The Dancing Plague

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.

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.

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.

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. Some of the most known are the “Grim Reaper”, the "Dance of Death", and "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” by Albercht Dürer.

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.

In the play, the witches were commonly incorporated with “demonic forces”. 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.

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.

The Placebo Effect is a change in a person 's’ illness or behavior that results from a belief that the situation is actually happening (Placebo Effect, 2015). If the girls truly thought that they were possessed by the devil, then they probably tricked their minds into believing that, therefore their bodies reacted in unexplainable ways. These two theories are both also possible explanations. How It Could Have Been

Mass Hysteria In the Salem Witch Trials Abigail is the one who starts the whole witch thing, when her and all the girl from the village were in the woods doing a ritual about who they wanted to marry. The girls didn't notice that someone had followed them into the woods and they were caught and a young child fell to her knees and into a comma. The townspeople thought it was to be witchcraft. Abigail didn't want the towns people to know so Abigail threatened the girls and told them if they were to talk she would kill them.

Three deranged girls, from 1692 Salem; Massachusetts, precipitated the mass hangings of twenty innocent people accused of witchery for the reason that of their adept prowess at acting, their marital status and jealousy of the newfound eastern wealth. As a result of their skills in deception, the accusers were able to dupe the jury to convict people of witchcraft. For example, Document C describes the three girls’ reactions once their target entered the vicinity. “As soon as she [Bishop] came near, all(afflicted girls) fell into fits.”

Young Elizabeth “Betty” Parris and Abigail Williams were cousins, but also best friends. The girls enjoyed playing together and listening to the stories of their slave, Tituba. Because of their connections with the church the girls had most likely grown up with Puritan beliefs and were strongly influenced by that culture. The girls knew all ten of the commandments and were familiar with what they were and weren't allowed to do by the ways of Lord. With this strong Christian influence, 9-year-old Betty and 12-year-old Abigail were the last people expected to get caught up in a witchcraft scandal.

In the article Hysteria and the Teenage Girl, it talks about girls who have been experiencing something similar to what the girls in the Salem Witch Trials in the play The Crucible had experienced that is contagious. There were multiple different types of epidemics, such as in 1962, 95 school students in Tanzania experienced a laughing epidemic that lasted for a month. Another one occurred in 1965 that was a fainting episode in Blackburn, England and landed 85 girls in the hospital. Lastly, in 1983, 900 Ara school girls experienced an epidemic that lead people to believe they were gassed but doctors tested them and they hadn’t. These incidences are similar to what happened in 1692 in the Salem Witch Trials.