Mass Hysteri The Salem Witch Trials Of 1692

In the Summer months of 1692, twenty-four innocent alleged witches and wizards had been hung, pressed to death, or died in jail in Salem, Massachusetts. However, what caused the mass hysteria known as the Salem Witch Trials? Puritans based their life strictly on religion and the Bible in which they had no free time, education, and felt pressured just to be alive; the citizens were fearful of their future, causing their religion to overpower scientific and mathematical reasoning. In June 1692, two young Salem girls, Betty Parris and Abigail Williams, accused slave woman Tituba and two other white women of practicing witchcraft after Betty and Abigail began to exhibit strange behavior. Tituba confessed to practicing witchcraft and exclaimed that

However, ergot bacteria most likely affected the grains the children ate, explaining why they were acting strangely, not witchcraft. Puritans planted cereal grains as a food supply and ergot is a parasitic fungus which grows on a large surplus of the grains. The swampy, marshy conditions of Massachusetts also was an ideal place for bacteria like ergot to spread. Ergotism or ergot poisoning is a condition for eating the infected rye and is most apparent in children. According to Caporael, who wrote about ergotism in Salem stated, “Ergotism is characterized by a number of symptoms. These include crawling sensations in the skin, tingling in the fingers, vertigo, hallucinations, mania, melancholia, psychosis, and delirium.” All these behaviors and symptoms were alluded to Betty, Abigail, and other citizens who thought their symptoms were due to witchcraft. In addition, Salem court records of the alleged witch deaths indicates that all the hangings took place in the Summer months,the same time as the “infected” rye was harvested. The fungus could affect one population of crops and could show up one year and not the next, indicating why the Puritans turned to witchcraft instead of a disease. Ergotism or Ergot poisoning symptoms the children of Salem conceived lead to the accusing and hanging of alleged witches because

Puritans believed in predestination, the idea that God elects before birth who will go to heaven or hell. In daily life, they would look for signs to help figure out their destiny. As claimed by Matteson whose purpose of painting was to portray the examination of the witch, depicts that even a skin flap or a witch's tit would be a symbol the Puritans would use to clarify if one's a witch. Samuel Parris, a Puritan father of one of the afflicted girls wrote, “Then she turned up her eyes, and the eyes off the afflicted were turned up.” Parris’s words portrayed how Puritans accusers would find anything that would make the accused witch guilty. To add, Puritans were fundamentalists; they believed that every word in the Bible was the true word of God. For example, they hung witches because they believed that was what God had wanted. Exodus 22:18, King James’s version of the Bible, the scripture Puritans read and lived by, includes the quote, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” The quote was interpreted literally by the Puritans leading them to want to hang all alleged witches. Moreover, Puritans also strongly believed in Satan and believed that the devil could unwillingly enter the body of a weak-willed person leading them to become a witch. Cotton Mather, an influential Puritan minister stated to his Puritan