The Dancing Plague

It was believed that they danced a black magic dance in nearby woods, and some girls would fall on the floor and hysterically scream. Shortly after that, these actions started to allot all over Salem. Ministers came to Salem trying to find who is responsible for this crisis. The Puritans believed that to become bewitched, a witch must draw a person under a spell. The young girls of Salem could not have brought this situation onto themselves, so they were questioned and forced to name their torturers.

Those who would admit to being a witch would go to jail, but for those who denied having interaction with the devil would have been trialed and hung, so really, anyway you put it it’s a lose-lose situation. Things like politics, religion, imaginations, and fear of people were just some of the main factors of what aided people into believing that Satan was upon the town of Salem. They believed that the humans were with devil and doing as he said which in turn gave them the power to harm others. One girl named Tituba was trying to save herself by confessing to witchcraft. She didn’t just confess but she also accused many other women about being witches and she said that they all were in the “hands of Satan”.

The Salem Witch trials popped up around 1692 and they were a disaster. The reason why they came up was because of their religion. The people in the town of Salem were puritans. This means their religion was very strict and that they believed in the devil. The way this all started was that the people who were accused of being witches were acting funny.

The witch, known as an incarnation of a human who betrayed their beliefs for something evil, was thought to be able to participate in witchcraft not with the Devil, but with their minds (Briggs). Instead of making pacts with the Devil, they were able to come up with their corrupt thoughts through their minds. Their rituals would be extremely horrible. They would hold cannibalistic and sexual rituals to show their honestly to the Devil (Briggs). The rituals and the people involved were seen obscene and horrifying.

Nineteen people were hung due to false judgement by human nature and society. Taking place in a small village called Salem, inside of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, during a depressing seventeenth century, was a movement that would challenge the nation’s religious and psychological beliefs. Innocent people were being accused of witchcraft, when rather they were just ill or not taken care of properly by family and friends. Thought to be caused by stress, fear, and panic, the Salem Witch Trials was an event that changed the nation’s view on mental illness because of false assumptions and mischievous behavior. The Salem Witch Trials was a series of false accusations of witchcraft taking place in Salem, which during the seventeenth century, was apart of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Flagellants were born, the flagellants were professional self-tortures would whip themselves for a fee to bring God's favor hoping to stop the plague. These guys thought that the Black Death was a punishment for sin and the only way to pay back this punishment was in physical terms. Also there was another group called "pseudo-flagellants", though they would perform unusual sexual acts in public. The Church outlawed both groups but this was not to stop them. It also brought other negative effects such as in the arts of those days, in fact scenes of deaths and dead people were the central idea of the paintings and statues.

During this time, Puritanism was very prominent, along with the belief in God. Puritanism had strict rules and views that were followed by many people. According to the reference article “Mental Illness and Psychiatry”, all behavior was considered or created by the will of God, but deviant behavior was considered as an illness brought on by the devil. In the same way, Beatriz Quintanilla wrote in her article “Witchcraft or Mental Illness?” that witchcraft is linked to devious powers. This article first introduces the belief that madness or symptoms of odd behavior were considered a message.

One reason this may be, has to do with their evil fortune for Macbeth. They left Macbeth with a riddle which then lead him to “profound” actions. Another note about the witches is that Shakespeare had created a scene of them doing real magic. This is what people think had caused real witches to place a curse on the play. The witches were offended (“Supernatural”).

During The Crucible, the Witch Trials caused many court hearings. A good deal of the court hearings consisted of people over exaggerating outbursts of demons inside of them just to get somebody convicted. The Witch Trails also affected the church in many ways. Reverend Parris’ already had a wicked reputation as their minister, and the trials made it even worse. People wanted him out of the church.

The Devil has returned putting children under his control is what many people believed in Salem village in 1962. In ¨ The Crucible¨ by Arthur Miller many people panicked from the witch hysteria which caused many to be accused of being witches, Judge Danforth decided what happens to the accused witches and is the most corrupted in Salem because his power of being a judge made him go overboard with his decisions on people. When he starts to realize he continues to avoid people from getting mad at him for putting innocent people in jail and killing them. To begin with Danforth became a megalomaniac a person crazy with their own power. As the Judge he gets to pick the punishment of the person accused making him feel superior to others.