“When he comes to,” the doctor then told her as he touched a hand to my mama’s arm. “Right now the most important thing for him is to rest. After a head injury your brain needs time to heal, time to reset itself and allow for inflammation to go down. Sleep is the best thing for that. If you ladies would like, you can see him for a few minutes, but that is all. After that you might as well go back home for a while, and we’ll call you when he wakes up.” We had thanked the doctor and then slipped quietly into the I.C.U. room to see him. Once inside my mama took my step daddy’s hand in hers and began weeping by his bedside. I averted my eyes because I didn’t want to look at him like this, his face all bruised up and swollen, hooked …show more content…
Like a surprised child waking in the middle of the night to find her parents stealing the tooth out from underneath her pillow while replacing it with a dollar, I was in shock. What was reality anymore? I hadn’t any clue. I hadn’t even the faintest idea of what my mama’s words had meant either, but I knew what they were—witchcraft. There was no doubt about it. My mama then moved her hands slowly over Step Daddy Cade’s body before raising her arms up to the ceiling in an almost worshiping like gesture. As I watched her work, I was in complete awe, but had remained totally silent. My best guess was that she was doing some sort of spell that would help him heal or maybe it was for protection. But I really had no idea as to what it was. The only thing I did now know was that my mama knew a lot more about our family’s history, witchcraft, my Grandmother Lyanna, this village, and Abellona Abbott than she had let on to me. When we’d arrived back at home, I went to bed early. My head was abuzz and still foggy, and all I wanted was to just lay down with my kitten and get lost in my bulky
The Devil in the Form of a woman by Carol Karlsen details the particular treacheries towards several women of all ages inside colonial The us. This particular thought ended up being created by the male driven culture of the Puritans.. Other than as an evident disciple to the activist institution connected with traditional imagined, the girl delicate factors the particular criticalness connected with witchcraft allegations for ladies inside New England. She contends for that relevance and criticalness connected with women's areas in the devouring madness connected with witchcraft inside seventeenth century United States. She unobtrusively states that many diversions were being used to mince away witchcraft practices along with the publication of material describing the matter. This describes that a certain type of woman gambled denunciation away from scope to help the woman group gain correct portrayal in the public forum.
Witchcraft had always fascinated many people and been a very controversial topic in North America during (seventeenth) 17th century. Many People believe that witchcraft implies the ability to injure or using supernatural power to harm others. People believed that a witch represents dark side of female present and were more likely to embrace witchcraft than men. There are still real witches among us in the Utah whom believe that witchcraft is the oldest religion dealing with the occult. However the popular conception of a witch has not changed at least since the seventeenth century; they still caused panic, fear and variety of other emotions in people…………………….
On January 20th, 1692, a nine-year-old girl, Elizabeth “Betty” Parris, and an eleven-year-old cousin, Abigail Williams, decided to play a game of magic out of boredom. Abigail Williams, niece of the village reverend, was always envious of her cousin “Betty,” and decided to take the game of illusion to the extreme. The mysterious Ouija board, given to her by an indian slave by the name of Tituba, was removed from a secret hiding place, and she began to pretend to call on the Spirit of Death. Suddenly, Abigail and her cousin began to exhibit sudden, strange behaviors. Abigail and “Betty” screamed blasphemous statements, had horrific convulsions, went into motionless catatonic states, and murmured strange conjurations, and, like clockwork, spread the craze of the game to other children in the village. The Salem children began to evoke the same cryptic behaviors in the puritan village. The game of two girls, due to personal resentments and
In all of human history, people have written about inhuman beings, many of which include gods, demons, wizards, sorcerers, sorceresses, and witches. Nowadays mystical beings are seen everywhere in media. Most of society stopped believing in these creatures years ago, but for 17th-century Salem, witchcraft became a living nightmare (Fremon, 1999).
The first accusers of those on trial for witchcraft were group of teenage girls. The first girl, Betty Parris, began to have painful contortions, fever, and what were most likely hallucinations. These symptoms may have been the result of ergot poisoning, the result of eating bread made with moldy rye, but at the time, no one knew that was possible. The family’s slave, Tituba, had come from Barbados and was knowledgeable in stories of voodoo and black magic. She shared these stories with Betty and her friends. After seeing the attention Betty was getting because of her behavior, her friends began to exhibit the same behavior. Because the local doctor knew of no medical explanation, he suggested the cause was supernatural. Tituba, with her knowledge of magic became the first person accused. She thought she could save her life by confessing and naming other women as her conspirators. Tituba’s accusations were unreliable because she was trying to do anything she could to save her life. Others were also accused by the girls. These women were generally unpopular or strange in some way, so it was easy for them to be targets of the girls accusations. For these girls, who were at the center of the town’s attention and perhaps had no real understanding of the seriousness of their accusati...
Rebecca Nurse is a pillar of the community, a devoutly religious woman in her seventies. When she is accused of witchcraft, it makes the Reverend Hale pause and reconsider whether the proceedings are just and fair. "Pray, John, be calm. Pause.This will set us all to arguin' again in the society, and we thought to have peace this year. I think we ought rely on the doctor now, and good prayer. Rebecca, the doctor's baffled! There is prodigious danger in the seeking of loose spirits. I fear it, I fear it. With a growing edge of sarcasm: But I m...
Witchcraft is said to be the most widespread cultural phenomenon in existence today and throughout history. Even those who shun the ideas of witchcraft cannot discount the similarities in stories from all corners of the globe. Witchcraft and its ideas have spread across racial, religious, and language barriers from Asia to Africa to America. Primitive people from different areas in the world have shockingly similar accounts of witchcraft occurrences. In most cases the strange parallels cannot be explained and one is only left to assume that the tales hold some truth. Anthropologists say that many common elements about witchcraft are shared by different cultures in the world. Among these common elements are the physical characteristics and the activities of supposed witches. I will go on to highlight some of the witch characteristic parallels found in printed accounts from different parts of the world and their comparisons to some famous fairytales.
Mary Warren started out in a manner reminiscent to that of Peter Pettigrew from the famous “Harry Potter,” series; she was a timid follower of a popular group, and admired the bravery and kindness she lacked. After Mary and her so-called ‘friends’ are found dancing naked around a fire in their conservative town, they know they will likely be accused of a crime that could punish them with death; witchcraft. Mary’s friend Abigail, tells the girls to stick to their story that they were dancing in the woods and threatens to kill the girls if they reveal the truth; that Abigail was practicing witchcraft and drank blood in order to take the life of the wife of a man she had had an affair with; Elizabeth Proctor, the boss and friend of Mary Warren.
The book begins with a brief history of the colonial witchcraft. Each Chapter is structured with an orientation, presentation of evidence, and her conclusion. A good example of her structure is in chapter two on the demographics of witchcraft; here she summarizes the importance of age and marital status in witchcraft accusations. Following this she provides a good transition into chapter three in the final sentence of chapter two, “A closer look of the material conditions and behavior of acc...
Bacon, Elizabeth E. “Witchcraft.” Encyclopedia Americana. Volume 29. Pages 83 – 84. Connecticut: Grolier Incorporated, 1999.
I knew it was my Ma. Her hands were always warm, no matter how cold it got. I shifted to the side and she sat next to me. I could tell she hadn’t been sleeping well. Her dark blue eyes accentuated the gray circles around them, but she still maintained that soothing smile that had lulled me to sleep for years. Even after seventeen years of me existing on this earth, my mother still took care of me tirelessly. She did the same with my other siblings, which was no easy task. The thought of my siblings drove the smile away from my face and I looked down at my dangling legs. We had started off with six people; Ma, Pa, my two little brothers, and me. However, my little brothers died of cholera two months after we left home. I could still remember how much agony they endured before they died. I shut my eyes hard as I can as if that would help me erase the horrible images I saw inside my head. Ma rubbed my arm comfortingly, grounding
Over the centuries, the concept of Witchcraft, as it presented within religion and society, evoked a variety of responses and attitudes that permeated throughout the cultures of the world. Christianity incited wars and hysteria and chaos in the name of extinguishing the practice of Witchcraft. Today there are prominent religions within many cultures that uphold the practice of witchcraft as a feasible manifestation of spirituality. The term conjures a variety of images for a diverse range of people. To the Azande, witchcraft and oracles and magic existed in everyday life as permeation of the Zande culture. In Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande, E.E. Evans-Pritchard focuses on the beliefs associated with witchcraft and how they manifest in the social structure of the Community.
It was Christmas Eve. I sat, huddled in a ball, behind the armchair in my living room. I was trying to be as still and patient as I could be. I remember moments where I held my breath thinking if she heard me breathe, she would leave and I would never get a chance to see her. I could feel myself drifting off to sleep, but I tried to resist. All I wanted was to see her just once. Usually, I would be scared at the thought of a witch, but she was different. She was a magical witch who flew on a broom from house top to house top, visiting children and filling their shoes with candy and chocolates. Sure enough, I awoke the next morning to find myself still huddled in the same ball; I had fallen asleep before La Befana arrived. As I stood up yawning, I took a big stretch and noticed my Christmas shoes lying by my feet full of goodies.
"Witchcraft." The Gale Encyclopedia of the Unusual and Unexplained. Ed. Brad Steiger and Sherry Hanson Steiger. Vol. 2. Detroit: Gale, 2003. 91-99. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 4 May 2014.
Lehmann A. C. & Myers J. E. Magic, Witchcraft and Religion – An anthropological Study of the Supernatural (Fourth Edition) (Mayfield Publishing Company, 1997)