Salem Conjures Up Its Past With Mix of Solemn Ceremonies, Frivolous Fun : History: Some commemorations of the witchcraft trials raise questions about truth and justice. Others try to cash in on the tourism market.

The little boy’s voice squeaked with concern and a little fear: “But why did Bridget Bishop scratch the face of the neighbor’s son when he visited her?” he asked.

Bishop, wearing a scarlet dress that seemed cut to shock, answered sharply: “What would you do if someone was sent over to find out if you were a witch?”

The boy and group of about 50 listeners pondered the answer and later, in a jury-like vote, three out of five chose to acquit Bishop of witchcraft charges despite the horrific testimony from witnesses and supposed victims of black magic.

This time it was all in fun. The mock jury formed part of a re-creation of the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692. Three hundred years ago, the real Bishop did not get off so easily. Over a three-month period, a magistrate convicted her and 19 other suspected witches. All but one were executed by hanging; a lone victim was crushed to death by rocks piled on his chest.

Salem, a once-great American port now long past its heyday, is commemorating the 300th anniversary of the trials, and although the scale of atrocities is no match for modern mass repression and genocide, the tale continues to attract the attention of scholars, writers and social critics who see in the event lessons to be learned and relearned.

“Salem has become a blank page on which Americans choose to see important lessons. Almost every meaning possible has been read into it,” said David Hall, a Harvard University historian and researcher on the trials.

The Salem commemoration is unconsciously paradoxical. On the one hand, the schedule of events has been full of high-minded lectures and exhibits that depict the trials as a tragic miscarriage of justice.

On the other hand, the abundance of witch kitsch in stores and exhibits creates a climate of frivolity.

Salem officially styles itself “Witch City;” if it could be proven that in 1692, there were absolutely no witches, the Salem of 1992 would have to invent them.

“The folk image seemed to have overtaken the educational efforts of Salem,” said Linda McConchie, who organized this year’s commemoration.

In any event, for the first time in 300 years, a monument to the victims was erected. The structure is a simple rectangular court framed by a low stone wall. Names of each of the dead, the date and method of their execution are engraved on slabs. Their pleas for mercy and justice are also carved into paving stones.

“I petition your honors,” asked one woman at her trial, “not for my own life, for I know I must die, but that no more innocent blood be shed. . . . “

On dedication day, the city also inaugurated a human rights award. The first annual recipient was Los Angeles actor Gregory Allen Williams, who risked his life to save a man from a mob beating during last spring’s riots.

Churches in the Salem area--the actual site of the hysteria was Salem village, a place now covered up by the town of Danvers--are busily rehabilitating past members of their parishes who were tainted by the accusation of witchcraft.

Bones found in a church in Marblehead are suspected of belonging to some of the victims. Researchers believe that the bodies were taken in by a sympathetic preacher and buried secretly. They may now get a public burial.

The Salem witchcraft trials have long provided a window through which to gaze at present troubles. Shortly after World War II, the author of a book on the trials focused on Salem as a way to understand the recent horrors of the Holocaust. “The human reality of what happens to millions is only for God to grasp,” wrote Marion Starkey in “The Devil in Massachusetts.”

In 1953, Arthur Miller wrote “The Crucible,” a play based on the Salem trials and a parable of the McCarthy--well--witch hunt. (He visited Salem during the summer and decried Witch City hucksterism. “I regret the name Witch City. It trivializes the agony,” he said.)

In the 1970s, a pair of New England scholars produced a social history of trial-era Salem, influenced, they said, by “the experience of living through the ‘60s.”

“The decade of Watts and Vietnam helped us realize that the sometimes violent roles men play in ‘history’ are not necessarily a measure of their personal decency or lack of it,” they wrote.

This year, much commentary on the Salem trials focused on the state of the American legal system, the role of economic distress in the hysteria and the issues of hate speech and women’s rights.

At a local symposium, legal experts argued over whether present-day courts would do better at stemming the witch hunt than the Salem court in the 17th Century.

Alan M. Dershowitz, the flamboyant Harvard Law School professor, argued that witch hunt targets today include immigrants, homosexuals and other groups he called “disenfranchised.”

“Most judges are willing to go along to get along. I worry deeply about the current judiciary of the United States, particularly the U.S. Supreme Court,” Dershowitz said in comments taped for the symposium.

In Colonial New England, the word witch was commonly used as an insult, as common as some profanities today--except that being called a witch could easily land the target in jail.

Women were the accused in well over 90% of the witchcraft cases, a statistic not lost on feminists today. “This is one issue that has come up constantly during the commemoration,” McConchie said. “Back then, women were morally inferior and therefore more susceptible to the devil’s influence. It is easy to see what kind of opinions can arise out of those kinds of attitudes.”

The issue of the psychological makeup of the Puritans is being reviewed again with an eye on the effect not only of their straight-laced background but also on the insecurities of living in a new and wild land.

Their exotic surroundings and the un-Christian character of the native population frightened the European newcomers. “To the colonists, this place was literally at the end of the Earth, to them the end of civilization. It seemed an easy place from which to fall into the devil’s hands,” said John Grimes, an archeologist at Boston’s Peabody Museum.

The outbreak of accusations began with two young girls who, after voodoo storytelling sessions with a West Indian slave, suffered from fits.

When medical treatment failed, relatives of the girls and officials asked them who was the cause of their affliction. The question itself implied that an evil hand was at work in the village.

Names were mentioned. Witnesses claimed to see flying “spectoers,” out-of-body images of the accused witches doing foul deeds. Misfortune was the common denominator among the self-declared victims of witchcraft. The death of a child. The loss of a pig. A business deal gone bad. An inheritance gone to a rival sibling.

The accusations spread willy-nilly, although studies show that poorer residents of the village often directed their charges at richer residents who lived closer to Salem port, seen already as a den of vice. Bishop owned a tavern where, her detractors said, men spent rather too much time drinking ale and playing shuffleboard.

By autumn, a new Colonial governor ordered an end to the trials and the release of hundreds of prisoners. Some say his call for reason was voiced only after his own wife was accused.

If the Puritans could only see Salem now. Witchcraft, at least in a 20th-Century version, appears to have made a comeback.

Emblems of both the police and fire departments, as well as the local newspaper, include a witch riding a broomstick. The Witch Auto and Body Shop will fix your car; the Witch Fudge Shop has gone out of business. October is Salem’s biggest month for tourism. To attract tourists, special events called “Haunted Happenings” are scheduled for Halloween.

The Yellow Pages list 17 headings under the “witch” section, and local witches complained that they were being left out of the commemoration ceremonies. They view their practice as a religion and to them the lesson of Salem was the intolerance of Christianity translated into repression.

Someone has pasted posters on utility poles advertising a countercommemoration video “devoted to the dis-SPELLING of the . . . representations surrounding Wicca, the religion of witchcraft.”

Mayor Neil Harrington said the witches were excluded from the commemoration in order to avoid the appearance that Salem was now in the business of supporting witchcraft as a religion.

“Occasionally, some fanatic will go into a witch’s store with a crucifix trying to make a conversion. We just try to stay out of it,” Harrington said.

The witchified atmosphere of Salem tells something about a kind of tolerance and also how America is able to digest distasteful episodes from the past and turn them into palatable myth. To the uninitiated, a visit to Salem might suggest that the trials were a Halloween prank, sort of the way ornery figures like Jesse James and Billy the Kid have been turned from criminals into rambunctious boys in the public mind.

In the play about Bishop that is being staged at the town hall, one out of every four audiences votes to convict.

“It’s tough to convince audiences to believe in witchcraft the way Puritans did,” said actor Mark Stevick, a drama teacher who plays the role of an accuser.

A 25% conviction rate is not particularly low. In Colonial New England, the rate was about 15%.