Hysteria, Thy Catalyst is Witchery

Everyone has skeletons in their closet they’d rather not talk about, things they would rather forget.  In essence, everyone in their own way has a tortured past. 

For Puritans settled in New England around the same time as Cotton Mather, after a torturous past of religious persecution, the stigma of ill fate continued to plague their people with the hysteria of the Salem Witch Trials.  As I was reading through various parts of On Witchcraft by Cotton Mather, I couldn’t help but feel that he was trying to justify that innocent lives were taken by, essentially, a massive mob.  Blinded by religious fervor and a feeling that their mission was to root out the unholy witches among them, the Puritans sought to destroy the witches in their midst to protect their colony, the witches having been sent by the Devil because “The New-Englanders are a People of God settled in those, which were once the Devil’s territories” (Mather 14). 

In this way, it seemed to me that you could equate the Devil to a jealous ex-boyfriend.  Try to image:  a new boyfriend, here played by the Puritans of New England, moves in on your ex-girlfriend you’re not completely over yet, or that you still have some manner of feelings for.  As the ex-boyfriend, the Devil, would you be upset?  In my experience, that answer should be a resounding yes.  So, what would you do?  As Cotton Mather put it, the Devil then “immediately try’d all sorts of methods to overturn this poor Plantation” to, following the metaphor I’ve created, get the new beau away from his ex-flame (Mather 14).  In one view, the taking of land that had once according to Mather belonged to Satan could be seen as an act of war.

As was touched upon in On Witchcraft, the Stephen Asma readings, in the movie shown in class and in our class discussions, the idea of the Devil and the ways in which evil manifests itself in various forms is, to me, both fascinating and disturbing.  The basis of my reasoning for this is as follows:  If the Devil can take any form, even the form of an innocent person, how then would we as humans be able to tell the different between Satan, God, an Angel, or a Demon if confronted by one?  Given this, how could anyone know the difference between what is holy and true, as opposed to what is evil and a lie?

Does my posing of these questions mean then that I think the girls in Salem who started all the ruckus of accusing people of witchery were not to blame for being faced with something we can’t fully explain or understand?  No.  Whether or not my image of these girls is tainted from my outside knowledge having seen the movie and read the script of The Crucible by Arthur Miller every year of my high school career for some class or another, my view is not that the girls are innocent babes thrust into an adult world wide eyed and scared.  In our modern world, no matter how much we pick and prod and probe at the past trying to figure out just way these young girls slandered and caused the deaths and imprisonment of so many innocent people, I feel we must also take into context the time and place in which these things happened.  While it is true that we can’t understand how things got so out of hand, it is also true that the world and its views used to be a lot different.  We can’t see through the eyes of the accusers or the accused in this instance and in such can only piece together our own theories without ever actually putting all the pieces together.

So what is my theory?  To paraphrase what someone said in class, “After seeing a scary movie, I see things in the shadows from the movie for days”.  For me, I think the girls of Salem were under the same captivating spell, at least at first.  Seeing magic performed by Tituba, something the girls knew even at their young ages was against the rules, the physical symptoms of the girls could have manifested themselves out of fear and thus could not be explained by a doctor.  Do I think the entire operation was mere fear and a bunch of girls thinking it was true?  Not in the least.  After getting so much attention and learning just what it was Tituba was showing them, and also why it was wrong, it is my belief that the girls became power-hungry.  Given so much attention by people of high rank in their society, when they were usually overlooked as unimportant for both being children and being female, the new idea that they might have something important to say or contribute must have been a powerful drug to them. 

For me, I imagine these girls the same way I picture one of my younger cousins, who I shall refer to from here on out as Kat.  As a young child, Kat liked to be the center of attention.  As a four year old, when she wasn’t the center of attention, she would do whatever she could to get attention, even if it meant telling lies.  I picture it being the same way with the girls of Salem who started the whole hysteria and witch hunts.  Anyone who’s told a lie can tell you; once you’ve started it’s as addictive as nicotine to a smoker.  Things keep going and snowball until they’re out of control.  And thus we have hysteria.

History repeats itself.  Sure, we’d love as Americans to say that the Witch Trials was a onetime deal, that we learned our lesson and moved on, but did we really?   No, we didn’t – just ask anyone persecuted during the Red Scare by McCarthyism.  During the Cold War, Rebublican Senator John McCarthy was that "a red scare of epic proportions was sweeping the United States" (Judge 95)*.  People left and right were being called communists, much like people were called witches back in the Puritan witch affair.  And yet, thinking about both black marks on our nation’s history, I can’t say that I can honestly blame anyone completely.  If I were a Puritan accused of being a witch, my options would be to say I was innocent and get hanged, accuse someone else, or admit to being a witch to get thrown in jail.  What would you do in that situation?  Follow the crowd for fear of being trampled by them?  Or, as John Proctor and a few other characters do in The Crucible, stand strong and speak out against the madness around you?

What, exactly, is evil anyways?  Is it like fate, or something that can be shaped and, in such, be avoided?  Is it in fact inherent inside all of us, lying in wait for the right moment to break free?  Or are we innocent as a people of the world until such a time that we choose to do evil unto another?  In today’s world words don’t hold as much weight as they used to.  People can throw around the words ‘love’ and ‘hate’ like they were feathers, and yet they can mean so much.  As per the quote Suzanne regaled us with in class from Hannibal Lector, “Can you stand to call me evil?” had been weighing heavily on my mind.  Could I call someone evil, even someone depraved or demented?  Is anyone really evil?  Or just misguided?  And, once fallen from the path, can someone get back on it again?  Can we really repent and make up for old wrongs, for sins we’ve committed?  Or in the end are we all doomed from our first breath?  Needless to say, this class has given my brain quite a workout already.

The entire time I was reading On Witchcraft, the point of Puritans being good as a collective and doing what they felt that had to in order to preserve the community as a whole rang very much for me like the finally Harry Potter book.  A young Albus Dumbledore and Grindelwald talked of Muggle casualties if the magical community tried to assume their place as the superior race as a necessary evil for the greater good.  In this way, the Puritans and Harry Potter seem to have a similar message, if only for a moment.  The people that were innocent yet murdered anyways in the Salem Witch Trials were the Muggles in this situation; their deaths were regrettable but necessary to the preservation of the whole. 

Is this a horrible and pathetic justification on Mather’s part?  In my opinion – YES, it very much is.  Whatever happened to the whole ‘Thou shall not kill’ part of the commandments?  Does killing in the name of God suddenly make murder okay?  This was not a matter of survival.  It was a matter of hysteria and panic causing people in a position of power to abuse said power and end innocent lives.  And yet, do I feel this part of history could have been avoided?  No, I don’t.  People as a whole tend to overreact in situations where they feel threatened.  As a Puritan, if I thought the Devil was sending witches to posses my neighbors and possible hurt myself, my family, or my children, I’m sure I would probably overreact too – especially if everyone around me was also overreacting and making it into a huge fuss.  What would any normal human being do in a situation of panic except be prone to overreact?

In a time of predestination and a religious education where Satan could be anywhere and everything, who wouldn’t be scared?  As Asma explains it in Biblical Monsters, God had to have created the frightening or ‘evil’ creatures that plagued the world, or at least allowed them to keep existing in it.  To quote Timothy K. Beal as Asma does, “Who is more monstrous, the creatures who must live through his vale of tears, or the creature who put them here” (Amsa, 63).  Try to image God as a parent with several children.  Now image the Devil as the school bully who is opening attacking and harming said children, or even as another adult abusing these children.  What kind of parent would allow their child to be treated so horrible?  Image being a Puritan with the view of God as a vengeful, uncaring parent, then try to tell me you wouldn’t be afraid of everything.  Who wouldn’t be scared in a situation where no matter what you did, your fate was already decided for you, and God didn’t care if you were a saint during your life time if it hadn’t already been decided that you were predestined to get into heaven?  In short, predestination is a scary mistress.  No wonder the Puritans panicked about the idea that the Devil might be in their midst with witches to aid him in corrupting their souls.

Whether you’re talking about Puritans and the Salem Witch Trials, the Red Scare and McCarthyism, or any other such case of panic snowballing into illogical hysteria, one fact remains true: a tortured past can follow us all.

* Quote taken from A Hard and Bitter Peace: A Global History of the Cold War by Edward H. Judge & John W. Langdon