By SuzAnne King, of Friends of Noosa Library
IN 1692 Salem, Massachusetts, no-one wore a black pointy hat.
There were probably brooms, but they mostly were used for sweeping – and black cats were purely of the domesticated variety.
Yet some people would swear in court to the highest officialdom that they saw their neighbours flying through the air and that some woman caused others to twitch convulsively.
Yet another had made some poor “innocent” steal a friend’s husband.
This isn’t make-believe or some fantastic television series. It is a book about true events that are “scarier than fiction” to quote Mark Twain.
The Witches: Salem 1692, by Stacy Schiff, is a perceptively written horror story of how one isolated and zealous community lost its humanity and collective conscience for the briefest moment in time with awful consequences that we still talk about today.
Schiff points out how these Puritan zealots had originally escaped British persecution during the Middle Ages’ hiatus of witchcraft: a time when many religions and not only Puritans believed in witchcraft and possession.
Most of the Salem superstitions and idiosyncrasies were cast from that time.
But more importantly, Schiff explores how the very mode of life in a dark backwoods and some startling trivialities all contributed to a macabre period of persecution not seen in the Americas before or since.
The Witches: Salem 1692, by Stacey Schiff, is available at the Noosaville library.
