The Encyclopedia Of Demons And Demonology

220 Salem witchcraft hysteria
Tituba made a witch cake out of rye meal mixed with
the urine of the afflicted girls. Taken from a traditional
English recipe, the cake was then fed to the dog. If the
girls were bewitched, one of two things should happen:
Either the dog would suffer torments, too, or he would
identify the witch as her familiar. The Reverend Parris
furiously accused Mary Sibley of “going to the Devil for
help against the Devil,” lectured her on her sins, and publicly
humiliated her in church. But the damage had been
done: “The Devil hath been raised among us, and his rage
is vehement and terrible,” said Parris, “and when he shall
be silenced, the Lord only knows.”
The first accused, or “cried out against,” were Tituba
herself, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborne. Warrants for
their arrest were issued, and all three appeared before Salem
Town magistrates John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin
on March 1. The girls, present at all interrogations,
fell into fits and convulsions as each woman stood up for
questioning, claiming that the woman’s specter was roaming
the room, biting them, pinching them, and often appearing
as a bird or other animal someplace in the room,
usually on a particular beam of the ceiling. Hathorne and
Corwin angrily demanded why the women were tormenting
the girls, but both Sarahs denied any wrongdoing.
Tituba, however, beaten since the witch cake episode
by Parris and afraid to reveal the winter story sessions
and conjurings, confessed to being a witch. She said that
a black dog—a favored form of the Devil—had threatened
her and ordered her to hurt the girls, and that two
large cats, one black and one red, had made her serve
them. She claimed that she had ridden through the air on
a pole to “witch meetings” (see SABBAT) with Good and
Osborne, accompanied by the other women’s familiars: a
yellow bird for Good, a winged creature with a woman’s
head, and another hairy one with a long nose for Osborne.
Tituba cried that Good and Osborne had forced her to attack
Ann Putnam, Jr., with a knife just the night before,
and Ann corroborated her statement by claiming that the
witches had menaced her with a knife and tried to cut off
her head.
Tituba revealed that there was a coven of witches in
Massachusetts, about six in number, led by a tall, whitehaired
man dressed all in black, and that she had seen
him. During the next day’s questioning, Tituba claimed
that the tall man had approached her many times, forcing
her to sign his devil’s book in BLOOD, and that she had
seen nine names already there.
All three women were taken to prison in Boston, where
Good and Osborne were locked in heavy iron chains to
prevent their specters from traveling about and tormenting
the girls. Osborne, already frail, died there. Tituba
joined the ranks of the accusers.
Complicating the legal process of arrest and trial was
the loss of Massachusetts Bay’s colonial charter. The colony
was established as a Puritan colony in 1629 with selfrule,
the English courts revoked the charter in 1684–85,
Title page of a witch-hunting pamphlet by Cotton Mather
(AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)
restricting the colony’s independence. Massachusetts Bay
had had no authority to try capital cases, and for the first
six months of the witch hunt, suspects merely languished
in prison, usually in irons.
The loss of Massachusetts’ charter represented to the
Puritans a punishment from God: The colony had been
established in covenant with God, and prayer and fasting
and good lives would keep up Massachusetts’ end of the
covenant and protect the colony from harm. Increasingly,
the petty transgressions and factionalism of the colonists
were viewed as sins against the covenant, and an outbreak
of witchcraft seemed the ultimate retribution for the colony’s
evil ways. Published sermons by Cotton Mather and
his father, Increase Mather, and the long-winded railings
against witchcraft from the Reverend Parris’ pulpit every
Sunday convinced the villagers that evil walked among
them and must be rooted out at all cost.
In May 1692, the new royal governor, Sir William
Phips, established a Court of Oyer and Terminer (“to hear
and determine”) to try the witches. By May’s end, approx-