“Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil,
as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.”
1 Peter 5:8
Zealously obedient to this admonishment from the apostle Peter, the
Puritans of New England scoured their souls—and those of their neighbors—for
even
the faintest stains. These stern, godly folk were ready to stare down that
roaring lion till Judgment Day saw him vanquished.
But while the good people of Salem had their eyes on eternity, the lion
walked softly among them during the 1670s and 1680s. Salem was divided into a
prosperous town—second only to Boston—and a farming village. The two bickered
again and again. The villagers, in turn, were split into factions that
fiercely debated whether to seek ecclesiastical and political independence
from the
town.
In 1689 the villagers won the right to establish their own church and chose
the Reverend Samuel Parris, a former merchant, as their minister. His rigid
ways and seemingly boundless demands for compensation—including personal title
to the village parsonage—increased the friction. Many villagers vowed to
drive Parris out, and they stopped contributing to his salary in October
1691.
Seeking release from the tension choking their family, Parris’s
nine-year-old daughter, Betty, and her cousin Abigail Williams delighted in
the
mesmerizing tales spun by Tituba, a slave from Barbados. The girls invited
several
friends to share this delicious, forbidden diversion. Tituba’s audience
listened
intently as she talked of telling the future.
The lion roared in February 1692. Betty Parris began having “fitts” that
defied all explanation. So did Abigail Williams and the girls’ friend Ann
Putnam. Doctors and ministers watched in horror as the girls contorted
themselves,
cowered under chairs, and shouted nonsense. The girls’ agonies “could not
possibly be Dissembled,” declared the Reverend Cotton Mather, one of the
brightest stars in the Massachusetts firmament.
Lacking a natural explanation, the Puritans turned to the supernatural—the
girls were bewitched. Prodded by Parris and others, they named their
tormentors: a disheveled beggar named Sarah Good, the elderly Sarah Osburn,
and Tituba
herself. Each woman was something of a misfit. Osburn claimed innocence.
Good did likewise but fingered Osburn. Tituba, recollection refreshed by
Parris’
s lash, confessed—and then some.
“The devil came to me and bid me serve him,” she reported in March 1692.
Villagers sat spellbound as Tituba spoke of black dogs, red cats, yellow
birds,
and a white-haired man who bade her sign the devil’s book. There were
several undiscovered witches, she said, and they yearned to destroy the
Puritans.
Finding witches became a crusade—not only for Salem but all Massachusetts.
Before long the crusade turned into a convulsion, and the witch-hunters
ultimately proved far more deadly than their prey.
(http://www3.nationalgeographic.com/salem/newcountryroadframe.html)
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