There is much we have learned about PTSD since the beginning of time. There is much that was considered mysterious, that we now understand. When we look back with knowledge, we see what was right there all along. PTSD has been recorded since the time when scribes first took ink to paper.
Read the passages of the Bible and see them clearly, especially in the Psalms. The inner struggles, pleading with God to ease suffering, or at least, to make sense of why it happened. Was it a judgment from God? Was it an attack from Satan? It is all there.
Read about the Salem Witch Trials and how researchers have been struggling to explain what was behind all of the accusations made causing 19 women and men to be hung and one crushed to death, along with those who died waiting for their trials. It is a complicated mix of what was carried with the Puritans into the new world, the hardships and horrors they faced on their new lands, political motivations, and yes, even PTSD.
In June, 1630 the Arbella sailed for New England with 300 English Puritans determined to establish “a Model of Christian Charity.” During the ten week passage across the Atlantic, passengers were confined to narrow quarters for ten weeks, living on short rations and without comfort. During the following decade, the Great Migration brought nearly 14,000 Puritan settlers, successful, mostly highly educated persons unprepared for the hardships that awaited them. Building a new society in the wilderness while surrounded by wild animals and hostile Indians induced transgenerational trauma and psychological symptoms that we now recognize as post-traumatic stress and mass conversion disorder, culminating in the Salem Witch Trials.
PTSD in the Massachusetts Bay Colony
In the “Old world,” the thought behind the witch hunts there was that the accused had been trying to destroy the church. We don’t talk much about what went on there but to understand how the Puritans here reacted, it is good to learn about what happened, especially in Scotland.
As historian Steven Katz explains, Europe’s witch hunts stemmed from “the enduring grotesque fears [women] generate in respect of their putative abilities to control men and thereby coerce, for their own ends, male-dominated Christian society.” Ultimately that hysteria claimed as many as 4,000 lives in Scotland—double the execution rate seen in neighboring England, as Tracy Borman points out in History Extra. Although the majority of victims were women (per Mitchell, five times as many women were executed for witchcraft in Scotland than in England), men also faced trial and execution.
Speaking with the Scotsman’s Campsie, McAndrew says, “The map is a really effective way to connect where we are now to these stories of the past.”
He adds, “There does seem to be a growing movement that we need to be remembering these women, remembering what happened and understanding what happened.”
This Map Shows the Scale of 16th- and 17th-Century Scottish Witch Hunts
Was it PTSD and they had no way of explaining nightmares, flashbacks, paranoia, physical stress, along with everything else that comes after trauma? When you listen to anyone speak of PTSD, often you hear the word “Demon” as if the person is fighting a battle with a dark force trying to take them over and destroy everything resembling goodness within them.
Back to Salem Village and what happened there, it was so bad, that ten years after one of their pastors left because he was not paid, they went after him and had him arrested in Maine.
In Salem Village in February 1692, two prepubescent girls Betty Parris (age nine) and her cousin Abigail Williams (age 11) began to have fits, complained of being pricked with pins and accused their neighbors of witchcraft. Some of the afflicted girls had been traumatized after losing one or both parents in King William’s War. The afflicted girls routinely described the Devil as a “dark man.”George Burroughs, the unpopular predecessor to Rev. Parris in Salem Village, had come from Maine, and returned there when the parish refused to pay him. Only five weeks before the accusations began, Indians had burned York Maine, 80 miles north of Salem, killing 48 people and taking 73 captives. When one of the accused confessed that the Devil had tempted her in Maine, Reverend Burroughs was arrested, charged with witchcraft and encouraging the Indians, and was hanged on Gallows Hill.
PTSD in the Massachusetts Bay Colony
The Ministers Of The Mystery Series takes what happened in Salem and gives it all a modern-day twist when a reporter is transformed from wanting to die because of what he survived, and becoming a reason why others around the world find a reason to heal.
He was accused of trying to take down the “church” when in fact he just wanted to help those that were churchless but not God-less.
The series is in three books. The Scribe Of Salem, The Visionary Of Salem, and 13th Minister Of Salem.
Now that the books are done, for now, I’ll be posting on this site again. Writing them caused me to go back into therapy again but I’m healing now. I hope you do too!
Here is the review of The Scribe Of Salem
Travel to Salem in This Deliciously Macabre Tale of the Occult on BookTrib
