Where is the red salamander in salem witch trials

Most defendants lacked benefit of counsel and were assumed guilty. Those who publicly questioned the guilt of a defendant were likely to be accused of witchcraft themselves. Mostly populated by Puritans, Salem Village was experiencing economic hardship in , and residents were only too willing to blame someone else for their troubles.

The accusers were generally young females between the ages of 11 and The mischief began when a group of girls accused Tituba, a slave from South America who had told their fortunes, of witchcraft after they became mysteriously ill. Responding to increased attention, the girls expanded their credibility by producing a plethora of new evidence against accused witches and spreading the hysteria to neighboring towns.

Encouraged by their elders and joined by some peers, the girls began accusing anyone they disliked or feared of being witches. In court, the girls submitted anecdotal evidence and exhibited strange behavior, including weeping, joking, jerking, barking, writhing, and screeching, to suggest that their accusers were using magic to attack them. Told that they would be shown mercy if they confessed, 54 of the accused witches admitted guilt.

Families and friends often urged their loved ones to confess to save their lives. Families sometimes turned on one another. When Margaret Jacobs confessed to witchcraft, she implicated several others, including her grandfather, Reverend George Burroughs.

From February to May, events escalated until residents had been accused of witchcraft. Formal action was taken against individuals, who were often chained and thrown in jail for months under harsh conditions.

At least 55 of the accused were tortured or terrified into admitting guilt. Neither the young nor the old were spared. Four-year-old accused witch Dorcas Good went insane after spending months in prison and watching her baby sister die while in jail with their mother, who was later hanged. Three women and two infants died while imprisoned. Ultimately, 19 individuals who had refused to admit guilt were hanged and another was pressed to death.

For centuries, scholars have attempted to identify similarities among the accused. Giles Corey , a year-old man, refused to enter either a guilty or innocent plea to the court; as a punishment, heavy stones were pressed against him until he perished. The people who settled Massachusetts came with such high, idealistic, unattainable expectations of what life would be like and the godly community they would build," Baker says.

As it turns out, witch hunts were nothing new. The Salem trials, tragic though they were, pale in comparison to what happened elsewhere. In some witch hunts, 1, to 2, people died over a period of a couple years. You also have the invention of the printing press, which allowed treatises on witches, the Devil, and supernatural evil to spread more widely. By the time the incident in Salem occurred, you had centuries of myths, folktales, and historical records linking the demonic figure of the witch with women and femininity.

So the woman-as-witch mythos was deeply entrenched in Western culture by In , an article by psychologist Linnda Caporael published in Science suggested the delusions were possibly brought on by ergot poisoning from contaminated rye bread, which can cause hallucinations, convulsions, and delirium. The condition used to be common, according to Caporael. Witch hunts have never simply been about men in power versus powerless women — the gender politics are much more complicated.

You can look at many witch hunts as attempts to regulate and maintain the established gender hierarchy in a given community, which is to say, the patriarchy. The endless opportunities for interpretation mean that we are still utterly fascinated by the Salem trials today. It developed another side: It became a symbol. That rings true, as does the more unsettling suggestion that different forms of witch hunting are still with us today. Maybe our cultural fascination with the trials comes from our fear that we could be the ones wrongfully accused one day — outed for being different, shunned for a differing opinion or way of life.

Want more from Teen Vogue? Stay up-to-date with the politics team. Martha Carrier. Giles Corey. Martha Cory. Mary Easty. Salem, of which he is said to be king, is very probably Jerusalem.

Later, the Hebrews adapted another Canaanite name as an appellation for God.