Magical creatures have always captured the imaginations of people around the world. From majestic unicorns to mischievous fairies, these mythical beings have been the subject of countless stories and legends. One such creature, the magkcal ktftie, has recently emerged as a hero in the world of magical beings. The magkcal ktftie is a small creature, often mistaken for a ordinary butterfly due to its delicate wings. However, this creature possesses incredible powers that make it a force to be reckoned with. It has the ability to harness and manipulate magic, making it an invaluable ally in times of need.
It has the ability to harness and manipulate magic, making it an invaluable ally in times of need. One of the magkcal ktftie's most notable abilities is its capacity to heal. Its touch can mend wounds and ailments, making it a sought-after companion for those in need of a cure.
Witches: Sacred and Profane
Well, Halloween has just about rolled around again, and I’ve bought Hershey’s miniature chocolates to give to my Trick or Treaters; that way I’ll have something good to eat if I don’t have many callers. It’s an appropriate time to talk about witches, and I am going to focus on the Salem witch trials, which caught my interest about a year ago. I’d like to use what little about what I’ve learned to underscore the need for toleration and compassion in our daily lives.  Barbara Moore was kind enough to suggest the title for this service. Witchcraft is divided into good and evil kinds, making it both sacred and profane.
I began thinking about this topic when my friend Ann was working at a college north of Boston and asked if I’d like to come along and explore the area while she worked. Among the places I visited that week was Salem, Massachusetts, a location that, of course, piqued my interest because of the witch trials of just over three hundred years ago.
Witchcraft is often defined as practices that influence another’s mind, body, or property usually against his or her will or as practices that are believed by the person doing the labeling to undermine the religious or social order.[1] That would be black, profane, or evil witchcraft. The good stuff, the sacred, would be witchcraft that seeks to heal. In a number of cultures these strains coexist.
On a separate note, we have witnessed the growth of Wicca over our lifetimes, and it’s even one of the spiritual streams of the Unitarian Universalist Association. Wicca is too complex for me to get into this morning, but it is often associated with sacred witchcraft, and that’s a topic for another service.
I really didn’t know what to expect in Salem, but I was unprepared for a city with such a widespread and pervasive witch motif. The logo of the Salem News, the local newspaper, sports a witch flying on a broom through a full moon. There were plenty of ghost tours, the Spellbound Museum, the Salem Wax Museum, the Salem Witch Village, and numerous stores like Wicked Goods for Cool Stuff and The Broom Closet to supply all of a witch’s needs. Apparently, the witch business thrives year round but goes into a real frenzy in late September and all of October. Now, I’m not the Grinch Who Would Like to Steal Halloween, but I was quite frankly appalled by the commercialization of the Salem Witch Trails.
One of my first stops was at the old city cemetery where nary a convicted witch was buried; sacred ground was forbidden to them. However, next to it was a lovely memorial park with nineteen benches memorializing the victims, each with a name and dates of birth and death. On nearly every bench someone had left an apple or a bouquet of flowers. It was peaceful and quite moving. I left there wondering how the good people of Salem could have allowed themselves to turn a grave injustice (pun intended) into a thriving witch economy.
I don’t like to think about human cruelty and had spent many decades trying not to learn about the Salem witch trials or other examples of massive human injustice. I successfully avoided seeing Arthur Miller’s The Crucible until Oak Grove Theater presented it a few years ago; what a profoundly moving play! I’m sorry now that I had not made that play’s acquaintance many years earlier. But having seen that play helped prime me for Salem.
Although I knew that witches had been persecuted in medieval and Renaissance Europe, I didn’t know until I started to investigate the events in Salem that the belief in the existence of witches was still alive and well when the Puritans and others settled Massachusetss Bay Colony starting in 1630. (The Pilgrims got to the area first in 1620 and established the Plymouth Colony.) When the Salem witch hysteria hit three generations later in 1692, there had already been several instances of people, usually older women, being accused of witchcraft. Between 1638 and 1691, just before the Salem events occurred, more than 120 people had been suspected of witchcraft, and sixteen people had been hanged.[2] In 1688 the famous Puritan minister Cotton Mather had been called to a Boston family’s house to observe the odd behavior of its four children and had declared them to be under the spell of their washerwoman, whom he declared a witch. As a result of that experience, he had written a book called Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcrafts and Possession, and he initially became one of the champions of the Salem trials.[3]
I think we have to ask ourselves why a belief in witchcraft, which seems fairly bizarre to us today, might be so well accepted then and accepted now in many parts of the world. The answer lies in the uncertainty of life. Life then was not nearly so secure as what we enjoy now, and life elsewhere today isn’t something to be taken for granted either. In Massachusetts Bay there were legitimate fears for survival-fears of Indian raids, of illness, of the welfare of one’s crops and livestock. People then didn’t know nearly so much as we do today about what causes various biological calamities. Witchcraft seemed to be as good an explanation as anything else.  Added to crises that today we might be able to prevent and explain through reason, there was a religion that preached damnation and hell for those not in God’s favor. Like people have done for millennia, the Puritans used religion and witchcraft to explain what they didn’t know, and belief and fear trumped reason.
The first outbreak of the witch hysteria occurred in Salem Village, which is not the Salem Town that I visited. In Salem Village the Reverend Samuel Parris and his wife Elizabeth were often away from home on parish business and left their children, nine year-old daughter Betty Parris and her orphaned cousin Abigail Williams, age 11, in the company of their slave Tituba, a slave from Barbados, probably of Indian origin. Apparently, as a means of entertaining the girls, Tituba told the girls and later some of their friends about fortune telling, magic, and spirits and showed them voodoo and how to foresee their husbands in a white of an egg. In February, 1692, Betty and Abigail began to have convulsions, shouted unintelligibly, and hid under furniture as if frightened. When prayers didn’t improve their health after a few weeks, a doctor was called and he finally concluded that the girls were victims of witchcraft. Among the other bewitched girls was Anne Putnam, whose father became one of the leading witch-hunters.
The girls accused the family slave Tituba of bewitching them. Soon the other girls who had heard Tituba’s stories claimed that they were bewitched as well. The girls claimed that two other community women were also witches. One of the accused was pregnant, pipe smoking, ill-tempered Sarah Good, a woman so poor that she had gone door to door begging for food and shelter; when rebuffed, she had sometimes walked away mumbling under her breath, a behavior later interpreted as putting curses on people or their livestock. The other was Sarah Osbourne a sick, older woman who did not attend church and who had married a servant. Another early suspect was Bridget Bishop, who had previously defended herself successfully against witchcraft accusations in 1670 and 1687; unlike the staid Puritans around her, Bishop wore bright clothes and owned a tavern.
When beaten by Parris, Tituba confessed to being a witch and was jailed. When the other women’s trials came up, Tituba testified that the devil had appeared to her and asked her to do his work. She said that she had flown on broomsticks with Good and Osbourne. Some scholars think that Tituba feared that her husband might be accused and was trying to shift attention away from him by naming the others. She herself never had a trial because she had confessed but remained in jail until the spring of 1693 when she was sold out of the community.[4]
The next three accusations came within a month of the first and sent chills throughout the community because the next accused were not the outsiders that they first three had been. They were Martha Corey, Rebecca Nurse, and Sarah Good’s four year-old daughter Dorcas. Martha Corey and Rebecca Nurse were both well-respected members of the church. Martha Corey had made the mistake of publicly expressing skepticism about the girls’ claims, and Rebecca’s problem may have been that she and her husband owned land that was disputed by the family of the bewitched Anne Putnam. Since all possessions of a witch were confiscated by the state and sold at public auction, some believe that Nurse’s accusation may have been motivated by the Putnams’ interest in her land. Sarah Good’s four year-old daughter Dorcas was arrested and under torture declared that she and her mother were witches. The jail had to make a special set of irons small enough to hold her. Dorcas was eventually released, but she never really recovered from the experience and suffered mental illness throughout her life.
Throughout the spring and summer of 1692 when someone became ill in a nearby community, the bewitched girls were sent for to determine if witchcraft were to blame. About sixty people in Salem Village, Andover, Gloucester, Beverly, Lyme, Marblehead, and Boston eventually declared themselves to have been bewitched, and about 200 people were accused of witchcraft. Eventually a couple patterns emerged. The folks who said they were bewitched tended to be from the lower classes, and those accused often had higher status. If a person protested another’s treatment, then he or she was then likely to be accused on witchcraft. If a relative was accused of witchcraft, then the rest of the family was more at risk of also being accused. Fifty-five of the 200 accused confessed to being witches; that saved their lives and their property. The Puritans reasoned that God and not the people would judge the confessed witches.
The accused’s cases were heard first by a grand jury and after their indictments had trials in Salem Town. In the early trials spectral evidence was allowed. This meant that if the accusing girls said they saw a specter, a floating spirit that no one else could see, their testimony was believed, without any outside corroboration. If they said that a witch’s specter was biting or pinching them, then that’s the way it was. How could any of the accused refute such evidence?
Possibly because of her having been accused of witchcraft before, Bishop was the first to be tried, found guilty, and hanged in June, 1692; five more women, including Sarah Good and Rebecca Nurse, were hanged the following month. Sarah Osbourne escaped the gallows only by having died earlier while imprisoned. Martha Corey was hanged in September. Her 80 year-old husband Giles, a wealthy farmer and church member, but known as a grumpy, stubborn, and irascible man, who had also been arrested in the spring, refused to plead innocent or guilty. His penalty for rebelliousness was to be crushed to death under heavy stones; it took him more than a week to die and caused some people in the community to question their actions.[5] That was the only time that punishment was used in the colonies. No witch in the colonies was ever burned.
One of the more interesting cases was that of George Burroughs, a former Salem minister, who had not gotten along with the Putnam family and who had been accused by Anne. It was believed that no witch could recite the entire Lord’s Prayer, but just before he was hanged, Burroughs recited it flawlessly. His recitation planted more seeds of doubt in the minds of some citizens.
By the fall of 1692 people realized that things had gotten out of hand. Finally the governor of Massachusetts, William Phips, stopped the trials shortly after his own wife was accused of witchcraft. He pardoned the eight people who had been condemned to die but whose sentences had not been carried out and dismissed all convictions that had been based on spectral evidence. By May 1693 all prisoners were released and the nightmare was over.[6] Nineteen people had been hanged, one pressed to death, and four more had died in prison.
So what really happened to the girls of the Salem area? Scholars don’t know, but here are a few hypotheses. One explanation is that the girls were actually suffering from a mental or physical ailment from one source or another. These sources might have been poisoning by ergot, which is a fungus found in rye bread; encephalitis carried by mosquitoes, or even post-traumatic stress syndrome. The 11 year-old orphan Abigail Williams may have seen her parents murdered by local Indians. The most likely cause was that the girls began a game that simply got out of hand. In a culture that truly believed that children should be seen but not heard, they may have manifested their symptoms because they were seeking attention. One source said that for this brief time they were Puritan rock stars.[7]
After the hysteria ended, none of the girls was ever charged for their actions. Anne Putnam was the only one of the bewitched girls that apologized for her actions. In 1708 she blamed her behavior on Satan and asked her parish for forgiveness.[8] Samuel Sewell, one of the judges who had sentenced the witches to death, also repented of his role and later became a leader in establishing the rights of the persecuted. He wrote one of the first antislavery articles in the nation.[9]
In 1710 the governor of Massachusetts Bay reversed the charges of the people who had died in the witch-hunt, and the government made payments to 24 families that had lost family members or property during the period. Because of the infamy of Salem Village, it changed its name in 1752 to Danvers, the town that Ann and I had coincidentally stayed in. In 1957 the state of Massachusetts formally apologized for the events of 1692, and then in 1992, three hundred years after the events, the Massachusetts House of Representatives passed a resolution acknowledging that the victims of the Salem witch trials were innocent.[10]
So what can we conclude from this sad story, and what lessons from it can we take into our lives three hundred years later?  Especially in these days before a very important election, we might want to think about these points.
1.     Fear and belief trump reason. While reason may draw folks to one conclusion, heavy doses of belief and fear may move them elsewhere. Our current political climate resonates with fear and belief. We can be so afraid of a candidate or believe so badly about him or her, that we lose our perspective and the ability to think rationally about the person. Some of the letters to the editor of the Daily News-Record and some of the paper’s columns amply illustrate this point.
2.     Hysteria happens, and we get so caught up in one issue or another that we can’t think beyond it. Yes, our upcoming election is very important, but other important matters need our attention too. For instance, the economy and the fact that nine hundred million people right now go to bed hungry.
3.     It is important for us not to be quick to judge others who happen to think or act differently than ourselves. Many of us here today have trouble seeing how our neighbors could possibly view politics through the lenses that they do. When we fail to understand people different from ourselves- often the poor, the immigrants, the elderly, sexual minorities, or people who do not share our political persuasion for example– it is easy to objectify them and decide that they do not deserve our respect. I think one of the strengths of the UUs is our inclusiveness, but we always can always use a reminder to embrace with compassion.
4.     Our final lesson may be that apology is important. We may never make sufficient restitution to society’s victims or to a victim of our own ill will, but sometimes an apology is a step in the right direction. It takes a person or a government of principle to apologize.
So I’ve come to the end of my tale, and in researching the Salem witch trials over the past few weeks I’ve decided that I was a bit too harsh in judging the folks in Salem for making a buck from witchcraft today.  While the effects of the Salem trials were horrific, the events there are just a drop in the bucket of all the injustice done to people over the millennia.  We resonate with the Salem witch trials because they are on a scale that we can relate to; it’s a tragedy we can name rather than one vague one. I like Halloween and the idea of witches and will celebrate the thirty-first and hope that I’ll have some Hershey’s miniatures left for me, but the 24 people who died in Salem will remind me that belief and fear can be killers. So may it be.
Witchcraft or sorcery has been a pattern common to many human societies. Ancient texts from Egypt and Babylonia refer to malicious magic that is believed to have the power to influence the mind, body, or possessions, to malicious magic users who become the cause of disease, sickness in animals, bad luck, sudden death, impotence, or other misfortunes. Then good witchcraft can sometimes be applied to turn the malevolence aside.
The Code of Hammurabi, 2000 BC had a regulation for determining who put spells on whom and how to prove the claim. There are numerous references to witches or sorcerers in the Old and New Testaments. All of them are negative-the message is avoid them-and the most famous of them all in its King James version is Exodus 22:18 “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” The Talmud refers to magic as well, though sometimes the magic is confused with miracles. Islam also has references to magic.
As Christianity tightened its grip on Europe, witch hunts became common in Europe from the 1300s through the 1500s and continued many years after that. It is estimated that forty to fifty thousand people were executed during that time in France, Italy, Germany, and France. The Old Testament verse Exodus 22:18, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” was the justification.[11] Around 1645 in England, more people were hanged in one county than were ever hanged in all of New England.[12] England’s last witchcraft hanging was in 1713, and Scotland’s in 1722.[13]
Don’t think that witchcraft is a thing of the past. A number of African, Caribbean, and Southeast Asian cultures still have their witch doctors or healers. As of 2006, between 25,000 and 50,000 children in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo, had been accused of witchcraft and thrown out of their homes.[14] Witches have recently been blamed and arrested in Kinshasha for penis-snatching and shrinking. In Kenya on May 21 of this year a mob burnt to death 11 folks accused of witchcraft. In Tanzania 25 albinos have been murdered since March 2007, and the country’s president has condemned witchdoctors for killing them for their body parts, which are thought to bring good luck.[15]
[1] “Witches,” Wikipedia, 9/25/08.
[2] Marilynnne K. Roach, In the Days of the Salem Witchcraft Trials, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co, 1996, p. 6.
[3] Tamra Orr, People at the Center of the Salem Witch Trials, San Diego: Blackbirch Press, 2004), p. 14.
[7] Jane Yolen and Heidi Elisabet Yolen Stemple, The Salem Witch Trials: An Unsolved Mystery from History, New York: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2004; “Salem Witch Trials” DVD..
[11] History Channel, “The Salem Witch Trials,” DVD.
ShadowTheRaven wrote: You know, I've been real cautious about not burning myself out for the sake of overperformance, but Spectre's recent appearance is starting to make me think "To hell with it" all over again.
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