The Beginning
The book opens with an imagery-laden description pinpointing the exact moment (or thereabouts) that the Salem witch hysteria began. As with so much of history, it seems impossible to believe that the conflagration which caused so much death and misery could have started from a barely flickering flame: “It began in obscurity with cautious experiments in fortune telling… fearful of the future, they began to cast spells and to practice `conjuration with sieves and keys, and peas, and nails, and horseshoes’… the girls devised a primitive crystal ball—the white of an egg suspended in a glass—and received a chilling answer: in the glass there floated `a specter in the likeness of a coffin.’ What had begun as fearful curiosity was turning to sharp panic" (1).
It’s Witchcraft...Right?
One of the most effective uses of imagery in the text is the descriptions of the evidence which actually sent people to their deaths on charges of having performed witchcraft. The power of these images comes from the enormous gap in perspective. Behavior today that would be derisively dismissed as evidence of nothing particularly unusual at all was enough to seal one’s guilt and execution: “No fewer than six persons, for example, testified that George Burroughs, the wizard-minister, had performance such super-human feats of strength as lifting a heavy gun at arm’s length with a single finger thrust into the barrel" (12).
Flames of Factionalism
Boyer and Nissenbaum use the image of a fire to suggest how a small spark can burst into a large conflagration: "the flames of Village factionalism, smoldering away for years, now burst spectacularly into the open" (68). The Salem Witch Trials were part of this, helping that spark ignite to create something far more vast and far more dangerous.
Salem Town
In the simple quote "From almost any point of view, whether geographic or institutional, Salem Town dominated the horizon of Salem Village" (86) the authors set up a stark image of how Salem Town was always visible, always looming, always present. It is no wonder many in Salem Village felt like the Village could not get out of its shadow, and why any involvement with it and its people could be suspect.
