Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft

During the fall of 1691, a group of teenage girls in Salem Village began the harmless practice of foretelling their futures. Divination of this sort was tolerated, though not condoned by the Puritan church. Before the end of 1692, the innocent diversion morphed into a persecution that resulted in the execution of 20 people and the arrest of 200 others on charges of witchcraft.

Because of the limited judicial apparatus available at the time, the witch trials were conducted primarily by local religious ministers, who had difficulty defining the nature of the crime. “For although witchcraft was indisputably a crime according to the word of God, the common law of England, and the statutes of Massachusetts,” the authors write, “it was, for those concerned with the law, the most maddening and frustrating crime imaginable” (11).

Though the crime was supposedly committed by unseen demonic forces, the court endeavored to rely on concrete proof to substantiate the charge. This consisted of confessions from accused witches, the testimony of eyewitnesses, a witch’s demonstrated inability to utter prayers, physical devil’s marks on the accused, episodes of anger followed by mischief, unexplained deaths of an accused’s victims, and spectral evidence given by a witness.