Books discussed in this essay

--Thomas B. Allen, Possessed: The True Story of an Exorcism (1993, o.p.).

--Richard Godbeer, The Devil's Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England (Cambridge University Press, 272 pp.; $33.95, hardcover; $14.95, paper, 1992).

--Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton University Press, 336 pp.; $24.95, 1995).

--Chadwick Hansen, Witchcraft at Salem (Braziller, 256 pp.; $17.95, hardcover; $8.95, paper, 1985 [first published 1969]).

--Frances Hill, A Delusion of Satan: The Full Story of the Salem Witch Trials (John Hopkins University Press, 279 pp.; $29.95, 1996).

--Carol F. Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (Vintage, 360 pp.; $13, paper, 1989 [first published 1987]).

--Mark S. Micale, Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretation (Princeton University Press, 327 pp.; $29.95, 1995).

--Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters, Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy, and Sexual Hysteria (University of California Press, 352 pp.; $14.95, paper, 1996 [first published 1994]).

Suddenly, she falls into a trance, her eyes rolling back and then her eyelids snapping tightly shut. Her body is alternately rigid, then convulsed with seizures that would seem to pull her bones out of joint. She speaks in a voice not her own, sometimes barking like a dog or howling like a wolf. She looks at people, or creatures, that no one else in the room can see, often conversing with them at length.

She cries out that she is being choked, clawed, or burned, even as welts or red marks appear on her body. If not guarded, she may try to cut herself or cast herself into a well or a fire. She has difficulty talking, sometimes becoming entirely mute, sometimes speaking in what would seem to be a foreign tongue. Some witnesses claim that in her trance state, she can see things hidden from her physical senses, that she can read their thoughts, that she has a nimbleness of mind or a facility with languages not evident in her everyday personality.

What is happening to this person? Is she1 demon possessed? Is she having a hysterical episode? Is she suffering from multiple personality disorder? Is she hypnotized?

The description given above is not taken from any one incident. Rather it is a composite of reported symptoms of the afflicted children of Salem in 1692, and of other victims of what is sometimes called "possession disorder." Most of these symptoms are also present in what a later generation would call hysteria, cases such as Freud's famous patient "Anna O." Yet again, many of these symptoms also appear in current cases of multiple personality disorder (recently renamed dissociative identity disorder).

At the risk of casting too wide a net, it should be noted that many kinds of trance states are associated with seizures, loss of feeling in the limbs, contorted bodily postures, and the emergence of a second personality. Examples may be found in the literature on topics as diverse as Spiritualist mediums, central Asian shamans, people under hypnosis, and children who report apparitions of the Virgin Mary. Less well known but no less intriguing are the so-called Sleeping Preachers in rural nineteenth-century America, laconic farmers by day who rose up in the night to become impassioned, dynamic preachers with a seeming photographic memory of the Bible, only to awaken the next morning with no recollection of their previous night's exertions.

Are these differing manifestations of a single overriding phenomenon of mental dissociation, or are the similarities merely incidental?

The famous Salem case may serve as a prototype. The trouble there began in the spring of 1692 when the daughter and niece of the village preacher, Samuel Parrish, began to be afflicted by strange fits. The two girls, about nine and eleven years old, endured strange bodily contortions as well as blindness, deafness, and loss of speech. They said they were being attacked by hideous creatures unseen to others in the room. Sometimes bruises and blisters would appear on their skin just as they screamed they were being beaten or burned. Sometimes they would speak in preternaturally low voices, or roar like lions.

The elders of Salem feared the children were bewitched. Accusations centered upon Tituba, the Reverend Mr. Parrish's slave woman from the West Indies, and upon two poor and unpopular women in town. Tituba confessed to witchcraft, and her life was spared. The other two were tried and hanged after witnesses came forth and said the women's apparitions had attacked children and livestock, causing sickness and death. Another woman was sentenced to die after human dolls with thorns in them were found hidden in the walls of her house. As the summer wore on, the ranks of the afflicted swelled, as did the ranks of the accused. By August, more than 30 people, including five men, had suffered from grotesque symptoms, and more than a hundred people had been accused of being witches.

By autumn, a backlash had set in. Some of the most respected members of the community had come to be accused, including the wife of the colonial governor. All trials were suspended in October of 1692, as the town judges discussed the validity of "specter evidence," the idea that a person's spirit could leave her body and do harm to others. Soon after that the trials were canceled entirely; four years later the judges in the trials repented, saying their use of evidence was faulty. The victims all recovered and went on to blend back into the community with no unusual aftereffects in later years.

When the witch trials of Salem ended, 19 people had been hanged as witches, one was pressed to death for refusing to enter a plea, and two died in prison. None was burned at the stake. All were given court trials according to English common law, and guilt was not a foregone conclusion: barely one in ten of the accused was declared to be guilty of witchcraft. Contrary to popular belief, not all of those executed were women, and not all were old. Three men, including a minister, were among those who died, and the women hanged as witches tended to be middle-aged rather than elderly.

The body of literature on Salem has become immense, with the witch trials serving as a Rorschach test in which each interpreter sees compelling evidence for his or her own world-view. The nineteenth-century historian Charles Upham presents the Salem trials as a case of science versus superstition, with Puritan leaders deliberately inflaming public sentiment in order to recapture their own waning political power. Marion Starkey (1950) takes a Freudian approach, telling a story of New England repression constricting the natural high spirits of young females. A. R. G. Owen (1964) compares the events at Salem to other reports of alleged poltergeists, remote sensing, and multiple personalities. For Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum (1974), the story is one of Haves versus Have-nots; of flinty, conservative Salem Village resenting and resisting a prosperous and progressive Salem Town. Feminist historian Carol Karlsen (1987) argues that a disproportionate number of the women executed at Salem were those who owned substantial property but who lacked a male heir. Richard Godbeer (1992) emphasizes the pervasiveness of folk magic in colonial New England and interprets the Salem trials as the last great collision between religion and magic in the English colonies. Frances Hill (1995) stresses the theme of disinheritance, of people in turmoil over receiving less than what they thought was their due. A welcome recent addition is Peter Charles Hoffer's The Devil's Disciples (1996), which offers biographical and historical contexts while deliberately avoiding the kind of Procrustean thesis that has skewed so many earlier studies.

Most works on Salem published in the past few decades have focused on social conflict in one form or other, and surprisingly little attention has been paid to the children's malady itself. The most common labels--possession, hysteria, multiple personality--are all problematic in the light of emerging scholarship.

The simplest explanation is to dismiss the presenting symptoms as "cunning imposture," the thesis offered by Upham in 1867. Though his anti-Puritan bias and historical errors were exposed by later historians, Upham's work remained tremendously influential among nonspecialists, as can be seen in a dramatic treatment such as Arthur Miller's The Crucible (first performed in 1953). Miller presents the afflicted children with symptoms no more unusual than speaking in unison and claiming to see invisible creatures in the rafters. The fact that their elders could not see through such transparent fraud suggests that they were willfully obtuse or malicious or both.

In the printed text of the play, Miller explained that he took a few liberties with the facts, but that his characters generally conformed with the behavior of their historical counterparts. The playwright presents one of the chief witnesses in the Salem court cases, Abigail Williams, as a "strikingly beautiful girl" of 17 "with an endless capacity for dissembling," whose real interest is not witch-hunting, but in doing away with the wife of her illicit lover. The Abigail Williams of history was 11 years old at the time of the Salem trials, and the man portrayed by Arthur Miller as her paramour, John Proctor, was 60. The just-released film version of Miller's play is even more brazen in its departure from the historical record; here the preadolescent Abigail is played by 25-year-old Winona Ryder.

Compare Miller's stage directions, which can be convincingly acted out by the average high-school actress, to the symptoms of this disorder as recorded by Cotton Mather, who witnessed it firsthand:

Sometimes they would be deaf, sometimes dumb, sometimes blind, and often all this at once. . . . Their tongues would be drawn down their throats or pulled out upon their chins to a prodigious length. They would have their mouths opened unto such a wideness that their jaws went out of joint, and anon they would clap together again with the force like that of a strong spring-lock.

Mather goes on to say that the children's shoulder blades, elbows, wrists, and other joints would be similarly stretched and contorted. At one moment their heads would be "twisted almost round" so that it was feared their necks would break; the next moment their necks would become so rigid they could not move their heads at all. They would sometimes lie as if their necks were manacled to their heels, and then suddenly their bodies would draw backwards "to such a degree that it was feared the very skin of their bellies would have cracked." In one instance, when a girl's belly was stretched out like this, it began to make croaking noises, and a big, low voice inside said "there's two or three of them."

Mather was a member of the Royal Society and had studied medicine before deciding to go into the ministry, so he felt confident that he could recognize what he called "diseases of astonishment"--those causing rigidity, catatonia, or loss of the senses. And he felt certain this was unlike anything he had encountered before. Of course, he considered the possibility that the children were only pretending to suffer, concluding that none of them had a history of erratic behavior and that their symptoms were so grotesque that "it was perfectly impossible for any dissimulation of theirs to produce what scores of spectators were amazed at."

There were other manifestations that suggested to Mather that the children's fits went beyond "any natural distemper in the world." When the children cried that they were beaten with cudgels, bystanders could see no cudgels, but watched as red streaks appeared on the children's bodies. Sometimes the victims seemed to be able to read a book in pitch blackness, to point out an exact Bible verse on demons without even glancing at the page, to understand Greek and Latin, and to tell the location of lost objects. Most remarkably, Mather testified that on one occasion a young woman was lifted out of her bed and floated in the air for several minutes with no part of her body touching the bed, a marvel so astonishing that Mather had six witnesses sign an affadavit swearing to what they had also seen.

It is not hard to see why the Salem Puritans concluded that "the evil hand" was on these children. In New Testament descriptions of demoniacs, we find many of the same characteristics: loss of sight and speech, self-mutilation, seizures, rigidity, preternatural knowledge.

Continued in next article

Copyright© 1997 by Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.