The Devil His Due

A Salem, Massachusetts, Hallowe'en

Photo by Bruno Guerrero on Unsplash

I’m sitting in a cute cafe in Salem, Massachusetts, a town where, as you know, for family reasons, Brian and I spend time.

The walls of the cafe are a cozy pumpkin-color; color-washed with a stucco effect, which takes me back to the happy 1990s, when this kind of decor was last in fashion. The floorboards are of scuffed yellow pine; real tree branches hold up shelves that contain casual reading for restless children and adults.

A big artsy poster above the serving area reads, in bold black letters, “Avocado.”

The servers are friendly; tattooed and pierced. The specialities on a big board above them are all vegan — “bowls”. These have either an Eastern-y or a pagan-Celtic-y name: Buddha Bowl; Green Goddess Bowl.

I’ve always felt quite comfortable and happy here, since this — hippie-friendly, with organic referents — is exactly the kind of interior that I grew up around in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury.

I have been in similar cafes my whole life: The “Village Natural,” now sadly defunct, in New York’s West Village, was one; a basement with, as I recall, brown walls — burlap-covered? — and with dusty ferns hanging from white macrame (always macrame) holders in the window. It was a reliable, familiar cave, unchanged, it seemed, since the 1970s.

My kids would eat platters of chewy buckwheat pancakes, and I would tackle tofu cutlets on mounds of flavorless steamed vegetables, on Sunday mornings, while we were served with silent attention by Tibetan waitstaff. (The servers at “Village Natural,” which was not a Tibetan restaurant, were always Tibetan. I do not know why).

There are similar cafes in Barcelona and Boston, London and Delhi; the staff members, when not actually from an exotic Eastern locale, tend to invoke the East; cheery young men and women with shoulder-length hair, wearing vaguely Moroccan harem pants, vaguely Indian vests. They may have ankle bracelets. They are likely to jingle when they move around.

I have a Pavlovian response to such places and people. I always feel right at home and am filled with joy.

The hippie vibe is a universal note in this world. Though the hippies, my (slightly older) people, my tribe, did not really prevail, they kind of also did.

A set of ethics and an aesthetic that were alternative and marginal in my childhood, has permeated our culture, often for the better. There are Vinyasa Yoga and sound-healing classes for stressed-out North Shore moms, at the YMCA across the street. You can live with your boyfriend or girlfriend without social opprobrium. You can get a cannabis gummy from any corner dispensary now. (Turn on!) You can listen to sitar music while commuting to work (Tune in!). Or you can work from home and take a “mental health day” (Drop out!).

The hippie aesthetic is mostly benign. It is — was — about life; about nature, babies, about peace, love, health, wellness, harmony, positive spirituality, goodness.

The hippie movement of the 1960s into the early 1970s did dismantle great superstructures of hypocrisy and needless repression. It is true. You can worship where you wish, or not at all; you can be an accountant by day and sing in a garage band on weekends; you can have all the babies you want, out of wedlock, and not be cast out of society, or pressured by society to give up your child for adoption.

But — new superstructures of morality, of positive community, let alone of group ritual, were not erected, to replace the bad old structures and rituals that fell apart. Or, if these superstructures were attempted, they did not last.

Woodstock came and went.

So there is now a void.

People in the West have all the license and moral liberty they wish; but we no longer have a civilization of light, a set of positive rites and traditions, made up of shared experiences with others.

So we seek meaning, order, group transcendence, ritual.

In my childhood, as I have written previously, Christmas was a real thing. Whether you were Christian or not, you thrilled with the general atmosphere: decorations involving gigantic silver bells sparkly with glitter; real Christmas carols that filled the air, really mentioning the Son of God.

He was born!

In my childhood, Easter was a real thing — a collective, national delight. Whether you were Christian or not, you rejoiced along with others: the flowered bonnets, the bright blue and pink-dyed Easter eggs; the families sitting down to a midday Easter dinner around a white tablecloth. There were spring flowers everywhere, and throngs of women in pastel dresses and men in dark suits with sparkling white shirts, standing in the sunshine, smiling, blinking in the light, after Church services.
The day felt hushed, special, magical.

He was Risen!

You did not have to be Christian to see and participate in positive rituals within the culture. In my childhood and into my adulthood, groups of somberly-dressed Jewish families would drift along the sidewalks to arrive at synagogue on Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur. You shared apples and honey for Rosh Hashanah, or broke the fast with others after Yom Kippur, and the days had the grave, ascetic quality of heightened meaning.

But — these rituals, along with others, are the target of erasure after erasure. Easter was “cancelled” in the UK in 2025 at a primary school, due to its not being “inclusive.”

The Boldmere Christmas Festival and “lights switch on” in the UK has been cancelled for 2025, allegedly due to “lack of funding”.

Tablet Magazine last year did a roundup of the examples of European countries disavowing or rebranding Christmas:

“France, the European country with the most immigrants of Arab origin, has also been de-Christianizing Christmas for years. After the jihadist attack against a Christmas market in Strasbourg in 2018, far from redoubling the defense of freedom and pride in their Christian traditions, political leaders intensified the secularist drift, and this year there are already a majority of French cities whose authorities have decided to eliminate Christian referencing in Christmas celebrations, sometimes going to ridiculous extremes. Nantes is now celebrating its “Winter Journey” (whatever that means), Angers is observing “Winter Suns,” Bordeaux is touting “Bordeaux in festivities,” and Saint Denis is holding a Christmas vacation called “Destination Beautiful Winter” while its mayor celebrates the holiday by shouting “Happy Winter!” The official festive brochure of this French community includes puppets, fire-eaters, craft workshops for children, and no iconic Christian Christmas imagery. […] In France, the madness was best captured, ironically, by a French Muslim deliveryman in a video that went viral. In it, he relayed how, on one of his deliveries this year, he noticed that Christmas decorations and nativity scenes were absent at a town hall in the countryside. The mayor told him that the state had sent out instructions that there should be no decorations in city halls […]”.

So the festivals of light and love, in the Judeo-Christian traditions, are being dialed down or dispersed.

But — somehow, this is not the case for Hallowe’en.

It is roaring along in America at least, stronger than ever.

On the soundtrack of this cafe, Lady Gaga is singing an aggressively catchy tune, “Abracadabra”:

”Abracadabra, abracadabra
Abracadabra, abracadabra


Pay the toll to the angels
Drawing circles in the clouds
Keep your mind on the distance
When the devil turns around


Hold me in your heart tonight
In the magic of the dark moonlight
Save me from this empty fight
In the game of life”.

“Abra Cadabra” îs a phrase that probably descends from Aramaic: “Abra” — I create — “keDabrah’ — as I speak. The phrase was used by gnostics to summon “beneficial spirits” and it is mentioned in writings of antiquity as forming the basis for amulets against disease. It is an occult phrase.

The phrase — I create as I speak — embodies the possibilities, and now I think the likelihood, that occultism, its ritual, its invocation, its symbolism, is summoning or channeling real energies, real powers.

Thus — I wonder about the robust and unfettered nature of the celebration of Hallowe’en.

As other, brighter holidays that invoke angels, and a Savior, are erased or euphemized or downscaled, Hallowe’en is supported, publicly and privately, more enthusiastically than ever.

I am not one of those religious fanatics who warn that “haunted houses” are the Devil’s work. Or am I? Am I inching in the direction of wondering about that possibility?

Do we invoke and unleash dark spirits — when we invoke and unleash dark spirits?

Do we know what we are doing, really, by getting rid of the church bells, the Christmas trees, the angels; and then, unprotected, invoking the Devil, death, hauntings by the dead, hell realms?

Is more involved perhaps than decor?

No one, interestingly, except people seen as actual fanatics, is suggesting that schools or townships stop celebrating Hallowe’en, though that holiday is not “inclusive” either, coming as it does from the Celtic “Samhain” — which acknowledged the opening of the portal between the living and the dead — and the later Christian tradition of recognizing “all hallows” — all souls — on this evening.

Here in this most iconic of destinations, Salem, Massachusetts, Halloween is the biggest day of the year, and it draws tourists and seekers from across the country - indeed, from around the world. The historic streets, many of them unchanged from the late 18th and early 19th centuries, are, in spite of the rain today, unusually thronged.

Women pass by, looking at fancy soaps and lotions in windows; they are wearing black witches’ hats, or space alien outfits, silver helmets obscuring their faces. Men pass by; they glance at the knives and tarot card decks displayed in the shop windows, and at the vintage comic books on display. The men are dressed as murderers, blood dripping from the sides of their mouths, or as monsters.

I passed a little girl dressed as a princess — all sparkly chiffon skirts and a tiara; and a little girl dressed as a ghost; then, to my surprise, I also passed a little girl dressed as a Puritan child: in black, with a long skirt, and a severe white collar, and a black headdress.

My pleasant server showed up with my Buddha Bowl. I glanced up at him and did a double take: he wore a lifelike Frankenstein mask, complete with a stitched-up cheek scar, a green tinge to the skin, and a low, threatening occipital ridge. “Can I get you some hot sauce?” the creature asked.

A cluster of chic French tourists sat in the niche diagonal to mine, accompanied by a well-behaved Collie service dog. A French woman in her 30s had black Christian crosses embroidered all over her fishnet stockings.

The porches of the neighborhoods around us are celebrating the holiday with gusto: our neighbor arranged two life-sized skeletons, waving at the street. There are two bloody palm print stickers on one of the windows of our building. (Ok, it is our window. Brian loves Hallowe’en, and all things creepy). A tiny doll with long black hair, a white gown and a shrunken head, hangs now on our own porch, where my floral and eucalyptus wreath usually hangs.

There are severed bloody limbs displayed on other porches nearby; and our neighbors have lined their entire garden plots with faux headstones. Skeletal hands emerge from mulch and from between shrubs.

Tourists flock to the sights devoted to the famous witch trials: you can see an entire theatrical enactment of the horrific events of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, at a “Witch Theatre” nearby.

As a cultural critic, it seems to me that aspects of all this ritual and celebration are kind of weird.

The Salem witch trials have, at least throughout the 20th and into the 21st centuries, been portrayed as revealing nothing more complex than the madness of fanatical Christian religiosity.

That, the trials certainly demonstrated. Innocent people were murdered by the State; the hysteria of teenage girls inflamed an entire Puritan judiciary.

But also — also — what if occult forces are also real?

What if the girls in question tripped, to their misfortune and to that of any number of innocent people, over something real?

Tituba, the enslaved Native American, probably Arawak, woman who was believed to have been sold through Barbados, was at the center of the Salem witch accusations. She was accused of introducing the girls whose hysterical symptoms launched the trials, to witchcraft. She was accused of making a “witch cake,” and of other dark practices.

She is portrayed in American culture, understandably, as a target of wholly demented hostility and fanaticism on the part of the Puritans.

But — what if there is a very human mixture of truth and untruth, of a very real folk practice taken out of its original context and grievously reinterpreted within Puritan Christianity, in this extraordinary story?

What if Tituba in fact did introduce the girls to aspects of witchcraft?

What if, isolated and hopeless of ever returning home, this enslaved woman shared some aspects of what she knew from her religious witchcraft tradition, as a way, perhaps, to gain favor or security in an incredibly hostile, completely alien environment?

If she did share a ritual or an occult practice, Tituba would not have seen such activity, culturally, the way Reverend Samuel Parris, the Puritan minister within Salem’s parish, and whose accusations against Tituba led to the Witch Trials - saw it; that is to say, she would not have seen such activity within the framework of Christian demonology.

“Obeah” was religious/occult practice of — witchcraft — in Barbados in the 18th century; it used magic for medicinal purposes — and also for anti-medicinal purposes. It was deployed in a completely different cultural context from that of Salem, one in which the use of both black and white magic is part of engagement with the natural world.

J. Handler, in “Slave Medicine and Obeah in Barbados, circa 1650 to 1834”, explains that Barbadian slaves in the period in question, did indeed believe that supernatural forces had a role in the real world — including in “slave medicine.”

“Obeah” was based on African beliefs. Scholarly articles about Obeah point out that 17th century English society was familiar, via enslaved Africans and Caribbeans, with “Obeah” — which is akin to, but not identical to, Santeria and Voudon or “Voodoo”.

The articles point out that enslaved people’s practice of “Obeah” gave rise to racist English depictions of enslaved people as being demonic, and as worshipping in ways that threatened Christianity.

“Obeah: Black and White Magic in the Bahamas”, by Basil C Hedrick, points out that Obeah does indeed engage with “white magic and black magic” ; “it is positive and it is negative. It can cure or it can cause harm.” “Obeah was essentially a type of sorcery, which involved harming others at the request of clients, by the use of charms, poisons and shadow casting.” Obeah is, as one practitioner put is, “a natural fact.”

About half of the clients of a mental health practitioner cited by Hedrick, believed that they had been “fixed” or hexed; the hex having caused them mental or physical pain.

May all of the victims of the Salem witch trials, including Tituba, who was imprisoned for months, rest in peace.

The trials do represent an explosion of madness, of course: 20 people were executed, and 200 were accused. Four others died in prison, awaiting trials. The miscarriage of justice was eventually recognized: Judge Samuel Sewell recanted his guilty verdicts in 1697, and accuser Ann Putnam Jr publicly apologized in 1706. The Massachusetts General Court issued a formal apology in 1957. There are now monuments to the victims and to the travesty of justice that their deaths and periods of imprisonment, represent.

That is as it should be.

But — do we erase what may have actually been real, by wiping away what was unreal?

Charles Baudelaire wrote that “the Devil’s best trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.”

I met a North Shore mom recently at a student athletic meet. I was delighted to meet her. She is a healer and energy worker. We spoke about the strange ‘vibe’ in Salem. I mentioned that though we have been coming here for four years, and though it is beautiful, I never feel completely comfortable. I always sense a darkness, and a feeling of foreboding.

“Don’t you know it is the world headquarters of Satanism?” She asked me. And this is true.

Maybe the Puritans in Salem in 1692 were insane and hysterical — but also, maybe, some of them picked up on the possibility that something among them was also real; maybe they came face to face with a complex, established belief system from elsewhere that used, well, witchcraft.

Maybe the storytelling about Salem in the 20th and 21st century seeks to erase even the possibility of our understanding that perhaps two world views collided at the end of the 17th century, in a little Massachusetts village,surrounded by dark forest, and that one of them may have represented something that was not imaginary but real.

Maybe the fact that Christmas and Easter and church bells and angels are being erased or silenced, and that life-affirming symbols such as flowers and chicks and eggs and babies in cradles are being put away and forgotten or never introduced to children — and that death-affirming symbolism such as devils and ghosts and graveyards and murderers are celebrated without constraint — and that the streets of this town are lined with shops selling “majick” and the rituals of the occult - — to cheery tourists —

Maybe all this actually does something to us, on this, our plane of human existence.

Maybe those who practice Obeah and Voodoo and Santeria, are smarter than we are, about certain “white and black” forces.

Maybe other people know that, and we, to our detriment, have forgotten.

Maybe you shouldn’t invite these forces in — unless you want them to come in.

Photo by Manny Becerra on Unsplash