Spectral Evidence

WITCHCRAFT AT SALEM by Chadwick Hansen. 252 pages. Braziller. $6.95.

The year 1692 was a very bad year for the town of Salem, Mass. During a summer of superstitious hysteria, grim events took place there that have permanently tarnished the popular American memory of its Puritan past. According to widely accepted tradition, the whole thing was whipped up by Cotton Mather and the lesser clergymen of a frowning theocracy. Before it was over, the story goes, 19 men and women were convicted and hanged as witches, and one man was pressed to death beneath large rocks for refusing to plead. The tradition holds that the executions were the result of a repressive fanaticism in the Puritan character. Underlying this modern attitude toward the Salem trials is a smug belief that since we do not now believe in the power of witchcraft, the existence of witchcraft is a delusion, as impossible and unscientific, say, as the Ptolemaic notion that the sun revolved around the earth.

Clearing the Clergy. Such judgments, according to Chadwick Hansen, professor of American Studies at Penn State, are remarkably misleading. Beyond the fact that witchcraft trials resulted in 20 executions, he says, everything in the popular tradition is false. Far from inciting tragedy, the clergy "acted throughout as a restraint upon the proceedings and it was their misgivings which finally brought the trials to an end." (Clergymen had much influence but no office; the Bay Colony was no theocracy.) The afflicted girls, whose courtroom convulsions at the sight of the accused convinced the judges, were not spiteful exhibitionists, but felt themselves to be truly afflicted. In fact, writes Hansen, the girls had good reason for their hysterical terror of witchcraft. "There was witchcraft at Salem, and it worked. It did real harm to its victims and there was every reason to regard it as a criminal offense."

Hansen, naturally, does not believe that the witches had actual power derived from an alliance with the devil. His assertion instead is based on a reading of the religious, psychological and historic conditions existing at the time. Like other historians, he points out that the Salem trials were anything but unique. In the 17th century people not only still believed in witchcraft but passionately persecuted witches. There were witch burnings in Scotland and hangings in England, and on the Continent incomplete records tell of the burning of 5,000 witches in the province of Alsace alone. The learned believed in witchcraft as strongly as the ignorant; Hansen notes that the British chemist Robert Boyle, who discovered the law of gas pressures that bears his name, once proposed that miners be interviewed to see whether they "meet any subterraneous demons, and if they do, in what shape and manner they appear."

Charms and Nail-Parings. Hansen spells out the point: "If you believe in witchcraft and you discover that someone has been melting your wax image over a slow fire or muttering charms over your nail-parings, the probability is that you will get extremely sick. To be sure, your symptoms will be psychosomatic rather than organic. But the fact that they are obviously not organic will make them only more terrible, since they will seem the result of malefic and demonic power."

One statement completes the matter: a society that believes in witchcraft will produce innocent people who are mistaken for witches, fools who idly pretend to be witches, and guilty souls who, actually believing themselves to be in league with the devil, practiced the forms and rituals of witchcraft.

He concedes that most of those executed were clearly innocent, convicted on nothing more than "spectral evidence"--testimony that apparitions resembling the accused had tormented people--and the hysterical behavior of the teen-age girls who were the chief witnesses. Hansen notes that hysteria, as defined medically, can produce fits of supernormal violence, a vivid appearance that the sufferer is being choked, and psychosomatically induced "bite" and "pinch" marks on the skin. These were the main symptoms of the afflicted girls.

Other cases are less clear. The Rev. George Burroughs, says Hansen, enjoyed pretending to be a witch, puffed his reputation by such tricks as overhearing conversations and then repeating them, letting his listeners assume that black magic gave him the knowledge. When the witchcraft frenzy struck Salem, this vain foolishness was remembered, and Burroughs was executed.

On the other hand, Hansen says, old Bridget Bishop, whose revelations of witchcraft panicked Salem, "in all probability" was a practicing witch. That was her reputation, and apparently she had not denied it before the trials. Dolls with pins stuck in them had been found in the cellar wall of a house she had lived in. A local dyer testified that she had asked him to dye pieces of lace too small for human use--bits intended for use in image magic, Hansen thinks.

Leading the Leaders. The clergy were nearly powerless until the neurosis had run its course. Cotton Mather, highly respected and a believer in witchcraft, warned repeatedly against the use of spectral evidence, saying it was not to be trusted. His great failure in the matter was in trusting too much in the steadiness and good sense of the judges who, on the record, seemed to be honest and sensible citizens.

In the end, a vigorous pamphlet by his father Increase put a formal stop to the dreadful affair. A general pardon was declared. The trials did not continue. Dozens of presumed witches were let go or allowed to escape.

Hansen might profitably have tried to examine the network of small-town malice, envy and ambition at work in the trials, which the modern rational and liberal mind likes to blame for the whole Salem tragedy--most dramatically exhibited in Arthur Miller's grinding parable, The Crucible. A chapter sketching the life and death of Puritanism would have been useful; as Hansen has indicated, much of what is popularly supposed about the Puritans is incorrect. But Hansen has done two things admirably well: he has suggested how nearly impossible it is to see another era clearly through the accretion of prejudice and the changes of time. And he has demonstrated that in the Salem witch hunt, as in many others since, it was really the people who led the leaders.

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