September 20, 2025 • 17 mins
This unique anthology is the first to provide a multicultural perspective on witchcraft from the 15th to 18th century. Featuring primary documents as well as scholarly interpretations, Witches of the Atlantic World builds upon information regarding both Christian and non-Christian beliefs about possession and the demonic. Elaine G. Breslaw draws on Native American, African, South American, and African-American sources, as well as the European and New England heritage, to illuminate the ways in which witchcraft in early America was an attempt to understand and control evil and misfortune in the New World.
Organized into sections on folklore and magic, diabolical possession, Christian perspectives, and the question of gender, the volume includes selections by Cotton Mather, Matthew Hopkins, and Samuel Willard, among others; Salem trial testimonies; and commentary by a host of distinguished scholars.
Together the materials demonstrate how the Protestant and Catholic traditions shaped American concepts, and how multicultural aspects played a key role in the Salem experience. Witches of the Atlantic World sheds new light on one of the most perplexing aspects of American history and provides important background for the continued scholarly and popular interest in witches and witchcraft today.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/quantum-akashic-network--6730906/support.
Thank you for Listening
Organized into sections on folklore and magic, diabolical possession, Christian perspectives, and the question of gender, the volume includes selections by Cotton Mather, Matthew Hopkins, and Samuel Willard, among others; Salem trial testimonies; and commentary by a host of distinguished scholars.
Together the materials demonstrate how the Protestant and Catholic traditions shaped American concepts, and how multicultural aspects played a key role in the Salem experience. Witches of the Atlantic World sheds new light on one of the most perplexing aspects of American history and provides important background for the continued scholarly and popular interest in witches and witchcraft today.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/quantum-akashic-network--6730906/support.
Thank you for Listening
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to the deep dive, your shortcut to being well informed. Today,
we're taking a really fascinating, sometimes pretty terrifying journey into
the history of witchcraft.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Yeah, we're aiming to go beyond just you know, the stereotypes,
the bubbling cauldrons and pointy hats exactly.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
We want to understand the sort of deep societal structures
that actually made mass persecution possible. And we'll be focusing
quite a bit on Salem, the events there in sixteen
ninety two.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Right. Our mission today is, well, it's complex. We're trying
to step into the mindset of people across the Atlantic world.
How did different cultures even define evil?
Speaker 1 (00:39):
And how did those definitions impact legal systems? I mean,
how do you even have a legal battle about something invisible?
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Exactly? And what other explanations are there? Some quite surprising
ones actually for all that chaos.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
And I think the core thing, the universal insight here
is that if you look across pretty much any civilization, misfortune,
you know, sudden illness, livestock dying, crops failing, it wasn't
just seen as bad luck.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
No, never just random. It was always seen as deliberate, purposeful,
an action by some kind of spiritual force or often
a specific human agent.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
Adversity wasn't an accident. It was basically a crime, and
it needed.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
A culprit, and that basic human need to find a cause,
find someone to blame for harm. That's really where the
whole story of the witch hunt begins.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
But things changed dramatically when Christian theology gets involved.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
Oh, absolutely, that instinct gets codified, weaponized, almost in a
very specific way.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
Okay, so let's start before that big shift. In pre
Christian Europe, you had figures like uh, cunning folk, wise men,
wise women, right.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
People using healing herds, charms, folk remedies. They were definitely
using magic, but they were often seen as useful figures
in their communities, socially useful.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
And that wasn't just Europe, was it.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
No, it's pretty global. Think about traditions like the obia
or the oracle in parts of Africa, or shamans among
American Indians. These figures often acted as like community stabilizers.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
Curing illness, telling the futures, sometimes resolving conflicts. They weren't
automatically seen as purely evil precisely.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
But then Christianity comes along and performs this well, this
crucial shift. It basically weaponized traditional magic. Oh so well,
theologians started saying that any magical technique done by a
lay person so outside the church's official sacred practices, it
had to be inherently evil, it had to be satanic.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
So if it wasn't God's work through the Church, it
must be the Devil's work.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
That's the logic. It forces all this traditional folk magic
into a really stark binary either approved divine intervention or
direct appeal to the devil. The Antichrist satanic by default, essentially.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
And this fear wasn't just abstract theology. It got formalized
spread through books like the infamous Melius Melficarum The Hammer
of Witches fourteen eighty six.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Yeah, and that wasn't just some collection of scary stories.
It was basically a legal and theological how to guide
for hunting witches.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
It compiled beliefs often grimly extracted under torture.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Right, and it puts this key idea right that the
witch willingly chose this foul servitude to the devil. It
wasn't just about possession of the wicked. The devil was
actively trying to seduce good Christians undermine everything What seems.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
Really counterintuitive, though, is how the Reformation, which was meant
to purify religion, actually seemed to fuel the witch hunts.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
It's a paradox, isn't it. Think about it. The Catholic
Church had offered things like exorcism rights, holy water, saints
you could appeal to for.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
Protection, traditional defenses against evil exactly.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
But when Protestants rejected many of those traditional sacred practices,
those spiritual defenses, what happened then They put ordinary people
in a really tough spot. Protestants didn't deny the devil existed.
Some leaders emphasized the devil's power and presence even more, okay,
but at the same time, they stripped away the spiritual armor,
the tools people had relied on for centuries to fight
(03:58):
back against that evil.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
Ah, the Protestant paradox. So you're told witchcraft is real,
the devil is everywhere, but you don't have any officially
approved way to defend yourself anymore.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
You're left feeling completely vulnerable, defenseless against this invisible enemy
you've been told is absolutely real and active.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
Wow, that sounds like a recipe for panic.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
And that sense of existential vulnerability. That pressure cooker of
acknowledged threat and denied protection helps explain why we see
mass hunts really flare up in places going through intense
religious change.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Okay, so that's the theological background driving the fear that.
How did the actual legal system, particularly in England try
to deal with this? English law needed evidence?
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Right, it did. The sixteen oh four statute was key.
It specifically required proof of a pact with the devil
for a conviction. You couldn't just say someone looked like
a witch.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
But how on earth do you prove a secret pact
with the devil in court?
Speaker 2 (04:56):
Well? That's the impossible problem, isn't it. And there's another
cruel twist in that law regarding literacy. It denied something
called the benefit of clergy to anyone convicted of witchcraft.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
Right, remind us what that was? Benefit of clergy?
Speaker 2 (05:07):
It was this old loophole. Basically, if you were literate,
even as a layperson, you could often read a Bible passage,
claim a kind of clerical status and avoid execution from
many crimes, a.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
Get out of jail free card for the literate essentially
pretty much.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
But by denying this specifically for witchcraft, the law was
saying this crime was exceptionally evil. It put witches in
the same category as the absolute worst, unpardonable offenders, no loopholes.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
And in the courtrooms themselves, you saw a split, didn't you,
between what juries cared about and what judges were looking for.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
Absolutely, juries, often made up of ordinary folks, were really
focused on the harm done, what they called maleficium. Did
someone's cow die? Did someone get sick after an argument?
That was their main concern.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
They weren't necessarily hung up on the details of the devil's.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
Packed less, so they wanted to know, did this person
cause the bad thing? But the judges, the magistrates, they
were bound by the law. They needed proof of that
diabolical pact, and frankly they were getting more and more
skeptical that such proof could ever be reliably found.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
And this skepticism wasn't just quiet doubt. You had figures
like Reginald Scott speaking out quite early.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Yeah. Scott a Protestant layman, writing in fifteen eighty four,
his discovery of witchcraft was a direct attack on the
whole persecution mindset. He argued, people confessing were probably delusional,
suffering from melancholy as they called depression.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
Then he just didn't buy the supernatural part at all.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
Not really. He was very pragmatic. He basically said there
was no credible evidence for any of it. Famously, he
equipped that if all the old women in the world
were witches, it wouldn't change the weather one git, we
wouldn't get a drop of rain or a blast of
win the more.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
That's a remarkably skeptical statement for that era, it really is.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
But still the courts had to function somehow. Even people
who weren't as radically skeptical as Scott, like the Minister
William Perkins around sixteen ten, tried to offer guidance.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
What did he suggest?
Speaker 2 (07:05):
Perkins advised magistrates to make a distinction. He talked about
presumptive evidence, stuff that was maybe enough to bring someone
to trial, like suspicion or bad reputation, okay, but then
you needed sufficient proof for an actual conviction. And he
stressed how incredibly hard that sufficient proof was to get
for a secret crime like witchcraft.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
So even those trying to manage the process recognized the
fundamental problem of evidence. The system was kind of set
up to fail, or at least struggle immensely.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
Definitely, it was almost designed to collapse under its own
impossible standards, but not sadly before causing immen's harm.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
And all these tensions, theological, social, legal, they just exploded
in Salem Village in sixteen ninety two.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Yeah, the spark was those afflicted children in Reverend Paris's house.
Doctor Griggs examined them and gave the diagnosis bewitched.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
But the real catalyst, the thing that gave the crisis
its specific shape, seems to have been the confession of
Pituba Apps Critical.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
Tituba was an Indian woman, a servant in the Paris household.
Her testimony was this unique blend, a kind of multicultural
catalyst that set the template for everything that followed.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
How did her cultural background play into it, Well.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
The Puritans already had these ingrained associations of Native American
culture with demonic power, So when Taduba confessed, her story
mixed familiar Puritan ideas like signing the Devil's book with
things that seemed to draw on her non European background.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
Giving it a kind of exotic and therefore more sinister
flavor for the Puritans.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
Exactly, and her testimony was vivid specific She talked about
seeing a man sometimes black sometimes white, representing the devil
and weird creatures helping him, like birds and other animals.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
So she provided a narrative framework.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
Precisely, it gave the afflicted girls and later other accusers
the vocabulary the imagery they needed to describe their own
experiences in a way that seemed believable within that charged atmosphere.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
And once that framework was locked in, the court started
accepting of evidence that looking back seems just disastrous.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
Utterly catastrophic. The most infamous, of course, was spectral evidence.
Explain that again, it means accusations based purely on the
victim saying they saw the specter or apparition of the
accused tormenting them, even if the accused person was physically
somewhere else.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
So basically, I saw her ghost hurting me.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
Yes. And the huge problem, which critics like Thomas Braddle
pointed out right away, is how do you verify that?
How do you disprove it? Braddle argued quite logically that
a demon could easily impersonate an innocent person. You're basically
taking the word of an afflicted person over someone potentially
respected in the community.
Speaker 1 (09:40):
It's unfalsifiable, and that wasn't the only questionable method they used,
was it No.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
They also used the so called touch test. This was
the idea that if an afflicted person was having a fit,
making them touch the accused, which would supposedly make the
fit stop.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
Which sounds like magic itself.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
Brattle called its sorcery. He said, using a potentially mana
cure to detect a witch made no sense.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
And then there were the physical searches, Yes, the.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
Search for witches marks or teats, basically any unusual mole
mark or skin tag on the accused body that could
be interpreted as a place where they suckled demonic imps
or familiars.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
Leading to incredibly degrading physical examinations of people like George
Jacobs looking for any bodily proof.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
It was desperate stuff, and this reliance on such incredibly
weak evidence, especially the spectral testimony, it did eventually cause
a backlash.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
People started pushing back.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
Yes, Governor Phifs himself started having doubts and sought advice
from leading ministers. Many of them strongly criticized relying so
heavily on spectral evidence and confessions, especially those likely forced.
They pointed out the impossibility of really verifying.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
These claims, and there was genuine remorse afterwards.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
Oh, absolutely. Some of the jurors later signed public statements
expressing deep regret. They admitted they'd acted in the dark,
relying on insufficient evidence, and had condemned innocent people based
on essentially spectral fantasies.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
But then you have that really strange take from John Hale,
a minister who was there during the trials.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
Yeah, Hale's interpretation is fascinating. He later argued that the
whole tragic episode, all the errors, were somehow providential and necessary. Necessary.
In his view, it was God's way of delivering a
harsh warning to the Puritans about their own spiritual failings,
forcing them to confront their sins and repent. The tragedy
in a way had to happen to ultimately save the
(11:32):
colony's soul. A really jarring perspective. Definitely.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
Okay, let's shift a bit from the events themselves to
how historians now try to interpret what was going on.
One huge factor you can't ignore is gender.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
Absolutely inescapable. The statistics are overwhelming, depending on the study,
somewhere between seventy one percent and a staggering ninety two
percent of the people accused during the major witch hunts
were women?
Speaker 1 (11:55):
Why such a huge bias?
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Well, there are deep theological roots, like the Malleus Maleficarum
were explicitly misogynistic, arguing women were naturally weaker, more carnal,
more easily swayed by.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
The devil, and that played out in the Puritan context too,
very much so.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
In that rigid patriarchal society, this theological bias got weaponized
against women who didn't fit the mold.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
Who are they targeting specifically?
Speaker 2 (12:18):
Often women who were older past childbearing age, perhaps widowed
or unmarried, women who existed somewhat outside the direct control
of fathers or husbands, outside the expected roles of wife
and mother.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
Women seen as challenging the social order maybe exactly.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
Think about that quote from Cotton Mather. Rebellion is as
the sin of witchcraft for Puritans. A woman rebelling against
male authority, her husband, her father, the church elders could
be seen as akin to rebelling against God himself spiritual treason.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
And it wasn't just about status sometimes it was about
behavior too, right.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Research shows accused women were often described as having a ready,
sharp and angry tongue. Basically, being a cert argumentative or
seen as socially disruptive could make you a target verbal
aggression with suspect.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
Beyond gender, there's also a really interesting psychological angle some
historians explore.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
Yes, scholars like John Demos looked closely at the accusers,
the afflicted girls, focusing on themes of aggression.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
And orality orality What does that mean here?
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Think about the symptoms they described, being bitten, pinched, choked,
and their own actions shrieking, making biting motions. Plus the
imagery and their visions often involved being devoured or wanting
to tear at others.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
Okay, I see the connection.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
Demos suggested that in such a strict culture where children,
especially girls, had very few outlets to express anger or frustration,
it had to go somewhere, right, that suppressed aggression might
have been displaced onto an external target, the witch. It
becomes a way to act out internal conflicts, perhaps stemming
from difficult family dynamics like mother daughter tension, without confronting
(13:57):
them directly. The witch becomes the scapegoat for internal turmoil.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
The kind of societal release valve makes sense. And then
there's the medical theory ergotism.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
Yes, the ergot fungus theory. Ergot can grow on rye grain,
which was a staple crop in Essex County where.
Speaker 1 (14:12):
Salem is, and this fungus is toxic, highly toxic.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
It produces alkaloids that can cause really severe physical and
psychological symptoms in humans and animals who eat contaminated grain.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
And how do those symptoms connect to Salem.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
Well, the symptoms of what's called convulsive ergotism match up
strikingly well with what was reported in Salem in sixteen
ninety two. That's such as convulsions, muscle spasms, crawling or pinching,
sensations on the skin, hallucinations, delirium even in reports of
farm animals acting strangely could potentially fit.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
So it offers a potential physical, biological explanation for experiences
that were interpreted purely, spiritually or demonically at the time exactly.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
It doesn't necessarily explain everything, the social dynamics, the legal procedures,
but it provides a compelling material explanation for the initial
physical and psychological afflictions that kick things off.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
Okay, so we've covered a lot of ground here. We
started with that basic human need to blame someone for misfortune.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
Then move through the specific Christian framework that turned magic
into devil worship, the legal nightmare of trying to prove invisible.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
Crimes, the unique cultural mix in Salem with Tituba's key confession,
the deeply flawed evidence used.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
And finally, these modern interpretations looking at gender dynamics, psychology,
and even potential medical causes like ergotism.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
It really shows, doesn't it, how easily fear, rigid beliefs
and maybe social stress can just coalesce around one explanation,
one narrative, the witch, with devastating results.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
Absolutely, the witch hunt remains relevant because it's a stark
reminder of how societies can latch onto a single scapegoat
for complex problems, whether they're social, economic, or even medical.
That need for a simple culprit for complex fears is powerful.
Speaker 1 (15:59):
Let's leave our listeners with one final thought, though a
point of contrast, we've focused a lot on the Puritan
obsession with identifying and eliminating the status of being a witch.
Speaker 2 (16:08):
Right now, think about a different perspective. Consider the Zandi
people in Central Africa. They traditionally believed witchcraft was an
inherited physical substance in a person's body certain people just
were witches?
Speaker 1 (16:20):
Okay, but how did they act on that belief?
Speaker 2 (16:21):
Here's the crucial difference. They generally only investigated or took
action against the suspected witch if they believed that witch
was actively harming them.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
Right then, So just knowing someone might have this witchcraft
substance wasn't enough.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
Exactly to a zondie. Historically, knowing someone technically as a
witch might be interesting, but it's largely irrelevant unless they're
actively causing you or your family harm. Now it's a
much more practical, harm focused approach.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
That's fundamentally different from the Puritan drive to root out
and punish anyone deemed to hold the status of which
regardless of proven current harm.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
Completely different. So the question tom all Over is this,
What really is the difference between knowing or believing a
person is evil versus knowing they're actively harming you?
Speaker 1 (17:08):
Status versus action. That's definitely something to think about. Thank
you for joining us for the steep dive.
Welcome to the deep dive, your shortcut to being well informed. Today,
we're taking a really fascinating, sometimes pretty terrifying journey into
the history of witchcraft.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Yeah, we're aiming to go beyond just you know, the stereotypes,
the bubbling cauldrons and pointy hats exactly.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
We want to understand the sort of deep societal structures
that actually made mass persecution possible. And we'll be focusing
quite a bit on Salem, the events there in sixteen
ninety two.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Right. Our mission today is, well, it's complex. We're trying
to step into the mindset of people across the Atlantic world.
How did different cultures even define evil?
Speaker 1 (00:39):
And how did those definitions impact legal systems? I mean,
how do you even have a legal battle about something invisible?
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Exactly? And what other explanations are there? Some quite surprising
ones actually for all that chaos.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
And I think the core thing, the universal insight here
is that if you look across pretty much any civilization, misfortune,
you know, sudden illness, livestock dying, crops failing, it wasn't
just seen as bad luck.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
No, never just random. It was always seen as deliberate, purposeful,
an action by some kind of spiritual force or often
a specific human agent.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
Adversity wasn't an accident. It was basically a crime, and
it needed.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
A culprit, and that basic human need to find a cause,
find someone to blame for harm. That's really where the
whole story of the witch hunt begins.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
But things changed dramatically when Christian theology gets involved.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
Oh, absolutely, that instinct gets codified, weaponized, almost in a
very specific way.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
Okay, so let's start before that big shift. In pre
Christian Europe, you had figures like uh, cunning folk, wise men,
wise women, right.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
People using healing herds, charms, folk remedies. They were definitely
using magic, but they were often seen as useful figures
in their communities, socially useful.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
And that wasn't just Europe, was it.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
No, it's pretty global. Think about traditions like the obia
or the oracle in parts of Africa, or shamans among
American Indians. These figures often acted as like community stabilizers.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
Curing illness, telling the futures, sometimes resolving conflicts. They weren't
automatically seen as purely evil precisely.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
But then Christianity comes along and performs this well, this
crucial shift. It basically weaponized traditional magic. Oh so well,
theologians started saying that any magical technique done by a
lay person so outside the church's official sacred practices, it
had to be inherently evil, it had to be satanic.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
So if it wasn't God's work through the Church, it
must be the Devil's work.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
That's the logic. It forces all this traditional folk magic
into a really stark binary either approved divine intervention or
direct appeal to the devil. The Antichrist satanic by default, essentially.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
And this fear wasn't just abstract theology. It got formalized
spread through books like the infamous Melius Melficarum The Hammer
of Witches fourteen eighty six.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Yeah, and that wasn't just some collection of scary stories.
It was basically a legal and theological how to guide
for hunting witches.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
It compiled beliefs often grimly extracted under torture.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Right, and it puts this key idea right that the
witch willingly chose this foul servitude to the devil. It
wasn't just about possession of the wicked. The devil was
actively trying to seduce good Christians undermine everything What seems.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
Really counterintuitive, though, is how the Reformation, which was meant
to purify religion, actually seemed to fuel the witch hunts.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
It's a paradox, isn't it. Think about it. The Catholic
Church had offered things like exorcism rights, holy water, saints
you could appeal to for.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
Protection, traditional defenses against evil exactly.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
But when Protestants rejected many of those traditional sacred practices,
those spiritual defenses, what happened then They put ordinary people
in a really tough spot. Protestants didn't deny the devil existed.
Some leaders emphasized the devil's power and presence even more, okay,
but at the same time, they stripped away the spiritual armor,
the tools people had relied on for centuries to fight
(03:58):
back against that evil.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
Ah, the Protestant paradox. So you're told witchcraft is real,
the devil is everywhere, but you don't have any officially
approved way to defend yourself anymore.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
You're left feeling completely vulnerable, defenseless against this invisible enemy
you've been told is absolutely real and active.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
Wow, that sounds like a recipe for panic.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
And that sense of existential vulnerability. That pressure cooker of
acknowledged threat and denied protection helps explain why we see
mass hunts really flare up in places going through intense
religious change.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Okay, so that's the theological background driving the fear that.
How did the actual legal system, particularly in England try
to deal with this? English law needed evidence?
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Right, it did. The sixteen oh four statute was key.
It specifically required proof of a pact with the devil
for a conviction. You couldn't just say someone looked like
a witch.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
But how on earth do you prove a secret pact
with the devil in court?
Speaker 2 (04:56):
Well? That's the impossible problem, isn't it. And there's another
cruel twist in that law regarding literacy. It denied something
called the benefit of clergy to anyone convicted of witchcraft.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
Right, remind us what that was? Benefit of clergy?
Speaker 2 (05:07):
It was this old loophole. Basically, if you were literate,
even as a layperson, you could often read a Bible passage,
claim a kind of clerical status and avoid execution from
many crimes, a.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
Get out of jail free card for the literate essentially
pretty much.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
But by denying this specifically for witchcraft, the law was
saying this crime was exceptionally evil. It put witches in
the same category as the absolute worst, unpardonable offenders, no loopholes.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
And in the courtrooms themselves, you saw a split, didn't you,
between what juries cared about and what judges were looking for.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
Absolutely, juries, often made up of ordinary folks, were really
focused on the harm done, what they called maleficium. Did
someone's cow die? Did someone get sick after an argument?
That was their main concern.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
They weren't necessarily hung up on the details of the devil's.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
Packed less, so they wanted to know, did this person
cause the bad thing? But the judges, the magistrates, they
were bound by the law. They needed proof of that
diabolical pact, and frankly they were getting more and more
skeptical that such proof could ever be reliably found.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
And this skepticism wasn't just quiet doubt. You had figures
like Reginald Scott speaking out quite early.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Yeah. Scott a Protestant layman, writing in fifteen eighty four,
his discovery of witchcraft was a direct attack on the
whole persecution mindset. He argued, people confessing were probably delusional,
suffering from melancholy as they called depression.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
Then he just didn't buy the supernatural part at all.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
Not really. He was very pragmatic. He basically said there
was no credible evidence for any of it. Famously, he
equipped that if all the old women in the world
were witches, it wouldn't change the weather one git, we
wouldn't get a drop of rain or a blast of
win the more.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
That's a remarkably skeptical statement for that era, it really is.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
But still the courts had to function somehow. Even people
who weren't as radically skeptical as Scott, like the Minister
William Perkins around sixteen ten, tried to offer guidance.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
What did he suggest?
Speaker 2 (07:05):
Perkins advised magistrates to make a distinction. He talked about
presumptive evidence, stuff that was maybe enough to bring someone
to trial, like suspicion or bad reputation, okay, but then
you needed sufficient proof for an actual conviction. And he
stressed how incredibly hard that sufficient proof was to get
for a secret crime like witchcraft.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
So even those trying to manage the process recognized the
fundamental problem of evidence. The system was kind of set
up to fail, or at least struggle immensely.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
Definitely, it was almost designed to collapse under its own
impossible standards, but not sadly before causing immen's harm.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
And all these tensions, theological, social, legal, they just exploded
in Salem Village in sixteen ninety two.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Yeah, the spark was those afflicted children in Reverend Paris's house.
Doctor Griggs examined them and gave the diagnosis bewitched.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
But the real catalyst, the thing that gave the crisis
its specific shape, seems to have been the confession of
Pituba Apps Critical.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
Tituba was an Indian woman, a servant in the Paris household.
Her testimony was this unique blend, a kind of multicultural
catalyst that set the template for everything that followed.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
How did her cultural background play into it, Well.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
The Puritans already had these ingrained associations of Native American
culture with demonic power, So when Taduba confessed, her story
mixed familiar Puritan ideas like signing the Devil's book with
things that seemed to draw on her non European background.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
Giving it a kind of exotic and therefore more sinister
flavor for the Puritans.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
Exactly, and her testimony was vivid specific She talked about
seeing a man sometimes black sometimes white, representing the devil
and weird creatures helping him, like birds and other animals.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
So she provided a narrative framework.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
Precisely, it gave the afflicted girls and later other accusers
the vocabulary the imagery they needed to describe their own
experiences in a way that seemed believable within that charged atmosphere.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
And once that framework was locked in, the court started
accepting of evidence that looking back seems just disastrous.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
Utterly catastrophic. The most infamous, of course, was spectral evidence.
Explain that again, it means accusations based purely on the
victim saying they saw the specter or apparition of the
accused tormenting them, even if the accused person was physically
somewhere else.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
So basically, I saw her ghost hurting me.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
Yes. And the huge problem, which critics like Thomas Braddle
pointed out right away, is how do you verify that?
How do you disprove it? Braddle argued quite logically that
a demon could easily impersonate an innocent person. You're basically
taking the word of an afflicted person over someone potentially
respected in the community.
Speaker 1 (09:40):
It's unfalsifiable, and that wasn't the only questionable method they used,
was it No.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
They also used the so called touch test. This was
the idea that if an afflicted person was having a fit,
making them touch the accused, which would supposedly make the
fit stop.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
Which sounds like magic itself.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
Brattle called its sorcery. He said, using a potentially mana
cure to detect a witch made no sense.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
And then there were the physical searches, Yes, the.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
Search for witches marks or teats, basically any unusual mole
mark or skin tag on the accused body that could
be interpreted as a place where they suckled demonic imps
or familiars.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
Leading to incredibly degrading physical examinations of people like George
Jacobs looking for any bodily proof.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
It was desperate stuff, and this reliance on such incredibly
weak evidence, especially the spectral testimony, it did eventually cause
a backlash.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
People started pushing back.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
Yes, Governor Phifs himself started having doubts and sought advice
from leading ministers. Many of them strongly criticized relying so
heavily on spectral evidence and confessions, especially those likely forced.
They pointed out the impossibility of really verifying.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
These claims, and there was genuine remorse afterwards.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
Oh, absolutely. Some of the jurors later signed public statements
expressing deep regret. They admitted they'd acted in the dark,
relying on insufficient evidence, and had condemned innocent people based
on essentially spectral fantasies.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
But then you have that really strange take from John Hale,
a minister who was there during the trials.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
Yeah, Hale's interpretation is fascinating. He later argued that the
whole tragic episode, all the errors, were somehow providential and necessary. Necessary.
In his view, it was God's way of delivering a
harsh warning to the Puritans about their own spiritual failings,
forcing them to confront their sins and repent. The tragedy
in a way had to happen to ultimately save the
(11:32):
colony's soul. A really jarring perspective. Definitely.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
Okay, let's shift a bit from the events themselves to
how historians now try to interpret what was going on.
One huge factor you can't ignore is gender.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
Absolutely inescapable. The statistics are overwhelming, depending on the study,
somewhere between seventy one percent and a staggering ninety two
percent of the people accused during the major witch hunts
were women?
Speaker 1 (11:55):
Why such a huge bias?
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Well, there are deep theological roots, like the Malleus Maleficarum
were explicitly misogynistic, arguing women were naturally weaker, more carnal,
more easily swayed by.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
The devil, and that played out in the Puritan context too,
very much so.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
In that rigid patriarchal society, this theological bias got weaponized
against women who didn't fit the mold.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
Who are they targeting specifically?
Speaker 2 (12:18):
Often women who were older past childbearing age, perhaps widowed
or unmarried, women who existed somewhat outside the direct control
of fathers or husbands, outside the expected roles of wife
and mother.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
Women seen as challenging the social order maybe exactly.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
Think about that quote from Cotton Mather. Rebellion is as
the sin of witchcraft for Puritans. A woman rebelling against
male authority, her husband, her father, the church elders could
be seen as akin to rebelling against God himself spiritual treason.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
And it wasn't just about status sometimes it was about
behavior too, right.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Research shows accused women were often described as having a ready,
sharp and angry tongue. Basically, being a cert argumentative or
seen as socially disruptive could make you a target verbal
aggression with suspect.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
Beyond gender, there's also a really interesting psychological angle some
historians explore.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
Yes, scholars like John Demos looked closely at the accusers,
the afflicted girls, focusing on themes of aggression.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
And orality orality What does that mean here?
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Think about the symptoms they described, being bitten, pinched, choked,
and their own actions shrieking, making biting motions. Plus the
imagery and their visions often involved being devoured or wanting
to tear at others.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
Okay, I see the connection.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
Demos suggested that in such a strict culture where children,
especially girls, had very few outlets to express anger or frustration,
it had to go somewhere, right, that suppressed aggression might
have been displaced onto an external target, the witch. It
becomes a way to act out internal conflicts, perhaps stemming
from difficult family dynamics like mother daughter tension, without confronting
(13:57):
them directly. The witch becomes the scapegoat for internal turmoil.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
The kind of societal release valve makes sense. And then
there's the medical theory ergotism.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
Yes, the ergot fungus theory. Ergot can grow on rye grain,
which was a staple crop in Essex County where.
Speaker 1 (14:12):
Salem is, and this fungus is toxic, highly toxic.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
It produces alkaloids that can cause really severe physical and
psychological symptoms in humans and animals who eat contaminated grain.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
And how do those symptoms connect to Salem.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
Well, the symptoms of what's called convulsive ergotism match up
strikingly well with what was reported in Salem in sixteen
ninety two. That's such as convulsions, muscle spasms, crawling or pinching,
sensations on the skin, hallucinations, delirium even in reports of
farm animals acting strangely could potentially fit.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
So it offers a potential physical, biological explanation for experiences
that were interpreted purely, spiritually or demonically at the time exactly.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
It doesn't necessarily explain everything, the social dynamics, the legal procedures,
but it provides a compelling material explanation for the initial
physical and psychological afflictions that kick things off.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
Okay, so we've covered a lot of ground here. We
started with that basic human need to blame someone for misfortune.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
Then move through the specific Christian framework that turned magic
into devil worship, the legal nightmare of trying to prove invisible.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
Crimes, the unique cultural mix in Salem with Tituba's key confession,
the deeply flawed evidence used.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
And finally, these modern interpretations looking at gender dynamics, psychology,
and even potential medical causes like ergotism.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
It really shows, doesn't it, how easily fear, rigid beliefs
and maybe social stress can just coalesce around one explanation,
one narrative, the witch, with devastating results.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
Absolutely, the witch hunt remains relevant because it's a stark
reminder of how societies can latch onto a single scapegoat
for complex problems, whether they're social, economic, or even medical.
That need for a simple culprit for complex fears is powerful.
Speaker 1 (15:59):
Let's leave our listeners with one final thought, though a
point of contrast, we've focused a lot on the Puritan
obsession with identifying and eliminating the status of being a witch.
Speaker 2 (16:08):
Right now, think about a different perspective. Consider the Zandi
people in Central Africa. They traditionally believed witchcraft was an
inherited physical substance in a person's body certain people just
were witches?
Speaker 1 (16:20):
Okay, but how did they act on that belief?
Speaker 2 (16:21):
Here's the crucial difference. They generally only investigated or took
action against the suspected witch if they believed that witch
was actively harming them.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
Right then, So just knowing someone might have this witchcraft
substance wasn't enough.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
Exactly to a zondie. Historically, knowing someone technically as a
witch might be interesting, but it's largely irrelevant unless they're
actively causing you or your family harm. Now it's a
much more practical, harm focused approach.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
That's fundamentally different from the Puritan drive to root out
and punish anyone deemed to hold the status of which
regardless of proven current harm.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
Completely different. So the question tom all Over is this,
What really is the difference between knowing or believing a
person is evil versus knowing they're actively harming you?
Speaker 1 (17:08):
Status versus action. That's definitely something to think about. Thank
you for joining us for the steep dive.
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