It was 1692 when the Massachusetts Bay Colony was politically consolidated by the Puritans. These individuals were members of colonist families who, in c.1630, arrived at the new continent seeking religious freedom.
Such freedom, however, was not extended to others: Puritan minister Roger Williams was banished and founded Rhode Island in 1631 to implement his ideal of separation between church and state; Thomas Hooker, a Puritan clergyman, left the original colony in 1636 with 100 of his followers. Both men disputed the colony’s restrictive religious rules and its theocracy.
Nothing swayed the original settlers. In 1692, there transpired a series of events so heinous they rival the infamous Spanish Inquisition... not in numbers of victims, perhaps, but in the heritage they have left here in America, and elsewhere.
At a time when superstitious beliefs in witches and witchcraft prevailed, a series of trials took place, initiated by accusations from an hysterical passel of pre-adolescent girls.
Eighteen persons were hanged; one man was pressed to death with rocks. The entire geographic area was riddled sporadically with the practice over the years, but the Salem trials were the most intensive.
From these and the expanded spectrum of the 17th and 18th centuries when there were sporadic, but frequent incidents, the concept and phrase of “witch hunts” entered the vernacular and ultimately expanded to mean concerted attacks on innocent people.*
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No, this isn't a treatise on esoteric cults. It is about you and me and the neighbor next door. The witch hunts of today have different names but each is still an attack on another person, to hurt or humiliate or ostracize.
These are the techniques of hunting down an individual who is feared or envied or has, too often, something wanted and stands in the way of the hunter’s acquiring it.
On the part of the hunter there seems to be a fear of a power he senses is intrinsic to the other... A power, in this day and age, that might come from such things as accomplishment, success, talent, popularity... factors which are threatening to those who feel, often subconsciously, an absence of them in their own natures.
The United States has a grim heritage and has not, even in these “enlightened” times, rejected it. Witch hunting is alive and well in our land today.
The Hunt. It’s not trivial and it’s virtually ubiquitous. That is to say, at least, that all of us have an atavistic ability to exercise it. Most, I think, do not; but enough of us do for it to pose a dismal threat to our culture. The outcome is hurt, pain, and too often serious damage to the persons attacked.
Nothing swayed the original settlers. In 1692, there transpired a series of events so heinous they rival the infamous Spanish Inquisition... not in numbers of victims, perhaps, but in the heritage they have left here in America, and elsewhere.
