It was 1692 when the Massachusetts Bay Colony was politically consolidated by the Puritans. These individuals were members of colonist families who, in c.1630, arrived at the new continent seeking religious freedom.
Such freedom, however, was not extended to others: Puritan minister Roger Williams was banished and founded Rhode Island in 1631 to implement his ideal of separation between church and state.
Nothing swayed the original settlers. The year, 1692, became earmarked for events quite different from colonial recognition. That year a series of trials took place in Salem, Massachusetts, so heinous that they rivaled the infamous Spanish Inquisition... not in numbers of victims, perhaps, but in the heritage they have left in America and have revealed elsewhere.
At a time when superstitious beliefs in witches and witchcraft prevailed, magistrates' trials of neighbors, landowners, wives and mothers took place, initiated by accusations from an hysterical passel of pre-adolescent girls but which grimly spread to charges from adults... acquaintences, even so-called "friends" of the victims.
Eighteen persons were hanged; one man was pressed to death with rocks. About 17 more, accused, died in prison awaiting trial. The entire geographic area was riddled with the practice over the years, but the Salem trials were the most intensive.
From these and the expanded spectrum of the 17th and 18th centuries when there were sporadic, but frequent incidents, the concept and phrase of “witch hunts” entered the vernacular and ultimately expanded to mean concerted attacks on innocent people.*
Was that in the long ago and far away, and of no concern to us in these advanced times? You think?
No, this isn't a treatise on esoteric cults. It is about you and me and the neighbor next door. The witch hunts of today have different names but each is still an attack on another person, to hurt or humiliate or ostracize.
These are the techniques of hunting down an individual who is feared or envied or has, too often, something wanted and stands in the way of the hunter’s acquiring it.
The hunter seems to fear a power he suspects is intrinsic to the other... a power, in this day and age, that might come from another's success, talent, popularity, intelligence... an excellence which is threatening to anyone who feels there is an absence of it in his own character.
The United States has a grim heritage and has not, even in these “enlightened” times, rejected it.
Witch hunting is alive and well in our land today.
The Hunt. It’s not trivial and it’s virtually ubiquitous, because all of us have an atavistic instinct to exercise it to survive as basic, and usually unconscious, self-protection. Most, I think, do not allow it; but enough of us do for it to pose a dismal threat to our culture. The outcome is hurt, pain, and too often serious damage to the persons attacked.
And the unexpected result? The hunter reveals his own inadequacies, labels his own insecurities, when he attacks another. The Witch Hunt is a gesture of futility for the hunter. To damn another is to damn oneself.
and to the folks who have chosen the "rugged path upward"
by Kathryn Ilsley-Shannon
Thomas Hooker, a Puritan clergyman, left the original colony in 1636 with 100 of his followers. Both Hooker and Williams disputed the colony’s restrictive religious rules and its theocracy.
