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The most famous American venture into the field of witch-hunting took place in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. To this day most Americans think that Salem and the Puritans who lived there in the seventeenth century were uniquely wicked or deluded; that Salem was one of the great world centers of the witch persecution. In fact it was no such thing. It was a small and rather insignificant late outburst of a European social phenomenon which had just about run its course. But it was America's biggest witch scandal and we have always been proud of it. Instead we should probably congratulate ourselves on the considerable extent to which we avoided the witch hysteria that tore whole sections of Europe to pieces for several hundred years.

The cause of the Salem witch troubles was the same as the German, French, or Italian witch troubles, or indeed, any other known. Fundamentally it was this: seventeenth-century European man, like the twentieth-century Jivaro, was in general not capable of conceiving of fortuitous mischance. Epidemics, household accidents, bad luck, drowning, obstruction in one's career--indeed, all irritations whatsoever--were seen as the result of opposing influence, the malign wishes of a neighbor or some other enemy, aided more often than not by professional evildoers: witches, sorcerers, witch doctors. Now Salem, like the rest of New England, had always been precariously fixed: a tiny outpost on the edge of a continent truly dark and inhabited by legions of savages who even at their more quiescent moments were understood to be servants of Satan. The quality of life was, even beyond this paranoid circumstance, particularly hard and trying; that is, disregarding the unknown possibilities of the hinterland, the colonies were engaged in a day-to-day struggle against cold, hunger, and general deprivation which has become proverbial. True, they had for the most part gained a fairly solid footing by the end of the seventeenth century, but even so the year 1692 found Salem unusually hard-pressed.

The Indians were on the warpath, the French were hostile, there were pirates on the seas. The colonists' own English government was not much more pleasant to deal with: not content with imposing crushing taxes, it was in the process of questioning Salem's very constitution. Moreover the winter was exceptionally hard, and there was a smallpox epidemic. So in addition to hardship and danger we may cite uncertainty, perhaps the greatest cause of all of community hysteria; the reader will recall the witch outbursts at their height in England during the confused early period of the civil war, and in Germany during the religious broils of the Thirty Years' War.

The origin of the Salem incident was in the harmless custom of a group of girls, or young women, of coming over to the Reverend Samuel Parris's house to listen to his slave Tituba's ghost stories. Tituba was apparently a Carib Indian, not a Negro, as is often stated.

Her tales were so inspiring that before long they had some of the girls in convulsions: Parris broke up the group but the fits continued. At first these attacks manifested themselves in relatively harmless flouting of authority: the girls had the pleasure of disrupting prayers, throwing Bibles about, and sassing their elders. Events took an ugly turn however, as the hysteria spread to older girls: at the height of the Salem persecutions, the chief accusers were not children, but mostly girls in their late teens.

As people began to become concerned about the girls' behavior and to try to cure them, they naturally began to think of witchcraft as the cause of such preposterous and unheard-of behavior. The girls seem to have taken their cue from the questions of their better-informed elders, and begun to show significant symptoms: not only a (to our minds) very natural distaste for the long Puritan prayers, but a real inability to say them, or the name of God; and they now had visions of the Devil and his ministers, lurking nearby. And they began to name names. . .

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