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Episode 1 Transcript: Setting up Salem
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[Sound eect: a low, eerie drone]
BLAIR: “To the Puritan settlers in Massachusetts, fear was a daily companion.
They were afraid of God of course, whose punishments were swift and brutal. They were afraid of the devil, and the sinful temptations he oered.
They were afraid of death by disease. Over 90% of the indigenous population had been wiped out by smallpox, and the ancient old-growth forests just outside their settlements surely seemed vast and impenetrable to most of the settlers. The remaining indiginous communities did not want them there - for good reason.
They probably would’ve known about the failed colony in Roanoke, and the harsh Massachusetts winters did little to comfort them. The population was high, at around 20,000 people, but you still had to work hard every day to simply maintain your existence.
And most importantly, they frightened each other into social and moral compliance.
Even if you aren’t afraid, a culture of fear and anxiety has a way of permeating a community, of sinking its claws deep in the psyche of every inhabitant. That fear would lead to one of most famous and puzzling events in the history of the United States. This event would transform not only the immediate community, but would shape the course of American culture as we know it. The Salem Witch Trials.
INTRO
[Music: a steady, rhythmic, tinkling piano melody in a minor key]
Double double, toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble. Fillet of a fenny snake,
in the cauldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog, Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting, Lizard’s leg and howlet’s wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble, Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
Welcome to the inaugural season of Powerful Trouble - a podcast about witches. This season is all about the Salem Witch Trials.
Something wicked this way comes.
MAGIC IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE
[Sound eect: a low, steady wind]
The trials in Salem were far from the only instance of the persecution, prosecution, and execution of so-called “witches” in Colonial America. It’s not even close to the largest mass execution of witches in that time period. But even before we can discuss that, we have to examine the cultural, historical, and religious precedents that influenced the colonists at Salem’s actions.
Until roughly the late 1400s, in Western Europe practicing magic was mostly no big deal. Just about everyone was highly religious back then, and people saw the world in terms of the great cosmic power of God. There were two ways to tap into that great cosmic power: either through the “proper” way, which was a priest or other consecrated church ocial and church rituals, or for a more DIY solution, magic. They also believed the devil was every bit as tangibly real as God, and had the same cosmic access, albeit for evil and not good.
Magic straddled the line between religion and science, since it drew on the power of God, and even used some objects from churches, but was experimentally fast and loose. Science was absolutely nothing like we think of it today. Before the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution in the 1700s, science was considered a murky, inexact, and unreliable process. Magic fit neatly into this type of thinking, and was therefore considered a type of science.
Pretty much everyone practiced magic, including clergy members, but even then it was broken into two dierent levels. Common people mostly practiced magic like herbal healing, astrology, and ritual magic. Ritual magic at that time didn’t mean, like, sacrificing a baby in the middle of a pentagram, it was a common type of magic where you used specific rituals to try and get a specific outcome. For example, if you wanted your field to produce a bountiful harvest, you would steal some of the bread and wine from communion at church and bury it in the four corners of your field in a specific order while saying specific words.
These types of magic only required the most basic items that pretty much everyone would’ve had access to, or in the case of astrology, literally no objects, just stars. The other level of magic was practiced mostly by upper class and educated people, even priests, and was the kind of magic that required a lot of money and time to practice. Things like alchemy, which is the magical practice of changing the properties of things around you, and necromancy, which is magic having to do with the dead, either speaking with them or trying to bring them back to life. Both of these types required a lot of education for reading books on the subject, plus precious metals, scales, books, rare materials, and other expensive things most people could not aord.
This is not to say that everyone was super cool with people practicing magic. There were laws on the books against practicing magic, but they were mostly concerned with maleficia or black magic, magic intended to hurt other people. The church, in particular, claimed to not like it from a spiritual perspective, but it’s my personal theory that the early church’s crackdown on magic had more to do with the fact that they wanted to be people’s only direct link to God, rather than any objection to the actual practices of magic. I mean literally half the stu we do around Christmas is pagan solstice rituals.
EARLY WITCH HUNTS
[Sound eect: Clanging church bells]
In the 1200s Pope Gregory IX started recruiting some nomadic bands of monks to be Inquisitors. The church had decided in 1215 to tighten up some of the
rules, including deciding that those who wouldn’t bow to the ways of the church would therefore lose their rights to their property, and traveling monks were the perfect way to check on which members of the flock were straying.
Inquisitors were given all kinds of leeway to enforce religious conformity, and in 1252 they were even given permission to torture people if need be. Because the Inquisitors were ordained, technically
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they couldn’t draw blood, so some creative soul used the opportunity to come up with such lovely techniques as thumbscrews and the rack.
Inquisitors didn’t really bother with common people for one big reason: money. Remember what I said heretics lost the rights to their property? Well, Inquisitors got a piece of that pie, so it was way more lucrative to seize the land and property of a rich dead person you could probably prove was a heretic, than to go after small potatoes like the village wise woman who didn’t have any property you could legally plunder.
For the next century, while the Inquisitors were roving around, doing their thing, the world was plunged into chaos. Accusations of black magic tend to spike during periods of crisis, and there were lots of crises during the 1300s. I cannot stress enough how terrible it would’ve been to be alive during this time. There was a massive famine from 1315-1317, and over the course of the 1300s multiple black plague epidemics killed at least 100 million people. Even so, by 1420, there are records of only about 100 trials accusing people of sorcery, and those were mostly brought by wealthy, powerful people.
In the 1420s, witch hunts as we think of them began to explode, particularly in Italy, France, Switzerland, and some in Germany. The word, “hex,” derived from the Swiss-German word for witch, first appeared in manuscripts in 1419. There doesn’t seem to be a strong event or factor that caused the witch hunts in the mid-1400s, but there is a strong correlation with 2 things:
1. The rise in “urban preachers,” or people that would make money traveling from town to town relying on the good grace of the townfolk to live. They figured out pretty fast that the best way to get the attention, and therefore the money, the needed, was to be as agitating as possible.
2. Also,mostJewshadbeendrivenoutoftheareaafewdecadesearlier,and Jews are the preferred scapegoat of the scared and repressed.
It’s worth a deeper dive later, but many of the accusations against witches during this time, such as stealing and eating babies and practicing blood rituals, are accusations that have been lobbed at Jews for hundreds if not thousands of years. But since most Jews had fled, those stories were transferred to witches.
Still, by the end of the 1400s, witch trials were dying down in favor of a new target: blasphemers, or those who spoke out against the church and its beliefs. Protestant groups had been popping up and being squashed by the church for centuries at this point, but after a guy named Johannes Gutenberg introduced the Western world to this thing called movable type, all of a sudden ideas could more quickly and easily spread beyond your little community into the wider world. That’s when a dude named Martin Luther entered the picture, and all hell broke loose.
[Music: “Ein feste burg ist unser Gott” by Martin Luther played on an organ]
THE REFORMATION IN EUROPE
In 1517, Martin Luther had had enough. 34 years old
and a monk, he kept butting heads with a friar named Johann Tetzel, who was selling indulgences, or money that people paid to members of the church to ensure they or someone they loved would go to heaven. It was a crappy way of squeezing money from desperate people, and Luther was not about it. He fired o a list of his complaints about Tetzel, threw some in about the church in general, named it his Ninety-Five Theses, and sent it to a few of his friends and the Archbishop. Some people claim he also nailed it to the door of the church in Wittenberg, but there’s no actual proof of that. It’s really nice and dramatic, though, isn’t it?
Just like your Aunt Rhonda didn’t mean to cause a rift at Thanksgiving with her complaints on Facebook, Luther didn’t actually intend to leave the church, just nudge it towards reform. By the spring of 1518, however, Luther had accepted his role as an intellectual leader in the new movement that would come to be known as the Reformation. Luther ended up getting the support of princes in the Holy Roman Empire, what we now know as Germany, and seeing Luther’s
success, other protestant reformers, such as John Calvin, John Hooper, and John Knox rose to prominence. Side note: was literally everyone named John or Mary back then?!
Luther’s teachings evolved into what we know today as the Lutheran church, but lots of movements sprang up around this time that were unrelated to Lutheranism. Once Luther had the backing of powerful and wealthy monarchs, it emboldened other people to assert their beliefs, too. England has always liked to do things a little bit dierently, though, and the Reformation was no exception.
THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND
[Music: Greensleeves played by pennywhistle and tambourine]
In 1532, King Henry VIII of England had a problem. He was tired of his wife, Queen Catherine of Aragon, and having an aair with the beautiful Anne Boleyn. Catherine had not been successful in giving him a male heir, and Anne promised that she could. But he couldn’t get his marriage to Catherine annulled because they had a child together, and divorce was forbidden under Catholicism.
Before this, Henry had no objections to the church and apparently paid no mind to the chaos on the continent. Henry enjoyed the power the monarchy had in the church, and all the pomp that accompanied it. Who wouldn’t, if they had spent their whole life being told that their position, power, and wealth were all ordained by God specifically for them to possess?
However, technically the Pope ranked higher in the church than Henry did, and that didn’t sit well with him. The Pope was chosen by a council of his peers, but Henry was ordained by birth. In Henry’s mind, he shouldn’t have to do whatever the Pope said. He was the king. And the King wanted a divorce.
Acts severing the Pope’s ties over the English monarchy were rushed through Parliament in 1532, and by June 1533 Anne Boleyn was crowned the queen of England. In an ironic twist for Anne, she also could not produce a male heir, and accusing her of witchcraft was a tidy solution to his problem of finding a new wife.
[Sound eect: a blade falling]
[Music: Greensleeves begins again, faster]
Henry didn’t care about the theological arguments of reformers like Luther and Calvin, and he made barely any changes to the church. Therefore, unlike the mass trials for heretics and bloody struggles for towns on the European continent, the reformation was pretty quiet, until Henry died.
Henry’s first heir was his only son, King Edward VI of England. Under Edward, the church of England saw more changes to its theology and practices. However, Edward was literally 9 years old, so despite the fact that he was a devout Christian, most of the changes he made to the church were heavily influenced by the archbishop Thomas Cranmer and not his own ideas.
Edward was also an intensely sickly person his entire life, so when he died at the tender age of 16, his older half-sister Mary ascended the throne. Mary’s mother was Henry’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon, who was Spanish and therefore a devout Catholic. Mary was also a devout Catholic and was not about Cranmer’s reforms. Having already assassinated the woman her younger brother named as his heir, Lady Jane Grey, Mary had no problems launching a scorched earth campaign against Protestants in England, earning her the nickname of “Bloody Mary.”
During this tumultuous time, many Protestants fled to the safety of the continent, and specifically, into the wide open arms of John Calvin in Geneva, Switzerland.
Unlike Luther, Calvin was not, and never was, a priest or member of the clergy, but was generally an educated man-about-town who became friendly with intellectual religious dissidents in France. When his friendships got him into trouble and he was forced to flee France, he spent a few years on the run, writing, and thinking, and in 1536 he published his magnum opus The Institutes of Christian Religion, and ocially joined the Reformed faith. He became one of its most influential leaders and eventually settled in Geneva for good in 1541, where the Puritans would find him in 1553, and draw inspiration from the reformed church.
[Music: Flow, My Tears by John Dowland arranged for strings]
PURITANS
The Puritan faith began with a scue over, of all things, clothing. In the 1550s, a man named John Hooper was very into the most literal translations of the Bible possible, and because the Bible did not mention leaders wearing vestments, or fancy robes, he thought they were shallow tools of the corrupt Catholic church. Because of this strong stance on the purity of Biblical interpretation, those who rallied around Hooper’s way of thinking became known as Puritans.
The obsession with simplicity in Puritans hardly stopped at robes. As the Puritan faith grew, so did their commitment to their worldview. Puritans believed that in order for a faith to be healthy and moral, the community around the faith did, too.
Services were often punishingly long, and any singing was not accompanied by music. They believed in an angry, powerful, and vengeful God.
Much like their Calvinist influencers, they believed in predestination, or that your life is totally planned out, including whether or not you will go to heaven. They did not believe in excess, ostentation, or hedonism of any kind, but pure and simple morality. In the 1500s, people were obsessed with the notion that the apocalypse was nigh, and Puritans believed that because of their pure and holy living, they would be the stewards of it.
After Mary I was executed in 1558, the exiled Protestants in Europe were able to return to an England under the rule of the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I. They arrived energized and hopeful, as they believed that England was destined to be the greatest nation of the world, and they wanted to push the Queen to reform the Anglican church even more to match their world view. Prominent Puritans became influential members of Parliament, and they argued their case urgently.
One of the things they pressured the new queen on the hardest was reinstating laws against witchcraft. The strictly moral Puritans were terrified that the common people’s strong ties to pagan practices and superstitions were ruining their destiny as the best place in the world. By pushing for stronger laws against
witchcraft, they hoped to frighten people away from ungodly living and towards fully conforming orthodoxy.
Unsurprisingly, most people did not want to live an austere life of extreme humility, and wanted to hold on to their old superstitions and methods. Plus, you know, they liked drinking, and not having to wear scratchy, unattractive clothing if they could aord it. The paganistic practices of most people had been developing over literal centuries, and they didn’t want to give them up for some religious misfits with a stick up their butt.
There had been no laws banning witchcraft in England until 1547, and that law ended with King Henry VIII’s death. Under pressure from Puritans and other religious groups, Queen Elizabeth I signed a permanent law in 1563 making witchcraft that harmed or destroyed another person punishable by death. Then, in 1604, King James I made all witchcraft punishable by death, though he also outlawed the use of torture to get confessions from alleged witches.
Laws banning witchcraft were eective for a simple reason: they basically enforced themselves. Before all forms of witchcraft were banned, a common person who found themself hexed or cursed by the village wise woman would probably respond with some magic of their own. But if all magic was illegal, they in turn wouldn’t want to get in trouble for practicing magic, and so they went to the courts instead.
Before laws banning all witchcraft were common, trials mostly focused on dark magic practiced by the powerful and educated. But when anxieties ran high during times of famine, poverty, war, or pandemic, it felt good to
point a finger at your neighbor and blame them for your problems (sound familiar?).
Another characteristic of the witch hunts in England was that social standing no longer went as far towards proving your credibility. Famously, in 1612, a nine-year-old named Jennet Device was the key witness in the witch trial and conviction that executed her own mother and grandmother. At this time, testimony from women, children, and “known liars” was not considered real evidence of any kind, but by hinging on a 9y/o girl’s testimony, this trial totally changed the nature of evidence in the law. This trial would also set an eerie precedent for another witch 80 years later.
Despite these crackdowns on heresy, the Puritans didn’t have as much influence as they would’ve liked. Elizabeth was extremely savvy, and managed to give them enough breadcrumbs to keep them at bay while also doing what she wanted. She never allowed them to usurp any of her control over the church in England. Elizabeth was also very tolerant of religious pluralism; in fact, her favorite court composer, William Byrd, was a known Catholic. Puritans, as people who believed the world should only be one religion and that it should be a depressingly moral one, were not a fan of religious pluralism.
When James VI from Calvinist Scotland became James I of England in 1603, the Puritans were hopeful that they would finally see the changes they were pushing for. He did, after all, almost immediately pass a stricter law against witchcraft. Instead, James was more outright dismissive of the Puritans than Elizabeth was, and Puritans were forced to assimilate even more after Charles I took over in 1625.
During Charles’s reign, there were a few periods of serious witch hunts, particularly in Essex, where things were not doing great, socioeconomically speaking. Following the age-old pattern, any time there was any kind of crisis, the problem was blamed on witches. At least, until a bigger problem came along, which in England was a Civil War that lasted decades.
By the end of the 1600s, witch hunts had all but died out in England. People were exhausted from the war, and urbanization played a big part, too. A lot of the magic and accusations of magic came from things like old ladies cursing little boys who made them drop their eggs, and neighbors accusing other neighbors of spoiling their cow’s milk. In a city where you had better access to resources, dropping a basket of eggs was no longer such a monumental problem.
[Sound eect: a low, eerie drone]
Some Puritans didn’t experience this shift, however. They had left for the colonies in 1630. Disheartened by their failed eorts to reform the church of England, but not deterred from their goal to spread England’s mighty influence everywhere, a small group of Puritans set sail for a new world, and landed in a
place called the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In a moment of historical synchronicity, the area where the most infamous events of the settlement happened would be known as Essex county, the same name as the site of some of the most brutal witch hunts in England.
TEASER
[Sound eect: crashing waves and calling seagulls]
In the next episode of Powerful Trouble, we’ll discuss the settlement at Salem. When was it founded? Who lived there? What did they do? And we’ll also get into the accusations of witchcraft in Salem in 1692.
OUTRO
[Music: a steady, rhythmic, tinkling piano melody in a minor key]
Thank you for listening to Powerful Trouble - a podcast about witches. All research, recording, editing, and the theme music was done by me, Blair Carpenter. For a full list of sources in this episode, please visit powerfultroublepodcast.com/sources. If you want to show your support for the show, become a patron! You can find us at patreon.com/powerfultroublepodcast. And don’t forget to rate, review, and subscribe. Thanks for listening! “