I recently found myself reading a book and getting mad about a guy I imagined.
To be fair to me, this guy was not wholly hallucinatory. This was a gestalt of guys I’ve talked with before, both in person and online. This guy was not malevolent in spirit, only misinformed by things he’d seen online or in places that should be reputable historical resources, like the Encyclopedia Britannica. This guy, whom I had only partly made up, was talking about how the Salem witch trials were caused by ergot poisoning.
If you’re not familiar with this idea, I’ll lay it out briefly. Ergot poisoning is a consequence of ingesting the ergot fungus that sometimes grows on cereal plants like rye. This fungus contains alkaloids which are chemically analogous to LSD. If you eat enough of it, and especially if you have ulcers on your stomach that facilitate absorption of the active ingredients, it can make you convulse, hallucinate, shit yourself, and die. And you die pretty horribly, with gangrene and nerve damage setting in on your limbs.
Ergotism was first put forward in 1976 as an ‘explanation’ for the symptoms that befell many of the accusers in the Salem witch trials. No less a journal than Science published the article, which probably accounts for some of its enduring cachet. The hypothesis, in fairness, does explain some of the traits displayed by some of the victims: violent convulsions, for one. The LSD-like hallucinations could also explain the impossible visions that the afflicted claimed to experience, like malevolent spirits sallying forth from accused witches and harassing their victims by night. In short, author Linnda R. Caporael proposed that large numbers of the Salem populace ate tainted rye or moldy bread and had such a bad trip that they began accusing their neighbors of worshipping the devil.
It proved an attractive and enduring explanation. Robert Eggers even included several nods to in The VVitch, although ergot doesn’t grow on corn, allowing for a profoundly boring reading of the film in which everyone is just tripping until they die.
The ergot hypothesis was refuted the same year it was first ventured (and in the same journal) but it had already escaped containment and has since refused to die. The reasons for believing it, as I said, are that it explains the convulsions and the hallucinations. It’s also attractive to reduce complex, disturbing events like the witch trials to one single cause, doubly so if the proposed cause gives us modern people reason to pat ourselves on the back for our advanced scientific knowledge. Also, the idea of a bunch of Puritans taking acid and going insane is kind of funny.
The reasons for not believing it, though, are myriad. The symptoms don’t match up that well. No one among the witch-cursed were said to experience diahrrea or vomiting, both classic symptoms of ergot poisoning. If the grain supply was tainted, entire families should have fallen ill, yet usually only one or two members did. The geographical spread doesn’t match up — as Baker (and others) points out, “those complaining of witchcraft came not only from across Salem Village but from neighboring towns as well. It is simply impossible that all of them could have gotten their rye from a common source.”
The witch trials also went on for more than a year, with the afflicted convulsing and hallucinating all the while. Suffering from severe ergot poisoning for months on end should have left many of the afflicted insane or dead, but they all seemed to be pretty much fine once the craze passed, and none of them died.
Also, the afflicted girls — they were mostly girls — seemed to be able to manifest their symptoms on demand. They fell into wild convulsions in unison, for example, at key moments in the the trials, such as when accused witches denied that they were in fact the devotees of dark powers. Their hallucinations likewise often occurred in unison (or near enough), and again at points in the hearings when it would be particularly inconvenient for the defense. This — combined with other clear evidence of outright fakery — invites the explanation that they were simply making it up, and in fact at least one witch-accuser seems to have admitted just that (though she later recanted her recantation).
Or at least some of them were. It has also been suggested that at least some of the witch-sufferers may have been dealing with conversion disorder, a DSM-5 recognized phenomenon wherein serious physical symptoms manifest psychosomatically. It is a form of mass psychogenic illness, spreading from person to person a little like a biological agent, and like mass psychogenic illness generally it seems to affect women and girls more than men and boys. One famous example is the 2011 case of Le Roy, New York, where over a dozen teenagers, again mostly girls, suddenly developed odd neurological symptoms like tics and twitching. Instead of blaming witches, many in the town worried about environmental contamination from a chemical spill decades earlier, or from fracking. But tests failed to turn up anything that could have affected all of the teenagers. And when the teens’ story spread on local, national, and social media, more and more began showing the same symptoms.
Eventually they were diagnosed with conversion disorder, unfamiliar now and even less so then. After extensive investigations which featured no less a figure than Erin Brockovich, the state could discover no chemical, environmental, or biological commonalities between the girls, and becan offering them therapy, at which they began to recover.
You could imagine something similar at play here. As Baker discusses at length in the book I keep flogging, most of the witch-afflicted were under extreme amounts of stress due to external factors, just like the girls in Le Roy. There were two brutal wars with the Native Americans in a short span of time, and some of the accusers were refugees whose homes had been burned or families killed by Native raids. Political circumstances seemed on the verge of ending the Puritan experiment and reducing Massachusetts to just another colony. There were internal tensions and some evidence of physical or sexual abuse by parents or employers. It’s not hard to imagine a scenario in which all of this extreme stress manifests as physical symptoms — convulsions and tics, just like in Le Roy. These symptoms spread. And just like in Le Roy, the community goes looking for a commonly-accepted boogeyman. It’s just that instead of fracking chemicals in the groundwater, it was witches. Add to that some fakery, and you have a more or less ideal scenario for mass witch accusations, or so goes the theory.
Anyway, it wasn’t ergot.
Concise and informative. Great read
Thank you for writing this! The amount of bad 'scientific' explanations for folklore (like people linking rabies to lycanthropy or porphyria to vampires) is just so frustrating.