Comparing the Salem Witch Trials and Modern Satanic...

The Salem Witch Trials and Modern Satanic Trials Cotton Mather, in his The Wonders of the Invisible World, preserved for posterity a very dark period in Puritanical American society through his account of the Salem witch trials in 1692. His description is immediately recognizable as being of the same viewpoint as those who were swept up in the hysteria of the moment. Mather viewed Salem as a battleground between the devil and the Puritans. The New Englanders are a people of God settled in those which were once the devils territories. . . . The devil thus irritated, immediately tried all sorts of methods to overturn this poor plantation (Mather 421). Here Mather is alluding to the Native Americans as being a people†¦show more content†¦The precepts in society that drove the village of Salem to the execution of twenty people, who were judged to be witches and accordingly subjects to the ever present devil, still exists and even flourishes over 300 hundred years later at the dawn of the 21st century. Today our witches are lab eled Satanists and are still innately linked with the most often misunderstood members of society, the children. But now overt sexuality has become the main factor and pinching and tormenting by invisible hands has been replaced by sexual molestation and rape; instead of being linked with the blasting of crops and the death of livestock as their colonial predecessors were, todays Satanists are accused of ritual sacrifice of babies, cannibalism, necromancy, and the butchering of small animals. One can clearly see how the mythology has evolved since 1692 to more closely embody the fears of society. This manifestation of the human psyche now takes the form out of the shadowy fears parents have when they leave their small childrens care to the hands of strangers; the other which exists outside the microcosm of home and family. While this may seem to be a wholly modern phenomenon, the bones of such fears instilled in modern parents can be found in the mythology of the Salem witch trials The most prodigious myth concerning the Salem witch trials centers around one woman, Tituba, the slave from Barbados belonging to Reverend Paris, and later a confessedShow MoreRelatedSalem Witch Trial vs Mccarthyism1208 Words   |  5 PagesA review of A Fever in Salem: A New Interpretation of the New England Witch Trials, by Laurie Winn Carlson, Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 2000; 224 pp. $14.95 Paperback. ISBN: 1-566633095 A FEVER IN SALEM POSITS A biological cause for the early modem witchcraft epidemic, which resulted in the hanging of 19 people in Salem, MA, in 1692. Witchcraft persecution, Laurie Carlson writes, arose because of the strange behavior of the supposedly bewitched accusers. She concludes that the cause was a disease unrecognizable