The Salem Witch Trials: The Devil in Human Form

On a final note, some people, like Carol Karlsen who wrote The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England, believe gender played a role in the accusations and convictions of witches. She claims men were trying to silence and subjugate the more outspoken women to preserve the tradition of male power and inheritance. While this seems plausible to a degree, it can also be dismissed for a few important reasons. One reason is that many men were also accused of practicing witchcraft. Though clearly fewer men were accused than women, it is easy from a societal standpoint to see why without these accusations being labeled as mere misogyny. Women during this time period had far less power and influence than their male counterparts, plus religious beliefs put them at a constant disadvantage. Secondly, many women were accusing other women of witchcraft (a good point John Demos makes). Lastly, the accusers had nothing to gain if the woman was convicted other than satisfaction and given the huge number of those accused this seems highly unlikely.  

            Ergotism, politics, and public fear that lashed out towards the less favorable members of society fueled the continuation of the witchcraft trials until the fall of 1692. The trials ended as abruptly as they had begun and those who escaped execution were exonerated. How could this happen, weren’t they witches after all? Cotton Mather, the son of Increase Mather who was the leading minister at the time of the trials, offers us an explanation in his early history of New England, Magnalia Christi Americana. As the number of those accused kept rising the judges as well as some of the public began to realize that the situation was getting out of hand to the point where it was less and less believable that those accused were capable of witchcraft. The innocence of too many could not be denied. So, instead of blaming individuals, the people of Salem fell to blaming the devil instead. They concluded that the incident hadn’t been witchcraft all along, but a clever trick of the devil to turn the town against each other. That is a conclusion that can be settled on, for it was the devil, though not the one in Hell, but one that lurks in the heart of humankind itself.