What gave rise to the salem witchcraft hysteria? what did it reveal about late-seventeenth-century new england society?

The Salem witch trials were a series of prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts between 1692 and 1693. The episode is one of Colonial America's most notorious cases of mass hysteria. The exact cause of this hysteria is unknown but there were probably a number of causes such as: conversion disorder, epilepsy, ergot poisining, encephalitis, Lyme disease, unusually cold weather, factionalism, socio-economic hardships, family rivalries and fraud. Also, in seventeenth century Massachusetts, people often feared that the Devil was constantly trying to find ways to infiltrate and destroy Christians and their communities.

New England had been settled by religious refugees seeking to build a pure, Bible-based society, They lived closely with the sense of the supernatural. This society was Puritan, God fearing, theocratic which means that rulers act in the name of God, in other words, this society was religious extremist.