Summary Of Unraveling The Salem Witch Hunts By Marc Aronson

Truth Untold: Unraveling the Salem Witch Hunts through Marc Aronson

Marc Aronson uses this his book, Witch-HUNT: Mysteries of the Salem witch trials, to unravel and debunk myths surrounding the events of the Salem witch hunts and replace them with plausible theories based on evidence. Aronson relays that the modern ideas on the events of the witch trials and what may have happened are often wrong and the perpetrators of those pies used them to over stimulate the imaginations of those who were to believe these tales.

The Salem Witch Hunts that are referred to by Aronson’s book are the hunts and trials that took place between February 1692 through May of 1693 in Salem Village, Massachusetts. In a time of lawlessness or anarchy in

Sleeping Beauty has two popular recounts. One in which a King and Queen are not able to have a child and with the help a medicine woman are able to have one. The other is the story of a King and Queen who are finally blessed with child and invites everyone in the kingdom to a grand celebration with the commonality of both stories being that the old women of the community, the outcast, is not allowed to attend. In version one, the royals threw away the woman who once issued them help and in version two the outsider is shunned and excluded from everyone. This was a set example of how readily they sided with witchcraft accusers, never actually looking to the side of the accused. Aronson finds that the witch hunts of Salem were much like this in that the accused (the rejected) were outsiders who were outspoken, independent, have few to no children, bitter, and quite often depended on for medicinal assistance. “Who better to help bitter people get revenge than satan, the prince of darkness. The angel whose own envy of God made him try to subvert all of creation (Aronson

This often dim lit fact is that the family of the the accused suffered as well. Witches’ families could suffer as much as the witch because not only could they be accused of being accomplices in the witches’ activities but the families could also be stripped of their possessions or any possessions they would stand to inherit as a relative of the witches’ or prominent member of society (Aronson 2005). Godbeer, in 2011, found that the accused were outspoken, problematic and had little to no children as well. Aronson and Godbeer both agree that Sarah Good was perfect as the blueprint for what a witch looks like as she herself had no children, was heavily outspoken to her neighbors, and readily displayed her independence. Not only that but the two academics also agree that the hunt for witches in Salem was easily accepted do to the troubling nature of being without a government as well as the fact that most people accepted, on faith, the understanding of how the invisible world interacted with their daily lives in that God ultimately judged and determined everything but that there were also bad forces present in their lives in an effort to derail the efforts of