Hallucinations In The Puritan Society

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The Salem witch trials took place in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. It was an outbreak of one Puritan accusing another, hearings, trials, and executions of the people found guilty of witchcraft. One day, three teenage girls claimed to be possessed and were throwing violent fits consisting of vomiting, choking and hallucinations. Were they just bored, or was something really going on? The Puritan society was very patriarchal meaning their society relied heavily on the men in the families. The eldest male in a family was the head of the house and held all of the power, leaving the women to raise the children and teach them about God. Their religious beliefs were based on predestination: the pre- ordered destiny of each individual. Puritans …show more content…

They did this to try and win over God and be granted into Heaven since they originally believed everyone is damned to hell. One reason they are afraid of the devil is because he was once kicked out of Heaven himself. The devil’s name is actually Lucifer in the Bible. Lucifer was naturally one of God’s angels but started to question God’s acts. Lucifer believed that God didn’t want the angels to be as smart or as powerful as He so that they couldn’t overthrow him. “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lúcifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!” This being said, the Puritans were afraid of the devil because he turned away from God and that is the complete opposite of what they wanted to do. This is why Salem broke out when witches were thought to be around. Witchcraft is defined as the use of magical powers obtained especially from evil spirits by Merriam-Webster’s dictionary so it is believed that only people working for the devil could practice magic and if Puritans found out you were a witch, they had to punish you immediately by imprisonment or …show more content…

Since the puritans believed that everyone would have the devil in their lives, they also believed that the devil would attack the weakest ones first: the women and children. Not only was Eve the first person to obtain a relationship with the devil over God, but she also convinced Adam to go against God’s orders. This simple fact of the Bible causes the Puritans to constantly hammer the idea that the men are superior so that they do not fall into the trap of their wife who may be under the influence of the devil. The puritans characterized everyone’s soul as “female” and unappeasable showing if they thought of everyone this way, how much more so would they think the women were unable to be satisfied by strictly being a women? While Puritans were not against the idea of men being witches, their thought that women were the smaller frame physically and that women were always open to whoever/whatever was interested made them wearier of women during the hunt for

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