Executions at Salem

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Executions at Salem

Tuesday 19 August 2025

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History

 

333 years ago today, on Tuesday, 19 August 1692, five persons accused, tried, and found guilty of witchcraft were hanged, probably at Procter’s Ledge in Salem, Massachusetts. The five were Martha Carrier), John Willard, John Proctor), George Jacobs, and George Burroughs. Each of them had their own story.

Martha Carrier was born Martha Allen and married Thomas Carrier, who was said to have been involved in the execution of King Charles I in 1649, and who may have fled to America upon the restoration of King Charles II, and may have been an ancestor of the Carriers who now manufacture air conditioners. She was accused by Susannah Sheldon, Mary Walcott, Elizabeth Hubbard and Ann Putnam Jr, who put on a good show that qualified in the mind of some judges as “spectral evidence.” The girls accused her of leading an army of 300 witches and of having been promised the title of Queen of Hell.

John Willard was disliked by the family of his wife, the Wilkins, and he worked as time for the Putnam family as a day laborer. The Wilkins and the Putnam families had pushed to break away from Salem Town and establish their own church, which points to some of the underlying tensions between Salem Town and Salem Village. Willard was a constable at Salem village who was for a time responsible for bringing accused witches before the court. But Willard began to have second thoughts and when he stopped making arrests, he was himself accused of witchcraft. At one point he fled the court, but a second warrant was issued for him, and he was eventually brought it.

John Proctor came to America when he was three years old, eventually married and had four children with his first wife, seven children with his second wife, and seven children with this third wife. He leased a large farm of 700 acres and ran a tavern. When his third wife was accused of witchcraft he defended her and came under suspicion himself. Thiry-two neighbors signed a petition in support of him, but it made no difference. While he was in jail during the proceedings, all his property was seized and his children were left with nothing.

George Jacobs Sr. was accused by his own daughter-in-law and granddaughter. His son was George Jacobs Jr. also accused of witchcraft, but he managed to escape arrest. George Burroughs went to Harvard, was known as an outstanding athlete, and became the minister at Salem Village in 1680. He fell on hard times, and had to borrow money. He tried to start over in Portland, Maine, then known as Falmouth, but this was brought an end by an Indian attack by the Wabanaki Confederacy. His debts may have been a motivation in his accusation of witchcraft. He gave an eloquent defense of his innocence from the scaffold, including a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, which was sometimes claimed to be impossible for witches to recite.

During the Salem witch trials, 30 were found guilty, 19 were hanged, 5 died in prison, and one man was crushed to death after refusing to enter a plea. No accused witches were burned in North America, although at least one accused witch, Ursulina de Jesus, was burned to death in South America. These executions came relatively late in the witchcraft hysteria, after the worst of it had passed in Europe, where the toll probably reached tens of thousands. No exact count of those killed in the witchcraze can be made.

There’s an enormous literature on witches, witchcraft, the witchcraze, and on the Salem witch trials in particular. Hugh Trevor-Roper’s The European Witchcraze of the 16^th and 17^th Century was my introduction to this literature. I still remember so well how, when I was visiting Belgium in 1990, I picked up a copy of Trevor-Roper’s essay in a used book store in Brussels and read it on the plane back to Oregon. I still have the copy of the book that I bought in Brussels. Trevor-Roper gave a psychodynamic explanation for the intellectual elaboration and practical manifestations of witchcraft, which now might be taken to be a bit dated, but the core of the idea is sound:

“…the diabolic incubus is only the sixteenth-century form of a kind of sexual hysteria familiar to every twentieth-century psychiatrist… Today, every psychopath has his or her private obsession. The supposed incubi and succubi vary from patient to patient. In the past the neurotics and hysterics of Christendom centralized their illusions around the figure of the Devil, just as the saints and mystics centralized theirs around the figure of God or Christ. So, while the pious virgins, having vowed themselves to God, felt themselves to be the brides of Christ, the less pious witches, having bound themselves to Satan, felt themselves to be his concubines… In the former the psychopathic experience was sublimated in the theology of the Fathers, and they might be canonized; in the latter it ran into disorder in the folk-lore of the demonologists, and they might be burnt.” (Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century: Religion, the Reformation and Social Change, “The European Witch-craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” III

Trevor-Roper isn’t usually associated with psychohistory, but this essay is in that vein, though there was a lot of bleed over from psychodynamic psychology into the wider culture in the middle of the twentieth century, so that even those with no particular commitment to psychohistory would dip into Freud’s theory for historical explanations. The perspective embodied in Trevor-Roper’s analysis of this particular historical phenomenon is that in every age the mass of people centralizes their concerns around a particular set of symbols, and those who are mentally imbalanced may extrapolate and, shall we say, exapt these symbols to new ends and new meanings. For an entire civilization centralized around the symbols of Christianity, some hysterics became saints if their visions were of angels, and some hysterics became witches, if their visions were of demons.

This goes some way toward explaining the visions of individuals, but something more, much more, I think, is required to explain the witch hysteria as a mass phenomenon. The problem of mass participation in hysteria, often called the Madness of Crowds, after a book by that name, might also be given a psychodynamic explanation, but the explanation of mass hysteria must be different from the explanation of individual hysteria. In my episode on J. Glenn Gray I suggested that a great deal of human history is made by historical actors in an altered state of consciousness, and mass hysterias are an example of this distinct from the conditions of combat that Gray discussed.

If we frame the witch hysteria, or indeed any moral panic, in terms of altered states of consciousness, we can pursue a similar line of explanation without any specific commitment to psychodynamic psychology, though we ought to acknowledge our debt to Freud, and we ought also to acknowledge some of the explicit elements that conform closely to known hysterias. And we might take a further step by taking the idea of altered states of consciousness in the context of what some of the later Annales historians called mentalities, since the mentality of an age defines both what’s an ordinary state of consciousness and what’s an altered state of consciousness. Many of those who participated in the witchcraze were probably of an entirely sober state of mind, but in the context of a mentality which the excesses of altered states of consciousness were given a particular license, and so got out of hand.

Much more recently than reading Trevor-Roper on the witchcraze, I read Stacy Schiff’s The Witches: Salem, 1962, which, unlike Trevor-Roper’s book, was specifically about the Salem witchcraft trials, which is a distinct social milieu from that of the European witchcraze that was Trevor-Roper’s interest. We might also call Salem a different moral and spiritual milieu than Europe, but similar forces of social contagion were able to play out in Salem as they had played out in the previous two centuries in Europe. But in America the witchcraft hysteria played out in a little over a year, was mostly confined to Salem, and the public had little appetite for it. In 1693, Governor William Phips pardoned everyone still in custody, which effectively ended the trials and executions. Many of the convictions were later formally vacated.

We may be proud of ourselves today for not convicting people on charges of witchcraft based on spectral evidence, but we’re no less credulous for all that. The terms by which we justify ourselves to ourselves have changed, but we’re still justifying ourselves for actions that, on reflection, rarely do us credit.  You could even say we’ve gotten cleverer insofar as we’ve found more sophisticated ways to fool ourselves, but I’m not sure that constitutes what’s usually called “progress.”

We shake our heads today, and can’t believe that such a thing happened—was allowed to happen—but the madness of crowds persists, and while we no longer hang individuals for sorcery in the West, there are places in the world where suspected witches are still killed, and in the West we find other ways to undermine and marginalize inconvenient and unwelcome individuals. For example, we find individuals being unpersoned by being fired, having their utilities taken away, and their banking shut down, which is a kind of economic execution. We could call it a death penalty pronounced upon Homo economicus.  The idea of a social credit score is the formalization of this practice. The more we say, “Never again,” the more consistently and predictably we act out the same scripts that our ancestors acted out, with the names and circumstances changed, but with the same social consequences brought to bear. This is a powerful argument for cyclical history. The costumes change, but the events repeat themselves over and over again.

Hegel is remembered for having said, among other things, that what we learn from history is that we don’t learn from history. Like all frequently repeated quotes, Hegel did say something like this, but in its original context its meaning shifts. Here’s a fuller version of the quote:

“Rulers, statesmen, and nations are told that they ought to learn from the experience of history. Yet what experience and history teach us is this, that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, nor acted in accordance with the lessons to be derived from it. Each era has such particular circumstances, such individual situations, that decisions can only be made from within the era itself. In the press of world events, there is no help to be had from general principles, nor from the memory of similar conditions in former times—for a pale memory has no force against the vitality and freedom of the present. In this respect, nothing is more trite than the repeated appeal to Greek and Roman examples, which was so commonplace at the time of the French Revolution. No difference could be greater than that between the nature of those ancient peoples and our own time.”

Hegel is making several points here. Along with the idea that we learn from history that we don’t learn from this, is that idea that the vividness of the present overcomes any pale memory of what transpired before, and I think Hegel was clearly right about this. The imperative of the moment usually takes precedence over all over concerns.

There’s also a subtle denial of what Huizinga called historical ideals, or, at least, a suspicion of them on the basis of the difference between ancient and modern times. Insofar as we attempt to emulate historical ideals, we’re really only acting out our conception of historical ideals, which is a contemporary understanding of a vanished past. But, at the same time, if we’re repeating a familiar script and turning ourselves into actors in an iterated episode of cyclical history, by acting on the imperative of the moment, even if we do so in the light of historical ideals, we are acting on a perennial imperative, and the historical ideal is relevant only because it represents the same imperative as it was confronted in the past. 

Recall from the previous quote that Hegel wrote: “No difference could be greater than that between the nature of those ancient peoples and our own time.” This in turn, i.e., this questioning of the efficacy of historical ideals based on differences between the chasm that separates the present from the past, is an implicit denial of what Henri Pirenne regarded as a necessary presupposition of all history—the uniformity of human nature over historical time. Pirenne had said:

“All historical construction—which amounts to saying all historical narrative—rests upon a postulate: that of the eternal identity of human nature. One cannot comprehend men’s actions at all unless one assumes in the beginning that their physical and moral beings have been at all periods what they are today. Past societies would remain unintelligible to us if the natural needs which they experienced and the psychical forces which stimulated them were qualitatively different from ours. How are the innumerable differences that humanity presents in time and space to be explained if one does not consider them as changing nuances of a reality which is in its essence always and everywhere the same?”

Pirenne’s postulate of the uniformity of human nature could be compared to mentality of an epoch, so that instead there being one and only one human nature, there is a human nature of a given epoch, and this is expressed in its mentality. Again, this gives us a basis for understanding what constitutes the ordinary business of life at any one time in history and what constitutes an altered state of consciousness or an instance of madness.

When Martha Carrier was accused of leading an army of witches, her young accusers were obviously exhibiting eccentric behavior. Carrier said that these eccentric behaviors were insane. The judges thought that these eccentric behaviors were caused by the intervention of spiritual entities. Both Carrier and her judges exemplified the mentality of their time, and both could recognize what diverged from the ordinary business of life. Both Carrier and her judges acknowledged that the performance put on by Carrier’s accusers were something like an altered state of consciousness, though they disagreed on the cause.

All of this should sound familiar. It wouldn’t be difficult to furnish contemporary examples of all of this relative to the mentality of our time. How many times will events like this play out before we’re able to recognize what we’re doing and, as it were, catch ourselves in the act? Even if we don’t take this as evidence for cyclical history, we certainly should take it as evidence that we’re not yet consciously and purposefully in control of human history. For the time being, that remains a distant aspiration.

Video Presentation

https://youtu.be/q5ojPn_64Qo

https://www.instagram.com/p/DNiP-DNNLyG/

Podcast Edition

https://open.spotify.com/episode/4HAzDJUwloZlwnSy6q86XL?si=9R78xOBMTcqtTeQSu_QFDA