The Torturer's Dilemma: Analyzing the Logic of Torture for Information

all, leaving these children (between the ages of 9 and 19) so frightened that a few of them began to
suffer fits and seizures, including young Betty – the daughter of Salem village’s new minister, the Rev.
Samuel Parris – as well as her cousin Abigail. These torments understandably unnerved the Reverend,
who called on the assistance of William Griggs, a local physician. The doctor’s prognosis was that the
malady was preternatural – the girls were under an “evil hand.” (Boyer and Nissenbaum, p. 2; Roach,
p. 18) While at first the Reverend attempted to deal with the situation using the orthodox methods of
prayer, self-reflection and fasting, the fits grew worse over time. (Hansen, p. 31)
It is here that the folk belief in counter-magic first enters the picture. Elite-based beliefs
regarding witchcraft were founded on the conviction that humans could not make magic – that could
only be performed by angels and devils – and so witches were understood as those who had made a
pact with Satan in order to wield power in the visible world by serving the darkness in the invisible
one. And so while the Reverend, like other educated men of his time, would have seen counter-magic
as useless at best and diabolical at worst, the masses in New England tended to believe that witches
could be countered through so-called 'white' magic: these measures included placing horseshoes on the
outside walls of a house to taking a piece of the victims hair or urine and boiling/burning it – the witch
would then be identified by the damage this countermeasure had caused. Mary Sibley, assisted by the
Rev. Parris' Barbadian slave Tituba, baked an oatmeal cake mixed with the afflicted childrens' urine,
and then fed the result to the Parris' family dog: by doing so, Mary Warren's aunt hoped to break the
spell apparently preventing the girls from naming their tormentors. 45 The counter-magic worked: the
girls were still tormented, but they were now able to name their tormentors. They named three women
in the village: Sarah Osbourne, Sarah Good, and Tituba herself. These three women very much fit the
mold of the usual witch suspect: all three were women who were in important ways marginal to the
village community: Osbourne was an older woman who had occasioned scandal by marrying a much
younger man who had been her bonded servant; Good was intensely poor, married to an apparently
useless husband, and had a reputation for demanding aid from her neighbors and levying curses on
those who refused or came through with too little; Tituba was, of course, a slave. (Karlsen, p. 245) In
other words, the community would already have been primed to believe witchcraft accusations against
45 It was characteristic of folk belief in witchcraft that the witch could be hurt by damaging a part of the victim's body
(such as urine, hair, or other safely alienable body parts). Elite belief did not accept this concept, seeing it as magic, and
therefore diabolical. Rev. Parris in fact called out Sibley for her error in the matter – but this was before the nature of
the witch conspiracy became clear.
47