Review : The Witches (I)

It's time for another book on witches. Previously I've looked at Malcom Gaskill's Witchfinders (covering the machinations of Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne), the book-length section in Keith Thomas' epic Religion and the Decline of Magic (covering the typical behaviour and trials of individual witches), and Gaskill's sequel The Ruin of All Witches (looking at a single case in the early American colonies). This time it's Stacy Schiff's The Witches, covering one of the most famous incidents of all : Salem.

The Review Bit

As far as the book itself goes, the word that keeps coming to mind is dense. It's incredibly thorough, sometimes interminably so. Contrary to the hyperbolic review quotes that lace the cover, Schiff's writing style is – by far – the worst thing about this book. Her recounting of events and analysis of what happened is as good as any you'll find, but the prose itself sometimes becomes a right proper slog. It's full of forced rhetoric and odd references when a simple plain statement would do, and often drops apparently crucial developments in single throwaway lines. I frequently felt myself wondering, "wait, what ?" as some key development was glossed over, unclear if this was really supposed to be a part of the narrative or just referencing a future event for context.

I also encountered moments where I really didn't know what she meant at all, where I either didn't understand the metaphor she was using or would interpret a statement in exactly the opposite way it was apparently intended; parts of it felt downright contradictory and unclear. This isn't limited to the minor details either, with some contradictions being pretty fundamental to the analysis. As a relative unimportant example, she goes on at length about witches flying across Salem (indeed this is how she opens the whole narrative) only later to say that flying wasn't something Salem witches were ever believed to do; similarly, claims on the conviction rate for the accused vary wildly from "actually quite low, just as in usual witchcraft cases" to "literally 100%".

(I think the difference here is explained as Schiff meaning that were ordinarily low, say about 10%, whereas in Salem itself this went much higher, but she phrases things in a deeply confusing way)

The phrase that keeps coming to mind is trying too hard. There's some very, very good stuff in here but it could so easily have been simplified into a riveting page-turner. Schiff can certainly turn a phrase, but, like Edward Gibbon, she doesn't seem to know when to stop. It doesn't help that the font size is peculiarly small as well.

I'm going to give this one a 7/10. It gives an insight equal to any good history book and the exhaustive, meticulous research that's gone into this comes through in abundance. But the text has neither the clarity of Thomas nor the flourish of Gaskill. It wouldn't be my first choice for a look at witchcraft and witch trials by any means, but it was certainly worth persevering with.

Lessons of Salem

The more I let this one gestate, the more I realise how no one example can capture the full picture of witchcraft or witchcraft trials, any more than reading about a single murderer can wholly answer the question of why people kill each other. All the previous incidents I've read about had their own unique mitigating and exacerbating circumstances. Consequently, Schiff's book gives a new perspective on both witches and witch hunts, adding another piece to the proverbial puzzle.

Salem, in Schiff's telling, was a society in a perfect storm in which everything went wrong. If it doesn't offer any direct parallels to modern society, it demonstrates just how far south things can go, how a tight-knit community can tear itself to pieces... and how it can eventually rebuild itself. 

To understand how a small village rises to infamy through the obscenity of mass murder, I'll first set out how Salem distinguished itself from other incidents. In part two I'll turn to how evidence was presented in the courts and how 17th-century villagers reacted to such matters. And last of all, I'll look at the role of religious and sociological beliefs in influencing judgement, and end with what happened after that one dreadful summer of 1692.

Where Salem Went Wrong

Salem isn't much like the other incidents I've read about. Keith Thomas covered individual witch trials, as did Malcolm Gaskill in Ruin, but only Witchfinders looked at when things escalated into the proverbial, relentless witch hunts the phrase is now synonymous with. Most of the time, witches were treated more like ordinary criminals. That's the first point which distinguishes Salem : it was a case when things degenerated into an outright frenzy, a whole village falling for a catastrophic mass delusion.

By way of contrast, Hopkins and Stearne were witchfinders on tour, going from village to village; they killed a lot more people over not that much longer a timespan, but over a much larger area. With their "witches*" essentially a series of individual incidents in different village, each settlement suffered a lot less. Not so in Salem. This is (essentially) the tale of a single village that descended into virtual anarchy, to the point that complete self-destruction seemed just around the corner. Nothing like that came close with Hopkins.

* I do think Thomas' point that there were indeed witches is an underrated issue. True, the majority were innocent, vulnerable people who were made scapegoats (and even worse, as he points out, they were often those who had been wronged by the community who feared their justifiable retribution). But some were, by all reasonable definitions, guilty of attempted murder, even if we now accept the methods could never work.

And whereas H&S exploited the pre-existing fears of the locals but were themselves a critical driving force behind the witch hunts, there was no such instigating force in Salem. Here the village wreaked havoc purely upon itself, with nobody else to blame. The external situation did have a part to play in the events that happened, but the hunts were initiated and sustained entirely by the locals.

One similarity to the cases of Hopkins was the semi-lawlessness of the situation. The Witchfinder General operated in a Civil War environment where normal judicial procedures were suspended : had regular legal options been in effect, he and Stearne would have met with considerably less "success". Salem was a far-flung and conflicted colony, according to Schiff desperate to prove itself, yearning for independence but utterly unprepared for the realities which that would bring. They were also, every single bleedin' one of them, a bunch of petty, quarrelsome jerks whose underlying ideological beliefs were extraordinarily stupid and next-level toxic. Their leaders were self-important but not (by and large) especially intelligent and not at all interested in critical thinking. Remind you of anyone ?

Salem was also distinct in terms of the scale and nature of the accusations. The number of executions (fourteen women and five men) is not, on paper, anything remarkable as far as atrocities go : this was not much more than a modern mass shooting, certainly nothing on the scale of a major terrorist incident. But the context of a population of maybe 500, this was a big deal. Even more so in terms of the number of the (formally) accused, which reached well above 100, with preposterous figures of 700 witches being bandied about. Salem was, it seemed, both infiltrated and surrounded by hordes of demonic forces.

And the designs they had on this tiny backwater were even more stupendous. Whereas more isolated cases focused on the mundane and the banal (souring milk, causing sleeplessness), the Salem witches had grander plans. Here, in Satan's kingdom where the word of Christ had not yet found its audience, the witches were planning to destroy the town and eventually all of Christendom.

Such a task would take monumental powers, of which the Salem witches apparently did possess except when needed most (i.e. in prison). There were few accusations of cavorting with imps, but plenty of shapeshifting, flying, murderous designs, and sightings of strange glowing jellyfish (amid innumerable other claims, each more bizarre than the last). Witches apparently possessed all manner of supreme magical abilities yet were rarely able to evade capture, let alone escape from prisons. The would-be global apocalypse was fortuitously prevented by a small village constabulary.

Back in the motherland, belief in witches was still rife, but witch hunts had all but burned themselves out – in part due to a restoration of law and order. Salem was about fifty years behind the times, but another distinguishing factor was a heavy reliance on the seizures of young girls claiming them were victims of witchcraft. Schiff gives very little insight into these individuals but their role was crucial. It was hard for the courts to deny the "evidence" of teenagers having fits on demand whenever one of the accused was brought near them. These were children living in a highly oppressive society suddenly being given an incredibly powerful voice; they also knew a great deal of private information. In a world preciously thin on recreation ("we must have some sport", declared one) but big on blame and hard work, putting those normally at the bottom of the food chain in a position of blackmail over the great and the good was a recipe for disaster.

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Before we look in more detail at the society which led to this spiritual bombshell, we should first turn to why the courts were so utterly ineffectual in preventing things from getting out of hand. Poor as they were, even in a 17th century court it wasn't usually the case that an accusation led to conviction (any more than every Roman gladiatorial duel ended in a death). Everyone believed in witches, but they had no especial desire to see the world collapse into anarchy. Understanding the failure to properly evaluate evidence is the first piece of the puzzle in understanding the near-collapse of the social order, which we'll look at in part two.