August 5

Dedication of the Salem Witch Trials Memorial

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On the afternoon of August 5th, 1992, three hundred years almost to the season after nineteen people were hanged and one man crushed to death under stones in Salem, Massachusetts, a crowd gathered on Liberty Street to dedicate the city's first public memorial to its victims. The granite walls were finished. The twenty stone benches, each bearing a single name, a method of execution, a date, were finally in place. And at the podium stood a man whose own life had been defined by exactly the kind of organized hatred the memorial existed to condemn: Holocaust survivor, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and author of Night, Elie Wiesel.

What Wiesel said that afternoon has outlived the ceremony itself, still quoted, still taught, still carried by visitors who never heard it delivered. It deserves, on its anniversary, to be remembered in full.

A New Legacy of Remembrance

Salem's relationship with its own history was, for most of three centuries, one of avoidance rather than acknowledgment. The shame ran deep enough that longtime residents recalled being told, well into the twentieth century, that polite company simply didn't discuss the witch trials, in much the same breath as one didn't discuss divorce. Early memorialization efforts were sporadic and largely driven by individual descendant families: a granite obelisk for Rebecca Nurse in 1885, a plaque for Susannah Martin in Amesbury in 1894, a marker for John Proctor placed by his own descendants in 1902. Salem itself, the city where the trials and hangings actually took place, had nothing.

That changed with the approach of the trials' 300th anniversary. In 1986, the mayor's office convened an advisory committee to plan a proper commemoration, but progress was slow and occasionally contentious; a privately funded 1988 proposal for a statue of the accused Towne sisters was pushed through the City Council without public hearings, dividing the community before it ever broke ground. The Tercentenary Committee that eventually succeeded, led by Linda McConchie alongside Patty MacLeod and Alison D'Amario of the Salem Witch Museum, took a more deliberate path: a public design competition drawing roughly 250 entries, judged by a panel of artists, architects, and museum professionals, with playwright Arthur Miller unveiling the winning design in November 1991.

The result, created by architect James Cutler and artist Maggie Smith, was intentionally spare. A dry-laid granite wall on three sides. A stone threshold inscribed with the victims' own protests of innocence, the words abruptly cut off mid-sentence by the memorial's walls, a deliberate architectural symbol of a community that stopped listening. Locust trees, chosen because they flower last and lose their leaves first. Twenty cantilevered stone benches, each inscribed with a name, a date, and a method of death, offering visitors a place to sit inside the same rough enclosure that names the dead.

Wiesel opened, by his own account, almost apologetically. He told the crowd he'd wondered why he, of all people, had been asked to speak: his field was scripture, philosophy, and literature, not the specific history of colonial Massachusetts. He'd spent the preceding three or four weeks doing nothing but reading everything he could find about the trials, and confessed that even after all that study, he still wasn't certain he understood how a town devoted, as its very name suggested, to peace, could have produced such violence.

From there, Wiesel worked through the case with the instincts of a Talmudic scholar turning over an impossible text. He wondered aloud why scripture's harshness toward witches fell so disproportionately on women rather than men, and questioned why a community claiming to fear the Devil's influence would take it upon themselves to punish Satan's supposed followers rather than leaving that judgment to God. He compared the whole affair to a Kafka novel, one that begins with the smallest, most banal of incidents, in Salem's case, two bored young girls with nothing to occupy a summer afternoon, and spirals by sheer procedural momentum into gallows and graves. What troubled him most, he admitted, wasn't the judges or the accusers but the passivity of everyone else: a whole community that watched an injustice unfold and, with only scattered exceptions, did nothing to stop it.

He lingered, too, on how thoroughly legal the entire process had been. This wasn't mob violence or a church tribunal acting outside the law; it was a secular court, presided over by the colony's own lieutenant governor, following an indictment, an arrest warrant, and a full judicial procedure from beginning to end. That the machinery of law itself could produce such an outcome disturbed him more than any single act of cruelty within it. He located the underlying force behind it in a single word: fanaticism, which he called the mechanism that makes atrocity easy, that lets ordinary people believe children really saw demons, that lets a judge believe he speaks for justice while destroying it.

Wiesel offered one piece of hope alongside the horror: a story about an ordinary Berlin housewife who sheltered Jews throughout the Second World War, who, when asked by journalists after the fact where she'd found the courage, could only answer that she had done it out of simple self-respect. That capacity, he argued, the refusal of one person to let an injustice happen in front of them, was the only real counterweight history had ever produced against fanaticism, and it was available to absolutely anyone. In his own words, delivered directly to the crowd that afternoon: “In times of inhumanity, humanity is still possible.”

Perhaps most importantly, Wiesel didn't let the address stay comfortably in the past. Wiesel drew a direct line from Salem forward through the twentieth century: to Stalin's Moscow show trials, where Lenin's own former comrades confessed to invented crimes under coercion; to the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa against Salman Rushdie; and, with the most urgency, to the war then unfolding in the former Yugoslavia, where ethnic cleansing and newly opened concentration camps were making headlines even as he spoke. Salem, Wiesel insisted, was not a closed chapter. It was a pattern, and the pattern was still repeating in real time, with real victims, that same August.

He closed by returning to the memorial's own chosen theme, inscribed as one of its four guiding words: memory. Injustice against the innocent, he told the crowd, whether four-year-old prisoners in chains in 1692 or children dying under shellfire in Sarajevo in 1992, reveals something broken in the society that allows it. Remembering honestly, he argued, was itself a form of redemption, the only kind available once the harm was already done.

The memorial's story didn't end with its dedication. Its dry-laid construction, stones set without mortar by design, made it vulnerable in ways its creators hadn't fully anticipated: souvenir-hunters chipped away pieces over the following two decades, and the site became an inadvertent favorite of the early-2000s geocaching craze. A second fundraising campaign restored and reinforced the structure, and it was rededicated on September 9th, 2012. Today it's jointly maintained by the Peabody Essex Museum, the City of Salem, and Voices Against Injustice, the organization that grew out of the Salem Award for Human Rights and Social Justice, first presented that same August afternoon in 1992 to Gregory Alan Williams, honored for his actions protecting strangers during the Los Angeles riots earlier that year.

Visitors still leave flowers, coins, and handwritten notes on the twenty stone benches, particularly on the anniversaries of the hangings themselves. An estimated fifteen million Americans can trace some ancestral line back to the trials, and for many of them, this quiet stone enclosure, not a courthouse record or a history book, is where that inheritance finally becomes visible and a living history.

OCCULT READS PRESENTS: DAILY OCCULT REVIEW

Modern Occultist is proud to present today's “Daily Occult Review” from our ongoing series—as part of the newly-launched Occult Reads... Today, in honor of Wiesel's own insistence that Salem was never simply history, we're recommending a book built on exactly that premise.

The Once & Future Witch Hunt: A Descendant's Reckoning from Salem to the Present

By Alice Markham-Cantor | Llewellyn Worldwide

Alice Markham-Cantor discovered as a teenager that she was descended, nine generations back, from Martha Carrier, one of the twenty Salem victims, hanged in 1692 as the so-called “Queen of Hell.” The Once & Future Witch Hunt is the book that discovery eventually produced: a genre-blending investigation that alternates, chapter by chapter, between a carefully researched historical-fiction reconstruction of Martha Carrier's actual life and death, and Markham-Cantor's own nonfiction account of chasing her ancestor through archives, graveyards, and the accumulated three centuries of myth that grew up around Salem in the years since.

The book's real force, and its clearest echo of Wiesel's own August 1992 address, lies in its refusal to let Salem stay safely in the past. Markham-Cantor, who serves on the working committee of the International Network Against Accusations of Witchcraft and Associated Harmful Practices, traces a direct, documented line from the specific social mechanics that killed Martha Carrier straight through to witch-hunting violence still occurring against real people in the present day. Historian Ronald Hutton has called it among the most accessible entry points into the Salem trials currently available for readers coming to the subject cold, while still offering genuine new research for readers who think they already know the story.

This is not a light read, and the alternating structure asks a little patience from readers used to a single continuous narrative thread; those wanting a straightforward, single-genre account of the trials may prefer a more conventional history first. But for readers of this magazine who came to today's post already moved by Wiesel's own insistence that fanaticism didn't end with Salem's gallows, The Once & Future Witch Hunt makes that same argument from the inside of one family's actual bloodline, and makes it very difficult to look away from.

(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)

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