In the beginning there was Tituba: a woman who, according to the politics of the early 1960s, gained power because a working mother paid insufficient attention to her family. Although chroniclers of Salem's story vary in their explanations of her presence, Tituba appears in the overwhelming number of narrations as the central figure in the genesis of the witch trials. Her entrance onto the historical stage, in her precipitating role of beginning the witchcraft, receives its modern codification in the account by Charles W. Upham, whose Salem Witchcraft, published in 1867, has served as the most influential work in shaping subsequent myth and history related to the Salem witch trials.

Upham offers a speculation that Tituba and her husband John, slaves of the Reverend Samuel Parris of Salem Village, brought with them “the wild and strange superstitions prevalent among their native tribes, materials which, added to the commonly received notions on such subjects, heightened the infatuation of the times, and inflamed still more the imaginations of the credulous.” He suggests that they brought with them “systems of demonology” consistent “with ideas and practices developed here.”