Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft

“Something was subtly different about the situation in Salem Village in 1692, something which no one anticipated beforehand and which no one could explain at the time. What was it? This is the problem which will be engaging us in all the pages that follow.” 

The authors posit a theory that no earlier scholars had considered. Salem was not typical of colonial America; it was an anomaly that nobody recognized. By approaching the village as an aberrant ecosystem, the authors are able to explain the perfect storm that created the witch craze of 1692. 

“In each of these communities, in other words, the behavior of groups of young people (whatever may have produced it) served as a kind of Rorschach test into which adults read their own concerns and expectations.” 

The girls of Salem demonstrated odd behavior, which was then defined by the adults around them. As the adults selectively focused on some phenomena and dismissed others, they shaped a theory of what this puzzling behavior meant. Witchcraft wasn’t a foregone conclusion, but it was the conclusion that best suited the adults of Salem. 

“The selectmen in Salem […] denied the reality of any substantive political problems in the Village by attributing whatever complaints the Villagers might make solely to some collective defect in their social temper.” 

The Town preferred to dismiss all Village complaints by blaming the residents for their chaotic behavior. What should have been merely a political issue became a moral one instead. The Puritan tendency to mix the material with the spiritual also led to the conclusion that witchcraft might be a logical explanation for the Village’s ills. 

“What made Salem Village disputes so notorious, and ultimately so destructive, was the fact that structural defects in its organization rendered the Village almost helpless in coping with whatever disputes might arise.” 

The authors point out that there was no adequate safety valve to vent the frustration building in Village society. The Town had already internalized an assumption of the Village’s moral corruption. What better way to root out spiritual depravity than to stage a witch hunt? 

“The witchcraft episode did not generate the divisions within the Village, nor did it shift them in any fundamental way, but it laid bare the intensity with which they were experienced and heightened the vindictiveness with which they were expressed.” 

Putnam family resentment had been building for years before the witch accusations began. The law had failed them, and the economy had failed them. Their fury at adverse circumstances found no other outlet than the unlikely pressure valve of the witch trials. 

“The most that the Villagers could now hope for was to accommodate diversity within an essentially stable institutional structure, not to root it out altogether […] The nineteen bodies that swung on Witches’ Hill in the summer of 1692 were part of the price Salem Village paid for that ‘good issue.’” 

The witch executions taught the agriculturalists of Salem an important lesson. After 19 witches had been hung, and one man pressed to death, evil still remained in the world. Parris and his parishioners no longer deluded themselves with the notion that they could build a pastoral paradise on earth. They would learn to compromise with the world as it was.

“Our point of departure must be a central fact of Salem Village life: the immediate presence, directly to the south and east, of Salem Town. From almost any point of view, whether geographic or institutional, Salem Town dominated the horizon of the farmers of Salem Village.” 

The farmers of the Village found their visual perceptions of the world dominated by the Town. This panorama also suggests the degree to which the Town dominated the thoughts, actions, and economy of the Village to its west. Its influence was inescapable and must have created a sense of claustrophobia in the Village that it refused to free. 

“Their situation was growing bleaker, with no immediate prospects of relief, while the Town’s commercial orientation rendered it less and less responsive to the problems of the farmer.” 

For farmers struggling to survive economically, it must have been particularly galling to see the prosperity of the merchants in the Town. That the Village’s fortunes were tied to a community that had little interest in their concerns would have accelerated a sense of resentment. The richer the merchants became, the less they were likely to enact legislation to address the farmers’ plight. 

“For him, the church which the Village lacked before 1689 promised more than religious solace; it loomed also as a potential counterweight, spiritual and political, to the unfamiliar developments which were gaining such force so near at hand.” 

The Village church came to represent something more than a convenient place to worship. Symbolically, it stood for the values of the farmers who saw their way of life being eroded by the influence of the Town. The addition of a parson like Parris, who championed their cause, verbalized the implicit declaration of independence that the church represented.

“The pro-Parris faction thus emerges as a coalition whose shared fears united it in support of Parris.” 

The word “fear” is key in this quote. The faction wasn’t driven by greed or a desire for power over the Town. Its stance was reactive. The pro-Parris group feared being engulfed physically and materially. 

“During the 1690s and earlier, the essential nature of the conflict was never articulated so explicitly, at least in print, and this has contributed to the obscurity in which so much of the history of Salem Village—and of Salem witchcraft—has been shrouded.” 

This quote implies that primary sources during the witch trials were not helpful in understanding the nature of the affliction in Salem because no one at the time truly understood what was bothering the Village. It would take another 50 years and the independence of the Village from the Town for the real source of the inhabitants’ malaise to become apparent. 

“The crucial change in the eighteenth century, then, was not in the frequency of conflicts, or in the objective issues that produced them, but in their diminished moral resonance.” 

The residents of the Village in 1692 were still heavily influenced by Puritan notions of community. Self-interest was repugnant, and the villagers saw the merchant class of the Town pursuing self-interest unabashedly. To the Village, the merchants were a spiritually corrupting influence as well as an economically debilitating one. 

“They treated those who threatened them not as a political opposition but as an aggregate of morally defective individuals.”

To the Puritans of the Village, nothing would have seemed more natural than to view their commercial rivals as minions of Satan. Everything in their lives possessed a spiritual correspondence. The merchants weren’t simply a financial problem; they were a moral one as well.

“From the moment the elder Thomas Putnam had turned to Salem Town to take a second wife, Israel Porter had sensed his opportunity and bided his time.” 

Throughout the book, the authors depict Israel Porter as a shadowy figure working behind the scenes to further his own interests. He rarely surfaces in the primary documentation, while Thomas Putnam appears prominently. This suggests a contrast between the forthright Putnam and the Machiavellian Porter. 

“Martha Cory was the ideal transition figure: she combined respectability with a touch of deviance. If the Putnams could bring her down, they would be free, not only politically, but psychologically as well, to play out their compulsions on a still larger scale.” 

This quote explains the evolution of the targets being accused of witchcraft. Initially, only outcasts were chosen because they were already marginalized in the Village. Cory represented a progression to the Putnams’ real target, Mary Veren. 

“Did she fear that, covenanting church member or no, she had indeed lost her soul?—that it was she and her husband, with their open and drawn-out pursuit of money through the county courts, who were the real witches?” 

The authors offer an interesting line of speculation regarding the hidden guilt of the accusers. Thomas and Ann Putnam both felt cheated and had pursued money relentlessly. Neither consciously acknowledged their greed. However, Ann’s visions of being tempted by the devil with wealth may express much of what she could never admit consciously about her own longing for it. 

“Thus the ordination sermon had a double dimension: it was both public and intensely personal. November 19, 1689, would be the day when both he and the Village, through a collective act of will, aided by the power of Christ, could make a clean break with the past.” 

The authors interpret Parris’s behavior as Village pastor to be highly personal. His own prior failures dictate his actions as minister. He grubs for the money and respect that he never received as a merchant. His obsessions match those of the Village. It, too, is grubbing for money and respect from the Town. Neither Parris nor the Village will receive what they seek. 

“And furthermore, the minister himself became a kind of reference point by which the two groups identified themselves.” 

Parris was never simply a country pastor. His very presence in the Village acted as a rallying point for those who supported or opposed Village independence. Of course, his own obsessions encouraged him to escalate a local controversy into a witch hunt. 

“But it may be a measure of Parris’s ambivalence toward mercantile activity that one can hardly tell from such passages whether his loathing of Judas for having sold Christ outweighed his contempt toward him for having failed to get a better price.” 

This comment reveals Parris’s conflicted relationship with commercial success. He deplores merchants but envies their wealth and status. The authors imply that his inability to acknowledge this conflict created a dangerous obsession that he attempted to resolve through the witch trails. 

“As to the source of such menaces, Parris traced them neither to excusable human frailty nor to the natural (and universal) depravity of man, but to actual, conscious collaboration between individual human beings and the powers of Satan.” 

This quote suggests that Parris might have chosen to interpret the source of his community’s ills in matter-of-fact terms. Rather, his fear and paranoia led him to equate human enemies with demonic ones. In his mind, Satan became fused with individuals in the community. They didn’t simply do his will; they became demons themselves. 

“For while Parris had earlier seen wicked people as in league with the devil, his sermons during the witchcraft period blurred even this fragile distinction between the human and the supernatural.” 

This passage amplifies the meaning of the previous quote. Now that Parris has transformed his neighbors into demons, they aren’t entitled to human empathy or consideration. It becomes easy to condemn individuals to death if they no longer have any claim on the minister’s sympathies. 

“What is unique about our story is the lethal convergence of a man and a community in whom, and in which, these conflicts were already independently raging.” 

This statement implies that the Salem witch trials represented a perfect storm of circumstances and individuals. The Village might have continued its silent resentment of the Town for decades longer. Parris might have gone on to another unsuccessful mercantile venture. The combination of the two proved volatile and deadly when those forces joined together. 

“We have chosen to construe this force as emergent mercantile capitalism. Mather, and Salem Village, called it witchcraft.” 

The authors point out the difference between a 17th-century view of changing market forces and a more modern approach. They demystify events and give them a commonplace meaning. The same could not be said of the Village or its parson. They chose to see socially mobile upstarts as witches.