To deny a belief in witchcraft was perceived as a way of subtly advocating for it. To not speak perfect English was proof that the tongue had been tied by Satan. "Witchcraft inscribed a vicious cycle," Schiff writes, "its allegation generating witch-like behaviour." To appear exhausted or impudent or to not weep before the courts was a sign of witchcraft. To stand before the courts of colonial Massachusetts accused of witchcraft was in itself a damning sentence. But reading Stacy Schiff's new book about the 1692 Salem witch trials, it doesn't seem that far afield from the stubborn, villainous rationalizations that determined the fates of accused witches, wizards, sorcerers and other innocents presumed to have forged pacts with the devil. The sequence runs as follows: Witches burn and so does wood wood floats in water and so does a duck therefore, if the woman weighs the same as a duck, she's undoubtedly a witch and should be justifiably burned at the stake.Īs I say, the governing logic is bizarre and comically absurd. The presiding magistrate, Sir Bedevere, employs a twisted sequence of pre-Enlightenment "logic" to definitively prove whether the woman is indeed a witch. There's a scene in the 1975 Arthurian parody Monty Python and the Holy Grail in which townsfolk in some festering, 10th-century English backwater accuse a woman of witchcraft.
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