my dry, cracked, skin, which had become like a badly tanned hide. Few people have the misfortune to be born twice.

The human reality of what happens to millions is only for God to grasp; but what happens to individuals is another matter and within the range of mortal understanding...Witches in the abstract were not hanged in Salem; but one by one were brought to the gallows...After you have studied their lives faithfully, a remarkable thing happens; you discover that if you really know the few, you are on your way to understanding the millions. By grasping the local, the parochial even, it is possible to make a beginning at understanding the universal.

But Mather's smile faded as he thought of what other provisions the charter contained. What would the godly say when they learned that the electorate was no longer to be limited to members of the Covenant but broadened to include propertied members of every Christian sect this side of papistry? This was a revolutionary innovation, whose consequences would be incalculable. Hitherto the limitation of the privilege of voting to the elect had been the very corner-stone of theocracy. It had been a wise and human provision designed to keep the faithful in control even when, as had long ago become the case, they were heavily outnumbered by lesser men without the Covenant. God who had not designated the majority of men to salvation surely never intended for the damned to rule. Yet now, under the new charter, it very much looked as if they might.

Rather that being an aberrant expression of North American fears and attitudes about witchcraft, it should be instead be seen as the ultimate expression of it. And therein lies the most alarming aspect of the Salem witch crisis- if Salem is not aberrant then it cannot be comfortably consigned to the past.

Bobby conjured up something that scared him to death and he ran out of the house and never came back. Of course you’re supposed to close those doors but they never did… I found these cards dating back to the Salem witch trials that were at a house in New York where we lived with Raven, and they were covered in human blood. They were horrifying. I took about ten of them and they almost destroyed my life…The toilets flushed black and there was infestation of flies. Objects were flying off the counters at us. The house smelled like Rosewater Lavender, which was an old cologne people used in the 1600’s. We would tell the spirit to leave but it would go into another room. I was someone who didn’t believe in any of this and in two weeks I had to become an expert or it would have killed me and my son. Finally I found out who it was, what it was and I had to return it to Salem. Since then it has been a process of getting rid of the residual effects. I had an exorcism done several times….I am a very religious person because of it today. I won’t go into it any further but I will say that Cliff Burton of Metallica had the other half of the artifacts that I had and I really believe they killed him

Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh have promised to continue to fund efforts to prove the convicted men’s innocence, including more scientific “evidence testing and further investigation which will hopefully lead to the unmasking of the actual killer.”246 Because the West Memphis Three were released before the evidentiary hearing could be held, the new evidence already gathered was never given its day in court. This evidence, in addition to the evidence that Misskelley’s confession was false, now constitutes the bulk of the West Memphis Three’s case for exoneration. Despite all of the new scientific evidence, which wholly discredits the Salem Witch Trial–like “evidence” used to convict them, Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley remain convicted murderers today. They are free of their prison cells, yet they remain imprisoned by their legal status as convicted murderers. Jason Baldwin once said, “I know one thing, and that is how long is too long to keep an innocent person in prison: one minute! One minute is too long to deny an innocent person his freedom.”247 When they were finally released, on August 19, 2011, eighteen years and seventy-eight days after they were arrested, Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley had each

During the 2016 US presidential campaign, the hatred shown toward Hillary Clinton far outstripped even the most virulent criticisms that could legitimately be pinned on her. She was linked with “evil” and widely compared to a witch, which is to say that she was attacked as a woman, not as a political leader. After her defeat, some of those critics dug out the song “Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead,” sung in The Wizard of Oz to celebrate the Witch of the East’s death—a jingle already revived in the UK at the time of Margaret Thatcher’s death in 2013. This reference was brandished not only by Donald Trump’s electors, but also by supporters of Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s main rival in the primaries. On Sanders’ official site, a fundraising initiative was announced under the punning title “Bern the Witch”—an announcement that the Vermont senator’s campaign team took down as soon as it was brought to his attention. Continuing this series of limp quips, the conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh quipped, “She’s a witch with a capital B”—he can’t have known that, at the Salem witch trials in the seventeenth century, a key figure had already exploited this consonance by calling his servant, Sarah Churchill, who was one of his accusers, “bitch witch.” In reaction, female Democrat voters started sporting badges calling themselves “Witches for Hillary” or “Hags for Hillary.”48

There is a certain irony here, because many of the first werewolves to be outed in society from the 16th through the 18th centuries were actually women. Just as our American ancestors had their Salem Witch Trials, Europe had its Werewolf Trials, and a large number of the so-called “werewolves” tortured and burned at the stake were female. […] In the 17th-century werewolf trials of Estonia, women were about 150 percent more likely to be accused of lycanthropy; however, they were about 100 percent less likely to be remembered for it.” “Here’s also a pronounced lack of female werewolves in popular culture. Their near absence in literature and film is explained away by various fancies: they’re sterile, an aberration, or—most galling of all—they don’t even exist.Their omission from popular culture does one thing very effectively: It prevents us, and men especially, from being confronted by hairy, ugly, uncontrollable women. Shapeshifting women in fantasy stories tend to transform into animals that we consider feminine, such as cats or birds, which are pretty and dainty, and occasionally slick and wicked serpents. But because the werewolf represents traits that are accepted as masculine—strength, large size, violence, and hirsutism—we tend to think of the werewolf as being naturally male. The female werewolf is disturbing because she entirely breaks the rules of femininity.

The above is stereotypical FMS rhetoric. It employs a formulaic medley of factual distortions, exaggerations, emotionally charged language and ideological codewords, pseudo-scientific assertions, indignant protestations of bigotry and persecution, mockering of religious belief, and the usual tiresome “witch hunt” metaphors to convince the reader that there can be no debating the merits of the case. No matter what the circumstances of the case, the syntax is always the same, and the plot line as predictable as a 1920's silent movie. Everyone accused of abuse is somehow the victim of overzealous religious fanatics, who make unwarranted, irrational, and self-serving charges, which are incredibly accepted uncritically by virtually all social service and criminal justice professionals assign to the case, who are responsible for "brainwashing" the alleged perpetrator or witnesses to the crime. This mysterious process of "mass hysteria" is then amplified in the media, which feeds back upon itself, which finally causes a total travesty of justice which the FMS people in the white hats are duty-bound to redress. By reading FMS literature one could easily draw the conclusion that the entire American justice system is no better than that of the rural south in the days of lynchings and the Ku Klux Klan. The Salem witch trials of the seventeenth century are always the touchstone for comparison.

The Salem [witch] trials…can be seen as an example of the propensity of the American people to be convulsed by spasms of self-righteous rage against enemies, real or imaginary, of their society and way of living. Hence the parallels later drawn between Salem in 1692 and the “Red Scare” of 1919-20, Senator McCarthy’s hunt for Communists in the early 1950’s, the Watergate hysteria of 1973-74, and the Irangate hunt of the 1980s. What strikes the historian, however, is not just the intensity of the self-delusion in the summer of 1692, by no means unusual for the age, but the speed of the recovery from it in the autumn, and the anxiety of the local government and society to confess wrongdoing, to make reparation and search for the truth. That indeed is uncommon in any age. In the late 17th century it was perhaps more remarkable than the hysteria itself and a good augury for America’s future as a humane and truth-seeking commonwealth. The rule of law did indeed break down, but it was restored with promptness and penitence.

In the nineteenth-century American imagination hanging involved the "rule of law"-the culmination of an orderly legal process where the guilty just might indeed be guilty. "Burning," on the other hand, hinted at extralegal proceedings (or even the Roman Catholic Inquisition) and intensified what Salem's metaphor had invoked so successfully for years: conduct that was dangerously foreign, irrational, and barbaric.7

Southern use of the Salem metaphor ensured that when citizens read about the recent national election results in DeBow's Review in December 186o, they needed no further explanation of the message: "The North, who, having begun with burning witches, will end by burning us!"109

Noah Webster's statement that "the virtues of men are of more consequence to society than their abilities" reflected a mind-set that dominated not only late eighteenth-century political ideology but the resultant nineteenth-century American theory of education.25

those who pled innocent were executed while those who confessed their guilt lived;

In that search for the foundations of national character, many would find the memory of Salem's witch hunt a useful symbol to mark the cultural boundary between the virtuous national present and the superstitious, disorderly, and even brutal colonial past.62

Let us thank God for having given us such ancestors; and let each successive generation thank him, not less fervently, for being one step further from them in the march of ages."58

sworn testimony to her possession of puppets by witnesses in the Salem trials provided enough empirical evidence for any witchcraft charge.

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In the end, government exists to protect the rights of individuals. It does not exist to protect society, least of all from itself. This is because society is not something that can be protected. Society emerges from the interactions of its members over time. “Protecting society” has no real meaning, precisely because society is always a work in progress. It is constantly refining itself. To “protect society” would be to freeze it, or some aspect of it, in place. And this would destroy society by contradicting its very nature as an emergent phenomenon. So when we use coercive methods in an attempt to “protect society” rather than the individuals who comprise it, we end up with things like the Salem Witch Trials, the Trail of Tears, black chattel slavery, Japanese internment, and numerous other offenses.

The Salem witch trials have long been seen as the last manifestation of backward-looking Puritanism. So they were. But rage, bitterness, and envy produced by deep loss, on many levels including the individual and familial as well as the social and national, had fueled and attracted the murderous hostility.

there was no profession in the state of Texas with worse job security than that of high school football coach. Coaches were fired all the time for poor records. Sometimes it happened with the efficiency of a bloodless coup—one day the coach was there at the office decorated in the school colors and the next day he was gone, as if he had never existed. But sometimes he was paraded before school board meetings to be torn apart by the public in a scene like something out of the Salem witch trials, or had several thousands of dollars’ worth of damage done to his car by rocks thrown by irate fans, or responded to a knock on the door to find someone with a shotgun who wasn’t there to fire him but to complain about his son’s lack of playing time. When Gaines himself went home that Friday night at about two in the morning he found seven FOR SALE signs planted in his lawn. The next night, someone had also smashed a pumpkin into his car, causing a dent. It didn’t bother him. He was the coach. He got paid for what he did and he was tough enough to take it. But he did get upset when he heard that several FOR SALE signs had also been punched into Chavez’s lawn. Brian was just a player, a senior in high school, but that didn’t seem to matter. “That’s sick to me,” said Gaines. “I just can’t understand it.

These generous donations, the sale of which helped to fund the construction of Yale College in New Haven, were vigorously encouraged by Puritan minister Cotton Mather, who also vigorously encouraged the Salem Witch Trials.

The Salem witch-hunt, like all witch-hunts, was conducted not by an individual acting alone but by a group. All types of groups are capable of behaving in ways that would shock the consciences of their individual members. But those that espouse a morality of censure and blame rather than compassion and empathy are utterly merciless toward objects of hatred. The more a group idealizes itself, its own values, and its God, the more it persecutes both other groups and the dissenters in its midst. In doing so it protects

those it prizes from any aggression they arouse by deflecting it.

On a long enough timeline, the rules of man change, and they change quite often. What was once considered a sin punishable by death is now a simple social media update, an expression of sexual preference, politics, religious belief. A hundred years from now, sin in its current state might be a laughable pastime, the way we look back on our ancestors who once believed the world was flat. Or the way we resent the ignorance of the Salem Witch Trials. Our justice system and our beliefs are a direct reflection of our politics, based on what we’re willing to accept—what society as a whole can accept. But then there are rules to which we can’t argue, like those governing our existence.

People gave the heavens a voice, so they had something to ask for: a better harvest, a healthy child or a milder winter. God was hope, and mankind needed hope the way it needed warmth, food and ale. But with hope came disappointment. The downtrodden yearned for stories to explain their misfortunes, though what they really wanted was somebody to blame for their misery. It was impossible to set fire to the blight that had ruined your crops, but a blight was easily summoned by a witch, at which point any poor woman would do.

Her clever, hypothetical riposte was “But put the case, sir, that I do fear the Lord and my parents; may not I entertain them that fear the Lord because my parents will not give me leave?” That is, should human authority take precedence over the divine? This was a reasonable question in a time and place with little separation of church and state. The very concept of such a separation would not be introduced in Massachusetts society until more than a half century later, following the debacle of the witch trials in Salem Village.

I felt like I was back in Hawthorne’s Salem, learning the worst lesson of the witch trials: the public will bow to authority, no matter how corrupt, if they believe that authority is curtailing a greater threat—even if the complicity of the authority becomes increasingly explicit. The longing for a legal system to combat an almost otherworldly evil overrides the public’s ability to see the man-made evil right in front of them.

I wanted to learn about the Salem witch trials for history. I read books under my desk during lessons and refused to eat the bottom left corner of my sandwiches. I believed platypuses to be a government conspiracy. I could not turn a cartwheel or kick, hit, or serve any sort of ball. In third grade, I announced that I was a feminist. During Job Week in fifth grade, I told the class and teacher that my career goal was to move to New York, wear black turtlenecks, and sit in coffee shops all day, thinking deep thoughts and making up stories in my head.

Thought, it turns out, is everywhere at once. It’s part of the seamless whole of reality and is not confined in space or by space. In addition—and get ready for this—thought may not be constrained by time

the point is that this experiment proves thought and knowledge are not confined within the brain. Quantum physicists say it’s part of the whole. Anyone

The truth is that thoughts, perceptions, and memories, actually occur somewhere else and then are received and processed by the brain in a way similar to how a cell phone or radio receiver works.

University of Virginia—have collected that demonstrate that consciousness can exist without a brain being involved.

(The same June court session also annulled Ralph and Katherine Ellenwood’s marriage due to his “insuffiency.” Katherine declared that she “would rather die than live with this man,” whereas Ralph was reported to have blamed his problem on the presence of witches in the neighborhood.)

Since knowledge [thought] is not contained within a person’s cranium but is everywhere at once as was indicated by the double-slit experiment, belief or knowledge held jointly by a group of people would logically seem to be more powerful than that held only by a single individual.

In experiments using MRI scans, Westen has demonstrated that persons with partisan preferences believe what they want to believe regardless of the facts. Not only that, they unconsciously congratulate themselves—the reward centers of their brains light up—when they reject new information that does not square with their predetermined views.

In one test, subjects were presented with contradictory statements made by George Bush and John Kerry. Republicans judged Kerry’s flip-flop harshly, while letting Bush off the hook for his. Democrats did the reverse. Interestingly, the brain scans showed that the parts of the brain governing emotion were far more active during the experiment than the reasoning parts.

Harvard limited wine consumption to one gallon per student and three for degree takers, but banned a certain potent plum cake entirely.

Word was, her power was old and ancient and derived from the lives of her sister witches lost in the Salem trials. Alice was the sole survivor, thanks to Elenora’s intervention.

The Salem Witch Trials were about little else than bored girls letting their stories spin murderously out of control.

Whereas, if the Devil offer unto a good man all the pleasures, and profits, and honors of the world, he will not sin for the sake thereof, and wrong his own soul. ‘No,’ he says to the Devil.

Among the tricks the mind can play on itself in a hysterical state is to believe and not believe simultaneously. But half-belief is quite different from deliberate fraud.

To this faith, the world owes the modern institutional versions of orphanages, hospitals, and higher education, along with the intellectual revolutions of the Enlightenment. Renaissance painting and architecture, classical music, and the abolition movement, as well as the modern movements for workers’ rights, women’s suffrage, and civil rights, were all by-products, directly or indirectly, of Christian beliefs and actions. Despite Christianity’s positive influences in many areas, Christians were also responsible for the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the Thirty Years’ War, the genocide of native civilizations in the Americas, the Salem witch trials, American slavery and the slave trade, the Third Reich in Germany, “the Troubles” in Northern Ireland, the Rwandan genocide, and other atrocities. Clearly, Christianity has been both a positive and negative force in the world.

Thomas Szasz, writing in The Manufacture of Madness, points out that this “human tendency to embrace collective error—especially error that threatens harm and commands specific protective action—seems to be an integral part of man’s social nature.

Boyer, Paul S., and Stephen Nissenbaum. Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974. Breslaw, Elaine G. Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem: Devilish Indians and Puritan Fantasies. New York: New York University Press, 1996. Clark, Stuart. Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Cross, Tom Peete. Witchcraft in North Carolina. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1919. Davies, Owen. Popular Magic: Cunning-Folk in English History. New York: Bloomsbury, 2007. Demos, John Putnam. Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Gibson, Marion. Witchcraft Myths in American Culture. New York: Routledge, 2007. Godbeer, Richard. The Devil’s Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Goss, K. David. Daily Life During the Salem Witch Trials. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2012. Hall, David D. Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England. New York: Knopf, 1989. Hansen, Chadwick. Witchcraft at Salem. New York: G. Braziller, 1969. Hutton, Ronald. The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Karlsen, Carol F. The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England. New York: Norton, 1987. Levack, Brian P. The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe. 3rd ed. Harlow, England, New York: Pearson Longman, 2006. Macfarlane, Alan. Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1991. Matossian, Mary K. “Ergot and the Salem Witchcraft Affair.” American Scientist 70 (1970): 355–57. Mixon Jr., Franklin G. “Weather and the Salem Witch Trials.” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 19, no. 1 (2005): 241–42. Norton, Mary Beth. In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. Parke, Francis Neal. Witchcraft in Maryland. Baltimore: 1937.

Purkiss, Diane. The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations. New York: Routledge, 1996. Ray, Benjamin. “The Geography of Witchcraft Accusations in 1692 Salem Village.” The William and Mary Quarterly 65, no. 3 (2008): 449–78. Roach, Marilynne K. The Salem Witch Trials: A Day-by-Day Chronicle of a Community Under Siege. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2002. Rosenthal, Bernard. Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of 1692. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Rosenthal, Bernard, Gretchen A. Adams, et al., eds. Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic. New York: Scribner, 1971. Trask, Richard B. The Devil Hath Been Raised: A Documentary History of the Salem Village Witchcraft Outbreak of March 1692: Together with a Collection of Newly Located and Gathered Witchcraft Documents. Danvers, MA: Yeoman Press, 1997. Weisman, Richard. Witchcraft, Magic, and Religion in 17th-Century Massachusetts. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984.

more modern version of the hysteria complex is called Mass Psychogenic Illness, or MPI, which is defined as the contagious spread of behavior within a group of individuals where one person serves as the catalyst or “starter” and the others imitate the behavior.

The Salem witch trials of the seventeenth century are closer to the mark. So are the nervous disorders of the eighteenth century and the neurasthenia epidemic of the nineteenth century.1 Anorexia nervosa,2 repressed memory,3 bulimia, and the cutting contagion in the twentieth.4 One protagonist has led them all, notorious for magnifying and spreading her own psychic pain: the adolescent girl.

The segregation of the girls would have served to localize the psychic infection, and the girls themselves, exposed to the wayward streak of poetry in Mather's composition, would almost certainly have found their fantasies deflected to the more normal preoccupations of adolescence. They would, in short, like a large proportion of the female members of his congregation at at given time, have fallen in love with him. Infatuation is not any guarantee against hysteria; quite the contrary. But in this case such a development might have diverted the antics of the girls to less malignant forms.

The Salem Witchcraft Papers,

by Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum.

Perhaps Hawthorne himself best summed up the fraught relationship between the nineteenth-century American and the historical Puritan in a frequently quoted line: "Let us thank God for having given us such ancestors; and let each successive generation thank him, not less fervently, for being one step further from them in the march of ages."58

When anxiety about the course of a new cultural movement or political controversy arose, the average American did not have far to go to find a handy historical parallel to express quickly and completely the nature of his fears. If the concern threatened his sense of himself as part of a new nation that was moving forward, the metaphor of Salem witchcraft functioned well as a universally familiar shorthand for the social and political costs of sliding backward into a colonial world of irrationality, tyranny, and superstition.

The Specter of Salem reveals how the cultural memory of an event, like the episode of witch-hunting in 1692 Massachusetts, often has a longer-lasting effect than the event itself.

Here’s my long-term prediction for Long Now. When the Long Now audience of 2515 looks back on the audience of 2015, their level of contempt for how we go about judging political debate will be roughly comparable to the level of contempt we have for the 1692 Salem witch trials.

Rye growers face another challenge: the grain is vulnerable to a fungus called ergot (Claviceps purpurea). The spores attack open flowers, pretending to be a grain of pollen, which gives them access to the ovary. Once inside, the fungus takes the place of the embryonic grain along the stalk, sometimes looking so much like grain that it is difficult to spot an infected plant. Until the late nineteenth century, botanists thought the odd dark growths were part of the normal appearance of rye. Although the fungus does not kill the plant, it is toxic to people: it contains a precursor to LSD that survives the process of being brewed into beer or baked into bread. While a psychoactive beer might sound appealing, the reality was quite horrible. Ergot poisoning causes miscarriage, seizures, and psychosis, and it can be deadly. In the Middle Ages, outbreaks called St. Anthony’s fire or dancing mania made entire villages go crazy at once. Because rye was a peasant grain, outbreaks of the illness were more common among the lower class, fueling revolutions and peasant uprisings. Some historians have speculated that the Salem witch trials came about because girls poisoned by ergot had seizures that led townspeople to conclude that they’d been bewitched. Fortunately, it’s easy to treat rye for ergot infestation: a rinse in a salt solution kills the fungus.

As with later witch trials, like the ones in Salem, flexing normal court processes in response to a powerful authority can lead to mass injustice...

We ascribe human behaviors and attributes to things we don’t understand, because humanity is all we know. We identify with a vengeful God because we are vengeful people. If such a perverse concept of God represents the moral compass guiding the religions of the world, is it any wonder that people commit the atrocities they do? Throughout history―from the Salem witch trials to the Ku Klux Klan, from the Holocaust to modern suicide bombers, from the Inquisition to slavery, from torturing fellow humans to beheading them for not adopting a religion―the most horrific acts are committed in God’s name. It has been said that men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. Perhaps God could do without all the help from his most zealous fans.