Early American horror show

Salem's weren't the first witch hunts, either; many people were executed for witchcraft in medieval Europe as well as in England and Scotland no more than a few decades before the crisis in Massachusetts. What makes Salem extraordinary, as Norton points out, were the sheer numbers of accusers and accused, as well as the variety of people charged. Usually the people targeted as witches were what Norton calls the "usual suspects": quarrelsome older women of "dubious reputation." (The idea that witch hunts were church-run persecutions of wise old herbalists carrying on the remnants of pre-Christian woman-centered nature religions is regarded as wishful thinking by serious historians.) In Salem, many men were accused (and six were executed), as were prominent citizens and respectable, pious members of the church.

Also remarkable was the nature of their accusers, mostly young and female; the two girls who launched the crisis were 11 and 9. Most of the afflicted were in their teens, and only one was over 30, though Norton argues that their complaints of bewitchments were taken much more seriously when Ann Putnam, a 30-year-old wife and mother, joined their ranks. Although the afflicted were not the solid adult citizens who were the usual complainants in witchcraft trials, their charges were uncustomarily treated as very credible. And contrary to yet another popular misconception, there's no evidence that the afflicted had as a group engaged in any spell-casting of their own, although fortune-telling and countermagic (to protect against evil enchantments) were common, if forbidden, folk practices of the time. (And while we're at it, no one was burned at the stake in Salem, or accused of flying through the air on a broom.)

Historians have come up with at least a half-dozen explanations for what was wrong with those girls and why so many people around them were willing to see their neighbors hang for it. Feminists have called the Trials both a misogynist rampage (ignoring how many men were accused) or a rebellion on the part of young women, many of them servants (including Mercy Lewis, a 19-year-old whom Norton figures for the informal ringleader), who were disgusted with their dismal, powerless lot in life. Other scholars have dismissed this interpretation and claimed that the Trials actually constituted a proxy battle for contesting factions among the town's male leaders. Still others have suspected epidemics of ergot poisoning or encephalitis that supposedly induced the afflicted's fits and visions of spectral tormentors.

Norton (who writes that she began her history expecting to advance another feminist interpretation) offers the theory that the Trials were a displaced response to the trauma of the Indian Wars on the frontiers of the British settlements in New England. She traces the connections the various participants had to Maine, the location of some especially bloody conflicts with the Wabanaki tribes and their French allies. Today, knowing as we do that the Indians would ultimately lose everything, it's easy to forget how fragile those early British settlements felt to their residents, especially in 1692, when it seemed that the Indians and French were enjoying "continued and seemingly unstoppable successes," and the Indians were boasting that they'd soon have the continent to themselves again.

Norton traces some of the hideous spectral visions of the afflicted (witches were seen roasting human beings on spits, for example) to reports of similar Indian atrocities. Some of the afflicted girls saw friends and relatives tortured and killed before their eyes and were forced to become servants when they lost everything after Maine homesteads were attacked and had to be abandoned. Norton insists that revenge against the leaders who failed to protect them must have at least unconsciously motivated the afflicted girls. (Two of the high-status men accused were the reverend of a Maine congregation and a naval captain said to have sold arms to the Indians.) The judges and clergymen who accepted the girls' accounts were eager to blame their inability to defend their people on the evil designs of Satan, who was said to have sent both the Indians and the witches to destroy the Christian enclave of New England.

It's a persuasive argument, even if Norton does wind up pushing it too hard. She's more convincing when she's merely asserting that "the conflict created the conditions that allowed the crisis to develop as rapidly and extensively as it did," than when she appears to be presenting the Indian Wars as the primary cause of the crisis. It's easy to see how the threat at the frontier and the lack of clear-cut authority at home (Salem Village -- now the city of Danvers -- was still unhappily dependent on Salem Town, while the very governance of Massachusetts was in flux at that time, awaiting a new charter from London) made the prevailing atmosphere jumpy and irritable, a feeling the youngsters no doubt picked up on even it they didn't entirely understand it.

Yet however plausible Norton's theory, like the others, it doesn't feel quite complete. At the end of "In the Devil's Snare," there's an appendix in the form of a chart listing the cases heard by the court with the various relevant dates. Scanning down through the column marked "Outcome," the entries read "Hanged, July 19," "Hanged, Sept. 22," "Hanged, Aug. 19," "Pressed, Sept. 19" and so on -- a chill litany that speaks of some irreducible darkness in human nature that can't ever be fully explained. Norton's theory is an interesting part of a fascinating conversation, but it's not the last word. Furthermore, while Norton claims that her book is a straightforward chronological history of the crisis, in fact, "In the Devil's Snare" is a lamentably confusing and often tedious read. For the curious nonscholar, Marilynne K. Roach's new book, "The Salem Witch Trials," offers a more lucid "day-by-day chronicle," as promised by its subtitle, much better written, theoretically noncommittal and as gripping as, say, "Into Thin Air," another meticulous dissection of a catastrophe.

The truth is that even without a frontier war, ours is a nation peculiarly prone to hysterias and conspiracy theories. The Red Scare of the 1950s is not even the best example; Communists, at least, do actually exist. More than one observer has noticed the parallels between the Salem Witch Trials and the ritual satanic abuse panic of the 1980s, in which dozens of people (many of them childcare providers) were charged with crimes in connection with an alledged underground network of cultists who molested and even killed children in bizarre rituals. Eventually, the existence of any such conspiracy was thoroughly debunked by law enforcement officials, but not before innocent people were sentenced to long prison terms (most of them since overturned) and even a confession or two was elicited. (Several of the Salem accused confessed, an example of the unreliability of even this most apparently damning form of evidence.) All of this occurred without the influence of superstition and religious fervor, two factors that have also been blamed for the Salem crisis.

No one, fortunately, was executed for committing ritual satanic child abuse in the 1980s. To revisit Salem is to be reminded of how important the much-maligned principle of due process can be, how it's often the only thing standing between an innocent citizen and that irreducible darkness mentioned above. No monster movie or ghost story could ever be as scary as the surviving records of the Salem investigations (almost all transcripts of the actual trials have been lost). Frightened and baffled people try to defend themselves against the insane, circular logic of magistrates who've already decided they're guilty. The sizable crowd of onlookers always includes a pack of the afflicted girls, raving hysterically, claiming to be pinched and struck and threatened by specters (thus "proving" their charges) and reducing the proceedings to chaos. The voices of the accused as they desperately and vainly protested their innocence in the face of this certain and utterly pointless death should never be forgotten -- because whatever possessed Salem in 1692 will never entirely go away.

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