Salem

I have noticed that my previous posts have strong philosophical orientation. I figure if I engage another discussion on the meaning of life or human mind, I myself may begin to roll my eyes. This piece gets back to history, which I have deep affection for.

Last Thursday, I went to a small town near Boston called Salem. Salem is famous for the notorious witchcraft trials that took place in 1692. A simplified story goes like this: In early 1692, several girls in the house of the Reverend Samuel Parris in Salem villiage began to have fits that could not be stopped by regular medication. A physician (named William Gribbs) was called in and pronouced that the girls were bewitched and nothing could alleviate their symptoms except that the source of witchcraft was identified. An extensive search ensued and a special court (the court of Oyer and Terminer) was established for the trials of the accused. Eventually nineteen people (fourteen women and five men) were executed by hanging, and one was crushed to death by stones (Giles Corey) because he refused to show up in the court. The Salem witch trials is the largest of the type in American history (still dwarfed by the European counterpart).

When I visited several museums in Salem, this is the basic story that was repeated with vivid narrative and sensational details. The executed were portrayed as innocents, or even heroic martyrs, who were the victims of an age of ignorance, intolerance, and great fear. I was a bit disappointed that almost no artifacts were left from the tumultuous event: the original execution site, called Gallows Hill, has become a baseball field, and no relics of these victims can be found. Instead, these museums offered artificial props, with wax figures and imaginary settings, and tours that explained the story to a curious audience. The commercial atmosphere was manifest; they always ended the tour with the giftshop. And after visiting the first museum or two, I found the story began to repeat itself and become hackneyed.

But this does not mean there are no interesting things. There are plenty. At the Salem Witch Museum, I found a display of a potpourri of herbs that were used by witches at the time. The labels explain the medical and magical property of each of these herbs. For example, daisy helps headache, and also brings luck. Another example: basil can ease stomach cramps, insect bites and fevers. In the magical realm, it can banish negativity and help keeping in love. Interestingly, I found another herb called star anise, which can ease stomach disorder and ward off the evil eye. Star anise is called daliao in Chinese, a household spice in Asia. How come this commonplace spice in Asia turned into a magical herb in America? I have no clue.

When I was at the Witch House (the name is misleading, since this house is only tenuously linked to witchcraft), I found an intriguing object that the witch presumably used in the 17^th century to cast spells on a target. It is a stuffed human miniature made of cloth, with a needle on the site of nose. The idea is that the witch used this miniature, in the form of sympathetic magic, to exert injury to her victim. Again, this is a form of magic that is not unfamiliar to a Chinese audience. For one case, in the famous novel The Story of the Stone, the malevolent Ms. Zhao employed a certain Lady Ma, a witch type of figure, who taught Ms. Zhao to write the birth date of Baoyu (the protagnist of the novel) on a human miniature made of paper, and together with five ghosts (also made of paper) hide it in his bed so as to cast curse on him (chapter 25). Wherever its origin, which can be traced back to antiquity, I believe this particular kind of witchcraft has wide currency around the world.

Final anecdote. Nathaniel Hawthorne, the famous 19^th century writer who wrote The Scarlet Letter, was a Salem native. His great-great-grandfather, John Hathorne, was one of the executors who participated in the Salem witchcraft trials, and never regretted his actions. Because of this, Nathaniel added a “w” into his last name in order to distant himself from his infamous ancestor.

So many tidbits of information. But let’s go back to the original story. After all, nothing left to these days except this story. Obviously, what happened in 1692 in Salem was terrible and unfortunate, another familiar story in human history in which the weak and the unorthodox were unjustly crushed by the powerful and the conventional. Subsequently, the modern narrative tries, somewhat hastily, to rectify the mistake and reveal the truth, that is, to emphatically show the innocence of the prosecuted weak. Surely there is a sense of redemption here, by getting the story “right.” After all, the people, who gave me the tour or worked at the giftshop, are the descendants of the people who initiated the trials 300 hundred years ago. In a way, the Salem story not just reveals, but also acts as a redemptive trope for these people to absolve their collective guilt. Perhaps.

But let’s go to the next level. What can we learn from such an event? A tour guide at the Salem Witch Museum proposed the following equation: fear + trigger = scapegoat. She further elaborated that this equation recurred in our history, unfortunately. In recent time, examples include McCarthyism, blaming of the gay community for AIDS, and the portrayal of Muslims as terrorists after 9/11. This is a fine comparison. At least it brings up an interesting issue – the perenial fear in humans, fear of the unknown, fear of the dissimilar, fear of each other… But if communism, AIDS, or terrorism is the concrete origin of fear for the 20^th century Americans, what was the origin of fear that trggered the whole Salem trials? Not so clear. You may say witchcraft. But witchcraft was a common practice in the 17^th century New England, not unlike the current fad of alternative medicine. Something deeper, I surmise. Surely there was a component of misogynism and racism in the event. Tituba, the servant in Parris’s house who was one of the first accused of practicing witchcraft, was a black slave from Barbados. The gender difference among the executed manifests an overwhelming prejudice toward women. But these are no surprise to anybody, given the general social context of the 17^th century New England.

Several pieces of information is relevant. The first person who was executed, Bridget Bishop, was by no means a conformist. For one thing, she remarried four times. By the contemporary standard, she was an incongruous oddity, if not a sheer lascivious evil. Moreover, that poor guy Giles Corey, who was stoned to death, was a man of rebellious nature and with explosive temper (his execution was a testomony), often associated with fights and misdeeds. No wonder he was an easy suspect. Although we don’t know an aweful lot of the Salem victims, except the saintly Rebecca Nurse, it is perhaps plausible to speculate that these people were victims of the community long before they were executed for witchcraft. Their unconventional behavior, non-conformist way of life, and sometimes previous misdeeds made them a dangerous existence that fomented fear in a suspicious and intolerent society. Hence they were marginalized, maligned, and if necessary, eliminated. Sounds familiar? Yes, the anti-Semitism in the early 20^th century Germany. In fact, in both cases, we see a dark side of democracy: if the popular sentiment gets off the rein, astray it can go.

Finally, let’s go to the other part of the equation, namely, the trigger. In Salem’s case, the trigger was a few girls from Parris’s house who had bouts of fits. Most of people arreasted and executed were the ones these girls pointed out, sometimes by spectral evidence (that is, imaginary vision). It was not until these girls pointed out the governor Sir William Phipps’s wife as a suspect of witchcraft did the whole farce come to a speedy end. Later evidence indicates that these girls were not sick at all. They may just play a game to entertain themselves, perhaps imitating what was shown in a witchcraft manual, to which they had access in their house. A play with devastating consequences! As I suggested earlier, the popular prejudice towards the weak and the unconventional may play an important role in the event. But what about these kids? What about this “trigger,” without which the whole event could not unfold? Of course, the Salem narrative does not highlight this part, since kids are always depicted as immaculately innocent, as if they belonged to a different species (just listen to how President Obama ended his touching speech after the Arizona gunshot early this year). But after all, I think children are just part of us adults. Any criteria to separate these two categories are superficial. We can be as good as kids be evil. Of course I don’t want to hold these kids responsible for what they did, but to get them completely off the hook in our historical thinking is somewhat unsatisfactory and unsettling to me. To explore the historicity and mentality of children is another grand topic that I cannot tackle here (the recent movie “White Ribbon” by Michael Haneke seems to be quite relevant, which tells a story of a group of children who were ritually suppressed in pre-WWI Germany), but when I looked into the eyes of those evil-kid dolls displayed in the gift shop, I could not help contemplating what were behind those mesmerizing eyes.