While most of the accused witches in 1692 lived in Salem Village, which is now known as Danvers, the city of Salem, for obvious reasons, takes most of the “credit” today for the witch trials.
And they’ve leaned in hard on this identity over the years, to say the least.
Salem is often called “Witch City.” The Salem Police Department incorporates a witch flying on a broom stick on its patch (And the chatbot icon on the city’s website is also a flying witch.) Can you guess what the Salem High School mascot is? Of course you can!
While it’s difficult to blame the city for trading on its infamous past—particularly when more than a million tourists visit Salem annually, mostly to revel in its witchiness during the fall ‘spooky’ season—it’s entirely incongruent with the actual events that occurred more than 330 years ago.
Of course, there were no witches in Salem three centuries ago. And as far as we know, nobody ever claimed to be a practicing witch, as we would view them today. To a seventeenth-century Puritan, a witch was somebody who had sold their soul to the devil. Somebody who existed well within the Calvinist belief system that the Puritans practiced. For Puritans, witches weren’t practicing a nature-based spirituality. They were doing the devil’s work to undermine everything that they held dear. It was deadly serious business. Being a witch was nothing short of the worst thing a person could be.
But, then again, maybe Salem is just being smart. A million visitors a year can’t be wrong, right? Maybe connecting Salem’s infamous past with present-day witch practices is the way to go. At least it seems to be working for them.
Still, it makes me wonder how many of those million plus people who visit Salem each year actually understand what really happened there.
What do you think?
I just listened to your latest podcast with the Danvers historians, and wanted to say how great a panel that was. Nice work!
It is tacky and probably more than a little disrespectfulin some ways, but considering there are still some Christians in this country who characterize anything they don't like as the work of the devil, having a "ground zero" to parade in the face of that still insidious belief is cathartic. In a way Salem honors the memory of the victims by keeping the irrational folly of witch hunts present in the cultural memory.