Rev. Victoria Weinstein of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Greater Lynn in Swampscott delivered a lecture titled “Beyond Salem: The History and Legacy of the European Witch Trials,” drawing connections between historical witch hunts, modern-day persecution, and the upcoming production of The Crucible at Marblehead Little Theater.

“It’s amazing to me that people walk around with T-shirts in Salem as tourists and they have things that say ‘more weight’ and other jokey slogans,” Weinstein said. “We’re in a culture of such constant exposure to violence, political state sanctioned violence. I think there’s been a massive numbing and desensitization.”

Weinstein spoke in hopes of having people think more deeply about the accusations of witchcraft, why they happened and “how the same kinds of behavior persist to this day.”

The Salem witch trials were a series of prosecutions for alleged witchcraft that took place between 1692 and 1693. Accusations and arrests were made throughout the area too, not just in Salem. There were numerous occurrences in Andover and Topsfield. Thirty people were found guilty; 19 were executed by hanging. Others were tortured, like Giles Corey, who was pressed to death under heavy stones and uttered the phrase Weinstein referenced: “more weight.”

Corey is one of the characters in The Crucible, which was written by Arthur Miller in 1953 and is a dramatized retelling of the Salem witch trials as an allegory for McCarthyism, when Americans were persecuted over alleged communist ties. Swampscott resident Trudi Olivetti is directing the play throughout October. 

“When Trudi told me she was directing The Crucible, I was really excited because Arthur Miller’s play is a really excellent interpretation of what happened,” Weinstein said.

Weinstein went on to tell how she believes that not only do people genetically inherit history from their ancestors but “we might also inherit some kind of generational trauma from those to whom we are not kinfolk relations.” SShe recalled being “obsessed” with the show Bewitched as a child, and begging her father to take her to Salem. When they visited, he explained it was a place where people accused of being witches were persecuted and killed.

“Apparently, according to my father, I said, ‘How did they die,’ and my father told me they hanged them, and I replied ‘I remember being burned,’” Weinstein said. “I don’t remember that, but that was from my father.”

She named each other victims of the Salem witch trials, noting that “what happened up the road from us was a very small blip on the map of the larger hysteria that occurred.”

Witchcraft prosecutions peaked between 1560 and 1630, during the religious wars in Europe. Lower class members accused their neighbors of witchcraft. In some regions, witches were burnt at the stake, and in others they were punished for religious heresy. 

“Tens of thousands of innocent people were subjected to the inquisitorial process of interrogation under torture and executed for the crime of witchcraft,” Weinstein said. “This wasn’t a little wave of madness. It went on for a long time.”

Weinstein pointed to the political instability and class issue dynamics that played into the intimidation and fear. With “no room for ambiguity,” if someone stumbled on the Lord’s Prayer, they were accused of being a witch. Having a miscarriage was even seen as a cause for an interrogation, Weinstein said. 

“Anyone who had power and knowledge to heal was very easily blamed and persecuted for unexplained harm, and they were tortured and they died for it,” Weinstein said. “And this is frightening to me, given what we’re going through in this country today, that required women to register their pregnancies and to have a witness at the moment of birth…I felt that it was important to share this. It’s so heavy. It’s so horrifying, and yet there is that history.”

And it was all from this “accusatorial system where a suspect knew her accusers and the charges that they had brought to the inquisitorial process.”

For the Salem witch trials, several of the accusers admitted in the years following the prosecutions that they had fabricated their charges. In 1702 the General Court of Massachusetts declared the trials “unlawful,” and in 1711 the colonial legislature annulled the convictions. 

“This is such a warning about how any of us can be swayed by peer pressure or pressure in the moment to fix a problem in our town or in our leadership position,” Weinstein said. “In 1692, Cotton Mather wrote up a lengthy paper on areas of concern around the accusations and trials for witches, and he was already in May of 1692, so this is before anybody goes to death in Salem, concerned about the legitimacy of spectral evidence, which is the whole thing where you see the girls doing this in Salem.”

Even still, since these ideas have continued to be contrived, Weinstein said. Witches are seen as “malevolent practitioners of abortion and infanticide and even cannibalism.”

“It’s a call to violence,” Weinstein said. “Women were forced into compliance…We need to ask ourselves, what remains in our lives of all of this and understand that it is the result of factors. It isn’t divinely ordained. It didn’t arise naturally or organically.”

Weinstein left the congregation with a message to encourage them to think about the images of witches when they pop up this Halloween season.

“I hope you see The Crucible and attend productions of some more recent plays written by women that shed more light on the girls’ experience in Salem,” Weinstein said.