Snitches or Witches?

When reading chapters 4 and 5, I immediately went back in time to my freshman seminar, Satan in Salem. In that class, we read many articles about the Salem witch trials. For our final project, we had to write a paper explaining why we thought the Salem witch trials happened. For my paper, I wrote about how it was all a joke. It started with 3 girls accusing their servant to be a witch. The servant, Tibula, played with voodoo, which led to her being a witch. The girls would then pretend to be possessed by Tibula and the devil. The people in charge of the court believed the girls and sent Tibula to jail for being a witch. This went on and on. Young girls would accuse older women and sometimes men as being witches, making all of those women and men go to jail for a long time, or even executed. This was all a joke to those girls. Although in that class I had never learned about witches eating babies going to orgies. Though I am not sure which came first, the witches in Salem and the witches in England were influenced from each other.

Kassy made a great point about how the people did not want to blame God for the miscarriages and low mortality rates. That is why the people blamed witches. Witches were associated with the devil; the devil does bad things; therefore the devil and witches were blamed for the bad things. She makes a good point when she says “After all, [God] was the being they feared, admired and worshiped to help guide them through the tough times.” God was so powerful that he could not be blamed for anything remotely bad.

I am very curious to know if the town truly believed these witch tales, if they thought their neighbors, or milk man, or even families, were witches. Maybe they did believe it, because they had no other explanation for these strange happenings. Or maybe they did not believe it, and only went along with it for their own personal entertainment. I would love to have dinner with someone from the 12^th century to know how they felt about this; if they did truly believe in magic. There had to be some people that did not believe in the witch tales, but they went along with it because they were too scared to defend the witches. I mean if you defend a witch then obviously you are a witch too.