Cotton Mather and On Withcraft

Cotton Mather was part of a prominent family of Salam. Village during the Witch trials. He wrote about the trials in his book On Witchcraft. His book gives valuable insight into Puritan life and their thoughts on witchcraft. The Puritan people were a very close knit community. They believed that everyone was born as children of the devil and that only God’s grace would lift them out of original sin. Mather as well as other Puritans in the town believes that Satan can assume different shapes. In addition, he believes that people can be seduced without their conscious knowledge. The only way to protect yourself according to the Puritan faith is to pray that you can be protected from the devil.

I think one of the reasons that the trials got to be so massive was the mentality of fear that the Puritans were living in. They were taught to be afraid of the wilderness and land that they were living in. They believed that it was Satan’s land and that they had to war with him in order to win it for God. So they were consistently living for when he would attack, and they saw witchery as a way for him to break the Puritans and hurt God’s work that they were doing there. So when the girls started accusing people of being witches, everyone was afraid that Satan had come to attack the village. Mass hysteria broke out at the thought of their neighbors or friends being witches. This type of hysteria reminded me of the kind of hysteria that Europeans had about the Jewish people leading up to World War II. Hitler blamed all of Germany’s problems after World War I on the Jewish people. People at the time were looking for a reason as to why they were blamed for the war, and why Germany’s economy fell so far. They believed the hysteria that Hitler told them, and began to be afraid of the Jewish people. Just as the number of accused at the trials rose, so did the people blamed for Germany's fall. Now anyone who was different than Hitler’s Aryan race (twins, mentally disabled, gay, gypsies and others) began to be targeted as well as the Jews. In both cases, the people were worried and so wound up that hysteria broke out.

I have learned about the witch trials before, but learned new things that I thought were kind of interesting. One thing is that the trials were the first time that spectral evidence was able to be used in the courts. Spectral evidence was things that were only evident to those who were affected, for example the ghosts of someone coming to haunt the girls. Another thing that I thought was interesting was that the first wave of accusations of witchcraft was people that didn’t go to church and had low stature in the community. The second wave of accused people had high status and was respected. For example, many people respected Rebecca Nurse as a pillar of the community and a good Christian woman; however she was accused in the second wave of accusations. The town was split; the western side of the community had a lower status and was farmers. The accusers lived on the Eastern side of town and were richer with more liberal views. Children as young as 4 years old were being accused in the second wave of accusations. The only sure way to live was to confess, out of the 200 people accused, 55 confessed to witchcraft. Overall, 24 people died as a result of the trials and accusations.

The Puritans may have continued the accusations as a way to provide excitement in their otherwise somewhat boring lives. They could also have continued them to become famous as the news of the trials spread all the way to England. Although these are both plausible explanations, I don’t think these were the reasons. I think they believed that it was their mission to destroy Satan and to maintain God’s work in their community. They believed they were fighting a war and that this was a necessary evil in order to continue God’s plan for Salam.

What is evil? I think that evil could be either an internal or external force. It can be an external force that works against people such as Satan and demons. I also think that some people can be inherently evil such as Charles Manson, Jeffery Dahmer and other serial killers. I don’t know what would make a person evil, whether it’s a bad home life, or abuse but I do think that some people are evil.



Questions
Were there really witches in Salam?
Did the girls make it all up, or were they really afflicted?
Is there a chemical explanation for what happened to the girls such as ergotism in the rye bread?

Source: Randall Bytwerk, Bending Spines: The Propaganda of Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2004). A paperback edition is also available.