What were 'witches' and facts on them please?

Question

I'm talking about the 'witches' hanged in the witchcraft trials of salem.

Answer 1

The puritans believed that witches were women and men in communion with demons and the satan. Anyone who spoke against the heirarchy was often accused of witchcraft. Anyone who held valued goods, but would not part with them amicably was accused of witchcraft. Most often, they were exploited citizens that went outside the standards set by the community. Sometimes they mentally ill or epileptic persons, and seizures were considered demonic possessions.

Answer 2

witches were regular women who were hanged due to the fact the the children of the village lied because the adults wouldn't give them what they wanted, its a very impt case, if you go to Salem, mass there is a full animated story on the Salem witch trials, the girls lied under oath even accusing the ones father because she couldn't get her own way, there was a man also accused but they didn't hang him like the women, if memory serves me right he died rather horribly...they placed several heavy stones till it crushed his chest and body

Answer 3

The term witchcraft (and witch) is a controversial one with a complicated history. Used in entirely different contexts, and within entirely different cultural references, it can take on distinct and often contradictory meanings. Each culture has its own particular body of concepts dealing with magic, religion, benevolent and harmful spirits, and ritual; and these ideas do not find obvious equivalents in other cultures.

Answer 4

Some interesting facts here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_trials

Answer 5

Salem witch trials
Encyclopædia Britannica Article


(May–October 1692), in American history, a series of investigations and persecutions that caused 19 convicted “witches” to be hanged and many other suspects to be imprisoned in the town of Salem in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Stimulated by voodoo tales told by a West Indian slave, Tituba, a few young girls claimed they were possessed by the devil and subsequently accused three Salem women, including Tituba, of witchcraft. As Tituba and other accused persons were pressured and consequently incriminated others in false confessions, public hysteria over the threat of witchcraft mounted throughout Massachusetts.

Civil magistrates, encouraged by the clergy, set up a special court in Salem to try those accused of practicing witchcraft, and Samuel Sewall, John Hathorne, and William Stoughton were chosen as the court's judges. The list of the accused increased (even Massachusetts governor William Phips's wife was implicated) until 150 people had been imprisoned and were awaiting trial. By September, however, the climate of mass hysteria had begun to abate, and public opinion first stopped, and then condemned, the trials. Governor Phips dissolved the special court in October and released the remaining prisoners. The Massachusetts General Court (legislature) later annulled the witch trials' convictions and granted indemnities to the families of those who had been executed.



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Salem witch trials

Date: 1692
From: Encyclopedia of Women's History in America, Second Edition.




Witch-hunts were not uncommon in Europe prior to or during the seventeenth century, and charges of witchcraft were not unknown in colonial Massachusetts: Approximately 100 residents of the colony were formally charged with witchcraft—and fifteen executed—in the years prior to 1692 in what are now known as the Salem Witchcraft Trials. The year 1692, however, was spectacularly marked by frenzied accusations of witchery levied against more than 200 people, mostly women.

The trial record is fairly clear. In February 1692 several adolescent and teenage girls fell into a series of fits. Upon questioning by adults who assumed the Devil was at fault, they implicated Sarah Good, Sarah Osburn, and, especially, Tituba, a slave in one of the girls' families who had been amusing the girls with tales of magic and fortune-telling games. Warrants were issued and the three women arrested on February 29, 1692.

At the public hearing that began on March 1 in Salem Village (now Danvers, Massachusetts), magistrates John Hawthorne and Jonathan Corwin severely interrogated the accused women. The pregnant and impoverished Sarah Good declared herself innocent but cast suspicion upon Sarah Osburn. Osburn, who would die in prison before trial, said she was not a witch but suggested that she, like the young girls, might have suffered symptoms of bewitchment; she cited a dream of a figure "like an Indian all in black, which did pinch her in the neck." Tituba at first declared herself innocent, but finally described "[f]our women and one man [who] . . . tell me, if I will not hurt the children, they will hurt me." She identified Good and Osburn as two of her threateners but refused to identify the remaining three. The number of accused widened until hundreds of alleged witches occupied the jails of Salem Town and eastern Massachusetts.

Sarah Bishop was the first woman to stand trial. A neighbor testified that Bishop's "spector" (i.e., the Devil in Bishop's form and image, an appropriation thought to require Bishop's consent) had been seen near the cradle of a child who subsequently succumbed to illness and death. Convicted, Bishop was hanged on June 10, 1692. During an eighteen-day recess, ministers advised the court that "spectral evidence" should be viewed as suspect, since the "demon may assume the shape of the innocent." Nonetheless, trials resumed on June 28, and the first five women brought to court were convicted. Among them was Rebecca Nurse, a well-regarded and deeply religious woman. Ultimately, twenty-nine people were convicted of witchcraft and nineteen executed.

The hysteria was brought to an end by the arrival of a new royal governor, William Phips, who suspended the witchcraft court, forbade further executions of the convicted, and released those held in prison. Five years later, in January 1697, the General Court mandated a day of penitent prayer and fasting and, in 1703 and 1710, descendants of the convicted persuaded the legislature to reverse most of the convictions.

Historians continue to debate the true causes of this event. Some believe that the young girls, a fairly powerless part of Puritan society, simply relished too well their sudden center-stage status and allowed their small fiction to escalate. Others suggest ergot fungus, a hallucinogenic chemical possibly present in rye flour, may have been responsible. Another faction points to the stress caused by shifts in Massachusetts' political situation between 1684 and 1688: During these years, the colony lost its charter and became, with other colonies, part of the Dominion of New England; had the validity of its land titles questioned by the dominion's imported governor; and then, when James II was deposed during England's Glorious Revolution, awaited the evolution of William and Mary's policies toward the American colonies.

Since at least 1881, however, feminist scholars have offered a divergent view. In that year, Matilda Joslyn Gage, in the "Woman, Church, and State" chapter of the History Of Woman Suffrage, found "three striking points for consideration" in her examination of the history of European and colonial American witchcraft trials:

First. That women were chiefly accused, a wizard being seldom mentioned.

Second. That man, believing in woman's inherent wickedness, and understanding neither the mental nor the physical peculiarities of her being, ascribed all her idiosyncracies to witchcraft.

Third. That the clergy inculcated the idea that woman was in league with the devil, and that strong intellect, remarkable beauty, or unusual sickness, were in themselves a proof of that league.

Gage cited accounts of no-longer-loved wives "dragged by their husbands before the arch-Inquisitor, Sprenger, by ropes around their necks," and the suspicions suddenly cast by the church upon women's carefully cultivated healing skills as evidence that "for 'witches' we [should] read 'women,' [to] gain a more direct idea of the cruelties inflicted by the Church upon women."

Many modern feminists also view the witchcraft trials as arising from gender issues. Anne Llewellyn Barrow and Carol Karlsen, for example, point out that those most in danger of accusation were successful businesswomen, female inheritors, unmarried women, and those who had passed childbearing age without producing a son. Barrow in particular stresses that the unusual right of Salem widows to hold title to their own property may have played a role in the Salem witch hunts.






Barrow, Witchcraze; DiCanio, Teddi, "Salem Witchcraft Trials," in Great American Trials, ed. Knappman; Gragg, "Under an Evil Hand" Hansen, Witchcraft at Salem; Karlsen, Devil in the Shape of a Woman; Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1; Starkey, Devil in Massachusetts; Upham, Salem Witchcraft.



Text Citation: Cullen-DuPont, Kathryn. "Salem witch trials." Encyclopedia of Women's History in America, Second Edition. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2000. Facts On File, Inc. American History Online. .

Media Citation: "Salem witch trials." Library of Congress. Prints and Photographs Division. Facts On File, Inc. American History Online. .