Status Updates From The Witches: Salem, 1692

Giving this a shot since the witch trials are my current hyper fixation!

Okay was anybody going to tell me that Walt Disney was a descendant of George Burroughs, the only minister executed for witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials, or was I just supposed to read that in this book myself???

Samuel Parris feels bad about the witchcraft and whatnot

“The question is not why they retailed preposterous stories but why in 1692 they were believed; it is easier to understand their real or artificial visions than the vertiginous tales of everyone else. (‘Indeed,’ notes a modern psychiatrist, ‘a sane adolescent would have something wrong with her.’)”

“Hysteria is contagious and attention addictive; wanton self-abuse comes naturally to a teenager.”
This book is offering the best most plausible explanation for the Salem “bewitchings” I’ve ever read. No they didn’t have fungus in their grain or whatever, a bunch of teenagers wanted attention and to get out of doing work and it got really out of hand from there

“the devout tend to glimpse the devil more frequently. Possession rarely occurs in the absence of intense piety.”

Funny, that 🤔