Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974).This is a model work of social history. I'm sure that a good deal has been written since in response to it, and that much more primary research has come along to supplement it, but I doubt that has affected its status as a wee classic.
I thought it would be interesting to many people because the witchhunt as metaphor has become so common, so familiar, has in fact a distinguished literary history and a recent political one -- whose reality or importance I don't mean to diminish at all.
But what do we think we know about witchhunts? One group of associations has to do with superstition and scapegoats. If "simple" people become fearful of ... whatever ..., they may project their fears on to others, the Other, the outsider, or the eccentric in their own society, whose vulnerability seems to suggest that something is less than perfect in their own world or themselves.
Another group of associations has to do with establishments exercising social and political control cynically and opportunistically by inspiring and/or encouraging people to think of (what may be real) problems in irrational, melodramatic, or superstitious ways. We have seen this happen in North America, most spectacularly during the early fifties in the U.S. but in milder forms elsewhere, then and, well, maybe constantly.
Specifically of Salem, Mass., in 1692: Nathaniel Hawthorne (of, to me, sainted memory) turned the Salem witchhunt into a meditation on Puritanism -- in itself and as a continuing strand of American culture (see the opening to The Scarlet Letter (1850) -- one of Hawthorne's ancestors was a judge in the Salem trials). In his (wonderful) play The Crucible (1952), Arthur Miller understandably read Salem as a direct metaphor for his own and his friends' persecution during the early 1950s -- the accusers represented extensions of power; the accused = victims/dissenters.
Yes, but. Or yes, but only partly.
What follows is the briefest, most overgeneral, oversimplified summary of Boyer & Nissenbaum's research. But maybe it will inspire some thoughts, both about the politics of witchhunts -- or more generally, the sources of defensive, reactionary populism -- and about the potential of a certain kind of historical narrative.
Boyer & Nissenbaum did what good social historians are supposed to do: they started with the tax rolls, the church rolls, the legal documents, the archives, the maps. In other words, they started off by being good monks. (In my view, all good scholarship begins by honouring the monkish function: Preserve! even when you don't understand it. Especially when you don't understand it.)
They explain that Salem in 1692 was two places, the port that was about to become one of the major east-coast trading centres of the C18, and Salem Village to the west and north, a semi-rural centre whose prosperity was based entirely on the land. Salem Village is today the separate town of Danvers, Mass.; the "afflicted girls" (the accusers) and the first of the accused witches all resided in Salem Village.
B&N can locate just about every family living in Salem Village at the time on their map; they can describe all the land-holdings of the major families, the history of those acquisitions and of their division through three generations; the business and political connections to Salem Town of the major players in Salem Village; the church affiliations of same; and the locations of support for the accused and the accusers throughout the village. They draw all this history out on maps. I love a good map. It never hurts a good book to come with family trees and good maps.
And then they run through the histories of two powerful (intermarried) local families, the Porters and the Putnams, and one pathetic preacher, the weak and self-pitying and dangerous Samuel Parris. And those histories are gripping, if profoundly sad.
Both families appeared still immensely prosperous in the early 1690s. But the Porters had succeeded on three counts where the Putnams had failed: in acquiring the right land, in keeping their land-holdings undivided, and in capitalizing on their wealth by connecting themselves more and more to the business of Salem Town. The Putnams also sniffed the future promise of mercantile capitalism and pursued connections and influence in Salem Town; when they were frustrated, they withdrew increasingly into the paranoid world of Samuel Parris's village congregation (still treated as a colonial outpost of the town church, much to Parris's grimy chagrin).
The "afflicted girls" were, first, Samual Parris's adolescent daughters and then the young Putnam women. Their first targets were indeed eccentrics and victims: people who represented instability locally. But their accusations very quickly began mounting the social ladder: they never quite dared to accuse the senior Porter of witchcraft, but they circled about his family, his in-laws, his tenants ... And then, after only nine months from the first "afflictions," as the accusations spun out of control to touch, finally, the wife of the governor of Massachusetts, administrative and church authorities stepped in to halt the trials and executions (although not the incarcerations: some accused witches remained imprisoned for up to two years following).
There is no suggestion in any of the records that any of the actors involved was less than sincere in believing that they faced Evil. The afflicted girls truly were afflicted; they weren't faking the seizures they went into. The governor of the colony and legal and church scholars -- Increase and Cotton Mather, eg -- sound truly, deeply puzzled and distressed in their public and private interventions and memoirs of the episode.
But a generation later, the families of the accusers had vanished from Salem -- as, according to B&N, they would have anyway, given their economic vulnerability. The families of many of the accused "witches" remained to prosper through Salem's heyday as a great C18 port and centre of mercantile capitalism.
What did religion, or Puritanism, have to do with the witchhunts of 1692? Well, not nothing, for sure. The trials and the executions (in all, 24 died as a direct result of their arrests) would not have been able to go forward if everyone in all classes in the colony had not taken the language of C17 Puritanism seriously.
It seems so clear to us, though, that the source of the hysteria was anything but spectral. If the illness was spiritual, the cause was a very immediate, material threat.
And yet, truly: no one knew that at the time -- or at least, those most threatened in the long term (the accusers) were incapable of articulating the threat they sensed, except by conjuring up witches and the Devil. Even those most threatened immediately (the accused witches) were unable to imagine the source of their accusers' hatred for them. No one was able to describe his/her own motives in the terms that now seem so obvious to us.
Religions are languages, and in the Massachusetts colony in 1692, religion was the only language, the only conceptual system that most people, including governors, lawyers, and scholars, had to work with. There have always been machiavels, of course, but it's hard to find one in this setting.
We live, I confess I think, at the end of an economic era that was just beginning in Salem. I do believe that we exhausted all its beneficent, optimistic metaphors some time ago, and I would have a hard time accepting that our governors and other worthies were as sincerely puzzled by manifestations of "evil" in our times as were Increase and Cotton Mather in theirs.
But at a popular level, the metaphors are still shaking out, in puzzling and distressing ways. Now: how do I end this? I think I'll just stop for now, and see whether anyone's bothered to follow.