September 15, 2025

Greetings Everyone!

It is September.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, American writer and author of The Scarlet Letter, wrote “Young Goodman Brown,” a weird tale that has become identified with autumn. 

At sunset, Goodman Brown leaves his pretty young wife Faith in Salem Village to attend a Witches Sabbath in the forest.  Just before midnight, Brown emerges into  a clearing, where the Sabbath is just starting to take place. Hawthorne describes what happens next.

“In the interval of silence, he stole forward until the light glared full upon his eyes.  At one extremity of an open space, hemmed in by the dark wall of the forest, arose a rock, bearing some rude, natural resemblance either to an altar or pulpit, and surrounded by four blazing pines, their tops aflame, their stems untouched, like candles at an evening meeting.  The mass of foliage that had overgrown the summit of the rock was all on fire, blazing high into the night and fitfully illuminating the whole field.  Each pendant twig and leafy festoon was in a blaze.  As the red light arose and fell, a numerous congregation alternately shone forth, then disappeared into shadow, and again grew, as it were, out of the darkness, peopling the heart of the solitary woods at once.”

The devil appears at the pulpit, welcoming Goodman Brown and the other new initiates into the satanic community.  Brown is horrified to see his wife Faith among them and he calls out for her to look up to God and resist the devil.  He doesn’t know if she has heard him or not, but suddenly, the Witches Sabbath disappears and Brown is standing alone.  The celebrants are gone.  The forest is chill and damp; there is no evidence that any of the trees or foliage had been on fire. 

The next day, at the break of dawn, Brown returns to Salem Village.  He finds Faith happily waiting for him.  Although the Sabbath seems to have been merely an illusion, Brown isn’t sure.  At the end of the tale, he has become a “stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man” and after a long life,  when he dies, the townspeople carve no hopeful biblical verse on his tombstone, for “his dying hour was gloom.” 

Goodman Brown has been traumatized by his experience into believing that evil is more powerful than good; that evil is the nature of humankind.

JLS