So it turns out that the whole Salem Witch Trial business may have been the result of a fungus.
As it happens, this theory, more like a hypothesis, similar to a hunch, probably a total waste of ink, was first made public in 1976. But it’s new to me. And if it’s new to me, it’s new to you, because the reality of your “youness” resides strictly in my head, a condition that may also be the result of a fungus.
What got me exercised before I could even finish my coffee was an article up on the Smithsonian magazine website today, which presents a neat little précis of the witch history.
We all learned about the trials in high school, of course, unless you were one of those progressive types and learned of them in kindergarten. They began in 1692 and ended with the election of Barack Obama. More than fifty million men, women, and children were accused of practicing sorcery, witchcraft, and the macarena long after they had become fashionable. Of those fifty million, one-hundred million were executed, resulting in a stain on our history so dark, no amount of OxiClean could prove comfort.
Now that’s what you’d think had happened, given the way the old Puritans are popularly regarded. In fact, the trials occurred over a period of one year, 1692 to 1693. A total of two hundred people were accused of practicing the dark arts, and twenty were executed.
Twenty. As in “20.” As in more people are trampled to death outside Walmart on any given Black Friday.
In 1689, English rulers William and Mary started a war with France in the American colonies. Known as King William’s War to colonists, it ravaged regions of upstate New York, Nova Scotia and Quebec, sending refugees into the county of Essex and, specifically, Salem Village in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. …
The displaced people created a strain on Salem’s resources. This aggravated the existing rivalry between families with ties to the wealth of the port of Salem and those who still depended on agriculture. Controversy also brewed over Reverend Samuel Parris, who became Salem Village’s first ordained minister in 1689, and was disliked because of his rigid ways and greedy nature. The Puritan villagers believed all the quarreling was the work of the Devil.
In January of 1692, Reverend Parris’ daughter Elizabeth, age 9, and niece Abigail Williams, age 11, started having “fits.” They screamed, threw things, uttered peculiar sounds and contorted themselves into strange positions, and a local doctor blamed the supernatural. Another girl, Ann Putnam, age 11, experienced similar episodes. On February 29, under pressure from magistrates Jonathan Corwin and John Hathorne, the girls blamed three women for afflicting them: Tituba, the Parris’ Caribbean slave; Sarah Good, a homeless beggar; and Sarah Osborne, an elderly impoverished woman.
All three women were brought before the local magistrates and interrogated for several days, starting on March 1, 1692. Osborne claimed innocence, as did Good. But Tituba confessed, “The Devil came to me and bid me serve him.” She described elaborate images of black dogs, red cats, yellow birds and a “black man” who wanted her to sign his book. She admitted that she signed the book and said there were several other witches looking to destroy the Puritans. All three women were put in jail.
And so on. Cotton Mather, one of the more brilliant ministers of his day, intervened at one point, arguing that “spectral evidence”—that is, dreams, visions, and late-night Mexican dinners—was no evidence at all. Hangings occurred anyway, but the community was never the same.
On January 14, 1697, the General Court ordered a day of fasting and soul-searching for the tragedy of Salem. In 1702, the court declared the trials unlawful. And in 1711, the colony passed a bill restoring the rights and good names of those accused and granted £600 restitution to their heirs.
Think about that for a minute: eighteen years to come to terms with this dreadful episode. After almost a hundred years, the Turks still put their fingers in their ears and hum when you mention the Armenian genocide of 1915. And after more than two hundred years, the French are still trying to calculate how many civilians were massacred in the Vendée and whether it was all just a great rock-climbing expedition gone wrong.
Numerous hypotheses have been devised to explain the strange behavior that occurred in Salem in 1692. One of the most concrete studies, published in Science in 1976 by psychologist Linnda Caporael, blamed the abnormal habits of the accused on the fungus ergot, which can be found in rye, wheat and other cereal grasses. Toxicologists say that eating ergot-contaminated foods can lead to muscle spasms, vomiting, delusions and hallucinations. Also, the fungus thrives in warm and damp climates—not too unlike the swampy meadows in Salem Village, where rye was the staple grain during the spring and summer months.
One wonders whether this seemly simple solution appeals because it explains misunderstood people, or merely aids in explaining them away.
October 16th, 2012 | 12:40 pm
I’m not a fan of the way in which the Witch Trials have been portrayed and the quoted parts of the article have little to commend them as history.
But I don’t see why an hypothesis that the bizarre behavior of the original trio might have had a physiological basis is…well, whatever it is you seem to be implying about it. The issue of what might have caused *their* behavior is separate from that of the various adult authorities who responded.
Or perhaps I’m missing the point of your post?
October 16th, 2012 | 1:33 pm
A variant of this thesis has been advanced about the French Revolution, too. If I remember correctly, it was something about rotting grain stores building up hallucenogenic fungi. Maybe Bourbon oppressiveness was only an hallucination… :-)
If I might pose a response to Cox’s comment above: From an historical point of view, theses like the one above just aren’t very interesting. It’s a bit like the psychohistory phenomenon–where you start out wondering what effect psychology might have on historical events, and end up arguing that the Holocaust happened because Hitler never had a pony. You can say that if you want to, and provide some evidence, but once you have, what is left to talk about? My point is, that explanations like the one above tend to eliminate the role of human agency from events, which historians are often (or should be) reluctant to do.
If the above argument about Salem is in fact correct, of course, then we ought to talk about it, but my own view is that we ought to be prejudiced against accepting totalizing explanations of this sort, unless the evidence is really, really compelling.
October 16th, 2012 | 1:34 pm
And by the way, Anthony: where have you been? We need far more of your hilarious posts around here.
October 16th, 2012 | 2:34 pm
I believe the theory of ergotism was first suggested by Linda Caporael in 1976 and it has also been used to explain the Essex Witch Trials in England and even the outbreaks of Witch hunting in Scotland, all of which exhibit very similar testimony to the Salem Case.
Now rye was not eaten at all in Scotland; the principle cereals were meal (oats) and bere (barley) and some wheat. As these grains do not cross-pollinate, they are much less open to infection by ergot. Rye was used only for fodder; something that should be clear to anyone who examines the victual rents in the Register of Sasines and Teind Rolls for the period.
However, the dates are interesting. The Scottish Witchcraft Act was passed in 1563, three years after the Reformation and the cases form clusters – 1590-1, 1597, 1628-30, 1649 and 1661-2, (see Black’s Calendar (1937)) all periods of intense religious excitement
October 16th, 2012 | 2:37 pm
Given that the entire population of Salem at the time was less than a thousand people, it seems a trifle more significant. If six million people died on Black Friday and one in five people were injured, it might be… noticeable.
October 16th, 2012 | 2:38 pm
Not being you (you being Anthony), I’ve been aware of this hypothesis for some time, which doesn’t explain why you didn’t know about it because I did. I guess I’ll have to ponder that.
Anyways, I long ago read The Day of St Anthony’s Fire by John Grant Fuller which describes what looks like a village wide incident of ergotism in France in the early 1950s. The authorities did not respond very well then, either. And they came up with “scientific” explanations.
I’d say welcome to the human race, Mr. Cox, but I suspect you’ve been with us a long time.
October 16th, 2012 | 4:56 pm
With regard to arty’s comment, I don’t understand how a possible explanation of the childrens’ behavior isn’t interesting to the historian.
Based on the magazine excerpt cited by Mr. Scaramone, the hypothese put forward is the opposite of “totalizing.” In fact, it doesn’t attempt to “explain” the various events that over the course of a year comprised the “Salem Witch Trials.”
It simply suggests a possible explanation — body chemistry and toxins — for the childrens’ strange behavior, which precipitated those events. What happened afterwards isn’t the result of physiology and chemistry.
I don’t understand what Mr. Melendez means by his last sentence.
October 16th, 2012 | 5:01 pm
And so on. Cotton Mather, one of the more brilliant ministers of his day, intervened at one point, arguing that “spectral evidence”—that is, dreams, visions, and late-night Mexican dinners—was no evidence at all.
From a quick check of several accounts, it seems Cotton Mather was extremely wary of “spectral evidence” not because a witch could not have appeared to a witness in dreams, but because the devil could have taken the shape of an innocent person and appeared to a witness in a dream. Since it would be difficult if not impossible for the witness to distinguish between a real witch and the devil appearing in the dream in the guise of an innocent person seeming to be a witch, spectral evidence was not reliable.
October 17th, 2012 | 9:01 am
Then let me be simple, Mr. Cox. People fear and react on that fear, independent of belief systems. The beliefs will frame the fear but neither force nor prevent it. Seek the source in the fact the Salem judges and the people of Salem were afraid, not in their religion.
For a modern story of a very similar witch hunt, read widely about the early 1980′s daycare “sex abuse” cases. There the fear was framed with “psychotherapy”. A major difference between the two is that in Salem, some of the feared events actually occurred, perhaps due to ergotism. In the daycare case, the “psychotherapists” invented the events wholesale out of the fear.
October 17th, 2012 | 10:20 am
Mike Melendez –
Er… not entirely.
October 17th, 2012 | 2:21 pm
I did not realize that the Romney family included a religious historian.
October 19th, 2012 | 3:51 pm
Mr. Melendez, the idea that fear “explains” either the Salem Witch Trials or the sex abuse prosecutions actually doesn’t explain them.
Unless…you can identify what it was that “people” actually were afraid of; demonstrate that this fear was the dominant motive for the event; and show evidence of both of those.
I have not read widely regarding the ‘sex abuse cases,’ by which you presumably mean the day care sex abuse prosecutions. But I have read something of the Fells Acre case in Massachusetts: that seems much an instance of “fear” and much more one of prosecutorial misconduct, fueled perhaps by zeal or ambition or both.
October 19th, 2012 | 3:55 pm
I should have written….
” that seems much LESS an instance of “fear” and much more one of prosecutorial misconduct, fueled perhaps by zeal or ambition or both.”
It also occurs to me that that though one can be afraid independent of the teachings of one’s religion, that doesn’t mean that all fear or any given instance of fear is independent of religion.
October 29th, 2012 | 11:49 pm
I agree Arte, It’s nice to have a dose of Anthony humor. Have you seen his Strange Herring?Thanks FT! Many blessings
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