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MY PSYCHIC WORLD
WITCHCRAFT
I have been a practicing witch for many years. I admit i used to dabble in black magic,but it really isn't worth it at all. I am now a white witch,i only cast good and helpful spells. I have a great love for wicca,and i hope to practice it for many years to come.
History about salem
In 1692, in the town of Salem, Massachusetts, 24 people were killed after being tried as witches. Hundreds others were accused of being witches and wizards, but managed to escape the gallows. Why did this travesty of justice occur? Why did it occur in Salem? Salem was a prime spot for this event, and it the witchcraft trials were a culmination of many factors. The unfortunate combination of economic conditions, congregational strife, teenage boredom, and personal jealousies account for the spiraling accusations, trials, and executions that occurred in the spring and summer of 1692.
In 1688, John Putnam, one of the most influential elders of Salem Village, invited Samuel Parris, formerly a marginally successful planter and merchant in Barbados, to preach in the Village church. A year later, after negotiations over salary, inflation adjustments, and free firewood, Parris accepted the job as Village minister. He moved to Salem Village with his wife Elizabeth, his six-year-old daughter Betty, niece Abagail Williams, and slave Tituba, a West African native that Parris had acquired in Barbados.
The Salem that became Parris's new
home was in the midst of change: a mercantile elite was beginning to develop,
prominent people were becoming less willing to assume positions as town leaders,
the Putnams and the Porters were competing for control of the village and its
pulpit, and a debate was raging over how independent Salem Village, tied more to
the interior agricultural regions, should be from Salem, a center of sea
trade.Sometime during February of the exceptionally cold winter of 1692, young
Betty Parris became strangely ill. She dashed about, dove under furniture,
contorted in pain, and complained of fever. The cause of her symptoms may have
been some combination of stress, asthma, guilt, child abuse, epilepsy, and
delusional psychosis, but there were other theories. Cotton Mather had recently
published a popular book, "Memorable Providences," describing the
suspected witchcraft of an Irish washerwoman in Boston, and Betty's behavior in
some ways mirrored that of the afflicted person described in Mather's widely
read and discussed book. It was easy to believe in 1692 in Salem, with an Indian
war raging and the village in political turmoil, that the devil was close at
hand. Talk of witchcraft increased when other of Betty's playmates, including
eleven-year-old Ann Putnam, seventeen-year-old Mercy Lewis, and Mary Walcott,
began to exhibit similar unusual behavior. William Griggs, a doctor called to
examine the girls, suggested that the girls' problems might have a supernatural
origin when his own nostrums failed to effect a cure. The widespread belief that
witches targeted children made the doctor's diagnosis seem increasing likely.A
neighbor, Mary Sibley, proposed a form of counter magic. She told Tituba to bake
a rye cake with the urine of the afflicted victim and feed the cake to a dog. (
Dogs were believed to be used by witches as agents to carry out their devilish
commands.) By this time, suspicion had already begun to focus on Tituba, who had
been known to tell the girls tales of omens, voodoo, and witchcraft from her
native folklore. Her participation in the urine cake episode made her an even
more obvious scapegoat for the inexplicable.
Meanwhile, the number of girls afflicted continued to grow, rising to seven with
the addition of Ann Putnam, Elizabeth Hubbard, Susannah Sheldon, and Mary
Warren. According to historian Peter Hoffer, the girls "turned themselves
from a circle of friends into a gang of juvenile delinquents." ( Many
people of the period complained that young people lacked the piety and sense of
purpose of the founders' generation.) The girls contorted into grotesque poses,
fell down into frozen postures, and complained of biting and pinching
sensations. In a village where everyone believed that the devil was real, close
at hand, and acted in the real world, the suspected affliction of the girls
became an obsession.
Sometime after February 25, when Tituba baked the witch cake, and February 29,
when arrest warrants were issued against Tituba and two other women, Betty
Parris and Abigail Williams named their afflictors and the witchhunt began. The
consistency of the two girls' accusations suggests strongly that the girls
worked out their stories together. Soon Ann Putnam and Mercy Lewis were also
reporting seeing "witches flying through the winter mist." The
prominent Putnam family supported the girls' accusations, putting considerable
impetus behind the prosecutions.The first three to be accused of witchcraft were
Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborn. Tituba was an obvious choice, because of
both the color of her skin and her experience in voodoo. Good was a beggar and
social misfit who lived wherever someone would house her, while Osborn was old,
quarrelsome, and had not attended church for over a year. The Putnams brought
their complaint against the three women to county magistrates Jonathan Corwin
and John Hathorne, who scheduled examinations for the suspected witches for
March 1, 1692 in a local tavern. When hundreds showed up, the examinations were
moved to the meeting house. At the examinations, the girls described attacks by
the specters of the three women, and fell into their by then perfected pattern
of contortions when in the presence of one of the suspects. Other villagers came
forward to offer stories of cheese and butter mysteriously gone bad or animals
born with deformities after visits by one of the suspects. The
magistrates, in the common practice of the time, asked the same questions of
each suspect over and over: Were they witches? Had the seen the Devil? How, if
they are were not witches, did they explain the contortions seemingly caused by
their presence? The style and form of the questions indicates that the
magistrates thought the women guilty.The matter might have ended with
admonishments were it not for Tituba. After first adamantly denying any guilt,
afraid perhaps of being made a scapegoat, Tituba claimed that she was approached
by a tall man from Boston who sometimes appeared as a dog or a hog (obviously
the Devil) who asked her to sign in his book and to do his work.
"Yes", Tituba declared, "I am a witch, and moreover four other
witches, including Good and Osborn, had flown through the air on poles"
Tituba has been rumored to say. She had tried to run to Reverend Parris for
counsel, she said, but the devil had blocked her path. Tituba's confession
succeeded in transforming her from a possible scapegoat to a central figure in
the expanding prosecutions. Her confession also served to silence most skeptics,
and Parris and other local ministers began witch hunting with zeal.
Soon, according to their own reports, the spectral forms of other women began
attacking the afflicted girls. Martha Corey, Rebecca Nurse, Sarah Cloyce, and
Mary Easty were accused of witchcraft. During a March 20 church service, Ann
Putnam suddenly shouted, "Look where Goodwife Cloyce sits on the beam
suckling her yellow bird between her fingers!" Soon Ann's mother, Ann
Putnam, Sr., would join the accusers. Dorcas Good, four-year-old daughter
of Sarah Good, became the first child to be accused of witchcraft when three of
the girls complained that they were bitten by Dorcas's specter. (The
four-year-old was arrested, kept in jail for eight months, watched her mother
get carried off to the gallows, and would "cry her heart out, and go
insane.") The girls' accusations and their ever more polished performances,
including the new act of being struck dumb, played to large and believing
audiences.
Stuck in jail with the damning testimony of the afflicted girls widely accepted,
suspects began to see confession as a way to avoid the gallows. Deliverance
Hobbs became the second witch to confess, admitting to pinching three of the
girls at the devil's command and flying on a pole to attend a witches' Sabbath
in an open field. Jails approached capacity and the colony "teetered on the
brink of chaos" when Governor Phips returned from England. Fast action, he
decided, was required.Phips created a new court, the "court of oyer and
terminer," to hear the witchcraft cases. Five judges, including three close
friends of Cotton Mather, were appointed to the court. Chief Justice, and most
influential member of the court, was a gung-ho witch hunter named William
Stoughton.Mather urged Stoughton and the other judges to credit confessions and
admit "spectral evidence" (testimony by afflicted persons that they
had been visited by a suspect's specter). Ministers were looked to for guidance
by the judges, who were generally without legal training, on matters pertaining
to witchcraft, and Mather's advice was heeded. Judges also decided to allow the
so-called "touching test" (defendants were asked to touch afflicted
persons to see if their touch, as was generally assumed of the touch of witches,
would stop their contortions) and examination of the bodies of accused for
evidence of "witches' marks" (moles or the like upon which a witch's
familiar might suck). Evidence that would be excluded from modern courtrooms--
hearsay, gossip, stories, unsupported assertions, surmises-- was also generally
admitted. Many protections that modern defendants take for granted were lacking
in Salem: accused witches had no legal counsel, could not have witnesses testify
under oath on their behalf, and had no formal avenues of appeal. Defendants
could, however, speak for themselves, produce evidence, and cross-examine their
accusers. The degree to which defendants in Salem were able to take advantage of
their modest protections varied considerably, depending on their own acuteness
and their influence in the community.The first accused witch to be brought to
trial was Bridget Bishop. Almost sixty years old, owner of a house of ill
repute, critical of her neighbors, and reluctant to pay her her bills, Bishop
was a likely candidate for an accusation of witchcraft . The fact that Thomas
Newton, special prosecutor, selected Bishop for his first prosecution suggests
that he believed the stronger case could be made against her than any of the
other suspect witches. At Bishop's trial on June 2, 1692, a field hand testified
that he saw Bishop's image stealing eggs and then saw her transform herself into
a cat. Deliverance Hobbs, by then clearly insane, and Mary Warren, both
confessed witches, testified that Bishop was one of them. A villager named
Samuel Grey told the court that Bishop visited his bed at night and tormented
him. A jury of matrons assigned to examine Bishop's body reported that they
found an "excrescence of flesh." Several of the afflicted girls
testified that Bishop's specter afflicted them. Numerous other villagers
described why they thought Bishop was responsible for various bits of bad luck
that had befallen them. There was even testimony that while being transported
under guard past the Salem meeting house, she looked at the building and caused
a part of it to fall to the ground. Bishop's jury returned a verdict of guilty .
One of the judges, Nathaniel Saltonstall, aghast at the conduct of the trial,
resigned from the court. Chief Justice Stoughton signed Bishop's death warrant,
and on June 10, 1692, Bishop was carted to Gallows Hill and hanged .As the
summer of 1692 warmed, the pace of trials picked up. Not all defendants were as
disreputable as Bridget Bishop. Rebecca Nurse was a pious, respected woman whose
specter, according to Ann Putnam, Jr. and Abagail Williams, attacked them in mid
March of 1692 . Ann Putnam, Sr. added her complaint that Nurse demanded that she
sign the Devil's book, then pinched her. Nurse was one of three Towne sisters ,
all identified as witches, who were members of a Topsfield family that had a
long-standing quarrel with the Putnam family. Apart from the evidence of Putnam
family members, the major piece of evidence against Nurse appeared to be
testimony indicating that soon after Nurse lectured Benjamin Houlton for
allowing his pig to root in her garden, Benjamin died. The Nurse jury returned a
verdict of not guilty, much to the displeasure of Chief Justice Stoughton, who
told the jury to go back and consider again a statement of Nurse's that might be
considered an admission of guilt (but more likely an indication of confusion
about the question, as Nurse was old and nearly deaf). The jury reconvened, this
time coming back with a verdict of guilty . On July 19, 1692, Nurse rode with
four other convicted witches to Gallows Hill.
Persons who scoffed at accusations of witchcraft risked becoming targets of
accusations themselves. One man who was openly critical of the trials paid for
his skepticism with his life. John Proctor, a central figure in Arthur Miller's
somewhat fictionalized account of the Salem witchhunt "The Crucible,"
was an opinionated tavern owner who openly denounced the witchhunt. Testifying
against Proctor were Ann Putnam, Abagail Williams, Indian John (a slave of
Samuel Parris who worked in a competing tavern), and eighteen-year-old Elizabeth
Booth, who testified that ghosts had come to her and accused Proctor of serial
murder. Proctor fought back, accusing confessed witches of lying, complaining of
torture, and demanding that his trial be moved to Boston. The efforts proved
futile, of course, and Proctor was hanged. His wife Elizabeth, who was also
convicted of witchcraft, was spared execution because of her pregnancy
(reprieved "for the belly").No execution caused more unease in Salem
than that of the village's ex-minister, George Burroughs. Burroughs, who was
living in Maine in 1692, was identified by several of his accusers as the
ringleader of the witches. Mercy Lewis, the most imaginative and forceful of the
young accusers, offered unusually vivid testimony against Burroughs. Lewis told
the court that Burroughs flew her to the top of a mountain and, pointing toward
the surrounding land, promised her all the kingdoms if only she would sign in
his book. Lewis said, "I would not writ if he had throwed me down on one
hundred pitchforks." At an execution, a defendant in the Puritan colonies
was expected to confess, and thus to save his soul. When Burroughs on Gallows
Hill continued to insist on his innocence and then recited the Lord's Prayer
perfectly (something witches were thought incapable of doing), the crowd was
reportedly "greatly moved," forcing Cotton Mather, who was in
attendance, to intervene and remind the crowd that Burroughs had had his day in
court and lost.
One victim of the Salem witchhunt was not hanged, but rather pressed under heavy
stones for two days until his death. Such was the fate of octogenarian Giles
Corey who, after spending five months in chains in a Salem jail with his also
accused wife, had nothing but contempt for the proceedings. Seeing the futility
of a trial and hoping that by avoiding a conviction his farm, that would
otherwise go the state, might go to his two sons-in-law, Corey refused to stand
for trial. The penalty for such a refusal was peine et fort, or pressing. Three
days after Corey's death, on September 22, 1692, eight more convicted witches,
including Giles' wife Martha, were hanged. They were the last victims of the
witchhunt.
By early autumn of 1692, Salem's lust for blood was ebbing. Doubts were
developing as to how so many respectable people could be guilty. Reverend John
Hale said, " It cannot be imagined that in a place of so much knowledge, so
many in so small compass of land should abominably leap into the Devil's lap at
once." The educated elite of the colony began efforts to end the
witch-hunting hysteria that had enveloped Salem. Increase Mather, the father of
Cotton, published what has been called "America's first tract on
evidence," a work entitled "Cases of Conscience," which argued
that it "were better that ten suspected witches should escape than one
innocent person should be condemned." Increase Mather urged the court to
exclude spectral evidence. Samuel Willard, a highly regarded Boston minister,
circulated "Some Miscellany Observations," which suggested that the
Devil might create the specter of an innocent person. Mather's and Willard's
works were given to Governor Phips, and most likely influenced his decision to
order the court to exclude spectral evidence and touching tests, and to require
proof of guilt by clear and convincing evidence. With spectral evidence not
admitted, twenty-eight of the last thirty-three witchcraft trials ended in
acquittals. The three convicted witches were later pardoned. In May of 1693,
Phips released from prison all remaining accused or convicted witches.
By the time the witchhunt ended, nineteen convicted witches were executed, at
least four accused witches had died in prison, and one man, Giles Corey, had
been pressed to death. About one to two hundred other persons were arrested and
imprisoned on witchcraft charges. Two dogs were executed as suspected
accomplices of witches.A period of atonement began in the colony. Samuel Sewall,
one of the judges, issued a public confession of guilt and an apology. Several
jurors came forward to say that they were "sadly deluded and mistaken"
in their judgments. Reverend Samuel Parris conceded errors of judgment, but
mostly shifted blame to others. Parris was replaced as minister of Salem village
by Thomas Green, who devoted his career to putting his torn congregation back
together. Governor Phips blamed the entire affair on William Stroughton.
Stroughton, clearly more to blame than anyone for the tragic episode, refused to
apologize or explain himself, He criticized Phips for interfering just when he
was about to "clear the land" of witches. Stoughton became the next
governor of Massachusetts. WORDS BY........ http://home.texoma.net/~adwignall/
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