CRUCIBLE II
Increase Mather All rise for Judge Hathome.
Judge Hathome Increase Mather, can I have a report on
the morning's executions?
Increase Mather There has been a holdup
in one case. The girl Carla.
Judge Hathome What's the delay?
Increase Mather Apparently there's a lawyer outside who
wants to mount a defence.
Judge Hathorne A defence? This is very irregular. On
what grounds?
Increase Mather He says Carla's innocent.
Cotton Mather How
can she be innocent? She's a witch. Look, it's right here in Malleus
Mallificarum-III-Revised, in the criteria for witchcraft
Let me see, the criteria are A, significantly subaverage sanctity, B, gross and
sustained deficits in church attendance, and C, not innocent. By definition.
It's that simple.
Increase Mather It is being claimed, I think, that she's
been misdiagnosed.
Cotton Mather Nonsense.
She's had all the standard test batteries. We administered nonlinguistic tests
like being thrown into the duckpond and being stuck with pins, and linguistic
tests like saying the Lord's Prayer backwards, and she scored in the profoundly
or severely bewitched range on all of them.
Increase Mather He
does have some criticisms of the tests themselves. A suggestion, I believe,
that they don't necessarily measure what they purport to measure.
Cotton Mather Lord
save us. These tests have been employed for years, and I can assure you that
they've been exhaustively standardized on the entire surviving population of
Salem.
Judge Hathorne The tests are generally accepted, then?
Cotton Mather Of
course they are. It's only common sense, after all. The empirical correlations
are absolutely undeniable. People with high sanctity test scores have an 80%
higher than average chance of entering the ministry, and people with low test
scores have a 100% higher chance of being burnt at the stake. You can't argue
with the facts.
Increase Mather It's
possible, I suppose, that she could just have a specific sanctity defect.
Differential diagnosis in these cases isn't always easy. If she had a
developmental biblereading disorder, say, the prognosis then would be much
better - hanging, I think, rather than burning. In mild cases I believe there
are recorded instances of patients achieving lashing at the cart's tail.
Cotton Mather No,
no. There may be a grey area around borderline diabolism - that's fairly
prevalent, I think the last study said that there were soft signs of
developmental depravity in something like 98% of the normal population – but
profound witchcraft is quite unmistakeable. I sometimes think it should be
given a separate listing in the manual, something like organic devilry, to
distinguish it from the sinners at the bottom end of the normal curve.
Increase Mather The
defence has done their own tests, and they say that they have evidence that
she's been independently producing prayers at a sin-appropriate level.
Cotton Mather Oh,
I know what they're saying. It can sound quite convincing to a layperson, so I
took the precaution of having their papers looked over by an independent
professional. Allow me to introduce Dr. Bob Shopland, an officially registered
witchfinder with extensive clinical experience.
Judge Hathorne Has
he appeared as an expert witness in any other proceedings?
Cotton Mather He
testified at several of the last dozen burnings. Goody Crossley, I think, and
Goody Morton.
Judge Hathorne Good.
There's no question of his impartiality, then. You may begin, Dr. Shopland.
Dr. Bob Shopland
Thank you, your honour.
Judge Hathorne Have
you administered any tests to Carla yourself?
Dr. Bob Shopland Yes,
your honour. I administered the standard test in this area, the hydrometric
evaluation.
Judge Hathorne A
hydrometric evaluation?
Dr. Bob Shopland We
threw the accused into a carefully measured body of water - 68,540 liters plus
or minus 7 litres, accurate to within the 0.0% confidence level - and observed
whether she floated Studies have shown, your honour, that witches have a
specific gravity greater than two point one four standard deviations from the
norm, and correspondingly float. Innocent people, or, to give them their
technical name, 'corpses', sink to the bottom of the pond and stay there.
Carla did go under four times, for a mean time of 1.35 minutes, although the
amount of water she swallowed wasn't statistically significant, but towards the
end of the session she moved her arms to propel herself back into the mud at
the edge of the pond. On the basis of my observation, I would say that
her arms were clearly manipulated.
Judge Hathorne Manipulated?
Dr. Bob Shopland By the evil One. The prince of darkness. Old
scratch. Doug Biklen.
Judge Hathorne Quite.
And have you had an opportunity to look over
the so-called defence evidence?
Dr. Bob Shopland Yes
I have, your honour. And I'd like to say at the outset that I view with
some concern the prospect of nonprofessionals venturing into the field of
witchcraft. Bewitched people suffer from severe and global moral and spiritual
problems, problems which have been amply documented over the years in a
veritable bonfire of research. The intransigence of their diabolic handicaps is
well known, and one has to be wary of raising false hopes in vulnerable
parents.
Cotton Mather I
couldn't agree more. Show me a hope, I've always said, and I'll show you a
false hope. They've taken years, sometimes, coming to terms with the fact that
their son or daughter or husband is – different - and then along come these
people, some of them quite sincere, saying no, all you need to do is let him
out of the stocks or out of prison or not hang him and he'll be just like
anybody else. Families are so vulnerable to that kind of charlatanry. They
don't want to face the truth, and they'll snatch at any excuse to put off the
ugly realization that they have a devil worshipper in the household. I've seen
it a thousand times. It's what we in the profession call "Being in
denial' or 'avoidant coping'.
Judge Hathorne And
this being in denial' – would that affect the value of their evidence?
Dr. Bob Shopland Oh,
worthless. Completely unreliable. Denial works as a cognitive barrier, you
see, and until they've worked their way through it parents can't really be
trusted to tie up their own shoelaces.
Cotton Mather Guilt,
denial, anger, acceptance - they have to work through the stages. When
they've come round to accepting what we've told them, then we can listen to
what they have to say. That's why it's such an important part of the role
of professionals working in the area to help families to come to terms with
limited hopes for their child. In this case I had get them to learn to deal
with the notion of having her fry in hell for all eternity, and I may say that
that putting that across was a real challenge.
Dr. Bob Shopland Absolutely.
Sudden and rapid cures promised in a field where we know they aren't possible
can be very damaging, and undo years of hard work and hard won adjustment.
Judge Hathorne And
what about these prayers people have heard them say?
Dr. Bob Shopland I'm
not convinced. I feel — and I'm speaking here as a trained professional - that
both the content and format of these purported communications are quite
inconsistent with informed expectations. They simply defy rational explanation
in terms of established religious, medical, or educational theory.
Judge Hathorne No
coherent theory as to the underlying principle, eh?
That's very significant.
Dr. Bob Shopland People
who have previously given every clinical indication of being utterly damned are
said to be uttering complete prayers, things like -
"Oh Lord, get me out of here, oh god stop the
pain...." And, if I may say so, I find it
particularly suspicious that they all seem to say much the same sort of thing.
Nothing but criticism of the church and the elders, complaints of injustice,
misunderstanding, shoddy treatment, prescriptions for appropriate treatment for
accused people, statements about how they want to live in the community (or
just live)..... One could be forgiven for wondering if this was just the kind
of thing you would expect if words were being put into their mouths by people
with a bee in their bonnet about the evils of large institutions like jails.
Cotton Mather Well,
we all know their agenda. It's the same old gang that pushed for religious
toleration, and look what happened there! All the religious deviants pushed out
of their correctional institutions onto the streets. Oh, the liberals are all
right, the academics are all right, they've all gone back to their ivory
towers, they aren't the ones that have to cope with the consequences, you can't
go out into the street now without bumping into a gang of Quakers wandering
around not taking their hats off.
Increase Mather Get
a family of quakers in the street, and bang go your property values. No wonder
people don't like it.
Cotton Mather It's
not just the property values, either, it's for their own good. They don't fit
in, they don't belong, much as we would like to get rid of prejudice against
them it's there and there's no point pretending it doesn't exist, they'd be
much happier in so many ways being in a disciplined and supportive environment
with people of their own kind in the jail.
Increase Mather Or
the stocks?
Cotton Mather Or
the stocks, that would be another possible option. Or the ducking-pond. There
are a variety of possible placements. (Smiles indulgently) This isn't the bad old
days!
Judge Hathorne Gentlemen,
gentlemen, we're wandering from the point. We're not talking about quakers now.
We're talking about witches.
Dr. Bob Shopland Well,
yes, Quakers are at the other end of the spectrum. Higher functioning,
certainly.
Judge Hathorne The
point is, the defence is claiming to have evidence that this person isn't a
witch. If there is evidence, shouldn't we look at it?
Dr. Bob Shopland Judge,
I can assure you that there hasn't been a single instance where a claim of this
nature has stood up to scientific scrutiny. Oh, there's lots of anecdotal
evidence, people claiming that these people have displayed undiabolic
behaviours in the family or in the community, patted a child on the head or put
a coin in the poorbox, but on every single occasion where these claims have
been appraised scientifically in a controlled study by bringing these people in
and applying red-hot irons to their feet they've been unable to do anything
except scream like fiends.
Cotton Mather Exactly
like fiends.
Judge Hathorne There's
no consensus among professionals on this new theory, then?
Dr. Bob Shopland I
would say, in fact, that most professionals would be quite strongly against it.
I've spoken to quite a number of witchfinders myself, and I haven't found one
yet who's prepared to say that all the people he's had burnt as witches were
innocent. I'm not saying that it's never true – if someone is accused of
curdling the cows’ milk with the evil eye the question of whether or not
they're a witch remains an empirical question for the interrogator on each
occasion – but I do have to say that for anyone to imply, in the absence of
empirical validation, that this technique can break through the power of Satan
raises serious ethical concerns.
Cotton Mather Very
serious. Has your honour considered having the defense lawyers burnt?
Dr. Bob Shopland I
have to warn you, judge, that if all this rhetoric and media hype continues it
may well succeed in setting witchcraft services back forty years. Our only hope
is that rationality and the rules of evidence will prevail.
Judge Hathorne The rules of evidence?
Dr. Bob Shopland Standard
scientific practice. A valid test, judge, is a test where
1) the variables are strictly controlled - preferably with leg irons,
handcuffs, and choke collars;
2) the outcomes are double-blind - that is, both the subject and the torturer
wear blindfolds; and
3) there's a control group - that is, one group is in control of the other
group, generally with whips and red-hot pokers; and
4) the outcomes can be correlated with the consensus of the existing literature.
Cotton Mather All
we ask, judge, is that people claiming that you can drive out demons without
the use of fire in large quantities have to prove their point first, to me.
It's not as if I have a closed mind; I just want conclusive proof, through
rigorous and properly designed experiments that meet the rules of evidence and
identify the variables and eliminate the possibility of outside influence, that
the use of fire is no longer appropriate because hell has frozen over.
Judge Hathorne I'm
afraid I have to agree with you. We can't hear this evidence until there's a
consensus in the witchfinding community. It's most unsatisfactory, I must say,
and I wish I hadn't been put in this unfortunate position. Out of concern for
Carla and all other children who may be suffering from their inability to free
themselves from demonic posession, the court implores those individuals who are
able to do so to conduct the necessary studies to determine the reliability and
validity of this most interesting technique. Given the potential for breakthrough
to understanding and possibly remediating some of the tragic and mysterious
conditions affecting some children, professionals and non-professionals alike
would eagerly welcome definitive findings. Until this is done we will never
know if there is
“a knocking in the skull, an endless silent shout,
of something beating on a wall, and trying to be let out."
Cotton Mather And
what about Carla?
Judge Hathorne Carla? Oh, burn her.
Chris Borthwick 11/21/92
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