The Enemy Within (29 page)

The cumulative result was a loss of the special “sense of mission” that had inspired the colony's founding. The “yardstick” against which “the original settlers . . . measured their achievements” was gone, and, in the convulsive process of witch-hunting, their descendants wrestled with a host of unsettling consequences. Ironically, the subsequent collapse (and discrediting) of the trials enabled the community to reorient itself and mark out new boundaries—and thus to birth a new identity, built around the prototype of “the practical, self-reliant Yankee.” Whatever the value of this conclusion for sociological theory, it did jibe with some leading facts of early New England history: the undeniable, seemingly intractable, stresses—political, social, and psychological—the region had faced during the years and decades preceding the trials.

 
Salemwitchcraft as actual practice

 
Chadwick Hansen was the next important entrant in this increasingly crowded field; his book
Witchcraft at Salem
(1969) was designed to offer “a fresh and objective review of the entire matter.” Hansen began by adopting the position of Starkey, that the afflicted were nothing more (or less) than hysterics. “Their behavior,” he stated flatly, “was not fraudulent, but pathological. . . . They were mentally ill.” Moreover, he extended this diagnosis to include many confessors as well; thus the whole amounted to “an outbreak of epidemic hysteria.”

But the truly new piece in Hansen's “review” was his idea that “witchcraft actually did exist and was widely practiced in seventeenth-century New England.” From his own reading of the courtroom records he had concluded that several of the accused were “in all probability” guilty as charged. On this point he referred especially to evidence for the use of “image magic”; as an example, he cited the testimony given at the trial of Bridget Bishop about “poppets” found in her basement. From here he took a further step, arguing that witchcraft “worked” as intended by its practitioners, but “through psychogenic rather than occult means.” It was extreme fear in the victims that brought on their “symptoms,” energized their fits, and produced other disabling conditions up to and including death. Here Hansen invoked an important group of studies by medical anthropologists, on certain present-day West Indian communities, where severe, occasionally fatal, illness appears to have no identifiable cause apart from a dread of attack by magical means (voodoo).

Hansen's work seems, in retrospect, a transitional moment in the overall sequence of these histories. To some extent, it followed established patterns. Like most of its predecessors, it took the witch trials essentially as a set piece, without much connection to any wider historical forces; it also retained the old concern with the possibility of fraud (on which, however, it gave an emphatically negative verdict). But its careful research base, and, in particular, its interdisciplinary thrust—reaching out toward clinical psychology and anthropology—pointed in a new direction.

In fact, the study of Salem witchcraft was about to undergo a dramatic transformation in both quantitative and qualitative terms. The sheer volume of work on the subject would soon leap upward, as professional historians reclaimed it for their own. At the same time, the center of interest shifted to matters of context: how to situate witch-hunting in relation to other elements of time and place. This does not mean that previous questions were abandoned altogether:
What happened at Salem?
would always, perhaps inevitably, remain a lively point of concern. But there arose a second set of questions, parallel yet different, as to what witchcraft history might reveal about pre-modern life in a variety of related dimensions. In a sense, this history was no longer simply an end in itself; it was also a means to other ends. There was, too, a further implication here—that changing scholarly trends and fashions, as much as events in the world at large, would henceforth shape the approach taken by leading contributors.

 
Salemwitchcraft and the coming of capitalism

 
The most powerful such trend, during the 1970s, was the so-called new social history, a broad-gauge revisionary movement centered on the systematic (even scientific) analysis of the day-to-day lives of ordinary people. This provided the frame for the next major contribution to Salem studies, a brilliantly innovative work by a pair of young scholars, Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, published in 1974 as
Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft
. Both title and subtitle announced a difference. The Salem community, not the witch-hunt as such, would be the chief focus. And questions of social organization, not blow-by-blow details of the trial proceedings, would set the main lines of investigation. In fact,
Salem Possessed
relegated the trials almost to a prefatory role—summarized in its opening chapter and mentioned thereafter only tangentially.

The authors began by following up on a lead from Upham's work of more than a century before. Through careful analysis of land deeds and other local records, Upham had succeeded in creating a detailed map of Salem at the time of the trials, with every household carefully plotted in. He had then noted an interesting geographical pattern, which Boyer and Nissenbaum were able to confirm and to interpret. Salem was divided between its original nucleus, abutting the shoreline and known as “the Town,” and another section, a few miles back to the west and north, called simply “the Village.” The Town was strongly oriented to the sea and trade, while the Village was made up predominantly of small-scale farmsteads. This difference had widened steadily through several decades. By the end of the century, the Town represented (for its time) a “capitalist” way of life, with a cadre of busy merchants at the top of its steeply graded social and economic pyramid.

The witchcraft accusations began, it is clear, among residents of the Village. Moreover, Upham's map showed that virtually all the key accusers lived in the most
interior
part of the Village, while the accused came largely from households in the section bordering the Town. Boyer and Nissenbaum used this discovery as a stepping-off point for developing detailed “profiles” of two sharply antagonized factions in Village life. (The theme of “factionalism” had also appeared in Upham, but
Salem Possessed
would take it much further.) The group based in the interior consisted of old-style farmers of below-average means and highly traditional values. In direct contrast, its opponents displayed an “entrepreneurial” bent; they included tradesmen, innkeepers, and farmers who were at least partially oriented to the market (as befitted their location close to the Town). Boyer and Nissenbaum summed up the difference as follows: “From the evidence . . . the [interior] faction emerges as by far the more vulnerable of the two: less wealthy, . . . owning less land, quite literally hedged in by more flourishing . . . neighbors, and less able to benefit from developments centered in Salem Town.”

The struggle between them went back nearly 20 years before 1692. Its most visible aspect was a succession of controversies involving the Village ministers: first, Reverend James Bayley (hired in 1672, fired in 1679); followed by Reverend George Burroughs (1680- 83); and then Reverend Deodat Lawson (1684-87). The level of feeling, in each case, was remarkably high; as one Villager described the situation in 1679, “Brother is against brother, and neighbors [are] against neighbors, all quarreling and smiting one another.” A final, crucial phase began with the arrival in 1688 of Reverend Samuel Parris, around whom the old “contentions” immediately flared anew. The traditionalists were, by and large, Parris's loyal supporters, their more entrepreneurial counterparts his persistent detractors. The points of conflict were political rather than ecclesiastical, especially the desire—again, among the traditionalists—to separate the life of the Village as much as possible from the capitalist ethos of the Town.

Seen in full context, then, the trials constituted a kind of backlash phenomenon, an effort by the traditionalists to forestall and to punish the “evil” forces of change pushing outward toward the far corners of the Village from the Town. In Boyer and Nissenbaum's own words, the witch-hunt reflected (and was greatly energized by) one of the “central issues of New England society in the late seventeenth century: the resistance of back-country farmers to the pressures of commercial capitalism, and the social style that accompanied it.” To be sure, such folk were themselves of divided mind—both attracted to, and repelled by, the “pressures” at hand. In this, they “were part of a vast company, on both sides of the Atlantic, trying to expunge the lure of a new order from their own souls by doing battle with it in the real world.” Presumably, the goal was misguided, the effort futile, and the results (at least for Salem) devastating. But Boyer and Nissenbaum were not inclined to condemn; instead, they described feelings of “real sympathy” for the beleaguered Villagers. Here they made a connection to their personal experience of “living through the 1960s, the decade of Watts and Vietnam,” and thus coming to realize “that the sometimes violent roles men play in ‘history' are not necessarily a measure of their personal decency or lack of it.” Not for the first time, or the last, did a retelling of the Salem story find echoes in the teller's own present.

In sum,
Salem Possessed
offered much more than a new answer to the familiar question of what caused the witch trials. As the authors put it in a startling bit of metaphor, “We have . . . exploited the focal events of 1692 somewhat as a stranger might make use of a lightning flash in the night: better to observe the contours of the landscape which it chances to illuminate.” The landscape thus observed was broad, deep, and hugely significant: nothing less than the approach of the modern era.

In the 30-odd years since the time of its publication,
Salem Possessed
has faced a number of scholarly challenges, most recently on empirical grounds. Its portrayal of the two warring Village factions may be overdrawn; reinvestigation and reanalysis of some parts are still ongoing. Nonetheless, it remains the single most influential paradigm we have for understanding the Salem witch trials—not to mention its portentous “lightning flash” revelations.

 
Salemwitchcraft as “acid” trip

 
Now the publishing floodgates opened wide; since 1974 books and articles on Salem witchcraft have poured forth at such a rate that only a portion of them can be noticed here. One conspicuous example—sufficiently conspicuous that it would find its way onto the front page of some newspapers—first appeared in the journal
Science
, in 1976, under the title “Ergotism: The Satan Loosed in Salem.” The author was a young biologist named Linnda R. Caporael. The argument was drawn from clinical pharmacology. And the inspiration (or so one might speculate) was a rising public fascination with hallucinogenic drugs.

It was Caporael's basic contention that “the physical symptoms of the afflicted and many of the other accusers are those induced by convulsive ergot poisoning.” Ergot, she explained, is a fungus containing “powerful pharmacologic agents.” (In fact, it bears a close relation to lysergic acid diethylamide, also known as LSD or in street parlance, simply, acid.) Its usual hosts are cereal grains, most especially rye, from which it may eventually be carried into baked breads. It grows under many conditions of soil and climate, but dampness and warmth suit it best. The matchup with Salem and the witch trials, Caporael argued, was exceedingly close. The spring and summer of 1691 had been mild and rainy. Lots of rye had been grown in the Village fields. Harvesting would have occurred in the late fall, with baking and eating of ergotized bread following soon thereafter; the witch-hunt started up just a short while after that. Moreover, details of the fits in the core accusers—“convulsions” and all the rest—closely tracked the clinical picture for ergotism. Presto! A longtime mystery solved by medical science.

It seemed almost too good to be true. And, in fact, it was. Barely six months later, another issue of
Science
contained another article presenting a point-by-point refutation. According to the authors of this second piece, a pair of psychologists named Nicholas P. Spanos and Jack Gottlieb, the “general features . . . of ergotism” and “the events that occurred at Salem” did not make for such a good fit, after all. Prominent among the “features” they listed were vomiting, diarrhea, a “livid” skin color, “contractures of the extremities,” and a ravenous appetite—none of which appeared, to any significant degree, in contemporaneous accounts from the trials. Moreover, the timing was off, since many of the accusers became “afflicted” only in the late spring. Finally, the spread of accusations beyond Salem to numerous other communities would seem to have required “a concurrent spread of ergotized rye”; and for this, there was no plausible evidence at all.

Surprisingly, a new round of claims for ergotism began several years later (1982), with the publication of yet another article by another author. Mary K. Mattosian resuscitated Caporael's argument, with some modest reshuffling (for example, cold weather, rather than warm, was now deemed essential) and with the Spanos-Gottlieb “objection” ruled “not as valid as originally perceived.” Mattosian would subsequently extend the same theory to a vast range of historical events, in a book fetchingly entitled
Poisons of the Past
(1997). But by then the culture had changed; LSD was passé, and witchcraft study had moved on.

Salemwitchcraft and other witchcraft

 
Indeed, the 1980s brought a different direction entirely. Perhaps because the Boyer-Nissenbaum model proved so powerful an explanation of the Salem affair, historians shifted their attention toward earlier New England trials. The new goal was to unravel a general “system” of witchcraft belief (and of behavior based on such belief ).