Monday, October 26, 2009 10:02 PM CDT
Book Review: 'The Enemy Within: 2,000 Years of Witch-Hunting
in the Western World,' By John Demos
Review by Herb Meeker, Staff Writer
Two weeks ago, my great-niece proudly announced she was going to be a witch for Halloween.
When my wife asked whether she’d be a “good witch or bad witch” there was an awkward pause from the 5-year-old. Eventually, she responded with “good witch.”
Child-like innocence on witches is a source of entertainment for grown-ups, but it has not always been that way. Even the practice of trick or treat has a dark side to it.
There are accounts of women coming to farms centuries ago asking for a handout. When refused by the farmer, the woman might make a vow to seek retribution. If misfortune fell on the household then the woman was accused of “witchcraft.”
Human history has witnessed an unending battle to seek out and destroy witches. In “The Enemy Within: 2,000 years of Witch-Hunting in the Western World,” historian and Yale professor John Demos analyzes the accounts that stretch back to ancient times, when Christians were accused of ritualistic sacrifices — the communion of consuming Christ’s body and blood probably fueled the fears — to the Red Scares of the last century and even more recent “witch hunts.”
Much of the book concentrates on early colonial New England, especially the Salem witch trials of 1692-93, the most famous witch-hunting episode in western history. Dozens were accused, jailed, interrogated, but only a fraction were actually executed before the tide of fear receded at Salem. The initial accusers were girls claiming they were being tormented physically and mentally by specters created by the accused. Girls were sending women to their deaths and creating a frenzy of accusations.
Demos is known for using all possible resources to answer why something happened in the past. His award-winning book “The Unredeemed Captive” can cause a room of historians to go at it as they contend his use of psychological speculation on why an English girl carried away by American Indians in 1704 decided to remain with her captors for decades, while rejecting her original family’s pleas for her return.
Some of the answers on why witches became a real threat in early America might have to do with a confluence of fears, not just religious fervor against Satan and his minion, Demos writes. For example, in Salem there was fear of change from a farm-based, to a trade-based economy, creating antagonism between families.
Fear of attacks by Indians, allied with the hated French in Canada, also added to what Demos calls “nothing less than an overwhelming and highly toxic climate of fear” in Salem.
Fear will also play out in the Anti-Mason movement 130 years later and during the Red Scares of 1919 and the 1950s, when people were deported or jailed or branded as communist sympathizers. Some were radicals actually aiming for an overthrow of the system, while most were wrongly accused by way of association or slim evidence at best.
A similar hunt took place again in the 1980s with the high-profile child sex abuse cases, including Fell Acres in Massachusetts. Ironically, children were the accusers in these trials, but Demos claims it became a modern witch hunt, with accusations of ritualistic sex and torture that twisted the justice system toward unfair trial procedures.
The literary irony is Arthur Miller wrote his play “The Crucible” during the height of the second Red Scare, when Sen. Joe McCarthy reigned over the hunt for Reds. Demos said it is like placing a “dark mirror” on that era by using the language and records of colonial times.
This linkage is a testament to how fear can overwhelm justice through the centuries.
Contact Herb Meeker at hmeeker@jg-tc.com or 238-6869.
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