Witch Craft :: essays research papers

Around the seventeenth century, the belief in bewitches and witch craft was almost everywhere. The Church of Rome, more than three hundred eld ago, allowed penalizations for the use of witch craft and after that grammes of suspected people were burned-over alive, drowned or hanged. In the sixteenth century, more than one hundred thousand criminate and convicted people burned in the flames, in Germany. In England, enlighten men adopted the belief. The famous Sir Matthew Hale, who flourished during the civil war, the commonwealth and the period of the regaining of monarchy, repeatedly sentenced persons to death accused of witch craft. The Puritans brought the belief with them to America. They established laws for the punishment of witches, and before 1648, four people had suffered death for the supposed offence, in the approach of Boston. The ministers of the gospel there were shadowed by the delusion, and because of their powerful social influence, they did more to foster t he antic excitement and produce the distressing results of what is known in history as "Salem witch craft," than all others.      In 1688, a wayward daughter of John Goodwin of Boston, about thirteen years of age, accused a servant girl of stealing some of the family linen. The servants mother, a "wild Irish woman" and a Roman Catholic, impassioned disapproval the accuser as a false witness. The young girl, in revenge, pretended to be enamour by the Irish woman. Some others of her family followed her example. They would alternately become deaf, dumb and blind, clamber like dogs and purr like cats, but none of them lost their appetites or sleep. The Rev. Cotton Mather, a simple and conceited minister rushed to Goodwins theater of operations to ease the witchery by prayer. Wonderful were the supposed effects of his desire. The pose was controlled by them for the time. Then four other ministers of Boston and one of Salem, as superstitious as him self, joined Mather they spent a whole daylight in the house of the "afflicted" in fasting and prayer, the result of which was the sales pitch of one of the family from the power of the witch. This was enough proof for the minds of the ministers that there must be a witch in the case, and these ignorant minister prosecuted the ignorant Irish woman as such. She was confused before the court, and spoke sometimes in her native Irish language, which nobody could understand, and which her accusers and judges explain into involuntary confession.