Witches of Salem - First Season

Imagine a village consumed by a witch hunt.

The things that the people of salem endured in 1692

Were totally horrific.

If you live in a society that believes in witchcraft,

That believes that witchcraft and bewitchment are real,

Then it is.

- Kill her! - Kill the witch!

Imagine the terror of knowing the sentence

For witchcraft is death.

I'm not a witch. I am innocent.

A whole community who are educated and thoughtful

Believe themselves to be doing the absolute right thing.

We offer this witch for your judgment,

People who were not fundamentally bad

Thought that this was their duty.

I'm not a witch. No, no.

That makes it all the more horrific.

To keep us, your humble servants,

The devil from our midst.

The witch hunt is on.

It's a brutally cold night in January.

Abigail williams and betty parris

Are trying to find imaginative ways

To pass the time.

As it gets later, they decide to try to predict their futures

With something called a venus glass.

They were trying to see who would be their future husbands

Who they might marry someday.

Though they know that any kind of fortune-telling

Is off-limits, the two young girls can't resist consulting

The cup to see if the shape of the egg white

Will reveal important clues about their future husbands.

Look, can you see?

Supposedly the egg white coalesced in the bottom

Of the glass in the shape of a coffin.

Does that mean the man you marry will die?

The girls are horrified by the disturbing results.

In an environment where they had been taught that

Dabbling in any kind of magic, any kind of occult activities,

No matter how seemingly harmless

Were really a way of allowing the devil

To enter into your soul.

They would've been terrified by this.

You've done something forbidden,

And then something weird happened.

And so you really feel like, "what have I dabbled in,

What door have I opened?"

They have heard stories of demonic possession,

But now abigail and betty are terrified.

Have they just sold their souls to the devil?

So here we are in salem, massachusetts, in 1692.

Salem in 1692 is actually two different places.

Salem town, which is on the water, which is a port city,

And salem village, which is modern day danvers.

Salem village was more remote it was more outlying.

They are surrounded on all sides by wilderness.

A wilderness that is already peopled.

And peopled by people who the puritans would have considered

To be devilish.

It was practically a war zone.

There'd be places not that far off

That had been attacked. By native americans.

The puritans in salem village thought of native americans

As agents of the devil.

So there is a sort of existential dread

Attached to living on a frontier

That is at the edge of that which is unknown.

Many people came there with the idea

Of creating a perfect community.

They saw themselves as a new jerusalem,

As bringing the word of god into the wilderness, into a land

That they thought was really the dominion of the devil.

The puritans were hoping to build an ideal utopian

Community, a city on the hill.

This was to be a new eden.

What we find in the bible as literal truth for the puritans

Are a belief in witches

And also a belief in the ending of days -- the apocalypse.

The second coming.

The puritans are convinced of their religious righteousness,

All who disagree with them are damned.

It has a lot of connections to a cult-like community.

Sunday was the day of rest after a very hard working week

And the rest consisted of eight hours of going to a meeting.

I must warn you all,

The devil's hostility towards this church...

They would divide it up, men on one side,

Women on the other, and the children and servants

And slaves slightly set back.

...Cleansed and sworn into god's kingdom.

It would be very, very cold, it was completely unheated,

But they were expected to behave themselves in church.

They were expected to listen to the sermon.

To ensure people paid attention,

A member of the congregation known as the tithing man

Would poke people with a stick.

And presiding over the service was salem village's minister,

Samuel parris.

Who the minister was was of paramount importance.

They'd had a series of ministers who hadn't gone over

Particularly well with the congregation at salem village

And in 1689, the newest minister,

Samuel parris, arrived.

And it is imperative that we keep our town.

He was not initially called to the church.

He had a sort of mixed and varied career,

Including running a plantation into the ground in barbados,

Coming to boston and making a hash of being a businessman,

And then coming to salem village where he immediately

Made himself disagreeable with the villagers.

And I remind you all only through grace

Can one enter god's kingdom.

There was a faction in salem village,

Particularly the putnams, who really liked samuel parris,

Who thought he was the right man for the job.

Other important people in salem village

Didn't see him as a uniter of the town,

But rather someone who would divide.

There's sinfulness everywhere in this village.

Samuel parris lives in the church's

Two-bedroom residence, which he shares with his wife,

Elizabeth, and the two girls

Who had dabbled in fortune-telling,

His niece and maid, abigail williams,

And his daughter, betty.

After eight hours of listening to sermonizing,

Then it was time to go home

And read the bible together as a family.

So it was a really full day.

Christ sits at god's right hand and intercedes

For sinful humanity.

Samuel parris's household would not have been

One of a lot of light and a lot of joy.

They would have spent hours poring over scripture

By the fireside.

You can imagine these girls listening to samuel parris

Practice his hellfire and brimstone sermons.

There was a lot of emphasis on the idea

That women in particular

Were susceptible to the wiles of satan.

For the lord, your god, here it is...For you.

Betty?

What's the matter?

See to her, will you?

Parris asks his enslaved servant,

Tituba, to help betty.

Betty began exhibiting strange symptoms.

The first symptoms were of crawling under chairs

And talking in a disconnected way,

And nobody being able to figure out why.

I met with the village committee today

On not receiving my firewood.

I think betty parris and abigail williams

Were undoubtedly aware of the social tensions

That were swirling in salem at the time.

One can imagine the conversations

Around the dinner table

That may have fed into their fears

That were manifested in their own affliction.

What terrible sickness has been unleashed

In the minister's household?

Once samuel parris's daughter, betty,

Began to exhibit the symptoms of these violent fits,

It soon spread to another member of the parris household,

Abigail williams.

Betty. Betty.

I think the attention that the girls were able

To receive and channel was probably intoxicating.

The madness is about to engulf salem

In a wave of paranoia and terror.

Two girls in salem village,

Abigail williams and betty parris,

Have started to suffer violent unexplained fits

After secretly experimenting with fortune-telling.

The town's minister, samuel parris, is desperate

To understand the cause of their illness.

Is that sore?

Parris called upon william griggs,

The local physician, to come and try to diagnose

Whether there was an underlying physical cause.

Does that hurt at all?

Unsurprisingly, the doctor can't find anything

Physically wrong with betty or with abigail.

Instead of diagnosing a physical cause, the doctor

Suggests something far more disturbing.

I'm sorry, but I think she's under the influence

Of an evil hand.

Meaning that he suspected bewitchment.

Samuel parris's initial reaction was to be patient

In the face of god's punishments

And in the face of adversity, and rather to pray for guidance.

Please deliver us from the evil forces that have...

The belief in witchcraft was sanctioned by

The greatest minds of the age,

Educated scholars from cambridge and harvard

And the greatest universities taught that witchcraft was real.

When his daughter and servant abigail fell ill, samuel parris

Would have rightly looked at himself

And wondered if this was some kind of mark

Against the state of his own soul.