When i hear burning times, for whatever reason, I think the area in Salem, I believe, where I think, the paranoia was started as a joke and then escalated to an extreme. Is that right, or? Cause there was more in other places besides that but?
Ok I wanna do this justice. Its not a bad thing that you think that because that’s what we get told over and over here in the US. So. You’re getting an essay, and I’m sorry but I’m not sorry.
What They Say Happened
It comes from a 1990 documentary from Canada that you can watch on youtube if you hate yourself enough. They’re factually incorrect, barely did any research, and they’re just wrong and racist through the whole thing. They say millions of women died over hundreds of years, globally, and that it was a “women’s Holocaust”, which as a woman and a Jewish woman, they can go fuck themselves right now. I’ll wait. Later, other writers have focused it more on the Americas, and they’re still incorrect and racist. That’s mostly the one I’m addressing here.
What Happened In Salem
The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693 which resulted in the executions of twenty people, fourteen of them women, and all but one by hanging. It began when two young girls began having fits and contortions and wouldn’t stop screaming, and a doctor diagnosed them with bewitchment. It was a politically tense time and Puritan communities were incredibly xenophobic and judgmental and they blamed three women, one of them a Black slave as the cause. Tituba, the slave, confessed. Some think she was trying to get herself a better deal, some think that she was coerced because this wasn’t even America yet, there were no Constitutional rights protecting her during interrogation, and even today false confessions are unfortunately common. Either way, she named other women (Because she didn’t like them? Because she was told to? Its unclear) and hysteria spread. [x]
In retrospect, it was likely ergot poisoning. It could have happened through contaminated wheat, and it has basically the same effects as LSD, and it can also cause convulsions and mania. Given that the madness started with two sick children, its likely that they were just more sensitive to it and reacted worse, and everybody else panicked and was disoriented and did what people do best and turned on anyone they didn’t like as the “obvious” cause. But their doctors didn’t even know to wash their hands and “bewitchment” was still on the books as an actual diagnosis.
Why We Keep Hearing About It
Well it was a scary time, and it got really out of hand, and then people wrote books and plays about it. If you’ve been to American schools I’m positive they’ve made you read The Crucible, which is a dramatic re-telling, and then they tell you about McCarthyism and then you just want to lay down and never read again. Oh I’ve been there.
It caught people’s attention. Children were actually hurt, justice was perverted, and it only ended when the Governor stepped in and told them to get their shit in order. Wait you haven’t heard that part?
What They Conveniently Leave Out
Yeah the town’s Minister, Cotton Mather, and his father, Increase Mather, the president of Harvard Collage, urged the town to avoid the use of “spectral evidence” in the convictions. Yeah, the Minister was not in on this at all, he was very uncomfortable with the whole situation. The court on the other hand, ignored him and continued to churn out convictions. In fact, Increase is quoted as saying “It would better that ten suspected witches may escape than one innocent person be condemned.”
As word got around, Governor Phips stepped in and dissolved their courts and issued pardons, releasing all those still in prison on charges of witchcraft.
In January 1697, the Massachusetts General Court declared a day of fasting for the tragedy of the Salem witch trials; the court later deemed the trials unlawful, and the leading justice Samuel Sewall publicly apologized for his role in the process. The damage to the community lingered, however, even after Massachusetts Colony passed legislation restoring the good names of the condemned and providing financial restitution to their heirs in 1711. [x]
But that wasn’t even the first witch trial in the early Americas. 30 years earlier, in Hartford, Connecticut, there was a hysterical witchcraft outbreak after a young girl died from who knows what, because again, medicine basically didn’t exist back then and autopsies were still illegal. Other trials happened in smaller batches through the colonies on and off and were barely recorded. People didn’t understand medicine, were tense from Native American raids, feared any religion practiced by their African Slaves, and basically hated each other and didn’t have an adequate outlet to express emotions, so they panicked and murdered each other. Classic American behavior, honestly.
Why This Narrative Is Flawed
So if its basically true, why is it a problem? Well its not an issue to remember these events and be wary going forward and mourn the deaths of the people that have died. But the narrative is flawed because it was not some mass killing, it was a handful of people over the years, with Salem being the biggest in American history. But before that, in Europe, people were put to death for it. And in Africa. And Asia. And South America. And Australia and the South Pacific. The original story mentions that it was a larger scale even, but leaves out that many of them are men, or children. There have always been good practitioners and bad practitioners, in every culture, and the bad ones, the ones that are not of us, whoever that us is, must be killed. Good practitioners get labeled faithful, the bringers of culture and religion, and the bad ones get called monsters and demons and put to death.
An incomplete narrative is one thing, and in the average person I would chalk it up to ignorance, but my real issue is with larger writers who I shall not name to avoid starting fights, but you know who I mean. Larger writers who are going to write a book and have the audacity to be incorrect don’t deserve to be published. And worse still, its part of a larger, more insidious behavior: racism.
To focus on the “Burning Times” as a pivotal moment, or even the greatest tragedy of our community is to focus the bulk of the importance on the West, and on predominately white people, and in most narratives, predominately on women. Because to many of these writers, that’s what a witch is, a white, western woman. Rarely do they remember Tituba, or all the black men and women whose names were never recorded because nobody ever cared to mention them. They never remember all the Native Americans put to death for their religion. They never remember the witch hunts that went on in other parts of the world, or that in some parts they still continue today. They focus the narrative on white, western women and say “but its over”. Its not over.
It was a pivotal moment in history, and in American history, and we shouldn’t stop remembering, but we need to remember exactly what happened and what the context was. Its important for everybody, not just witches. But its important to remember all the other people who were put to death in all the other parts of the world, because most times they were outsiders, or the disabled, or religious minorities, or people with some kind of knowledge. Remember that when the plague hit, Jews, Muslims, and women who studied medicine and knew to wipe their asses and wash their hands didn’t get the plague and were put to death. (I say women because male doctors thought they were clean by virtue of existing, which is a different rant for a different day). In the past few years, “witch graves” were found containing young children with anything from epilepsy to anemia.
What We Should Remember Instead
We’re witches. We’re the fringe. And what we need to remember is to protect the most marginalized part of our group, of any group.
Protect trans and non-binary witches
Protect LGBT+ witches
Protect witches of color
Protect witches of all faiths, especially the marginalized ones
Protect young witches
Protect older witches
Protect disabled witches
Protect immigrant witches
Protect male witches
Protect new witches
Protect people who aren’t witches but are otherwise marginalized
We’re witches. We seek the truth beyond the mundane, we seek the power to understand and grow. This is what we should remember, what we should take away. There’s a million kind of witchcraft, but this should be the one thing that unites us all, regardless of anything else.
We’re witches. We should remember.
Bam. Well said.
Over the last two weeks I’ve seen a few treatments of what ‘The Burning Times’ are/were/aren’t/weren’t, and why and how its use in popular media is massively flawed. I’ve found this one wonderfully thorough and accessible.
To add my European two € cents: It wasn’t even really about witchcraft either; at least not in Europe. If you check the social standing of the victims, you’ll notice that many, many of them were affluent outsiders of the norm, like rich widows, who were insufficiently protected by familial bonds. Now, if you condemn a person to death because of witchcraft, all their belongings go to the town/city coffers. It wasn’t about fear of evil. It was about picking off people who they thought they could get away with killing to gain money.
The “Burning Times” were a symptom of a changing society – power moved from the hands of nobles to merchants and magistrates, women were ousted from craft councils where they had been represented at all times during the Middle Ages, and they lost the right to administer to or own anything, not even the clothes on their backs. It was a time of revival for backwards ideas about gender and medicine from antiquity (which medieval lore had readily surpassed), and a time of a sudden influx of a lot more foreign goods, people, and ideas (which a lot of people were really uncomfortable with) – and illnesses like the Black Death. All that contributed to a social climate that made those horrifying things possible.
The Middle Ages usually get blamed for producing the witch hunts and the Malleus Maleficiarum – but indeed, the true “Dark Age” was the so called Renaissance.
The Carving Witch 