Witches and Warlocks, Terrorists and Sex Offenders

[icymist]

Szandor Blestman
July 23, 2007
From the fifteenth century to the nineteenth century, people were accused of witchcraft, put on trial and sentenced to death if found guilty. These proceedings were often barbaric and one sided. The accused never stood a chance. Torture was used to obtain confessions. Trickery was used to obtain witnesses. Convictions resulted in death sentences, but sometimes the interrogation led to death. The trials were nothing but theatre, a farcical sideshow to convince the masses that there was some semblance of justice to these state sponsored murders. The vast majority of these “witches”, these victims of the state, were women. Some men were also accused, but usually the victim was a witch and not a warlock. There are many reasons given for why these atrocities happened, but I have my own ideas. Historians would have us believe that way back when people believed in witches and warlocks and were ignorant of the sciences and what actually made our world work. To an extent, this is true. The general masses of people living at the time had little or no access to education. They believed in a living devil, demons and possessions and attributed all the evils of the world to these things. But there were men of science both in and out of the church that knew different. They refused to teach the common man the truth. Why? Power. Control. These are the things that such men coveted. Knowledge is power. To teach the people of various illnesses and of other sciences would be to relinquish a certain amount of control. To perpetuate these myths, and in doing so the injustices imparted upon those accused of being witches, was to maintain power and dominion over the populace. It was these injustices and persecutions, along with many others, that helped propel people across the Atlantic Ocean to a new world where they could live free of tyranny.

Ahh, but it was not to be. A group of Protestant Church members who themselves had been persecuted in Europe found passage across the Atlantic and settled in the new English colonies in an attempt to escape said persecution. They came to the new world and began their own communities. Before too long they were struggling in a dangerous world where they could be besieged by natives, or their crops could fail, or a severe winter could wipe them out. But survive they did and by the late seventeenth century they had well established settlements and a well defined political structure. It was at this time that they started a little persecution of their own. It started when an illness or some sort of seizures were suffered by two young female relatives of a minister. The minister and the town physician decided a witch’s curse was to blame for these afflictions. At first only three women were accused of witchcraft, these being a slave woman owned by the family, an impoverished single woman and an old woman who was not well liked by the townsfolk. These three people were easy targets because they were undesirable, but the episode didn’t end with their deaths and eventually led to the Salem witch hunt which ended up costing 20 people their lives, including fourteen women and six men, and resulted in the incarceration of an estimated 175-200 others. Most of the confessions used at the trials of these people were coerced through torture. Most of the witnesses were young children, females, who were easily manipulated. Many of the men who were caught up in this turmoil were merely trying to defend the women. When they spoke out against the injustices being perpetrated against their wives or another family member they were quickly also accused and incarcerated with no evidence other than the fact that they questioned those in power. Soon people began to realize that anyone could be accused of being a witch, not just the undesirables, but that didn’t really seem to matter. A frenzy ensued in which the properties of those who were accused of being witches were forfeited as well as the properties of those who were convicted. It seems that these people were concerned with more than just stopping witchcraft. There were profits to be made from all the hubbub. All of a sudden there was more involved than just protecting the public from these very dangerous witches and warlocks who could cast their spells upon their unwitting victims, there was money, power and control to be had.

There have been many explanations proffered to explain why these events took place in Salem Massachusetts. I’ve heard everything from the Puritans truly believing witches existed in league with the devil to fungus growing on the wheat they ate which had a hallucinogenic affect on the populace and made them believe they were actually seeing witchcraft in action. I believe these men were educated enough to realize that witches and magic were not instruments of the devil, but that they were myths to be used to control the populace through fear. I also believe that these men knew when an opportunity arose and how to take full advantage of it. Furthermore, once the ball had started rolling, it became difficult for them to back down or admit that they had made a mistake and that witchcraft was a myth. It took the establishment of a superior court about a year later to put an end to the madness by releasing most of those who had been arrested due to the fact that their arrests had been based on “spectral” evidence.


Thank goodness we have progressed past such thinking. Thank goodness we no longer punish people based on myth. It’s a good thing that we no longer are scared little children shaking in our shoes and easily misled by fear. Take the terrorists, for example. We are holding many of them all over the world. I’m sure we have a great deal of physical evidence that we can present to a jury so that they’d find them guilty. That’s why we don’t hold them for too long without a trial. That’s why we give them an open, fair public trial which everyone can see and hear, we are that certain they are in fact terrorists and not some farmer that some of our allies picked up for money or some other poor schmoo that might have been defending his home and/or family. We, being morally superior and having learned our lessons from past experiences, would never resort to torture to extract a confession from one of these prisoners. We are not so fearful of these people as to think they could magically conjure up some spell or summon some devil to possess us and perhaps make us destroy ourselves. We are not so fearful as to beg our government to take away our rights so they can protect us from these monsters. We would never execute an innocent person like they did in Salem over three hundred years ago. We have grown beyond that.

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[ayeshahaqqiqa]

1. FYI

Salem wasn't the first outbreak of witch hysteria in Massachusetts. About 50 years earlier, a woman in Watertown was accused as well, but the populace stood up and stopped the frenzy, including one of my ancestors. Interestingly enough, one of my ancestors was condemned as a witch, and another was foreman of another witch trial.

The article is right in its assumtion that the whole thing was a grab for power by the ministers. The women who were first condemned were old, poor, on the margins of society. Anne Foster was a widow, her children farmers--no political power, though they were literate enough to sign their names to documents. She was accused of witchcraft because she had stopped going to church after one of her daughters was murdered by a drunken husband just a few years after Anne's husband died.

Thomas Fiske was foreman of the jury in the Rebecca Nurse trial. Interestingly enough, several years later, he wrote a document recanting his actions and explaining why he and the other members of the jury voted to convict, when they were ready to set the woman free--basically, the ministers in charge told them to "reconsider". This document is fascinating, and a matter of public record.

[icymist]

2. I like the comparison of terrorists to the Salem witch trials as a money grab.

Especially now that Dimson signed a decree that property can be confiscated for dissent against his War On Terra in Iraq!