Salem: The Case for the Prosecution.(argument for witch hunts)(Brief Article)

As she stood before the gallows at Salem, condemned witch Sarah Good pronounced one of the most famous of American curses. "I am no more a witch than you are a wizard," she snarled at her most persistent persecutor, Reverend Nicholas Noyes, "and if you take away my life, God will give you blood to drink."

The noose tightened, Good was dispatched (hellward?), and Noyes died 25 years later by choking to death ... on his own blood. Nathaniel Hawthorne, a descendant of John Hathorne, the grim magistrate who examined Good and found her Bad, made art of Good's imprecation in The House of the Seven Gables. And the curse of Salem endures to this day, as innocent American highschool students are annually tormented by Arthur Miller's inevitably assigned schlock drama of Salem, The Crucible. Oh, give me the gibbet!

It is not surprising that a man who married Marilyn Monroe reduced Salem to a cartoon allegory against the buffoonish Joe McCarthy; to Miller, the executions of 20 men and women were merely examples of "human sacrifice to the furies of fanaticism and paranoia." Miller's take on Salem is probably the most common view, though academic adventurers have also blamed the witch trials on Puritan sexual repression, the social conflict between merchant and farmer, and plain old malice.

Still, the question persists: Why in 1692 did the good people and learned clergy of Salem go berserkly on a witch hunt? Not until 1969 did a thoroughly respectable scholar, Chadwick Hansen, advance the startling thesis: Because Salem had witches!

Brazenly, Hansen demolished the pillars of the Salem myth, in particular the beliefs that "no witchcraft was practiced at Salem," "the behavior of the afflicted persons was fraudulent," and "the executions were unique in Western civilization, and therefore monstrous and attributable to some narrowness of fanaticism or repressiveness peculiar to Puritans."

To the contrary, Hansen demonstrated, witchcraft was practiced widely in seventeenth-century New England and throughout the world. No eye-of-newt occultist, Hansen nevertheless argued that "in a society which believes in witchcraft, it works. If you believe in witchcraft and you discover that someone has been melting your wax image over a ...