The Influence of Puritanism on the Salem Witch Hunts

- The witchcraft trials in Salem were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. - The trials were sparked by a group of young girls who claimed to be possessed by evil spirits and accused several people in the community of practicing witchcraft. - These accusations spread fear and paranoia throughout the community, leading to a wave of arrests and trials. - The trials were heavily influenced by religious beliefs and superstitions of the time, with the accused being presumed guilty until proven innocent. - The evidence used during the trials was often based on spectral evidence, which was considered to be the testimony of the afflicted girls claiming to see the spirits of the accused. - Many innocent people were accused and wrongfully convicted, with a total of 20 people executed and several others dying in jail.

This is the question I set out to answer in my book, Waking the Witch: Reflections on Women, Magic, and Power. In it, I explore how the figure of the witch is inextricably linked to our anxieties and aspirations regarding female power. Looking at witches in fiction became a crucial part of my research because, as I quickly discovered, the archetype of the witch is constantly evolving, and beliefs about “real” witches are deeply influenced by the stories we tell about them. In other words, our conception of witches is a cross-pollination—or even a cross-pollution—between reality and fantasy.

More than one woman wears a voluminous cape; some subjects fingers are crowded with ornate, sculptural rings, and others makeup is goth-y and exaggerated lips crimson, eyes dramatically shaded. Okorafor s Akata series is an example of Africanjujuism, a term she coined to describe, in her words, a subcategory of fantasy that respectfully acknowledges the seamless blend of true existing African spiritualities and cosmologies with the imaginative.

- Many innocent people were accused and wrongfully convicted, with a total of 20 people executed and several others dying in jail. - The trials came to an end after the daughter of the governor was accused of witchcraft, leading to doubts about the credibility of the afflicted girls. - The aftermath of the trials saw a significant decline in belief in witchcraft and a shift towards a more rational and evidence-based approach to justice.

The Many Faces of Women Who Identify as Witches

My first encounter with the figure of a witch in popular culture—apart from those in kids’ movies like Disney’s “Sleeping Beauty” and M-G-M’s “The Wizard of Oz,” or in books like Tomie dePaola’s “Strega Nona” and Roald Dahl’s “The Witches”—was in a campy scene from Oliver Stone’s 1991 bio-pic, “The Doors,” depicting Jim Morrison (played by Val Kilmer) and one of his lovers, a Wiccan witch (a character played by Kathleen Quinlan, and based on the rock journalist Patricia Kennealy, who reportedly married the singer in a Celtic handfasting ceremony, in 1970). In the flickering light of dozens of candles barely illuminating a high-ceilinged chamber, the two peruse an esoteric sorcery tract in the nude, snort cocaine, slit their wrists with a dagger, drink each other’s blood, and have wild sex to the shrieking strains of Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana.”

More than a quarter century later, the often paradoxical grab bag of clichés tied to the contemporary figure of the witch is not that far off, I think, from those shown in Stone’s movie. The witch is often understood as a mishmash of sometimes contradictory clichés: sexually forthright but psychologically mysterious; threatening and haggish but irresistibly seductive; a kooky believer in cultish mumbo-jumbo and a canny she-devil; a sophisticated holder of arcane spiritual knowledge and a corporeal being who is no thought and all instinct. Even more recently, the witch has entered the Zeitgeist as a figure akin to the so-called nasty woman, who—in the face of a Presidential Administration that is quick to cast any criticism as a “witch hunt”—has reclaimed the term for the feminist resistance. (This latter-day witchiness has often been corralled to commercial ends: an Urban Outfitters shirt bearing the words “Boss Ass Witch,” say, or the women-only co-working space the Wing referring to itself as a “coven.”) The muddled stereotypes that surround witches nowadays are, in the end, not so very different from those used to define that perennial problem: woman.

In her portrait series “Major Arcana: Witches in America,” which will be shown at the ClampArt gallery, in Chelsea, beginning October 4th, the photographer Frances F. Denny seeks to explore the figure of the contemporary witch beyond the cultural chestnuts that have shrouded and obscured it. In the course of the past two years, Denny, who holds an M.F.A. in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design (where I taught her for a semester a number of years ago), has travelled in California, Louisiana, and along the East Coast, taking the portraits of dozens of women who identify as witches. Her subjects are of diverse age, social class, and ethnicity, and practice a range of rituals, often drawing on “mysticism, engagement with the occult, politically oriented activism, polytheism, ritualized ‘spell-work’ and plant-based healing,” according to Denny’s exhibition notes. Among them are “self-proclaimed green witches, white witches, kitchen witches, hedge witches, and sex witches.” The series as a whole aims to avoid easy formulas and, instead, to exhibit the heterogeneity and individuality of modern-day witches, Denny told me recently, adding, “I’m not pinning these women down.”

In one photograph—“Randy (Plainfield, VT)”—a grandmotherly woman is standing in a lush green meadow, wearing a flower-sprigged sack dress, her hair arranged a bit girlishly in tousled white ringlets. In one hand she casually clasps a pair of divining rods, while in the other she holds up a pendulum, her gaze raised toward it, her lips upturned in a slight, self-possessed smile. In another—“Kir (Brooklyn, NY)”—a young, lithe woman is dressed in tight black jeans and a tank top, her booted feet planted firmly on a city street, a large, inquisitive-looking tabby cat on a leash at her side. And in “Shine (New York, NY),” a statuesque black woman, posed against a wall of ivy, is dressed in an elaborately embroidered coat, gazing piercingly at the camera. These subjects are all self-identified witches, and yet that fact would not be immediately or necessarily obvious to the uninformed viewer. When she first started the project, Denny read a book by Margot Adler about witches, in which the late journalist and Wiccan priestess argued that “witch” was not just a word but “a cluster of powerful images,” Denny said. “So I thought, I want to make this cluster of images.”

Denny asked the women she photographed for the series to wear an outfit or bring along an item that they felt would represent their practice and identity as witches, and some of the portraits do answer more readily to our expectations of what a witch might look like. More than one woman wears a voluminous cape; some subjects’ fingers are crowded with ornate, sculptural rings, and others’ makeup is goth-y and exaggerated—lips crimson, eyes dramatically shaded. They brandish mysterious implements—a crystal ball, a bow and arrow, a wooden staff; one woman reclines, entwined with a snake—and most are dressed in black. Still, Denny said, it was important for her to make portraits that diverge from the ways she had seen witches typically photographed. “In what I saw out there, there was a lot of low lighting, and a lot of use of colored gels, usually purple or green. There was an immense theatricality,” she told me. In her photographs, Denny used natural light whenever possible, and the women are posed straightforwardly, facing the camera. Like other portraitists, such as the contemporary Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra, or the twentieth-century German master August Sander, Denny captures her subjects suspended delicately between performativity and naturalism. These self-identified witches are positioning themselves before us, fully conscious of our eye, and Denny is allowing them a lovely three-dimensionality.

In her portrait series “Major Arcana: Witches in America,” which will be shown at the ClampArt gallery, in Chelsea, beginning October 4th, the photographer Frances F. Denny seeks to explore the figure of the contemporary witch beyond the cultural chestnuts that have shrouded and obscured it. In the course of the past two years, Denny, who holds an M.F.A. in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design (where I taught her for a semester a number of years ago), has travelled in California, Louisiana, and along the East Coast, taking the portraits of dozens of women who identify as witches. Her subjects are of diverse age, social class, and ethnicity, and practice a range of rituals, often drawing on “mysticism, engagement with the occult, politically oriented activism, polytheism, ritualized ‘spell-work’ and plant-based healing,” according to Denny’s exhibition notes. Among them are “self-proclaimed green witches, white witches, kitchen witches, hedge witches, and sex witches.” The series as a whole aims to avoid easy formulas and, instead, to exhibit the heterogeneity and individuality of modern-day witches, Denny told me recently, adding, “I’m not pinning these women down.”

- The trials have since become a symbol of the dangers of mass hysteria and the importance of due process and the presumption of innocence..

Reviews for "Comparing the Salem Witch Trials to Other Witch Hunts in History"

1. Jane - 2 stars

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2. Mark - 1 star

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3. Emily - 2 stars

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4. Michael - 1 star

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5. Sarah - 2 stars

"The witchcraft trials in Salem quizlet fell short of my expectations. The questions lacked nuance and failed to address the various factors that contributed to the hysteria surrounding the trials. The quizlet seemed to focus only on the direct events without exploring the cultural and religious climate of the time. Additionally, the lack of context made it difficult to fully comprehend the implications of the trials on the history of witchcraft persecution. I would recommend supplementing this quizlet with more extensive resources for a more comprehensive understanding of the Salem witch trials."

The Salem Witch Trials: The Intersection of Religion and Law