Ergot or Erasure?
The Reformation took power away from the church, arguably a good thing especially during the time, however that power became distributed to the hands of the individual, who, for all their credit trying to get out from the subjugation under the wing of Catholicism simply redirected that oppressive nature toward themselves and the people around them, and without structural leadership, corrupt as it may have been, God could be whatever the writer (magician) wanted Him to be, and by extension, so could the enemy.
King James states plainly why women are–and forever would be–the typical practitioner of witchcraft, “The reason is easie, for as that sexe is frailer then man is, so is it easier to be intrapped in these grosse snares of the Deuill, as was ouer well proued to be true, by the Serpents deceiuing of Eua at the beginning, which makes him the homelier with that sexe sensine” (James 35-36). King James continues answering the question as to why this so-called witchcraft is found more so in regions such as Finland and Scotland, writing, “Because where the Deuill findes greatest ignorance and barbaritie, there assayles he grosseliest, as I gaue you the reason wherefore there was moe Witches of women kinde nor men” (James 54). This combination of women and foreigner is the type of xenophobic “spellcasting” that takes root in the typical layman of the time, forming the Puritan psyche and their vigilance, therefore to the Puritan if one does not have God then they are instruments of the devil, and the mere chance that one was born a woman means they are not above suspicion.
King James is right about women, there are more women in witchcraft than men, historically. They are called witches, oracles, priestesses—Pythia, for example—this statement of fact, though does not condone mass extinction. Women, bearing a physical embodiment of the feminine principle are, generally, more in touch with their inner world than their male counterpart giving them an advantage in walking between the worlds, linking the conscious with the subconscious mind. Again, this does not condone the actions taken by the Puritans, only that there was a precedent for the reality of witches in their time that spanned further back than the founding of Anglo-Saxon Europe.
Furthermore, this only illustrates the Puritan’s own view of religious intolerance toward traditions that differ in any way from their own, such as the barbarian and ignorant Finns and Scots. Unfortunately, this Puritanical worldview took root in this country and as much as we feel distanced by time from the early settlers we still think of witchcraft as a “primitive” tool of the Old World wherein men and women tried making sense of their world through a different lens than Christianity or science.
The modern man must make sense of the world and categorize historical events in their proper context, neatly organizing the complexity of the human experience because we are products of the Renaissance and its particular societal “spell.” The modern man does not stop at making sense of what she experiences here and now, but also what has happened, rationalizing what is difficult to wrestle with, in relation to the witch trials of this country there have been various hypotheses put forth to explain the actions of both the Puritanical witch hunters in Salem as well as the children who were under “investigation.” One of which is relatively young, from the nineteen-seventies where “psychologist Linnda Caporael proposed an interesting solution to the problem of why various physical and mental symptoms appeared […] She suggested that those who displayed symptoms of ‘bewitchment’ in 1692 were actually suffering from a disease known as convulsive ergotism” (Matossian). The theory is not widely accepted, however, being originally objected to by psychologists, contemporaries of Caporael, Jack Gottlieb and Nicholas Spanos. Two psychologists who made note of the reports of such symptoms typically associated with convulsive ergotism which include fatigue, depression, and nausea and–in extreme cases–convulsion. This might appear to be what Puritans would most certainly attribute to possession, and the psychologists do write that it is true that individual susceptibility varies in regard to “gangrenous ergotism, convulsive ergotism is another matter. According to Barger,” here the two quote from the book, “Ergot and Ergotism (1931),” written by George Barger, a British chemist, “it was common for all members of a family to develop symptoms of convulsive ergotism during epidemics.”
The fungus poisoning demonstrates human’s desire to make sense of things that go beyond the scope of material objectivity. This hypothesis and those like it cripple our understanding of the Puritans, framing them as a problem of the past and in no way influential in our times at present. It is easy to assume that this group of Europeans seeking a place to worship went a little off the rails when introduced to an environment teeming with spores that infected their minds and ability to act rationally. That is not what happened, though. The argument that this could not have happened had the Puritans been in their rational-thinking mind goes to espouse the belief that witches do not have rights, because this continues the ignorant view that witchcraft was left in the caves when we discovered fire and agriculture. There is more than enough evidence supporting that the vast accusations of witchcraft were false claims, whether this was due to fear, paranoia, or misogyny is beside the point since all those things coalescence to the same consequence, innocents dying.
The number of accusations range in the tens of thousands and amounted to, in terms of the Salem trials, “fourteen women and five men were hanged, protesting their innocence to the end” (Foner 112). Any killing under these pretenses is unjustifiable, most killings under any pretense are unjustifiable. For a moment, though, let’s consider, hypothetically, that one out of the nineteen people who were killed at Salem was a witch. This would mean that the identification process of the witch are quite lacking in efficacy. The model is skewed and powered by human error bread from fear and improvisation. There are plenty of reasons for this: paranoia, religious fervor (extreme), and a cultural hatred of women, conscious or unconscious. Regardless of why these mechanisms for witch-hunting were faulty, there was no authority guiding the Puritans.
There was no expert witch hunter, only a zealous and fearful people who, due to the widespread information at their disposal due to the Reformation, the printing press, and harmful literature circulating at the time, were ensnared by the very evil they sought to guard against. They were living in a time of an unprecedented spread of information and because of this were overwhelmed by the isolation that brings with it as well as an inability to wield the information responsibly. Modern writer and political scientist specializing in international affairs attributes this thinking to a “contemporary” issue he describes as a “mirage of knowledge,” quoted in an interview regarding established knowledge, “People were no longer merely uninformed, […] but ‘aggressively wrong’ and unwilling to learn. They actively resisted facts that might alter their preexisting beliefs. They insisted that all opinions, however uninformed, be treated as equally serious” (Gibson). If our world today cannot handle the mass information at our disposal without falling into logical fallacies and even emotional clinging to previously held beliefs, then looking at the Puritans might help us understand just how they got to the point of hysteria such as they did. The point held by Nichols might help us to appreciate the reality of witchcraft in its historical context, as well. There was confusion, religious dogmatism, and a wealth of evidence affirming witchcraft as a tool of the present, no longer in the shadows of the past. The Puritans were not a backwards folk, they were fighting a reality in their time that’s existence did not require them to conjure it up. The trials and hunts are issues pertaining to an execution of their knowledge, not a judgment on the knowledge itself.
The contemporary world misses something crucial in drawing distinction between a metaphysical reality and an objectively material one where it becomes a difficulty to put on the mind of the early settlers because we no longer have their “language,” to engage with the world. We simply cannot see what they saw, ergot poisoning or not, and because we do not have a frame of reference, we might never come to a different conclusion regarding the witch trials: The Puritans were not wrong in their belief that witches were real, they were wrong in their belief that witches must be killed.
Si comprehendis, non est Deus
Works Cited:
Matossian, Mary K. “Views: Ergot and the Salem Witchcraft Affair: An Outbreak of a Type of Food Poisoning Known as Convulsive Ergotism May Have Led to the 1692 Accusations of Witchcraft.” American Scientist, vol. 70, no. 4, 1982, pp. 355–57. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27851542. Accessed 10 Sep. 2022.
Spanos, Nicholas; Gottlieb, Jack. “Ergotism and the Salem Village Witch Trials: Records of the Events of 1692 Do Not Support the Hypothesis that Ergot Poisoning was Involved.” Science, vol. 194, Iss. 4272, 1976, pp. 1390-1394. Science, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.795029. Accessed 10 Sept. 2022.
James I, King of England. “Daemonologie in forme of a dialogue.” Edinburgh, 1597. Project Gutenberg, June 29, 2008, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/25929/25929-pdf.pdf. Accessed 11 Sept. 2022.
Scot, Reginald. “The Discoverie of Witchcraft.” London, 1584. Internet Archive, February 05, 2009, https://archive.org/details/discoverieofwitc00scot/page/40/mode/1up
Gibson, Lydialyle. “The Mirage of Knowledge: Tom Nichols dissects the dangerous antipathy to expertise.” Harvard Magazine, 2018. Harvard Magazine, https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2018/03/death-of-expertise-by-tom-nichols. Accessed 12 Sept. 2022
Foner, Eric. “Give Me Liberty!” 6th ed., WW Norton, 2020.
Wilson, Suzanne. “The Impossible Story of an African Pioneer in Colonial America: Anthony Johnson’s place in American history significant, says ASU historian.” ASU News, 2019. ASU News, https://news.asu.edu/20190819-discoveries-impossible-story-african-pioneer-colonial-america. Accessed 13 Sept. 2022
Witness, NM 