Such facts were gathered from Cotton Mather's account; they come to us from one whose influences and writings are alleged to have been most strongly provocative of executions for witchcraft. Perhaps some of them became so. But his presentation of both the momentous fact and its confirmation by observed experiences, that the spirit of an executed psychologist could act back from beyond the gallows, involved a crushing argument against the wisdom of suspending her or any one else with a view to stop bewitchment. The liberation of one's spirit increases its powers for action upon surviving mortals. Mather's facts argued that.
The world-renowned and momentous display of extraordinary manifestations, known the world over as _Salem Witchcraft_, originated and was mainly manifested in what was then called Salem Village--territory distinct from Salem _proper_--embracing the present town of Danvers, together with parts of Beverly, Wenham, Topsfield, and Middleton, in the County of Essex and State of Massachusetts.
There, in the family of the Rev. Samuel Parris, minister at the Village, on the 29th of February, 1692, mysterious causes had wrought strange maladies upon two young girls during the six preceding weeks, which excited great public alarm, and produced such mental agitation that the civil authorities were called upon to give the matter official attention.
The true origin and the actual authors and enactors of that tragedy are among the prime objects of our present researches. It is not our purpose to furnish a _full_ history, but to scrutinize and test the hypotheses of other writers; and give a solution of the origin and specification of the actors and effects of that tragedy different--widely different--from the prevalent modern ones. Upham, Drake, and Fowler all agree in fundamentals. All of them have assumed that the agents and forces which evolved those marvelous operations were scarcely, if anything, other than ten or twelve respectable girls, from nine to twenty years of age, together with a few married women and a few men, voluntarily exercising and manifesting only their own wayward constitutional faculties and forces, in the performance of tricks, impositions, and malignancies; and with none other than lamentable results. Their positions we deem open to deserved attack, and we expect to overthrow much that has been reared upon them, by using facts abounding in the primitive records of testimony given in at trials for witchcraft as our chief instrumentalities. The three expounders just named have rested much upon allegations that the girls and women alluded to above had, just previous to the strange outburst of terrors at the Village, been accustomed to meet as _a circle_, and at their meetings put themselves in training for the efficient and successful performance of what soon after transpired through them. Our readings of the records pertaining to Salem witchcraft have, as we know and freely confess, fallen short of complete exhaustion; and yet we have read much, and also have failed to find any remembered allusion to such a circle prior to its mention in the present century.