Witchcraft At Salem Essays - Salem Witch Trials, Witchcraft

Witchcraft at Salem In 1692, nineteen villagers were put to death in Salem, Massachusetts. The reason for conviction was the torment of teenaged girls by supernatural means: witchcraft. These teenagers had experienced "pricking" and "pinching" sensations, and some contorted into strange bodily positions, reaching unusual postures of extreme rigidity. The village doctor blamed the abnormal behavior on the supernatural; he delared, "An evil hand is on them."(1) With those words began the greatest witchhunt in America's history. In 1976, Linnda Caporeal from the University of California at Santa Barbara explained the actions of the girls as the effects of an illness resulting from the ingestion of ergot--a fungus with LSD-like properties that resides in rye. Perhaps this is not the true cause of the strange behavior, but to the twentieth century world, it is a justification more believable than that of the village doctor. It is a human tendency to jump to conclusions without knowing all of the facts. In the case described above, the village doctor probably did not feel that he was jumping to conclusions because of the abundance of "witches" in those days. Even today, with the abundance of knowledge about the way things work, some hasten to postulate "God's doings" as the answers to all of our unanswered questions. Are we on this earth because "God put us here"? Was it a chance arrangement of amino acids in a molecular pool which evolved into a human being? Or does the answer lie in some different theory that only time will reveal? Whether it be in the case of medicine, religion, history, or anything requiring judgement, even gossip, one must realize that reality is impossible to pin down. Although we may be sure that two parallel lines could never meet, there may be someone named Lobachevski who is sure that they can. (1) Alice Dickenson, The Salem Witchcraft Delusion (New York: Franklin Watts, Inc., 1974), p. 16.