ng her with the
strictest scrutiny, guilty or not guilty, they slay her, suspected of
this very heinous sin. The corpse, and whatever belonged to her, they
cast into the sea. But the winds did not thus remit their violence, or
the raging sea its threatenings...."[20]

Even in Virginia, where less rigid religious authority existed, it was
not uncommon to hear accusations of sorcery and witchcraft. The form of
hysteria at length reached at Salem was the result of no sudden burst of
terror, but of a long evolution of ideas dealing with the power of
Satan. As early as 1638 Josselyn, a traveler in New England, wrote in
_New England's Rareties Discovered_: "There are none that beg in the
country, but there be witches too many ... that produce many strange
apparitions if you will believe report, of a shallop at sea manned with
women; of a ship and a great red horse standing by the main-mast, the
ship being in a small cove to the eastward vanished of a sudden. Of a
witch that appeared aboard of a ship twenty leagues to sea to a mariner
who took up the carpenter's broad axe and cleft her head with it, the
witch dying of the wound at home."

The religion of Salem and Boston was well fitted for developing this
very theory of malignant power in "possessed" persons. The teachings
that there was a personal devil, that God allowed him to tempt mankind,
that there were myriads of devils under Satan's control at all times,
ever watchful to entrap the unwary, that these devils were rulers over
certain territory and certain types of people--these teachings naturally
led to the assumption that the imps chose certain persons as their very
own. Moreover, the constant reminders of the danger of straying from the
strait and narrow way, and of the tortures of the afterworld led to
self-consciousness, introspection, and morbidness. The idea that Satan
was at all times seeking to undermine the Puritan church also made it
easy to believe that anyone living outside of, or contrary to, that
church was an agent of the devil, in short, bewitched. As it is only the
useful that survives, it was essential that the army of devils be given
a work to do, and this work was evident in the spirit of those who dared
to act and think in non-conformity to the rule of the church. The
devil's ways, too, were beyond the comprehension of man, cunning,
smooth, sly; the most godly might fall a victim, with the terrible
consequence that one might become bewitched and k