Witchcraft And Fear Research Paper

This happened after both the first accusations of witchery as well as the attack on twin towers. All citizens in Salem believed that the girls were telling the truth about the accused, and so, everyone began to turn against one another. People were afraid to do anything wrong or rude to anyone (especially the girls), because if so, there would be a great chance of accused for witchery. Similarly after the 9/11 attack, security in airports and other transportation were on high. Like the town of Salem, US citizens were extremely afraid of another attack. The town of Salem and the United States after 9/11 are similar because all citizens were greatly affected, but more importantly, they lived in fear after the

Fear has become part of humanity as humans evolve over time. Since the beginning of time humans had always been afraid of the unknown and this fear has given humans a drive to progress to be better. In the past, there have been societies that take wrongful advantage of this fear by creating mass hysteria by religious, political, and social activities. The article Mass Delusions and Hysterias: Highlights from the Past Millennium by Robert Bartholomew and Erich Goode, talks about Salem’s situation in 1692. “Salem Village (now Danvers, Massachusetts) was the scene of a moral panic that spread throughout the region and involved witchcraft accusations which led to trials, torture, imprisonment, and executions” (Bartholomew and Goode). The famous play The Crucible by Arthur Miller demonstrates the similar act as the article which led to a mass hysteria between people of Salem for wrongful accusations and death of twelve individuals of Salem for witchcraft. According to the play, the delusions of fear in Salem turned into a mass hysteria. “Mass hysteria is characterized by the rapid spread of conversion disorder, a condition involving the appearance of bodily complaints for which there is no organic basis” (Bartholomew and Goode). In The Crucible, this mass hysteria has been used as a tool by Putnam for personal gain to acquire land of other citizens, Danforth for his political gain, and Abigail for her revenge against John Proctor’s wife Elizabeth.

    Fear can control your life. It can make you hallucinate and think of doing evil things. People used this as an advantage to get what they wanted during the Salem Witch trials. The  Salem Witch Trials was a horrific event for family, friends, children, and parents. During the year of 1692, Salem Village, Massachusetts had a fearful downfall. In the Salem Witch hunt times, there was so much paranoia that anyone could and would be accused. These accusations spread like wildfire and caused chaotic pain.(Fear) The villagers used fear to control other people’s minds; which made it easier for

Fear can lead to a lot of things, but unfortunately, in humans it usually leads to something bad. Throughout history, fear has lead to some of the most violent actions by man, and some of the biggest collapses of organized society. In early American history, the people of Salem experienced this for themselves. Arthur Miller shows this in his book. The society of Salem that Miller creates in The Crucible shows how fear can slowly cause rational thought to deteriorate, leading to mass hysteria and eventually the breakdown of civilized behavior.

Fear is definitely not always a harmful emotion. Fear influences people to take extreme measures and act irrationally emotion. While fear is one of the main emotions people face, fear is not a always harmful emotion. In the Crucible, Arthur Miller shows us how fear and suspicion can destroy a community. As the play develops, Miller shows us how fear and suspicion increase and destroy the community. Throughout the play it becomes apparent that the community gets more and more divided as time goes on. In the beginning there were arguments about ownership of land between some of the villagers. As the story progresses people fear for their own safety and begin accusing their neighbours of witchcraft in order to escape being hanged. Salem became overrun by the hysteria of witchcraft. Mere suspicion itself was accepted as evidence. As a Satan-fearing community, they could not think of denying the evidence, because to deny the existence of evil was to deny the existence of goodness; which was God. In the 17th century a group of Puritans migrated from England to America - the land of dreams - to escape persecution for their religious beliefs. As Arthur Miller tells us in the introduction to Act 1 'no one can really know what their lives were like.' We would never be able to imagine a life with 'no novelists' and 'their creed forbade anything resembling a theatre or vain entertainment.' 'They didn't celebrate Christmas, and a holiday from work meant only that they must concentrate

The most vulnerable submit to fear until it tears them apart. Fear entraps each character into making preposterous accusations against people in the town and causes the vulnerable to unhinge. This topic represents events that occured is similar fashion on a much larger scale. Throughout history, until now, there have been unjust events that were committed out of fear and works like The Crucible allow people to realize these atrocities and prevent them in the future. The Crucible centers around the witch hunt, which was when thousands of young, innocent people were killed because traditional, gospel centered societies thought that there were witches threatening their stability. The Salem witch trials were similar to the Japanese internment camps during World War II. This all occurred in the wake of Pearl Harbor, which increased Japanese resentment and fear among Americans. The US was fearful that there were Japanese spies living in the United States hoping to bring them down internally, so the United States saw this a fit solution. This mirrors the witch trials because they were both done out of fear that their lives were threatened. In both cases the fear was not justified, even though at the time it seemed like the most logical decision to make. It is true that a majority of convicted “witches” were innocent, and thousands of Japanese Americans were innocent as well. Every living,

The largest outbreak of witchcraft in America took place in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. A group of girls, including the Parris’s Indian slave Tituba, gathered in the Salem village and were attempting to see the future by decoding “messages”. Shortly after this gathering the girls started showing signs of the possessed (pg. 73). To this day people all over America are still amazed with the events that took place in this time. But why is that? The fear of the village fell heavily onto the judicial system, which later made people focus on the proper separation of government and religious beliefs. Mass hysteria broke out amongst the village and many people were being accused, therefore leading to many innocent deaths. Although there could be many theories as to the reason the witch trials in Salem began, there are two points of view that are very commonly shared amongst people. Some believe that the Salem witch trials were women unconsciously searching for power, whereas others believe it was an encephalitis epidemic.

Three centuries ago, the Puritan religion was the base of the Salem village and many townspeople strongly believed in the existence of witches and witchcraft. According to the common Puritan belief, witches were in alliance with the devil and were granted power to harm. People were blamed for illness, failed crops, to bad weather, and many other things that were evident centuries ago. Due to the belief in witchcraft villagers were, perhaps, inclined to the most improbable explanations. The Puritans held strict views, ways of living, perspectives fears, and fantasies. Many Puritan ministers used the the fear of witchcraft to scare the believers into following the church. Historians believe these strict Puritan ways of life may have brought upon the witchcraft hysteria in Salem. At the time, witches and witchcraft were a serious and viewed as a real threat; almost as real as

The Salem Witch Trials brought havoc among the citizens of Salem, Massachusetts starting in 1692. Many of the people within the town continued to have strong loyalties to their new Puritan religion and their old king back home. The church of England had moved away from the Catholic religion with the help of King Henry VIII and the Puritans were a new group of people who accepted the split from Catholicism but still believed that the church of England had a lot of aspects that remained with the Catholic religion. Despite this, loyalty to the king remained strong because the Puritans were not looking to break off from the Church of England instead they wanted to reform the religion and make it their own. These loyalties stretched to such an extent that any sin committed was also considered an act of treason and thus punished. The Salem community was constantly searching for evil within their town to prove their righteousness to God which lead to high rates of fear and paranoia in their daily lives. The strict Puritan religion soon became the root cause of the monstrous imagination that started to form within the community of Salem. Many people still feared the presence of Catholic ideas within their communities and in response were willing to go to any extent to irradiate these views. Some historians also account the beginning of the trials to divisions within the two towns of Salem that lead to tensions and turmoil between the townsmen. But without the increased belief in their new religion, women around town wouldn’t have been persecuted. The strict belief in the Puritan religion and culture was the root cause of fear and paranoia that led to the mass execution of many women and townspeople during the Salem Witch Trials.

People often fear things they do not understand. In Nigeria, churches are accusing defenseless children of witchcraft; a boy’s “family pastor had accused him of being a witch, and his father then tried to force acid down his throat as an exorcism ” (The Boston Globe para. 2); permanently impairing the boy. The boy’s father did not understand why or how what his son was and tried to kill him out of fear of the consequences. Pastors were accusing either orphaned or children from poor families as witches because they could not fight back, as way to establish their credentials. Hysteria made the townspeople actually believe and fear witchcraft in both Nigeria and Salem. In the case of “The Dying Girl that No One Helped” one person did not get involved because the police” might have picked [him] up as suspect” he feared the outcome and did not understand the importance of the situation.

Fear is used many times to essentially deteriorate the mental state of the community of Salem. When Abigail led on the girls to cry out during the accusations. “Abigail, now staring full front as though hypnotized, and mimicking the exact tone of Mary Warren’s cry: She sees nothin’!” (Miller, Abigail 115) this suggests a very crazy and hysterical account on the girls’ part. As the girl go on, chanting and crying, it sends demonic and horrifying emotions into the trial. It radiates a sense of dubiousness towards the reader as well. This is a prime example of mass hysteria at this particular moment, creating a latent fear. Additionally, fear played a role in a different part of the play as well. In the beginning, the whole community was captivated by the fact the devil’s presence may be lurking among them. As said by Miller, “Salem folk believed that the virgin forest was the Devil’s last preserve, his home base and the citadel of his

In Salem Massachusetts 1692, many innocent people were accused of practicing witchcraft, or being possessed by the devil. The puritans believed everything in the bible and that people had been inhabited by the devil either by force or on purpose and needed to be killed. What caused the chaos in Salem, 1692? The witch trial hysteria was caused by the fear of being accused and hanged, or for being possessed when they weren’t. In that time, you would die either way, unless you confessed in which case you would be sent to church to fix yourself. Also, back then people were very proper and not allowed to sit improperly, otherwise they would get in trouble.

Both Salem, Massachusetts in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, and post 9/11 America are societies that dread witches or terrorists and tries to identify and eliminate them. When people find something that they are afraid of, they will do everything in their power to get rid of that fear. It will not matter to them what they have to do in order to eliminate their unease. Any fear that is great enough can take over people and make them do horrible, unjust things.

Fear can be an influence on someone's descent into a bad situation. In the play The Crucible the Puritan town of Salem is under suspicion of witchcraft. When a group of girls is discovered dancing in the forest, their leader (Abigail) tries to cover it up by accusing people in the town of witchcraft. All the accusations of witchcraft result in many different events, including the arrival of Judge Danforth and Reverend Hale. If anyone were to be under suspicion they would be tried for a confession that they dealt with witchcraft, and if they didn’t confess they would be hanged. The characters in the play are conflicted with different types of fear that change their personality and causes them to act differently. Fear influences people to take extreme measures and act irrationally.

"I'll get you my pretty, and your little dog too!" The Wicked Witch of the West...