THE DEVIL IN MASSACHUSETTS (310 pp.) —Marion L. Starkey—Knopf ($3.50).
When the Reverend Samuel Parris took the ministry of tiny Salem Village in 1689, he brought with him two dark-skinned slaves he had picked up while trading in Barbados. One of the slaves, an ageless woman named Tituba, became the darling of Salem's teen-age girls. In a stern Puritan community that shunned amusement, Tituba's stealthy demonstrations of West Indian voodoo could be wonderfully thrilling. But to children like Betty Parris and her cousin Abigail the shows also brought spasms of guilt, for they were convinced they were trafficking with the devil.
In mid-January 1692, Betty and Abigail fell sick. Betty would break into fits of weeping and sometimes make hoarse choking sounds, almost like the barking of a dog. Abigail would run about on all fours, rasping and babbling. The children could not bear to hear prayers, and when Betty came out of one seizure she sobbed that she was damned.
The malady spread; there was hardly a corner of Salem without its afflicted maiden. Long weighed down by Indian raids, smallpox and quarrels with London, Salem took to the outbreak of convulsions with something approaching relief, as if a holiday had been declared.
After the local doctor had tried his few remedies on the girls ("physics" made no difference), he weightily declared that "The evil hand is on them." With these chilling words the witch-hunt began.
In her debonair, Freudianized study of the Salem witch trials, Marion L. Starkey analyzes the maidenly affliction as hysteria. She sees the girls as partly possessed and partly calculating, weighed down by the rigors of Calvinism, depressed by the lack of an outlet for their high spirits, and finding in their seizures a way both to draw attention to themselves and to wreak an incredibly malicious revenge on the adult world.
"Who Torments You?" Once the devil's hand was suspected, a group of ministers-in-conclave queried the girls: "Who torments you?" At first, they did not know. Only after a dish of "witch cake" (a blend of rye meal and the sufferers' urine baked in ashes) was fed to a dog, were their tongues loosened. Betty Parris named Tituba; the others also accused a village tramp and a matron who did not attend church regularly.
The two Massachusetts magistrates sent to Salem Village for preliminary examinations faced a difficult problem: what constituted evidence of witchcraft? The Bible mentioned it in the same breath with sodomy and idolatry, but neglected to define it. After due deliberation the magistrates declared that a devil's "teat" or "devil's mark" on the body of the accused was proof of guilt, that mischief following anger between neighbors was ground for suspicion, and, most important of all, that "the devil could not assume the shape of an innocent person." This last meant that hallucinations would be accepted not as evidence of the wrought-up condition of the accuser but as proof of the guilt of the accused.