Read The Witches: Salem, 1692 for Free Online Page A

was “angry and sending forthdestroyers,” he alerted his parishioners. It was essential to persevere, “to beware of fainting when we are chastened,” to battle bravely against “all our spiritual enemies.” The explanation was to some degree satisfying. It was perversely flattering to be singled out to combat evil; there was a reason for those selective lightning strikes, the bolts from the blue, through the window, down the chimney. “I am a man greatly assaulted by Satan,” Mather would observe privately, sounding nearly boastful. “Is it because I have done much against that enemy?” Or as the father of the Goodwin children had phrased it, playing the adversity-shouldering game with grace, a dangerous condition was—spiritually speaking—a profitable one. “If we want afflictions we shall have them, and sanctified afflictions are choice mercies,” concluded the godly mason. Simultaneously he wrung his hands over a question that must have haunted Parris as well: What had he done to incite this heavenly rebuke? A minister’s home was meant to be a “school of piety,” not “a den for devils.”
    How the village received the diagnosis was clear from what came next. On February 25, Parris and his wife left Salem under teeming rain. In their absence a close neighbor paid a call. The Parrises presumably asked Mary Sibley to look in on Abigail and Betty, roaring now for over a month. The mother of five, Mary Sibley was six months pregnant. Among the wealthier couples in the community, she and her cooper husband were pillars of the church; Samuel Sibley stepped in when an estate needed to be settled or a bond guaranteed. His wife felt comfortable in the Parris household. Less comfortable with the pace at which her minister resolved the mystery there, she arranged a furtive experiment. The question was no longer what afflicted the children but who; Sibley determined to catch a witch. At her instruction, John, the Parrises’ Indian slave, mixed the girls’ urine into a rye-flour cake, baked amid the embers on the hearth. Sibley then fed the concoction to the family dog. There was some fogginess about how the countermagic worked—by drawing the witch to the animal, by transferring the spell to it, or by scalding the witch—but the old English recipe could be trusted to reveal the guilty party.
    Parris was livid to learn of the experiment. Countermagic had no place in a parsonage. He remained intent on the scourge not escaping his home; in his place, Boston ministers had taken great pains to suppress the names of alleged witches. Sibley courted greater perils as well. She had favored superstition over religion, a practice Parris decried as “going to the devil for help against the devil.” Her meddling unleashed occult, little-understood forces; she had set up a kind of satanic lightning rod. A month later—the intervening weeks proved tumultuous—the beleaguered minister would summon her to an interview in his study. He reproached her severely. Sobbing, she offered abject apologies. She had acted only unthinkingly, Sibley explained, “from what she had heard of this nature from other ignorant, or worse, persons.” She would be circumspect in the future. Parris read her the stiff reprimand he intended to share with the congregation after Sunday’s sermon. Her cake had occasioned much mischief. “By this means (it seems) the Devil has been raised amongst us,” Parris announced before administering communion on March 27, “and his rage is vehement and terrible, and when he shall be silenced, the Lord only knows.” He warned his congregants to be on the alert against “Satan’s wiles and devices.” From the pulpit, in a dark gown and a flat white linen collar, Parris asked them to bear collective witness to Mary Sibley’s misdeed, to call “our sister to deep humiliation for what she has done.” Might he have a show of hands? All agreed. Turning to the heavily pregnant Sibley, Parris asked