The San Francisco call. [volume] (San Francisco [Calif.]) 1895-1913, 1895-04-13
W|TCHCRAFT OF SALEM
1t Was Introduced Into New
England by West Indian
Blacks
Professor John Fiske of Harvard
Tells How the Epidemic
Spread.

Professor John Fiske of Harvard College
occupied Rev. Jenkin Lloyd Jones' pulpit
at All Souls Church yesterday morning,
delivering discourse on "The Witchcraft
of Salem Village" says a recent issue of
the Chicago Tribune Professor Fiske
traced the history OF witchcraft from the
year 1870 when the provincial parliaments
of Normandy condemned dozen women
to be burned and who were pardoned by
Louis XIV, much against the will of his
people. Then he spoke of the time when
early New England was aroused by the
delusion, when the people had a firm
belief in its reality. In the course of his
remarks he said:
"Unquestioning belief in the reality of
witchcraft has been shared by the human
race from prehistoric ages to the end of
the seventeenth century. There are tribes
of men whose minds are so little developed
that travellers have doubted the existence
of religious ideas among them, but none
have been found so low as not to have
some notion of witchcraft. One of the
most primitive shapes which the relation
of cause and effect assumed in the savage
mind is the assumed relation between
disease or death and some malevolent per-
sonal agency. The conceptions of natural
disease and natural death are attainable
only by civilized minds. To the savage all
death is regarded as murder, either at the
hands of a superhuman power that must
be propitiated or at the hands of some
human being upon whom vengeance may
be wreaked.
''Among educated people the belief of
witchcraft is practically extinct What
has caused this remarkable change in our
mental attitude toward witchcraft? Surely
not argument. Some powerful cause has
made our minds insuperably inhospitable
to such sort of evidence. That cause is the
gigantic development of physical science
since the days of Newton and Descartes.
The minds of civilized people have become
familiar with the conception of natural
law and that conception has simply stifed
the old superstition as clover chokes out
weeds. 1t has been observed that the ex-
istence of evidence in favor of witchcraft
closely depends upon the disposition to
believe it, SO that when the latter ceases
the former disappears. Accordingly we
find no difficulty in understanding the uni
versatility of the belief until quite modern
times. The disposition to believe was one
of the oldest inheritances of the human
mind, while the capacity for estimating
evidence in cases of physical causation is
one of the very latest and most laborious
acquisitions"
Speaking of the introduction of witch
craft into Salem village Professor Fiske
stated that in 1892 there were circnm-
stances which favored the outbreak of
such an epidemic in that place quite apart
from any personal influence. War had
broken out with Louis XIV and had been
going badly with the colonists; the great
expedition to Quebec had come home
crestfallen with defeat; the devil was be-
stirring himself, the fuel for an explosion
had been gathered and it needed but a
spark. This was provided by the servants,
children and their visiting playmates of
the household of Samuel Paris, the min
lister of Salem village. Paris had come
to New England from the West Indies and
had brought with him two blacks, one
male and one female, the latter assuming
to be the wife Of the former. She
taught the children and servants how
to enter frances, and from her they
soon learned to believe in palmistry and
fortune-telling and became quite proficient
in talking gibberish. This bag was known
as Titula, and it was not long before the
young girls of the minister's household,
over whom she seemed to WELD such an
influence, became the talk of the village.
In fact, they came TO be known as the
afflicted children" Professor Fiske
added:
eve may suppose that the minister's
West Indian servants began by taking
Indian medicine and teaching its tricks
to his daughters and niece; then the girls
OF their acquaintance would naturally be-
come interested and would seek to relieve
the mQnotony of the winter evenings by
taking part in the performances. Their
first motives are most likely to have been
playful but there was probably half
shuddering sense of wickedness, slight
aroma of birthstone about the affair,
which may have made it more at
tractive. | feel sure that sooner or later
some of these girls would find them
selves losing control over their spasms,
and thus getting, more than they
bargained for would deem themselves be-
witched by Titula and John Indian, and,
especially if they found themselves taken
to task by their parents, the dread of pun
lshment-perhaps of church discipline,
wherein Paris was notably would
be sure to make them blame the Indians
in order to screen themselves. If Cotton
Mather's preferred methods had been fol-
lowed the affair would have been hushed,
and the girls, isolated from each other,
would have been subjected to quiet and
soothing treatment, and thus no doubt, it
all would have ended. But when Paris
made the affair as public as possible, when
learned doctors of divinity and medicine
came and watched these girls and declared
them bewitched, what more was needed to
convince their young minds that they were
really in that dreadful plight2 Such a
belief must of course have added to their
hysterical condition. Naturally they &C
cused Titula.
"Such an explanation accounts for the
fact much better than any such violent
supposition as that of conscious con-
spiracy. Our fit attitude of mind toward
1t is pity for all concerned, yet the feel