Crucible. Noun

As promised, a guest blogger: from my wife Shona. Enjoy.

Crucible. Noun: a severe test or trial; a container for heating substances to high temperatures. 

This is a wonderful word whose etymology takes several turns before it arrives at its modern meaning.  A crucibulum was a Roman night lamp.  Linguists are not certain why the night lamp was named this.  One theory suggests that its wick was shaped like a cross, which is why some of you may have recognized the root for cross, the Latin word crux. Another possibility is that the root of the word is not crux but crassus, the Latin word for grease or fat—the lamp’s fuel. 

By the late Middle Ages, crucibulum had been anglicized to crucible and had become the word for a kind of pot that could withstand great heat, probably because the original night lamp had to be fairly heat proof to burn its greasy fuel.  Alchemists, the forebears of modern scientists, used crucibles to melt metals in their search for the way to turn the ordinary and mundane into gold.  The literal meaning of a melting-pot took on a more symbolic shading as time went on; the great stresses under which metals were melted and fused together in the alchemists’ crucibles took on the name of the pot itself, and by 1645 we have the first figurative use of the word crucible to mean simply a severe test or trial.

So why did Arthur Miller use The Crucible as the title of a play about the Salem Witch Trials?  Both literal and figurative meanings are at work here.  The Trials were like the alchemist’s pot in which, instead of metal, society itself and its rules and rituals were being tested: mix a few things together, heat to a very high temperature, and see what happens.  Only one thing is for certain: everything will be changed afterwards.  Nothing will be the same. 

The Salem Witch Trials were themselves a crucible in which the values, laws, and power structures of colonial America were put to a severe test.  The same could be said for the McCarthy-era witch-hunts of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and the values, laws, and power structures of 20^th-century America, as Arthur Miller—and Robert Ward—were well aware. And we as audience members are left to ask ourselves, Will we be a better nation for having passed through this test of fire?  Will we have the strength to prevent it from happening again?