Persecutions Sometimes End

Witches, part 2

By the fall of 1692, people in Salem were beginning to come to a semblance of their senses. Many were questioning the sheer number of accusations – finding it improbable they could have that many witches. They began to question the trustworthiness of those who claimed to have been afflicted by the witches. Maybe the accusers were the ones who were lying? Suddenly – as suddenly as it had started – the witch craze was over. The numerous people still in custody were released.

We can easily surmise that behind the persecutions were resentments and grudges. There was also a fertile context of theological rigidity. As Stacy Schiff writes in The Witches: Salem 1692,

“Salem is in part the story of what happens when a set of unanswerable questions meets a set of unquestioned answers.”

As my colleague Rev. Erica Baron, herself a pagan trained in and active with the Temple of Witchcraft, put it:

“This is a story of a community willing to believe the worst about each other on some of the flimsiest evidence imaginable.”

1692 Salem was extreme, but every community harbors resentments, quarrels, grudges, jealousies.
Those tensions sometimes rend the fabric of community, and healing is in order.

Fourteen years after the witch persecution, in 1706, Ann Putnam, who had claimed to be afflicted by witchcraft and had accused over 60 people, apologized. Many of the jurors who had handed down guilty verdicts also apologized, signing a letter to the community and to descendants of those convicted and executed. They wrote:

“We confess that we ourselves were not capable to understand, nor able to withstand the mysterious delusions of the powers of darkness and prince of the air, but were for want of knowledge in ourselves and better information from others, prevailed with to take up with such evidence against the accused as on further consideration and better information, we justly fear was insufficient for the touching the lives of any...whereby we fear we have been instrumental with others, though ignorantly and unwittingly, to bring upon ourselves and this people of the Lord, the guilt of innocent blood....We do, therefore, hereby signify to all in general (and to the surviving sufferers in especial) our deep sense of and sorrow for our errors in acting on such evidence to the condemning of any person.”

1692 Salem was extreme, but women have long been the go-to group to blame for whatever is frustrating for the powerful, or, for that matter, the relatively powerless. No one has been literally burned to death in this country for being a witch for 300 years, but women continue to feel the burn of judgments that they are "witches" if they speak out against abuses they endure.

In the Salem of 1692, the sheer number of the accusations triggered a sudden shift, an opening of eyes -- a realization that this many women can't all be witches. Today we may see a dimly echoing parallel shift. The sheer number of accusations may – with any luck – trigger a similar eye-opening shift. This time the accusations are not against, but by, mostly women -- speaking up about sexual harassment and assault. But the growing realization is, again: this many women can't all be "witches."

In 1692, incredible accusations against mostly women were deemed credible. These days, highly credible accusations by mostly women have been disregarded and dismissed. Maybe we are prepared as a society now to see that women willing to speak up about unwanted advances are not some version of witches. As humans, we all want to be attractive and friendly. Women face additional burdens to not be attractive or friendly in what someone might perceive as "the wrong way" -- whatever that is -- yet still face harassment and assault, no matter how careful they've been, because it turns out it doesn't really have to do with attractiveness, or insufficiently prim dress or behavior. Mostly women and a few men face a double persecution: subjected to harassment or assault, and then subjected to a grueling and demeaning process if they speak up. Even on rare occasions when they win a significant monetary settlement, it comes with enforced silencing.

Ending the second persecution will go a long way to also ending the first. When victims can report harassment and assault and be taken seriously and believed, the impunity which allows that mistreatment to go on and on will be over.

In fall of 1692, in Salem, a persecution of mostly women very suddenly stopped. In fall of 2017, across the US, will another persecution of mostly women similarly suddenly stop? May it be so. May it be so.

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This is part 2 of 2 of "Witches"
See also
Part 1: Witches!

I am indebted to my colleague Rev. Erica Baron, upon a sermon of whose I have relied.

Witches!

Witches, part 1

One of the connections that the dominant US culture makes with Halloween is witches. So this Halloween I want to reflect with you about witches.

Witch is from the Old English wicce, meaning "female magician, sorceress." As Christianity spread through England, it came to mean "a woman supposed to have dealings with the devil or evil spirits and to be able by their cooperation to perform supernatural acts."

There were men, supposedly, who practiced witchcraft, too -- wizards and sorcerers. In fact, wicce is the Old English feminine and wicca the masculine for such practitioners. But this "dealings with the devil" idea has a very long-standing much stronger association with women. The Laws of Ælfred, established in about 890, for example, identified witchcraft as specifically a woman's craft, whose practitioners were not to be suffered to live among the West Saxons. Behind this, we see women's wisdom, power, or authority was resented and suspect.

The Biblical verse, Exodus 22:18, declares, in the King James, "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." The word rendered as "witch" meant "female sorcerer." That the feminine was specified apparently indicated that casting spells was much more common among women among the ancient Hebrews -- or that the patriarchal interests of the time were more threatened by women than men engaging in sorcery.

With that as background, let us turn to Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. It all began in January of that year with accusations against three people:

• Sarah Good, a beggar who was disliked for constantly, well, begging – and showing little gratitude for what she received while cursing those who declined;
• Sarah Osborne, also peripheral to the community, who was a widow engaged in a protracted court battle over the settlement of her husband’s will; and
• Tituba, the Indian slave of the town minister’s family.

The two Sarahs maintained they were innocent of any devil consorting, but Tituba gave a long and lurid confession with all manner of strange details about her pact with the devil and blasphemous rituals. That really got the whole community worked up, and the search was on for others who might have participated. Eventually, 19 people would be executed: 14 women and 5 men.

Stacy Schiff, in her book, The Witches: Salem 1692, writes:

The youngest of the witches was five, the eldest nearly eighty. A daughter accused her mother, who in turn accused her mother, who accused a neighbor and a minister. A wife and daughter denounced their husband and father. Husbands implicated wives; nephews their aunts; sons-in-law their mothers-in-law; siblings each other. Only fathers and sons weathered the crisis unscathed. A woman who traveled to Salem to clear her name wound up shackled before the afternoon was out. In Andover, the community most severely affected – one of every 15 people was accused. The town’s senior minister discovered he was related to no fewer than 20 witches. Ghosts escaped their graves to flit in and out of the courtroom, unnerving more than did the witches themselves. Through the episode surge several questions that touch the third rail of our fears: Who was conspiring against you? Might you be a witch and not know it? Can an innocent person be guilty? Could anyone, wondered a group of men late in the summer, think himself safe? How did the idealistic Bay Colony arrive – three generations after its founding – in such a dark place? Nearly as many theories have been advanced to explain the Salem witch trials as the Kennedy assassination. Our first true-crime story has been attributed to generational, sexual, economic, ecclesiastical, and class tensions; regional hostilities imported from England; food poisoning; a hothouse religion in a cold climate; teenage hysteria; fraud, taxes, conspiracy; political instability; trauma induced by Indian attacks; and to witchcraft itself, among the more reasonable theories. You can blame atmospheric conditions or simply the weather: Historically, witchcraft accusations tended to spike in late winter. Over the years, various parties have played the villain, some more convincingly than others. The Salem villagers searched too to explain what sent a constable with an arrest warrant to which door. The pattern was only slightly more obvious to them than it is to us, involving as it did subterranean fairy circles of credits and debits, whispered resentments, long-incubated grudges, and half-forgotten aversions. Even at the time, it was clear to some that Salem was the story of one thing behind which was a story about something else altogether. In 300 years we have not adequately penetrated nine months of Massachusetts history. Things disturb us in the night. Sometimes they are our consciences. Sometimes they are our secrets. Sometimes they are our fears.

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This is part 1 of 2 of "Witches"
See also:
Part 2: Persecutions Sometimes End

I am indebted to my colleague Rev. Erica Baron, upon a sermon of whose I have relied.