Salem Witch Trial
A historic illustration of the trial of Susannah Martin for witchcraft. (Source Unknown)
Today marks the 330th anniversary of the hanging of my great-grandmother Susannah Martin. Actually, there are nine “greats” before grandmother, but that gets redundant quickly. As did the allegations against her when she was put on trial in 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts, charged with being a witch. One guy accused her of bewitching 16 of his oxen, causing them to run wild on an island in the Merrimack River. One woman said Susannah had walked a long distance on a rainy day, only to arrive with her shoes dry and petticoats clean. And so on. When confronted by her accusers in court, Susannah simply laughed at them.
The evidence was thin and, indeed, laughable. Yet those were perilous times. Creeping secularism threatened traditional authority in the colonies. Cotton Mather, Salem’s Calvinist minister, spearheaded the effort to combat the alleged Satanic influences in a science-based modern order that was challenging his Puritan world. In the wake of war and a recent smallpox epidemic, Mather leveraged fear and a distrust of others into a full-blown campaign of hate and violence against women.
It’s easy to look back and shake our head at the primitive beliefs that gave rise to the Salem Witch Trials. Yet we live in an age when some people are more afraid of books in classrooms than guns in classrooms, when a Congressional representative warns us of Jewish space lasers, when millions of people believe a cabal of Democrats drinks the blood of kidnaped children in order to remain in power, and when 70 percent of Republicans believe Donald Trump won the last presidential election.
It’s easy to look back and shake our head at the misogynist attitudes that built the gallows where my foremother was hung. Yet we live in an age when some conservatives want to perform pregnancy checks on women crossing state borders, when some legislators believe 10-year old girls shouldn’t be exposed to drag queens but it’s ok for them to be forced to give birth to their rapist’s child, and when thousands of indigenous women continue to be murdered or go missing with scant public notice.
It’s been a long time since Grandma Susannah was executed in Salem. Yet it seems that not much has changed.
Paul Jeffrey
The Rev. Paul Jeffrey
The Rev. Paul Jeffrey of Eugene, Ore., is a United Methodist photojournalist. This post is republished with permission from his Facebook page. To reproduce this content elsewhere, please contact the author via Facebook.