Priyanka Das
Assistant Professor, Presidency University, Kolkata. Email: priyanka.eng@presiuniv.ac.in
Special Issue on Diseases, Death and Disorder, 2020
Abstract
This paper seeks to develop parallels between the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic and the Salem witch trials of the late seventeenth century as depicted in the American supernatural Television series Salem. One striking resemblance between the two events is the process of a witch-hunt, both in its literal and metaphorical sense, that encompasses the narrative of the pandemic. By tracing the trajectory of science from its embryonic stage in the early modern period to the myopic situation in the twenty-first century, this paper theorizes the idea of disease focusing on the following aspects- the spread of the disease, the panic triggered and the redressal mechanism. At a time when the world is struggling to make sense of the overwhelming and inexplicable presence of the Coronavirus, I propose reading Salem in conjunction with the unfortunate events around us that can contribute to our collective ongoing efforts to contextualize and conceptualize the disease.
Keywords: disease, pandemic, corona, witch-pox, witch hunt.
Introduction
The Salem Witch Trials (Feb 1692 – May 1693) is arguably one of the most distinct episodes of witch-hunt in colonial history. This fifteen-month episode witnessed more than 150 arrests, twenty executions, and at least 5 deaths within prison walls. Whether nullified as a colossal mistake of the colonial times or justified as the Puritanical move of reforming the society, historians and scientists have tried to foreclose the debates around witchcraft with rational explanations. It is now a popular culture that has stepped in to tread upon the uncharted territories. This is evident from the plethora of films and TV series based on the fundamental idea of witchcraft, the proliferation of which testifies America’s obsession with its dark colonial past. Creators have approached the idea with multiple, at times, contradictory, ideologies. Although the central plot often retains the Biblical dieresis, narratives of witchcraft attempt to reveal the parallel Satanic view. Some of the basic elements remain unscathed, for instance, the eternal conflict between the Divine and the Demonic, witchcraft being one of the most powerful forms of sorcery channelized directly from the Devil, the witches’ timeless devotion towards the Dark Lord, and their eternal attempt to bring Satan on earth in his human form, and help Satan in his undying wish to open the gates of Hell for his condemned brothers to walk the Earth. However, every single adaptation has tried to deal with the story with its own unique plot.
While Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, the latest adaptation, has bagged immense popularity among the netizens, WGN America’s Salem (2014- 2017) has been widely recognized as the closest accurate depiction of the actual events. Salem has all things exhilarating about the dark world. It has spells, invocations, necromancy, demons, incubus, exorcism, sacrifice of kids, sexual explorations with demons, participating in witches’ Sabbath, consecration of unborn children, burning of witches, disease, plague, and eternal damnation. However, in my view, two aspects particularly stand out in the treatment of witchcraft in Salem. First, it is the expanded notion of “witchhood” in Salem. While many other media adaptations maintain the idea that witches are born and cannot be made, Salem wishes away with the homogeneity of a witch’s existence. It not only retains the idea of naturally born witches but also accommodates the ‘initiated’ ones in the form of the ‘mortal vessels.’ Mary Sibley, the protagonist, is one such initiated witch who sells her soul to the Devil by sacrificing her unborn child through black magic. The initiated however is not considered secondary because she is empowered by the Devil and becomes the most powerful of the Essex witches. The idea of the pact with the Devil was a defining Renaissance trope as glorified in the figure of Doctor Faustus. Mary Sibley, arguably in a Faustian lust for power and revenge, challenges God and brings the plague. Second, it is the connection between disease and witchcraft in Salem. In Puritan imagination, the witch is considered diseased. Additionally, Salem portrays how witches cause an epidemic in the form of plague that affects the townspeople in huge numbers. The rigid practice of witch-hunt in Salem leads to the brutal killing of scores of people even though in many cases they are innocents.
This paper argues that an understanding of these two unique features of Salem can be useful in critiquing the recent experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic. The analysis focuses on three broad thematic parallels– the Salem “witch-pox” and the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic. Such a comparative analysis between events which are three centuries apart – or between a product of popular culture and the experience of a contemporary real-life crisis – might appear far-fetched. However, I believe this has the potential to contribute to our collective attempts at theorizing the pandemic.
The Origin of the Disease
In Salem, the plague that Mary Sibley has inflicted the town with is part of the Grand Rite, or Ritum Magni, the most dreadful rituals performed by the witches. It begins with the sacrifice of thirteen innocent lives, after which, the ancient holy relic of witchcraft, known as the Malum, must be buried in the ground thereby making it the source of the plague. The witch-pox is hoped to decimate the human inhabitants of the town, thereby consecrating the earth for the Devil. The Latin word malum has several connotations, like evil, calamity, illness, or apple. In Salem, the ancient relic appears in the shape of an apple which triggers the witch-pox, while in Sabrina, the malum is an actual apple a bite of which yields sacred covert knowledge. By extension, then, malum alludes to the forbidden fruit of Eden. The novel Coronavirus is believed to have spread from the live animal market in Wuhan, with a video going viral of a woman having bat-soup. This consumption of raw, uncooked animal flesh has a primitive dimension to it, and it evokes, almost in an uncanny way, the frequent practice among the witches involving sacrifice of live animals. To develop the analogy further, bat-soup or live animals, in this context, become the malum.
Another important analogy involves the interpretations of the epidemic. Firstly, in Salem, the Church is often shown trying to propagate the idea that Salem has been cursed by God’s wrath who has been utterly disappointed by the wretchedness and the contamination of the human souls. Others believe it to be the Devil’s wrath against humanity which has served God to date. Similarly, many believe that the Coronavirus pandemic is nothing but Nature’s revenge against mankind. At the limit of our wits, this is perhaps the only explanation that can console us for now. Either way, the idea of revenge is paramount, and one can find a theological dimension in these two events. Religion has been a crucial part of both the discourses. While in Salem the possible redemption suggested by the clergymen is to return to God with unalloyed devotion, in the 2020 pandemic, we are encountering faith leaders who are engaged in debating whether this pandemic is an act of God. People in India are resorting to rituals and chants of “Go Corona Go”, almost in a dramatic performance of immersing a goddess.
Secondly, if in the 17th century, people held sorcery responsible for the plague, then in the 21st c, social scientists are using political terminologies to explain the corona pandemic. Drawing from the Foucauldian notion of biopower and Agamben’s biopolitics, sociologists and political theorists are conjecturing the possibility of China having manufactured the virus in a laboratory and employing it as biological warfare, thus annihilating possible threats to its claim for supremacy. While this runs the risk of sounding xenophobic, the theories of biopolitics are not hogwash interpretations as well. In both cases, we witness the elementary nature of man that is his lust for power. While in Salem, the Puritans use public execution to exercise their sovereign power, and witches frame their rebellion by using sorcery and necromancy, in 2020, world powers are encouraging ethnocentric explanations and blaming China as the mastermind behind the pandemic.
The Spread of the Disease
The next point of the analogy is the spread of the disease resulting in the mass extinction of both rich and poor. The Salem witch-pox contaminates the bodies of the afflicted with festering boils that secrete a pungent fluid and leaves the patient writhing with pain. When Dr. Wainwright dissects a terminal patient alive, he finds the internal organs dissolved into black tar. This supernatural disease is supposed to fill the body of the victim with Hell blood, which will then serve as the fuel for the Hell Gate. The plague was designed to infect anyone who is not directly a witch or associated with one. In other words, the witches who were the outcasts in the normal societies, and were continuously hunted down by the Puritans, were the ones who were protected against the infliction. Dr. Wainwright who was treating the infected patients was at his wit’s end because he failed to determine any known cause of the pox. This makes the witch-pox alien to human imagination and leaves it undefined. While Coronavirus may not differentiate between the rich and the poor, the initial cases were reported from people who travelled to the virus-hit countries and returned to their homelands, sometimes unaware of them being carriers. In a way, this was a rich man’s disease, or at least of people who could afford to travel to advanced countries. The Coronavirus itself has an amount of foreign-ness about it, not only in the sense that it comes from the foreign lands but also because the source of the disease is unknown, therefore, foreign to human imagination. In both cases, the disease is imported from some unexplored source which is beyond scientific explanations.
Additionally, in Salem, Dr. Wainwright believes that the plague shows signs of compassion since it kills the victim very quickly without prolonging the suffering. Coronavirus also seems to quicken death which has threateningly resulted in a rapid decline of the world population.
As unfortunate as it could get, both the witch-pox and the Coronavirus saw a quick ballooning and reached the stage of community transmission in no time. The contagious nature of both the diseases entailed similar measures that were adopted to contain the spread. In Salem, it started with the provision of masks and then the implementation of quarantine. Isolation could be afforded by the lords and the governors of Salem, but not by the poorest of the poor living in congested ghettos like the Knocker’s Hole where the maximum number of infected cases were reported. Similarly, the strategy of social distancing adopted to fight Coronavirus could be afforded only by the most privileged of the classes. India’s lockdown since March 25, 2020, has resulted in utter chaos with thousands of migrant labourers stuck miles away from home in other states, and millions of daily wage jobless and unable to provide for their families.
Yet another similarity could be noted in the profession of the people who fought the battle from the front line. In Salem, we see when native physicians, unable to find the source or the cure of the pox, exhausted themselves, doctors with royal certificates of proper training were immediately sent from Boston. Similarly, the world was astounded when 52 Cuban doctors and nurses flew to Italy, one of the worst-affected countries, on March 22, 2020. Apart from the health experts, several others risked their lives fighting the disease – scientists, the police, security guards, and in 2020, delivery personnel as well.
The Hunt and the Trial
Much of Salem’s events derive from mass hysteria among the inhabitants. Historically, it was Elizabeth Hubbard, aged 17, who was said to experience mysterious ‘fits’ that the town physicians conceived as ghostly possessions. In Salem, Mercy Lewis, who was initially possessed by the demon, has been the prime instigator of the witch trials and was instrumental in sending innocent lives to gallows. Owing to the supernatural aspect of witchcraft, there was no solid evidence based on which one could recognize a witch. Targeting random women (and men) had become a sadistic game for the townspeople. Both Mary Sibley and Mercy Lewis would accuse people of witchcraft – sometimes out of personal vendetta – sometimes simply out of their whims. But the public trial that followed would inevitably end in hanging the accused in public sight. While Foucault theorizes the spectacle of public punishment as the medieval ages’ obsession with torturing the body of the condemned, there are more insights into the ideas of sovereign power and disciplinary power as witnessed in the two events discussed in this paper.
Reverend Increase Mather who was a staunch Puritan, both in the historical Massachusetts Bay Colony as well as in the TV show, Salem, had an influential administrative role to play during the witch trials. While the Blackstone ratio in modern criminal law maintains that ‘it is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer’, in Salem, Mather, being an orthodox clergyman, believed otherwise- “Do you not see, when hunting witches, far better a hundred innocents die than a single solitary witch walks free”. This testifies the intensity of the hysterical fear that was looming large in the Puritan New World. This process of witch-hunt has a striking similarity with the way the Coronavirus patients are treated. Determining the diseased has eventually become a difficult exercise involving the accusation of anybody and everybody as a possible case of Covid-19. Apart from the confirmed cases, there could be anyone with symptoms of common flu but suspected as corona patients, while one can also carry the disease and yet be asymptomatic. Suddenly every individual has become ‘untouchable’ and even one single confirmed case is resulting in all the family members being sent to quarantine or entire vicinities being turned into containment zones. Moreover, this has also led to serious stigmatization of corona suspects. One striking example is the first reported case of a corona patient in West Bengal, who had returned from the UK with the infection and was instantly trolled on social media for his alleged irresponsible behaviour regarding the seriousness of the disease. Reportedly, in North Korea, one of the drastic measures undertaken was to shoot the infected person thereby eliminating the threat of contamination. On the other hand, in the USA, the idea of putting a whole nation into quarantine is not taken in good faith. While the USA faces the worst death rate, hundreds of US citizens have taken out anti-lockdown rallies. Some believe that a virus is too insignificant to wipe out nations and others believe that even if the threat is real, they should be free to choose their lifestyle and the government must not violate their democratic rights. North Korea and the USA, in two disparate ways, demonstrate how the state machinery of repression is taking charge of people’s lives in a rather militant way. These challenging moments reveal the naked truth behind the state machinery. While the Puritans enjoyed their sovereign right to kill people, mostly based on deductions, the modern state machinery uses its disciplinary power to have the same effect.
Lastly, as we know, every culture believes in a proper funeral to honour the dead. However, in both Salem and the Coronavirus pandemic, we witness that the trial of the diseased does not cease even after death. In Salem, the Crags is a mysterious place but has been useful for two purposes. Firstly, as a mass grave for the unwanted corpses of slaves, criminals, witches, or native Indians, and secondly, as the bosom chosen by the Essex hive for practicing their witchcraft and later to consecrate the ground for the Devil himself. Soon when the death toll in Salem massively increased, the doctors advised disposing of the corpses in the Crags since the contagious disease could spread even from the dead bodies. This idea faced strong resentment from some of the town folks who could not imagine such a profane act of not giving the native Puritans a proper burial. The present case of Coronavirus strikes an uncanny resemblance to this. Worst-hit countries like Italy and the USA are digging mass graves and disposing of the dead bodies in a casket from high ground. A diseased body retaining the threat even after death is one of the most ill-fated endings one can imagine.
Conclusion
Coronavirus crisis and the Salem witch-trials are separated by three centuries. While it is possible to argue that these are rooted in two completely different contexts, as one watches Salem one finds uncanny resemblances between the two events. As discussed, the parallels regarding the origin, the spread, the hunt, and the trial of the two events are too striking to be missed. As we are confronting the unfathomable crisis due to Covid-19, the discourse of witch-pox in Salem, in my view, offers us important markers to measure the depth of the crisis and to theorize the stigma of the disease.
References
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford University Press, 1998.
Braga, Brannon and Adam Simon, directors. Salem. WGN America, 20 Apr. 2014.
“Coronavirus Lockdown Protest: What’s behind the US Demonstrations?” BBC News, BBC, 21 Apr. 2020, www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52359100.
DH WebDesk. “‘Go Corona Go’: Know the Man behind the Slogan.” Deccan Herald, DH News Service, 3 Apr. 2020, www.deccanherald.com/national/national-politics/go-corona-go-know-the-man-behind-the-slogan-820750.html.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage Books, 1995.
Harikrishnan, Charmy. “Miseries of Migrant Labourers Worsen amid Coronavirus Pandemic and Lockdown.” The Economic Times, 11 Apr. 2020, economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/miseries-of-migrant-labourers-worsen-amid-coronavirus-pandemic-and-lockdown/articleshow/75099573.cms?from=mdr.
Varghese, Johnlee. “North Korea’s First Confirmed Coronavirus COVID 19 Patient Shot Dead: Report.” International Business Times, Singapore Edition, 12 Mar. 2020,www.ibtimes.sg/north-koreas-first-confirmed-coronavirus-covid-19-patient-shot-dead-report-40042
Priyanka Das, Assistant Professor of English at Presidency University, Kolkata, is a scholar of Popular Culture and teaches science fiction, critical theory, and the Holocaust in literature. Her M. Phil dissertation was on the objectification of Male Body in Bollywood Movie and Advertisements. Her Ph.D. is on the politics of visuality in the popular Television show Game of Thrones. Currently, she is working on the Holocaust in Popular Culture and the Kaiju Monsters in Japanese Science fiction movies.