Witch City -- more sexism than sorcery

IN 1692 strange events took place in Salem, Massachusetts, events that

have never been thoroughly explained. The general feeling today is that

what occurred in Salem village had very little to do with witchcraft at

all. Everything from menopausal paranoia to the psychopathology of

adolescence has been put forward as possible causes.

The story began in February 1692 when a little girl told a fortune and

others began to cast spells. Excitement in England over witches had

spread to the colonies. William Penn, the distinguished Quaker

theologian and founder of Pennsylvania, even sat on a witch-trial but

dismissed the case, saying that ''there was no law in Pennsylvania

against riding on broomsticks''.

In the past 20 years the amount of speculation and scholarly theories

has exploded. Was it illness, mass hypnosis, or something more

down-to-earth that caused fits and hallucinations and suggested to the

fathers of the town that the young women were practising witches?

Modern medical theories have proposed everything from acute

premenstrual tension to post-traumatic stress syndrome (the condition

that afflicts soldiers after conflict). Was it abuse from stern parents

or just youthful high spirits that left 19 dead, 150 jailed, and

hundreds imprisoned? A hippie-inclined theory suggested that magic

mushrooms were to blame. If new ideas are given credence then Salem was

a town full of very twentieth-century neuroses and a place more in need

of counselling than courtrooms.

''Thanks to scholars, seventeenth-century Salem has emerged anew as a

nervous, recognisable town that seems to have been bedevilled far more

by sexism than sorcery, downward mobility than devils,'' wrote Mark Muro

of the Boston Globe recently.

Every few years there is another book or study which re-examines the

events. Feminists blame the frenzy on misogynistic Puritan culture, and

say that witch-hunts were a backlash against unconventional women. It

was a male-dominated society's revenge on such uppity women as Rebecca

Nurse who ''continewed to rail and scold'' after a neighbour's pig

trampled her corn.

Another trendy theory suggests the trials were racially inspired.

Several Salem girls were reported to have been seen listening to voodoo

stories told by Tituba, a Caribbean slave-woman. Tituba told fortunes

and suggested who the girls' future husbands might be. The girls began

behaving oddly; they became moody and had visions.

Tituba was blamed and then, perhaps to save herself, she told of a

witch conspiracy. Some theoreticians say that hapless Tituba represented

white fears of alien, black culture; others say a suppressed guilt

surrounding slavery from an ultra-religious community found an outlet in

punishing her.

Carol Karlson's study, The Devil In The Shape Of A Woman, suggested

that many of those ''cried down'' as witches were rich widows, women

with careers, or women who controlled assets. Elinor Hollingworth, for

example, ran a tavern. ''For a long time people have said, 'Oh, Salem

was an aberration; the bigots just went berserk', but scholars have

tried to show that the witch-trials arose out of real people's lives for

real-world reasons,'' says Karlson.

Was greed the cause? Many of the women on trial stood to inherit

property. Acording to Karlson women from families without a male heir

accounted for 76% of women found guilty in New England witch-trials, and

86% of those executed. ''You didn't have to do anything to be accused,''

says Karlson. ''Just holding a measure of economic power provoked

reaction from a system designed to keep property in the hands of men.''

The town of Salem itself was prosperous and caused much envy from the

rural communities nearby. Two University of Massachusetts historians,

Stephen Nissenbaum and Paul Boyer, went through old tax-ledgers to

discover who owned what. Their theory suggests that rivalry was the

cause of the Salem incident. Nissenbaum and Boyer argued that

witch-hunts were a desperate rearguard action on the part of farming

folk against elitist townees. The poorer inland farmers led by the

Putnams fought dirty against their old rivals, the rich Porters.

Eight Putnams were involved in prosecuting 49 accused witches, of whom

19 were Porter allies. Ann Putnam accused Rebecca Nurse, for example,

possibly because of a dispute over land rights.

Last year, during the tercentenary of the witch-trials, while the town

was gripped by much commemorative tourist gimmickry, Alan Dershowitz,

the Harvard law professor who was involved in the Claus von Bulow trial

and Woody Allen case, came to Salem to discuss the history of legal

rights and the individual.

It was from the Salem witch-trials that we get a lot of

misconceptions. Witches were not burned in Salem but hanged. Women were

not the only victims -- five men were executed. The majority were not

old hags but young and middle-aged women. Court records show that one of

the alleged witches was a Mrs Margaret Thatcher. She escaped charges to

live another day.

In 1693 the royal governor, William Phips, returned from fighting

Indians and issued a proclamation to free all the suspects. After less

than a year, the trials ended as suddenly as they had begun. One of the

more disreputable chapters of American history was closed. And after

years of hiding its witchy legacy Salem is proud to call itself Witch

City. There are two museums and a Salem-based Witches' League for Public

Awareness. Since 1985 witchcraft (or Wicca) has been recognised as a

legitimate religion in the US.