Witch-hunting in the Western World: An Interview with John Demos

A host of historians, social scientists, writers, and artists have grappled with the Salem witchcraft hysteria of 1692. One of the most insightful efforts to explain these events was John Demos's Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (Oxford University Press, 1982), which won the Bancroft Prize. A quarter-century later, Demos, the Samuel Knight Professor of History at Yale, has returned to the subject of witchcraft and witch-hunting. But this time he examines these phenomena in much larger contexts in an effort to discern patterns that go back millennia and may still remain with us. His The Enemy Within: 2,000 Years of Witch-hunting in the Western World has recently been published by Viking. Historically Speaking senior editor Donald A. Yerxa interviewed him on November 3, 2008.

Donald A. Yerxa: What are you trying to accomplish with this book?

John Demos: I've been involved with studying witchcraft history for almost fifty years. My first effort was a term paper for the first graduate student seminar I took. I never expected that it would go on and on like that, but there you are. In the early 1980s, I wrote a long, quite scholarly book, Entertaining Satan, focusing on witchcraft and culture in a particular time and place, namely, early New England. And The Enemy Within was a chance to come back to the subject in a very different way and to attempt to draw out its broadest implications. I guess this second book is a matter mainly of breadth, whereas the first one was a matter mainly of depth. So it felt like a very different enterprise. I had never done a work synthesizing a large historical territory, and I wanted to try that. I also wanted to write a more popular book. I've hoped that my books would have some interest beyond the nearest and dearest of my scholarly colleagues, but this one is clearly different in that it is meant for a general audience. To meet the needs of a different readership, I told stories, trying to find different ways of expressing things that would be broadly meaningful to people beyond the guild of fellow scholars.

Yerxa: When you looked at witch-hunting in the Western world from this expanded horizon of two millennia, what sort of insights did you gain?

Demos: Although it was not exactly a new insight, I got a much stronger feeling for the almost universal presence and prevalence of witch-hunting. It just emerges again and again in a variety of very different settings. My emphasis shifted from accusers of witches to the victims of the witch hunts. I think that happened partly because of the sheer cumulative aspect of encountering one witch hunt after another, and somehow that drew my attention more and more to the victims. But that may also have occurred as a result of having to come to terms with the fact that there are people in my own present who have been the victims of witch hunts. And some of them are still literally in jail. So when I wrote about things like Red Scares and most especially the so-called daycare sex abuse crisis in the 1980s and 1990s, I had a feeling of connection to the targets, the victims.

A 17th-century witchcraft trial. From Henrietta D. Kimball, Witchcraft Illustrated (Boston, 1892).

Yerxa: What further insights might you have expected had you expanded your work even further beyond the Western world?

Demos: Well, I'm not sure. I started, in a sense, at that point many, many years ago when I came to this subject in graduate school. I had a strong feeling that a great deal could be learned from reading about witchcraft in a variety of non-Western cultures. So I took a year off from my history graduate training to work in anthropology. I took courses and seminars on witchcraft. I tried to move from that background to a very tightly focused approach to the historical material about early America.

Yerxa: Why do...