SOURCE: "The Shapes of the Devil," in Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1966, pp. 65–160.

In the following excerpt, Erikson discusses the factors that prepared the village of Salem for the witchcraft hysteria, summarizes the events of the trials, and concludes that the year 1692 marked the end of the Puritan experiment in Massachusetts.

… The witchcraft hysteria that began in Salem Village (a town some miles away from Salem itself) is probably the best known episode of Massachusetts history and has been described in a number of careful works. In the pages which follow, then, the story will be sketched in rather briefly: readers interested in a fuller account of those unusual events are urged to consult The Devil in Massachusetts by Marion L. Starkey, a book that captures all the grim drama of the period without losing any of its merit as...