Witchcraft at Salem

A GENUINE 1ST UK EDITION PRINTED AND BOUND ON ANTIQUE WOVE PAPER BY WM. BRENDON, ESSEX, TIPTREE, ENGLAND
THIS BOOK IS NOW 53 YEARS OLD AND HAS BEEN EXCEPTIONALLY WELL-PRESERVED
HERE ARE "SOME" OF THE SUBJECTS DISCUSSED: THE WITCH TRIALS, MYTHOLOGY, MAGIC, THE USE OF SPELLS, SPIRITUALISM, SALEM WITCHES, WITCH HUNTS, THE INVISIBLE WORLD, MAGICAL LORE, DIVINATION, PAGAN DEITIES, FALLEN ANGELS, GOOD & EVIL, THE WITCHES SABBATH, THE SALEM GIRLS, THE WITCHCRAFT TRIALS AND PERSECUTIONS, POSSESSION, EXECUTIONS, FORTUNE TELLING, ANCIENT WORSHIP, THE WITCHCRAFT VICTIMS, PANIC AND HYSTERIA, THE SUPERNATURAL, WITCHCRAFT IN NEW ENGLAND, & MUCH MORE
PLEASE NOTE: THIS IS AN ACCURATE HISTORICAL BOOK OF THE WITCH TRIALS AND DOES CONTAIN SUBJECT MATTER AND DESCRIPTIONS OF EVENTS THAT TRANSPIRED, WHICH ARE GRAPHIC IN NATURE
ONE OF THE MOST IN-DEPTH MANUSCRIPTS EVER PENNED ON THE WITCH TRIALS

"The most important scholarly contribution to the literature of witchcraft to appear in many years."

"Witchcraft is not easy to define, because it is not, like the major formal religions. In Western civilization, since prehistoric times, there has been a grouped body of magical lore, charms, spells, and so forth having to do primarily with fertility and infertility, and with health and sickness, as well as a series of more marginal concerns, including the foretelling of the future."

"The purpose of this book is to try to set straight the record of the witchcraft phenomena at Salem in the year 1692, which much has been written, and much misunderstood."

This is one of the most accurate and well-written books ever created on the persecution of the Witches. It was compiled from all of the original documents dating back to the 17th century. It is not only a fascinating book but a very important work of historical literature. The infamous Salem witch trials began during the spring of 1692, after a group of young girls in Salem Village, Massachusetts, claimed to be possessed by evil and accused several local women of witchcraft. Much has been written about the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692, and much has been misunderstood. "The more I studied the documents of what actually took place in the community, "writes Chadwick Hansen, "the more I found myself in opposition to the traditional interpretations. It seems that a serious consideration was in order." He argues, for instance, that witchcraft was actually practiced in seventeenth-century New England, as it was in Europe at the same time. Moreover, the behavior of the afflicted persons was not fraudulent, as some have claimed, but pathological: these people were hysterics in the clinical rather than the popular sense of the term. Further still, the persecutors did not inspire or take advantage of the witch hunts as has been charged; on the contrary, they were among the chief opponents of the "mass hysteria".

These narratives of witchcraft are no fairy tales. Weird though they seem to us, they were realities to thousands of men and women in seventeenth-century America. They were the bulletins of a war more actual, crueler, more momentous than any fray of flesh and blood. Nor were they bulletins alone, these messages of each latest skirmish in that age-long war of Heaven with Hell. To those enlisted in that war, they were instruction, encouragement, and appeal, as well; as in our day, to men once fascinated by world politics, so in that to those awakened to these vaster interests of a universe, all pettier concerns seemed trivial and provincial.

The condition of this book is very nice despite being over 50 years in the making. The covers have some aging and normal shelf wear. The binding is solid; the pages are in very good condition. Despite some normal age, it's been well preserved.

But to the modern student, a graver error is dangerous. To count that witch-panic as something incident to human nature and common to all lands and times is to repudiate history altogether. Whatever in universal human experience anthropology or folklore may find akin to it, the witchcraft our fathers feared and fought was never universal, in place or time. It belonged alone to Christian thought and modern centuries; clear as day to the historian of ideas is its rise, progress, and decline.

Not till the fourteenth did the Holy Inquisition draw witchcraft fully into its own jurisdiction and, by confusing it with heresy, first make the witches a diabolic sect and give rise to the notion of the witch-sabbath. It was in the fifteenth that the theory and the procedure spread to the secular courts, and that in these, as in the ecclesiastical, the torture began to prove an inexhaustible source of fresh accusations, fresh delusions. I

A rising tide of witchcraft hysteria overwhelmed the sober Puritan communities of 17th-century New England, culminating in the notorious Salem witch trials of 1692. Rooted in religious zealotry, political friction, and property disputes, the witch-hunts ranged beyond the gallows to ruin countless innocent lives. Voices from both sides of the controversy can be heard within this compilation of revealing documents from one of American history's darkest eras.

"The infamous Salem witch trials began during the spring of 1692, after a group of young girls in Salem Village, Massachusetts, claimed to be possessed by the devil and accused several local women of witchcraft. As a wave of hysteria spread throughout colonial Massachusetts, a special court convened in Salem to hear the cases; the first convicted witch, Bridget Bishop, was hanged that June. Eighteen others followed Bishop to Salem's Gallows Hill, while some 150 more men, women and children were accused over the next several months. By September 1692, the hysteria had begun to abate and public opinion turned against the trials. Though the Massachusetts General Court later annulled guilty verdicts against accused witches and granted indemnities to their families, bitterness lingered in the community, and the painful legacy of the Salem witch trials would endure for centuries.

Origins of the Salem Witch Trials
Belief in the supernatural–and specifically in the devil's practice of giving certain humans (witches) the power to harm others in return for their loyalty–had emerged in Europe as early as the 14th century, and was widespread in colonial New England. In addition, the harsh realities of life in the rural Puritan community of Salem Village (present-day Danvers, Massachusetts) at the time included the after-effects of a British war with France in the American colonies in 1689, a recent smallpox epidemic, fears of attacks from neighboring Native American tribes and a longstanding rivalry with the more affluent community of Salem Town (present-day Salem). Amid these simmering tensions, the Salem witch trials would be fueled by residents' suspicions of and resentment toward their neighbors, as well as their fear of outsiders.

Did you know? In an effort to explain by scientific means the strange afflictions suffered by those "bewitched" Salem residents in 1692, a study published in Science magazine in 1976 cited the fungus ergot (found in rye, wheat and other cereals), which toxicologists say can cause symptoms such as delusions, vomiting and muscle spasms.

In January 1692, 9-year-old Elizabeth (Betty) Parris and 11-year-old Abigail Williams (the daughter and niece of Samuel Parris, minister of Salem Village) began having fits, including violent contortions and uncontrollable outbursts of screaming. After a local doctor, William Griggs, diagnosed bewitchment, other young girls in the community began to exhibit similar symptoms, including Ann Putnam Jr., Mercy Lewis, Elizabeth Hubbard, Mary Walcott, and Mary Warren. In late February, arrest warrants were issued for the Parris' Caribbean slave, Tituba, along with two other women–the homeless beggar Sarah Good and the poor, elderly Sarah Osborn–whom the girls accused of bewitching them.

Salem Witch Trials: The Hysteria Spreads
The three accused witches were brought before the magistrates Jonathan Corwin and John Hawthorne and questioned, even as their accusers appeared in the courtroom in a grand display of spasms, contortions, screaming and writhing. Though Good and Osborn denied their guilt, Tituba confessed. Likely seeking to save herself from certain convictions by acting as an informer, she claimed there were other witches acting alongside her in service of the devil against the Puritans. As hysteria spread through the community and beyond into the rest of Massachusetts, a number of others were accused, including Martha Corey and Rebecca Nurse–both regarded as upstanding members of church and community–and the four-year-old daughter of Sarah Good.

Like Tituba, several accused "witches" confessed and named still others, and the trials soon began to overwhelm the local justice system. In May 1692, the newly appointed governor of Massachusetts, William Phips, ordered the establishment of a special Court of Oyer (to hear) and Terminer (to decide) on witchcraft cases for Suffolk, Essex, and Middlesex counties.

Presided over by judges including Hawthorne, Samuel Sewall and William Stoughton, the court handed down its first conviction, against Bridget Bishop, on June 2; she was hanged eight days later on what would become known as Gallows Hill in Salem Town. Five more people were hanged that July, five in August, and eight more in September. In addition, seven other accused witches died in jail, while the elderly Giles Corey (Martha's husband) was pressed to death by stones after he refused to enter a plea at his arraignment.

Salem Witch Trials: Conclusion and Legacy
Though the respected minister Cotton Mather had warned of the dubious value of spectral evidence (or testimony about dreams and visions), his concerns went largely unheeded during the Salem witch trials. Increase Mather, president of Harvard College (and Cotton's father), later joined his son in urging that the standards of evidence for witchcraft must be equal to those for any other crime, concluding that "It would better that ten suspected witches may escape than one innocent person be condemned." Amid waning public support for the trials, Governor Phips dissolved the Court of Oyer and Terminer in October and mandated that its successor disregard spectral evidence. Trials continued with dwindling intensity until early 1693, and by that May Phips had pardoned and released all those in prison on witchcraft charges.

In January 1697, the Massachusetts General Court declared a day of fasting for the tragedy of the Salem witch trials; the court later deemed the trials unlawful, and the leading justice Samuel Sewall publicly apologized for his role in the process. The damage to the community lingered, however, even after Massachusetts Colony passed legislation restoring the good names of the condemned and providing financial restitution to their heirs in 1711. Indeed, the vivid and painful legacy of the Salem witch trials endured well into the 20th century, when Arthur Miller dramatized the events of 1692 in his play "The Crucible" (1953), using them as an allegory for the anti-Communist "witch hunts" led by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. Author