Haunted Cosmos - The Dusty Tome: Salem, Part III

Episode Date: February 14, 2024

Enjoy this third installment of our inter-season sneak peeks at our Patreon-exclusive show: The Dusty Tome.Love Haunted Cosmos? Get access to our exclusive show, The Dusty Tome, early ad-free access to main episodes, monthly AMA's, and livestreams with Ben and Brian by becoming a patron of the show: https://www.patreon.com/c/HauntedCosmosBuy the Haunted Cosmos book: https://www.newchristendompress.com/cosmos PS: It's also available as an audiobook!In this episode, Ben talks more about the Salem Witch Trials. This episode is sponsored by Joe Garrisi with Backwards Planning Financial. Content Joe today to talk about managing your wealth.Hey! Since you're still reading this, why don't you grab some special coffee here. And since you are still reading (why though?), pick up a ticket to this year's New Christendom Press Conference. It's happening in June in Ogden, UT and Brian and I will be doing a live haunted cosmos recording sesh. Support the show

I hope this recording finds you well and flourishing in God's spoken world. And if you're not familiar with what's going on, we are currently in our off-season break, and that means that we're sharing six episodes of our Patreon exclusive show, The Dusty Tome, with you all. These six episodes cover a broad overview of the Salem Witch Trials and the topic of witches in general. And today, you've stumbled upon the fourth episode of the series. And you know what that means? That means that we're halfway through. the off-season break. Three more weeks, and we'll get the first episode of Season 3 of Haunted Cosmos dropped to you all. And hey, if you like what you hear of these Dusty Tome episodes, consider

becoming a patron of the show. Our work is absolutely impossible without all of them, and we would be greatly appreciative if you considered supporting our work. If you do, you'll immediately gain access to 40-plus more episodes, just like the one you're about to hear, of the dusty tome, ranging from topics of lycanthropy and hermeticism all the way to sea monsters in the flying Dutchman. So, again, if you like what you hear, consider supporting the show. Nonetheless, we are glad that all of you are here with us today, and we can't wait to see you in season three. For now, sit back, relax, and enjoy the show. Lady Luna in light canoe by friths and shallows of fretted cloudland cruises monthly,

with chrism of dews and drench of dream, a drizzling glamour, enchanta, the cheat, changing some time a mind to madness, melancholy pale, bleached with gazing on her blank countenance, orbed and ageless. In Earth's bosom the shower of her rays, sharp-fettered light reaching downward ripen silver, forming and fashioning female brightness, metal maidenlike. Her moist circle is nearest Earth. Excerb from the planets by C.S. Lewis. Have you ever stopped to consider what you're looking at when looking at the moon? She's a short, striking thing. There's stark white and silver blue, against a blanket of only black around her, she drifts across the sky, sometimes very fast and sometimes not even at night, like some sort

of wanderer in the heavens. One night she might be near, the next night she's far away and in a totally different spot in the sky. And then, just when you become used to her white and shining presence, you suddenly realize one night that she's not there anymore. She's gone black, run out of light, spend herself on giving some sort of distracted and half-crazed relief to the sleeping world. The moon seems like truly a fickle thing. And this fickle nature has led many throughout man's short history to associate her with raving lunacy. Luna, the Roman moon goddess's name, is where our word lunatic comes from, after all. But it isn't just her own behavior that leads to her reputation for madness.

It's also the apparently undeniable effect that she really does. does have on people, depending on what mood she's in. If you have a friend or relative that's a nurse or a doctor or teacher, someone that works with other people regularly, like maybe a cop, ask them if they ever notice something strange at the time of a full moon, when Lady Luna, as Lewis calls her, pours out her most potent and vibrant light nectar on the world. I bet you they'll all tell you the same thing. Oh yeah, full moons make people crazy.

That's a curious thing. But it isn't just these anecdotal accounts. The moon's influence over the world is also well-documented empirically. Of course, we all know of her influence over the ocean tides and changing seasons. That much is pretty clear. But did you know that the phase of the moon has an awful lot to do with how well one sleeps at night? It's true. As she waxes into her full beam,

and also for some days after she begins her waning cycle that will end in her being a void in the night, people tend to sleep worse. That's right. When the moon is full and bright, people have a harder time falling asleep, and they even have noticeably less time in deep rim sleep. And they even have a sharp uptick in disturbing and disruptive dreams.

What's more, this has been the recorded case all throughout history. It's not just a modern thing. And now, I know what you may be thinking. Well, duh, it's brighter outside. You know, if you don't have blackout curtains in your room, it makes sense that you sleep worse with a fuller moon. And if you think that, you'd be forgiven, but you'd also be wrong.

You see, studies have clearly shown that the guy sleeping in the most regularly blacked-out room with little to no awareness of the moon's phases at all will still suffer the same effects when she's full as the one who's sleeping outside under the stars. All of this is obviously very fascinating, but why does it actually matter? The Medieval's had this idea about the curse of sin that's a bit different from the common reformed understanding that we have. You see, we confess that sin affected all of creation. Everything from the photon particle that glares off your child's hair and hits your eye

to the most massive and unknown and unknowable star in the distant coastlands of spacetime has felt the effects of man's fall from grace in some way. But the Medieval's didn't see it that way. To them, the curse only went as far as what immediately concerns man in nature. Since man's dominion was never meant to extend beyond the boundary of the atmosphere, they say, the curse lost its potency in the heavens. The heavens remained as they were at the very beginning, very good. Further, they saw the orbit of the moon as the most obvious boundary that separated the earth's, and therefore man's concern from that of the heavenly

bodies. The application of this idea was that everything under the moon was under the sway of sin and man's sin and curse, but everything beyond Lady Luna was still pure, holy, perfectly glorious to its God in the highest heaven. But the moon, being the boundary separating the two, was constantly being pulled to and fro by both influences. As she waned her light from the eyes of fallen men, it was because she was turning her gaze rightfully towards heaven, joining with the perfect symphony of the stars. But as she waxed her light and directed it back down to earth, she was falling into the temptation of the curse and was therefore less stable. And so as she shone down on man in full brightness, her influence over him grew very strong and was oftentimes a bit

negative, driving him crazy. This is why I refer to Luna as, quote, half crazed. While the side that faces us is a marred and lifeless surface. Her dark side was a realm of purity and vibrant glory to the medieval mind. In his book, the discarded image, C.S. Lewis tells us that, quote, at Luna we cross in our descent the great frontier, which I have so often had to mention, from ether to air, from heaven to nature, from the realm of the gods or angels to that of the demons, from the realm of necessity to that of contingents, from the incorruptible, to the corruptible, end quote. He goes on to tell us that in men,

Luna's influence produces a wandering of two sorts. The first is that of the explorer, the brave and brash who boldly go where no one has gone before in search of glory to be one. The other is a wandering of the wits, especially a periodic insanity that comes on sometimes but never lasts forever. And this is her dangerous influence to man.

Lastly, and I'm including this here purely because I think it's very cool, the Medevals believed that all of the planets, Luna included, were driven in their motion by an angelic intelligence who followed the will of God in their turning of their respective heavenly sphere. And so, though Luna was half crazed, she was still a part of the heavenly host, driven by angelic power, and was therefore a symbol of hope and divine love and favor to man.

At this point, I have to be sure and stress the fire. following. I'm not saying that they were right to think this, at least not technically. Of course, thinking the planets are controlled by angels isn't a crazy notion at all, and it's one that I find quite attractive, but we have to qualify the other bits of what I said. I confess that the curse does actually cover all of the cosmos, not just our little sliver of it. The battle rages everywhere that Christ is Lord, and Christ is Lord everywhere. But the concept the Medieval's developed to help them explain what was so clear before their eyes, that the moon exerts a real influence over man and woman

in a way that still maintained utmost glory to God is a laudable thing. I say all of this to sort of answer that question that I just asked. Why does any of this actually matter, especially for looking at the Salem witch trials? Well, it matters because the moon exerts a clear influence over the affairs of the world. Even the most brutalistic materialist would agree with that. Just look at the tides.

And in our efforts to be good image-bearers and dominion takers for God's glory, we should try and understand this influence as far as we can. Unfortunately, in attempting to understand this thing that seems so abstract, we're a bit late to the game. You see, for a long time now, the pagans have grabbed hold of this difficult fact of God's world, and while spurning its creator, have sought to utilize the moon's power for their own nefarious ends. And here, like last week in our exploration of Moses' wizarding battle with the Egyptian pantheon,

we find the breadcrumbs leading to Salem once more. Have you ever wondered why we refer to the moon as a woman? In every iteration of her personification, apart from Tolkien's Middle Earth, to my knowledge, she's always a lady, a feminine image of beauty and power. But why is this? Well, it's actually not too difficult to answer when we really think about it. The moon's full cycle is 28 days long, four weeks, a month. One of the things people noticed before we stopped taking fresh air walks at night

was that a woman who frequently spends time outside, which was normal for all women up until about five cultural seconds ago, would have her monthly hormonal cycle sink up almost exactly with the 28-day cycle of the moon's full phase change. This very naturally meant that to the ancient and medieval mind, Lady Luna was a symbol of fertility. of potential fruit in the womb of life. She became heavily associated with birth

when those of a more superstitious bent began to swear that entering labor pains during a full moon was the ideal scenario that it actually reduced the pains and led to a faster birth. Maybe they were right. Even her effect on the tides fueled this association with fertility, motherhood, and life.

The ancient saw how the receding waters of low tide revealed a barren wasteland of sand and untouched earth, a solemn warning of what the world might become without the blessing of new life of all kinds. At the same time, once the high tides returned from the moon's pull, those once barren regions began swarming with water and various life of all kinds, and this was all due to the moon's forceful influence on the mechanics of earth and the affairs of mankind. But naturally, the association and influence of the lunar inner energy could not stop there. Last week we were introduced to the Egyptian goddess of fertility, resurrection, and sorcery, a goddess named Hechet.

And we saw the beautifully intricate and mocking way in which Jehovah judged her for her evil. But her story doesn't end there. As is the case with so many of these mythic motifs clearly strengthened by demonic and fallen angel power, Hequette took a new form in a new land soon after her Egyptian defeat. The Greek pantheon's repackaged version of Hiket was the goddess of necromancy and witchcraft Hacquet. But here's the thing. Gods like to travel in packs, if the Greeks are to be believed, and Hacquetay is no different. The goddess of witchcraft had a palanquin, a clique, an honor guard of other goddesses that shared in many of her attributes and powers and even served her in many ways. One of these members of Hacquet's coven, one that was always present right along some of the goddesses.

the goddess of night, light, magic, and crossroads is the moon goddess Selene. As her myth evolved, the interconnectedness of witchcraft and lunar power grew only more solidified in the pagan mind. Pretty soon, Greek women of antiquity would be offering supplications up to Selene, up to the moon, in the form of incantations, potions, and spells that sought to gain the moon's favor so that the young maiden in question might win the love of some suitor. Love magic became the cult practice of the moon goddess in ancient Greece. Interestingly, in a intricate case of dark providence that's so easy to miss if you aren't looking for it,

women would offer cakes to the moon in Hakate's name, beseeching favor from the lady in light canoe for any number of things. It reminds me a bit of that witch cake we learned about when we first began this journey through Salem. But what about Salem? I mean, we have these vague associations between the moon, and witchcraft through pre and ancient history that we can talk about all day long. But let's get to the point. What does the moon have to do with the Salem witch trials? Well, in the high middle ages, Christian mythology and hagiography began to attach

great significance to an otherwise forgettable, in the grand scheme of things, character in the synoptic gospels, Herodius. If you can't remember who Herodius is, she's the wife of King Herod Antipus, the man who killed the great prophet John the Baptist. You see, the Christians thought that as punishment for her horrible involvement in the prophet's death, she was doomed to roam the sky forever, finding rest only in tree-tops between midnight and dawn. As time wore on, her name began to shift around slightly, finally landing on Aradia. And by the close of the high Middle Ages, the myth of Aradia had reached its zenith in a profound moment of mythical syncretism between the Christians and the looming threads of Greek

paganism. Aradia, you see, was viewed as the loyal servant of Diana. Diana, for her own part, was the Roman equivalent of the Greek goddess Selene. And so we finally complete this meandering thread when we realized that the neo-pagan witches of the Renaissance and post-enlightenment world viewed this enigmatic and mythical, biblical figure of Aradia as the queen of the witches. The lunar influence, set in stone from the foundations of the world, had come to be seen as the overarching master of the queen of the witches. And thus we come to Salem, though it still may not be so clear how, for in that dark and cold winter of bewitchment and dour spring of trial and execution in 1692, in late February when the trials began in earnest, the moon shone down on Salem in bright fullness for all to see.

The half-crazed Celine was not silent while Aradia's servants allegedly performed their dark arts in the Puritan town. But whether her influence was upon the witches or the accusers, or of course on no one at all, maybe her influence really didn't matter, is still to be determined. It's interesting to consider one's smallness. In C.S. Lewis's excellent novel, and today's episode is real C.S. Lewis fan service. But at any rate, in his excellent novel Paralandra, the hero of the story, after literally saving an entire world from falling into sin by fighting and killing the devil on God's orders, stands before two angels as he's congratulated for his faithful work. The hero, his name is Ransom, feels a little uncomfortable as he stands before divine beings and receives praise from them.

Sensing this weird and new affection rising up in the man, one of the angels says, Be comforted, small one, in your smallness. He lays no merit on you. The weight of the world is not yours. It was born by another, by one whose bloody shoulders were able to bear it, up to Galgotha, into the tomb, down to Sheel, and then out, out again, into the light of resurrection. Have no fear, small one. the load that is yours with humility, like a weaned child, as one who hopes in the Lord

forevermore. The point, which could be discussed and has been for many hours by many people, is actually not too complicated. Though every saint of God bears his own cross, he never bears one nearly close to the weight of the cross Christ bore up to his crucifixion, which was of infinite weight. he bored on our behalf, we can be strengthened to bear our own with faithfulness because we have nothing to boast of. We can simply bear ours with humility like weaned children as those who hope in the Lord forevermore. One great way to bear our cross with humility, to be comforted in

our smallness, is to look at the sun every day and think, I'm just one among billions looking at that same sun. And every single one of us has a plate full of of things meant for us and no one else and it's heavy. Indeed, the same sun rises on every person and none are hidden from its heat. So be comforted in your smallness. But what happens when we forget this truth? What happens when we fall into the all too tempting trap of thinking our own crosses and missions? However truly important they may be are the greatest ones or the only ones, or the only ones that matter the most. Well, one thing that happens is that we overestimate ourselves

and the problems around us. When we refuse to be comforted in our smallness, we grow distressed at the overwhelming problems around us. When we do not walk in faith, we walk in paranoid fear of everything we see and some things that we can only imagine. Do you guys know that I'm going to be turning 40 this year? What?

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The following is a record of the examination of Sarah Good dated March 1st, 1692, Salem, Massachusetts. Sarah Good, what evil spirit have you familiarity with? None. Have you made no contact with the devil? No. Why do you hurt these children? I do not hurt them. I scorn it. Who do you employ then to do it? No creature, I am falsely accused. Why do you go away muttering from Reverend Paris's house? I did not mutter, but I thanked him for what he gave my child. Have you made no contact with the devil? No.

At this point, the examiner told all of the children to look upon Mrs. Good and tell him if this was the woman who had been tormenting them and all of the girls looked upon Sarah Good. And they said that she was the one by whom they were tormented. Sarah Good, do you not see now what you have done? Why do you not tell us the truth? Why do you thus torment these poor children? I do not torment them.

Who do you employ then? I employ nobody. I scorn it. How came they thus tormented? What do I know? You bring others here and now you charge me with it. Well, who was it? I do not know.

But it was some you brought into the meeting house with you. We brought you into the meeting house. But you brought in two more. Who was it then that tormented these children? It was Osborne. What is it that you say when you go muttering away from person's houses? If I must tell, I will. Tell us then.

If I must tell, I will tell. It was the commandments, I say. I say the commandments. What commandment is it? If I must tell you, I will. It was a psalm. What psalm? It was...

It was some part of a psalm. Who do you serve? I serve God. What God do you serve? The God that made heaven and earth? At this point, Sarah Good was not willing to mention the word God. Her answers seemed very wicked. They were given in a spiteful manner.

She was retorting against the authority with base and abusive words and many lies. It was here that her husband had said that he was afraid that she either was a witch or would be one very quickly. The examiners asked her husband why he thought this and he said that he had never seen her consorting with the devil, but she had been a bad wife to him and that she was an enemy to all good. Last week, we ended our time in Salem with the bombshell revelation of Tituba's examination by John Hawthorne and Jonathan Curran. though she denied all association with the devilish forces and schemes of witchcraft at first, she eventually admitted to consorting with the devil. Now, we can look deeper into this confession's validity at a later time,

but for now, we should remember who she ultimately blamed for the bewitchment of the girls in humble Salem, Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne. Sarah Osborne was no stranger to controversy and genuinely well-found accusations of wickedness. Born into a well-to-do family, Osborne, who was born Sarah Warren, married an upper-class man named Robert Prince before moving to Salem in 1662. The couple had three children, two sons, and a daughter named Elizabeth together, before Prince's untimely death in 1674. Upon the death of her husband, Osborne was left to tend to the family's estate by herself until her sons came of age. You see, Prince's will had designated his boys as the heirs of the estate, but they were far too young at his death to actually take ownership and management

of the land. So to help in this task of management for her son's future inheritance, Sarah hired an indentured servant from Ireland named Alexander, Alexander Osborne, and maybe you can see now where this is going. Eventually, Alexander paid off his indentured debt, and Sarah immediately brought the first waves of gossip and controversy upon herself by marrying the lower-class Irishman. The issue for Sarah was that because of her marrying down, she now had no social credit that she could live off of once her sons took over the estate. Now, normally, this issue would have been simple to overcome. The two-aged lovers could simply live with their children, as was normal at the time. However, this strange and unconventional marriage was further looked down on because of the fact that Sarah's children did not like Alexander Osborne.

Not much at all. Relations in the family were quickly breaking. down and Sarah was facing the prospect of being old and homeless in just a few years because she was spiting her children. So in order to avoid this nasty fate, Sarah and Alexander Osborne proclaimed the nullification of Robert Prince's will and just assumed full ownership of the estate. The Osbournes were attempting to steal the children's inheritance from them. Now, this type of legal drama would normally be forgettable in history, even in its relation to the incident at Salem.

So why does it matter for our story? Well, the man who was the executor of Robert Prince's will, the man now charged with defending the rights of Prince's sons against their encroaching mother, was Mr. Thomas Putnam. In case you don't remember who that is, he is the prominent figure in Salem, who was the father of the bewitched and Putnam.

And while Osborne's actions towards her kids are certainly despicable, one must wonder if this connection to Putnam played any sort of role in the macabre events to follow. Sarah Good's story is quite a bit different from Osbournes, though their final place is about the same. Where Osborne's greed is driven by some kind of apparent malice towards her kids, Good's story is admittedly more tragic. Her malice appears to flow more from her belief in it being necessary. Sarah Good was born into a wealthy family. Her father owned a popular tavern in 1653.

Early in her life, tragedy struck. As soon after her 16th birthday, her father died and he didn't leave a will, leaving his 70-acre estate weak to greedy land grabs of Salem's lords. Luckily, the Puritan culture protected the family from what could have been a much worse situation. The land was rightfully divided between Good's mother and her two older brothers. A smaller allotment of land was to be shared among good and her six sisters in the hopes that it would provide each of them a good dowry that would help them attract a landowning man when they were fit for marriage. Now, this might seem a little bit callous to us today. Why would they leave all the land to Sarah's mom and her brothers and only just a little bit to her and her sisters?

But just remember how affected we've been by the comforts of modernity. Back then, marriage mattered immensely, and so did Land. This was a genuine attempt to help the widow and the sons, while not neglecting the well-being also of the daughters. Anyways, in a twist of fate very much akin to that of Sarah Osborne's children, Sarah Good's new stepdad refused this right of land to his stepdaughters, leaving good with nothing. Her only prospect of marriage was now to an indebted,

indentured servant named Daniel Poole, and upon marriage he immediately spiraled them into considerable debt before dying soon after. Let us pause here and consider the sullenness of Sarah Good's situation. She'd been left destitute and broken. It is a status worthy of sympathy. However, her response to these things are not exactly worthy of praise. Bitter and jaded at the community she felt had brushed her off to rot in a ditch. Good and her new husband were forced to sell what little land they had to pay off debts and then live in abject poverty, homeless and begging.

Now, due to the town's robust culture of Puritan charity, the begging wasn't entirely unfruitful. On the contrary, many people frequently gave to Sarah Good and her husband. The Reverend Paris was a frequent contributor to the family. Another prominent family, Samuel and Mary Abbey, even provided lodging to the goods for a time. Unfortunately, they had to kick the destitute family out because of what they described as Sarah's, quote, turbulent spirit that was spiteful and maliciously bent, end quote. And this is apparently the impression she left on nearly everyone.

Reverend Paris reported one time that Good, after receiving charity from him, walked off his property, muttering under her breath as if she was cursing the good fortune of the man. That's the incident that we heard about in her examination just a little bit earlier. Her reputation for this sort of behavior spread across all of Salem and was indeed confirmed by her any time she actually interacted with her fellow villagers. Even her husband noticed how hateful and vindictive she had become. By the time of her examination in 1692, Sarah Good's name became synonymous for being, quote,

an enemy of all good. Our modern sensibilities again often scoff at the idea that someone who has dealt such an obvious bad hand in life can be anything other than a victim, but this notion is patently absurd. How often are we driven deeper into wicked sin when things just don't go our way? I know I often am,

and the bad circumstances certainly don't justify my sin. I believe that it was the psychologist Carl Young who once observed some of the most deceptive and greedy people I know are also the most impoverished I have ever met. Indeed, being a victim, being poor, to use a brutal term, it doesn't make one virtuous. It is what one does with whatever circumstance they're given that seals their status as righteous or wicked. To quote King Baldwin IV from the movie Kingdom of Heaven, when you stand before God, you cannot say I was told to do thus, or virtue is not convenient.

at the time. All of this is to say, while the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil, that root can find rich soil in the hearts of the wealthy and the poor alike. When all the facts are examined, one must admit that both Osborne and good seem to have taken the bait of greed, envy, and bitterness, hook, line, and sinker. And yet, this is not to arrive at any conclusion regarding their guilt of the sin of sorcery one way or another, at least not yet. After the initial examinations of Good, Osborne, and Tituba, the trials officially began. Unfortunately, there's really not that much to say regarding the actual timeline of the trials beyond a simple description. Otherwise, we just get bogged down and unnecessary details.

Usually, the way it worked was each of the accused was brought in to be publicly examined. Witnesses were brought to testify, and they would either support or deny the charges of witchcraft brought against the women and some men. Eventually, as we heard from Titubo's examination, some of them would confess to the crime and then would usually implicate other women in the same sin with them, refusing to go down alone. Usually, as the accused was brought in for cross-examination and to testify to their own defense, which all of them had a right to do, one of the victims of bewitchment would swoon or fall into a fit or trance in the crowd, claiming that the accused was tormenting them by their familiar even in that

very moment. This happened with scary frequency. And as we noted in previous episodes, it led to lasting physical harm for many of these girls. So we have to ask, was it all an act? Surely some of it was. In fact, in one instance, a girl supposedly bewitched began screaming and convulsing upon seeing one of the accused. When she came to, she claimed that the accused had just then attacked her with a knife in spectral form. To prove her claim, the girl held a law. a broken shard from a blade, a piece that she said had broke off during the attack and then took on its physical form once more. Only she was lying. A local Puritan merchant who was in the audience said that he had broken a piece of his knife off just that morning while trying to fix something in his home.

He pulled out the original knife to prove it and the court found that the broken piece that the girl had shown fit perfectly in the missing chunk of this merchant's blade. She must have found it on the street or something like that. But again, we still have to ask, was all of it like this? Was all of it an act? Did these young girls really care so much about the political power struggle of the region

to go through these horrible lengths just to help prove their father's right in accusing rival families of witchery? Would it not have grown tiresome and nonsensical to these young, young people after some short time? To feed future discussion and analysis, it's worth noting that Sarah Good, among some others,

never once wavered from her claim of innocence, even when other accused openly and freely confessed to witchcraft, knowing full well that it came with capital punishment. In fact, according to legend, upon being officially found guilty of witchcraft, Good shouted at the judge, quote, I'm no more a witch than you are a wizard,

and if you take away my, life, God will give you blood to drink." The legend goes on to say that 25 years later, that same judge, a Reverend Noyes, died from choking on his own blood. At the same time, though, we should consider that Sarah Good's daughter, Dorothy Good, did actually claim to have witnessed her mother consorting with the devil on multiple occasions. And while this might seem to be a somewhat damning piece of evidence, we should know that Dorothy was also accused of witchcraft herself.

Oh, and she was only five years old at the time. The end of the matter was that initially only three women were accused of witchcraft, Good, Osborne, and Tituba. Good and Osborne maintained their innocence, though they both accused each other of being a witch, but Tituba confessed openly to Witchcraft and implicated all three of them multiple times. From there, the hearsay, the gossip, the greed, envy, the malice and the politics at play in the village took over and it seems to have spiraled out of control. And all of this led to the execution of 14 women, five men, and two dogs,

all found guilty for the crime of witchcraft in the same little village outside of Salem Township. But let us not forget how all of this started. Remember that a handful of otherwise healthy young girls began suffering the most violent fits from unknown and seemingly unknowable sources, behaving as if they were possessed by demons. And this is the crux of the matter. We have to first answer this question before answering the question of whether or not the subsequent witch trials were in any way just. What caused the affliction of these girls? We will discuss this more next week in our final installment of this series on the Salem Witch Trials. For now, let us suffice ourselves with a few final words. Whether it was a full moon's mysterious power, a darkening spirit

sent upon the people akin to the one sent by the Lord to King Saul, or just the basic outworking of man's own sin, unhelped by any extra dark force, we can confidently say that the events in Salem grew out of control. Bewitched or not, in league with the devil explicitly or not, when we forget our smallness, when we walk not by faith, but by covetousness and envy and sight, when we forget who God is and who we are,

nothing waits for us at the end of our road except for despair and pain and shadow. Want more hunted cosmos? Then make your way over to Patreon where you can get early action to our content as well as exclusive content in regular dusty tomes and monthly live streams with Brian and myself. So go to patreon.com slash haunted cosmos and sign up now.