Between the Lines Series
A Boston girl goes home. The streets remember everything. And talk…but do we hear?
The Wronged “Witches” Are Still Watching: A Boston Girl Goes Home
There’s something about coming home as an adult that hits differently.
You know the streets twists and turns. The movement of the air is familiar, as is the way the light falls in July, the particular quality of a New England summer that nobody who didn’t grow up there can quite describe. It’s a feeling. You know it in your body before your brain catches up.
I’m a Boston girl. Back Bay born, Brookline raised, Massachusetts is in my bones. And coming back to Salem — first ten years ago — felt like something more than nostalgia. It felt like a reckoning. Personal and collective all at once. And that was pre-current administration!
Salem is an extraordinary place. First — and I need you to know this — the muffins at a little place in town are the best muffins of my life. Get the blueberry. This is not a drill. America’s oldest candy store is also here, charming and sweet and completely incongruous with the fact that just steps away, this town was the site of some of the most grotesque state-sanctioned murder in American history. Over months.
That contrast is Salem. That contrast is America.
Walking these streets — cobblestones worn smooth by centuries of feet, buildings preserved with a care that frankly should be a national mandate but in Massachusetts actually is — you feel it. History isn’t abstract here. It’s in the air. It’s in the ground. The trees remember. The wind off the water carries it.
And if you’re even a little bit sensitive — and I am, professionally and personally — you feel the weight of what happened here like a hand on your shoulder that won’t quite let go. You can almost hear the whispers of common town folk and legends over the decades and centuries.
America at 250: What Salem Never Forgot and We Never Learned
Let’s talk about what actually happened in Salem in 1692. Not the Halloween version. The real version.
Self-sufficient women — healers, landowners, women who lived outside the accepted social order — and many men were accused of witchcraft, largely by children whose testimony was taken as gospel truth. And here’s the part that doesn’t make it into the gift shop: when these women were convicted and killed, their land and businesses were repossessed. Order was restored. The message was received loud and clear by everyone watching.
Do not be different. Do not be independent. Do not be a woman with land and no husband and opinions about things.
British born Bridget Playfer, Bishop was the first to be tried and executed, making her the first recorded woman in the colony to die by hanging. Her first husband died and then when her second husband died they tried to prove she bewitched him to death but couldn’t due to a lack of evidence. (Quel surprise.) Town gossip said she bewitched them both to death. Worth noting: She was known to be in town with bruises and cuts from her husband. But she argued back loudly, was said to be abusive back, and they were frequently cited. Her elderly third husband gave testimony against her. She was arrested at the home she inherited from her second husband, where she was then living. She wore bright colors and exotic clothes – not the norm. Accused on bewitching five girls, during sentencing she was examined and found to have a third nipple, thought to be a sign of a witchcraft. Another examination showed no nipple. (I mean.) Recent research shows it is thought she’d never met these girls, as she claimed. June 10, 1692 she was put to death.
In so many cruelly unique and alarmingly creative ways — hanging, pressing, imprisonment — a society put itself on notice. Conform or suffer. And the suffering was public and deliberate and designed to be witnessed.
Now. Women’s incarceration in America has risen 10% since 2022. The names change. The mechanisms change. The costumes change. The story doesn’t.
What kind of society does this? Ours. Repeatedly. And those killed in Salem are still, in every meaningful sense, seeking justice. We just keep adding to the list.
In colonial times, property of convicted witches was seized by the state. Of course, the sheriff in Salem during the trials was the nephew of the judge. Family business. Seems familiar to now, no?
Mercy was missing then. We need to bring it back now – including for those who wrong.
History is Also Current Events: Indigenous Rights, Anyone?
This is not ancient history. This is American history. It’s also human history. And on the occasion of America’s 250th birthday, it feels important to say clearly: we have not resolved this. We have not even fully reckoned with it.
The Declaration of Independence contains some of the most genuinely brilliant political thinking ever committed to paper. It also, in its original form and intent, pertained exclusively to white European men of property. The genius was real. The hypocrisy was also real. Especially since it is recently being discussed how much of the document was taken – without credit – from Indigenous practices. And 250 years later we are still, exhaustingly, trying to make the genius match the reality for everyone — not just the people the founders had in mind. And give credit where it is due.
“More than 270 years ago, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy showed America’s founding fathers just what they’d been looking for – an example of a thriving democracy where distinct communities could remain sovereign yet united under one government.
Benjamin Franklin, one of the core founding fathers, immersed himself in learning about how six different Indigenous nations – the Oneida, Onondaga, Mohawk, Seneca, Cayuga and Tuscarora – had sustained the oldest continuous democracy in the world.” ICTNews.com
We need to change our documents. We need to make every vote count. We need to stop hiding behind states’ rights as a mechanism for denying people their humanity. We need to be what we keep saying we want to be.
That can’t be legislated into existence. But it is required. And the gap between what we say and what we do is where the damage lives.
Giles Corey, 81, was pressed to death after not submitting a plea. The law of that time said that if you did not enter a plea you couldn’t be tried. He was trying to save his family’s inheritance of his estate. “To try to get the accused to plead, the legal remedy was “peine forte et dure,” translating to “strong and hard pain.”’
Caption 2: Some views carry history in them. This is one. Stand here long enough and you feel it too.
Still Burning: Salem, Hawthorne, and the America We Keep Choosing
Nathaniel Hawthorne — my favorite Nathan, and yes I’m aware that’s a specific list 😄 — worked in Salem. Walked these streets. Looked out at the same view of the water from the Custom House that you can still see today, largely unchanged, thanks to the kind of preservation efforts that make Massachusetts quietly one of the most historically proactive states in the union.
He walked streets where atrocities had occurred only about 150 years before his time. And rather than look away, he wrote about it. Young Goodman Brown. Main-street. The Scarlet Letter. The House of Seven Gables. Stories about shame and judgment and what a community does to those who don’t fit, who transgress, who dare to be different or complicated or fully human in ways that make other people uncomfortable.
His books became and maintain popularity because the impulse to shame, to exclude, to punish difference — that wasn’t a 1692 problem. It was an 1850 problem. It’s a 2026 problem.
It’s human being problem. So how do we change that?
Walking the streets he walked, feeling the history under your feet, looking out at the water he looked at — you understand why he wrote what he wrote. You understand why it still matters. Preservation isn’t just about buildings. It’s about refusing to let yourself forget. It’s about keeping the mirror polished so you can see your own face in it clearly.
Silly us, for thinking we’d evolved past the need for the mirror. And for thinking we don’t have to do the work to change these traits that is still undone.
Best Muffins I’ve Ever Had. Also, America’s Darkest Mirror.
So here’s the question I kept coming back to, walking those Salem streets in the July heat, blueberry muffin in hand, America turning 250 around me:
How do we get each other to act from our best selves?
Not legislate it. Not decree it. Actually do it. How do we get humans to gather and accept and choose joy and support instead of comparison and fear and the lazy cruelty of deciding that someone with a different color, accent, belief system, or background is somehow less?
Because here’s what’s true and what every wisdom tradition — including Kabbalah, which I study and teach in astrology — will tell you: a society built by people ruled by fear cannot prosper. It hasn’t. It won’t. Fear contracts. Love expands. Sharing creates more. Hoarding creates lack. These aren’t spiritual platitudes. They’re observable facts if you’re willing to look.
And this is where the astrology comes in. Because of course it does. 😄
America’s Founding Astrology Is Again Today
Uranus in Gemini — which we are in again right now — is the transit of information, technology, ideas, and the speed of thought. It’s genius energy. It’s also the energy of information weaponized, of technology used to divide rather than connect, of brilliant minds deployed in the service of fear rather than wisdom. Uranus in Gemini was active during the founding of the USA. During our major wars. Think about that. Information is power. And the people in power used it accordingly.
Sound familiar?
We are in the same transit, 250 years later, and the question Uranus in Gemini always asks is: what are you going to do with all this intelligence? Use it for wisdom or use it for war?
America has Sagittarius rising. Sagittarius is the sign of philosophy, higher learning, wisdom, truth, the big picture. It’s the sign of the teacher, the traveler, the seeker. At its best, Sagittarius rising is a country that genuinely tries to learn, to expand, to include, to seek truth even when it’s uncomfortable. It’s about freedom and equity and a good time had by all!
At its worst — and Sagittarius has a shadow side — it’s dogma dressed up as philosophy. It’s “we have the truth and everyone else is wrong.” It’s the Puritan certainty that God was on their side when they hanged those women in Salem. (The current president has Sagittarius Moon.)
America has always been in that tension. Between the Sagittarian best — the Declaration’s actual genius, the moments of genuine moral courage, the times we got it right — and the shadow. The preaching. The tactlessness. The lack of care.
250 years in, the question is still the same one Hawthorne was asking. The one Salem is still asking. The one whose lives were stolen are still asking from wherever they are…
America Heading into 251…
Will you choose your best self? Will you use your intelligence for wisdom? Will you finally — finally — make the practice match the promise?
That can’t come from legislation alone. It has to come from each person deciding, individually and daily, to share more than they hoard. To see the person in front of them as fully human. To stop mistaking fear for strength and cruelty for order.
Kabbalah teaches that consciousness creates reality. Which means the world we have is the consciousness we’ve collectively chosen. And the world we want requires us to choose differently. One person at a time. Every day.
Salem is beautiful. The muffins are extraordinary. The candy store is a delight. The streets remember everything.
The question is whether we do.
America at 250. Salem at 334. The witches are still watching.
Are we finally ready to listen?
Wants to know. Has some questions. Very Sag. Always up for pizza. Planning several trips. Big fan of joy. Wants to talk about it. All of them. Is sure we can figure out this whole living thing. Is rooting for you.
