Bewitched: old suspicions persist

“Come to Salem and B-Prepared-2-B-Scared! It’s Halloween City!” ran one slogan. It’s a time of harmless fun for many, but the reason Salem is a centre of the Halloween industry is, of course, due to tragic events more than three centuries ago. It was in nearby Salem Village (now Danvers), that in 1692 accusations of witchcraft led to the execution of 19 people, with four other accused witches perishing in jail. Within a few decades Salem had become a byword for intolerance, bigotry and credulity. 

Today, Salem still looms large in America’s historical memory, thanks in part to its place in the curriculum of many schools. It is an episode ripe for illustrating lessons to be learned from history. This is commendable. Yet the focus is also problematic, for it overshadows America’s more complex and recent history of witch persecution.

The fear of witches that fuelled the Salem trials was no aberration, no wave of hysteria, but a deep, pervasive response to dealing with misfortune in a precarious everyday world. The trials may have originated with the malicious attention-seeking of two young girls, but it was the accumulated misfortunes of the community that generated the search for those responsible.

Two centuries on from Salem and many Americans were still living in an essentially similar social, cultural, economic and religious environment. The vicissitudes of life on the edge were all too real, and so was the fear of witchcraft as an explanation for misfortune and envy. Over the last three centuries, thousands of Americans, mostly women, have been abused for being suspected witches. Hundreds of court cases arose from accusations of witchcraft. Most startling of all, we know of more people murdered as witches in America after 1692 than were legally executed before that date.

So Salem not only marks the ending of the Colonial witch trials, but also the beginning of a new era of witch hunting. 

As in colonial Salem, the Bible was used to justify the existence and extermination of witches in modern America: the King James Bible found in the homes of millions of Americans was categorical that “Though shalt not suffer a witch to live” (Exodus 22:18). The learned Choctaw politician and minister Solomon Hotema referred to this injunction after shooting dead three people, including his sister-in-law, in 1899.

In Butte, Montana, in 1937, a Serbian immigrant Ilija Martinovich, who shot his policeman cousin in the back of the head for being a wizard, testified in court that during a bout of depression when he was unemployed, he had read the Bible several times. He returned repeatedly to Exodus and, in his own words, the command that “the wizard no live, that means they be killed”.

Religious movements and sects in America did not escape the atmosphere of fear and denunciation. Several Native American evangelical, prophetic outpourings were fuelled by and sparked off concerns over witches. During the first half of the 19th century Mormons faced persistent accusations of magic, while the activities of smaller sects attracted similar suspicion in local communities. Spiritualists were denounced in some quarters as necromancers and closet Satanists.

The Christian Science movement was shaken to its core in 1878 by the so-called Ipswich witchcraft trial. This was heard in the Salem courthouse, and concerned accusations of “malicious animal magnetism”, an invisible force that caused ill health in a similar manner to bewitchment.

Why has so little of this history been told? In part because centuries of dominant European-American voices have attempted to distance themselves from the story of witchcraft in America. In the majority view of the time, Native Americans and African-Americans were considered more inherently prone to such “superstitions” as witchcraft, thus generating racist condescension in the process.

Another comforting tendency was to “folklorise” witchcraft, depict it as an antiquated belief that lingered in the backwoods and hinterlands of America, an eccentricity of the scattered settlers in the Appalachians or closed communities of the Pennsylvania Dutch. From the mid-19th century, the belief in witchcraft was also pathologized. Surely anyone who felt so strongly about witches that they killed them must be insane! The truth is harder to deal with, less easy to fit in the narrative of American progress.

Yet here we are in America today and witches are all around us in literature, film and television – and on the streets during Halloween. So, spare a thought that it was only a few decades ago that behaving like a witch could have got you shot dead. And who is to say that those days of persecution may not return in the future?

 

Owen Davies is the author of “America Bewitched: The Story of Witchcraft after Salem” and a professor of humanities, University of Hertfordshire, England.