White witchcraft was a part of everyday life, a way of trying to control the environment in a preindustrial, prescientific society.

From American Heroes: Profiles of Men and Women Who Shaped Early America by Edmund S. Morgan. Page 115.

The outbreak of a witchcraft scare in Salem in 1692 was by no means the first instance of the kind in the American colonies. There had been twelve executions before that time, the earliest at Hartford in 1646, and another at Charlestown in 1648. In 1656 Ann Hibbins, widow of William Hibbins, a former merchant and magistrate of Boston, who had himself sat as a judge in the 1648 case, was executed. In 1662 Goodman Greensmith of Hartford was executed. Witches were not always women.

None of these early cases, however, had caused any epidemic of witchcraft or any panic. And it is worth noting that in many of them, as in most of the later Salem cases, the accused persons confessed to their crimes. Some of the confessions were probably obtained under some kind of duress, either psychological or physical, but it is not unlikely that some of the persons executed actually thought that they were witches, thought that they did have supernatural powers obtained from the devil.

Witchcraft is an ancient and in some societies a relatively respectable profession. In England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, witchcraft was widely used for benevolent as well as malevolent purposes. So-called white witches, sometimes called cunning women or cunning men, were to be found in nearly every community—there may have been as many of them as there were ministers—and people called upon them to cure diseases, both of human beings and of cattle, to recover lost property, to bring success in business or love, and for nearly every kind of enterprise in which normal means had proved insufficient. Such white witchcraft was frowned on by the authorities but was seldom interfered with. Indeed, white witchcraft was a part of everyday life, a way of trying to control the environment in a preindustrial, prescientific society. It was frowned on because it did constitute a kind of rival force to that of the church, but only when it turned malevolent was it likely to bring prosecution, and the persons who practiced malevolent witchcraft were usually different from the cunning men and women whom people turned to for the charms and spells that might assist them in legitimate enterprises.

I often refer to cognitive pollution - beliefs we indulge, not because they are true but because, for whatever reason, we find them comforting. In fact, the stronger and the more passionate the declaration in something, the more likely it is to be a belief not grounded in reason or evidence but in emotion.

We are inundated in our national conversations by cognitive pollution. It appears that beliefs in witchcraft functioned in a similar fashion - a means of imposing order on an otherwise incomprehensible reality.