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Stacy Schiff's 'The Witches' is an intoxicating brew of history

Kevin Nance
Special for USA TODAY
'The Witches: Salem, 1692' by Stacy Schiff

It's tempting to use historian Stacy Schiff's revelatory, sumptuously written new book, The Witches: Salem,1692, as yet another occasion to apply American history's favorite metaphor.

The witch hunt, exploited so memorably in Arthur Miller's The Crucible as an allegory of McCarthyism, might legitimately be used to describe to any number of the ongoing follies of our national life, from Internet bullying to anti-immigrant prejudice to the persistent speculation that President Obama is a Muslim. (He isn't, but even if he were — well, that's another essay.)

To indulge in the witch-hunt metaphor now, however, would be to lose sight of the all too literal events on which it's based. In a sense, we can't lose sight of what happened in late 17th century Salem, a small village in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, because — contenting ourselves with Miller, Nathaniel Hawthorne and a few other writers, mostly of fiction — we never had an accurate view of it in the first place.

What really happened, and why? Fortunately, if also horrifyingly, Schiff — who returns to the primary sources, including the few relatively unbiased contemporaneous accounts — has the answers. The trials were Kafkaesque at best, based on outlandish accusations made nominally credible by Puritan officials predisposed to believe them, and who, with persistent leading questions, proceeded to browbeat and brainwash many of the accused into false, often elaborate confessions.

Yes, several of the alleged witches admitted, they had afflicted their accusers at the behest of their master, the devil. Of course they had transformed themselves into black cats, wolves, wild boar and other, less certain species of animals. And naturally they had flown through the sky over the fields of the Bay Colony, at night and in broad daylight, on a pole. One of their number, an Indian slave named Tituba — a "satanic Scheherazade" in the household of the Rev. Samuel Parris, whose daughter and niece were among the earliest targets of diabolical enchantment — recalled everything as if it were yesterday.

Not all of the accused confessed, but in the end it made no difference. They were guilty as sin, so to speak, for which the consequences were Biblically prescribed ("Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live") and not remotely metaphorical. Nineteen people, including five men, were hanged — not burned at the stake, as later myth would have it — for the crime of witchcraft. An ordained minister, George Burroughs, was among the condemned, as were two dogs. In the course of the proceedings, an elderly man was trampled to death.

It was a nasty business, in hindsight: a mass slaughter of innocents in one of the most self-consciously pious communities ever founded in America. Even at the time, a few people may have glimpsed the possibility that the trials were a monstrous error. But those doubts, if they existed, were not enough. The so-called witches perished, their powerful magic consistently failing them on the scaffold.

Author Stacy Schiff

Having unearthed the actual chain of events and brushed away the dust of mythology that has obscured it from our view for more than three centuries, Schiff proceeds to divine its motivation. Paranoia was epidemic in the villages of New England, on the edges of what the Puritans viewed as civilization, especially at night. But the psychology behind the witch trials was not merely a matter of groupthink or mass hysteria. Some of the fatal finger-pointing had its roots not only in genuine fear of the supernatural but in more earthly concerns.

Without giving away too much of Schiff's reporting and conclusions, it can be said that the accusers of Salem, including a core group of adolescent girls and, later, several adult men who leapt with both feet onto their toxic bandwagon, were not above settling a score or two as they fulfilled their Christian duty to name names.

It's unsettling, gripping stuff, rendered in the burnished sentences of a master prose stylist. Perhaps it's unusual to speak of reading a book of history — especially one about events as gruesome as these — for the quality of the writing. But as with Schiff's previous book, Cleopatra, every page of The Witches is almost scandalously pleasurable, the phrases rising, cresting and falling like all the best incantations. She casts a spell on you.

The Witches: Salem, 1692

By Stacy Schiff

Little, Brown, 498 pp.

4 stars out of four

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