“A shipwreck of souls”

It was proverbial knowledge in the pre-modern world that “Hell is full of good intentions”. In a later adaptation of the phrase, the road to Hell was paved with the same things. This maxim described well the criminal prosecution of witches in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which may have claimed as many as 50,000 lives. The motives involved in these trials were as complex as those in any human endeavour, but the dominant impulse behind them was a sincere wish to eradicate evil. Later generations looked back and shuddered, and imagined the campaign against witchcraft in different terms. In 1863 Nathaniel Hawthorne described the view of Gallows Hill in Salem, Massachusetts, where nineteen alleged witches were hanged in 1692: “this was the field where superstition won her darkest triumph; the high place where our fathers set up their shame, to the mournful gaze of generations far remote.” Hawthorne’s assessment is seldom challenged in popular accounts; indeed, it is probably unshakeable. The phrase “witch hunt” – which was barely used in the age of witch prosecutions – is today a byword for deliberate injustice. ¹