The idea that the Salem Witch Trials were debunked due to the influence of ergot poisoning has gained significant attention in recent years. Ergot is a fungus that commonly affects rye and other cereal grains, producing ergot alkaloids which can cause hallucinations and other symptoms when consumed in large quantities. Some researchers argue that the ingestion of ergot-contaminated grain may have played a role in the mass hysteria and accusations that swept through Salem Village in 1692. However, the theory that ergot poisoning was a primary contributor to the Salem Witch Trials has been widely debunked. While ergotism can indeed cause symptoms such as convulsions, delusions, and hallucinations, there is little concrete evidence to support the claim that ergot-contaminated grain was a significant factor in the trials. One of the main arguments against the ergot hypothesis is the lack of recorded cases of ergotism in the affected region during the time period of the trials.
Beyond ‘mad’ and ‘bad’ at Salem
Whether in literature, film, children’s stories, or other popular media, the figure of a witch is typically represented as female. One of the chief reasons for this is due to the real-world accusations of witchcraft that occurred across the early modern period in Europe and America, where more women were accused of witchcraft than men. However, in many cases, those accusing women of witchcraft were other women.
One of the most famous witchcraft cases occurred in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. In this witchcraft episode, a group of young women aged between nine and twenty accused hundreds of people of witchcraft. They were not the only accusers to take part in the Salem witch-trials, but they were an integral part of many accusations and they accused more people than anybody else.
The historical documents show that these young women took an active role in the trials by exhibiting strange physical behaviour such as fits, bodily contortions, unexplained pain, going into trances, being struck mute and claiming to see the witch’s ‘familiar’ (a supernatural animal believed to be working together with the witch). They also participated in the process of accusation by claiming to have seen apparitions of the witches who often harmed them by pinching or choking them, and urged them to sign the Devil’s book.
In Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible (1953), these young women are portrayed as scheming and deviant, their actions deliberate and manipulative. Some historians have also interpreted their actions that way. During the trials, the girls were found with pins stuck in their bodies, which they blamed on the accused witch. Bernard Rosenthal has pointed to instances like this to argue that their behaviour was deliberately fraudulent and that the girls were faking their symptoms. Peter Hoffer came to a similar conclusion in his work, arguing that when teenage girls joined the group of accusers, deliberate fraud must have been involved.
Others have suggested that they may have had some kind of mental or physical illness that caused them to react in this way. One of the most long-lasting theories has been that the girls were suffering from ergot poisoning, as was argued by Linnda R. Caporael in 1976. Ergot poisoning occurs when someone eats grain products, such as bread, which has been contaminated with fungus. Its symptoms include spasms, convulsions and muscle pain. While the theory of ergot poisoning has been largely debunked, historians have still hypothesised that these young female accusers were suffering from some kind of mental or physical illness. Emmerson Baker has suggested they may have been suffering from mass conversion disorder which affects the nerves in the body, causing it to contort and twitch. He linked this to other outbreaks of mass conversion disorder such as an occurrence in New York in 2012, where a groups of girls from Le Roy high school were affected.
However, there is a long history of young women not only accusing others of witchcraft, but also behaving in a very similar way when they did so. In my article for Cultural and Social History, I compare the behaviour and actions of the young female Salem accusers with those from other English witchcraft trials involving young women. I particularly explore the emotions displayed by these young women, as emotions can be very revealing aspects of society and culture. We have very few sources from young women and their experiences across the early modern period, and their agency is often diminished. Because of this, I also wanted to draw attention to the agency of these young female accusers and the role they played during these events.
Apart from exhibiting similar physical symptoms, young female accusers also demonstrated similar emotions and emotional reactions. Accusers were often angry at the witch because they believed she was causing them physical pain. In an English witchcraft case that took place in Lowestoft in 1662, 11-year-old accuser Elizabeth Pacy fiercely attacked the accused witch Amy Duny in court. They also expressed terror and fear in court and through their depositions, often after seeing apparitions of the witch. However, if the witch confessed to his or her crimes, they were compassionate and forgiving – in the Salem trials, when Mary Lacey Jr. confessed to witchcraft, her accuser, Mary Warren, publicly embraced her and cried with her. These emotions were scrutinized in court and are part of what made the accusers so believable.
I also read the accusations as ‘narratives’ – observing the story these young women were telling about the accused and (inevitably) about themselves. These narratives also contained similar themes of temptation, in which young women passionately recounted their resistance to it. Puritans believed that the Devil could tempt people into witchcraft, and young women often expressed how they overcame these temptations in pious ways.
If young women across different regions and time periods were behaving so similarly, as well as conveying similar narratives revolving around similar fears, hopes and desires, is it really credible to think they were all mentally unwell or deliberately faking their symptoms? I think it is far more likely that this behaviour shows us a gendered reaction to witchcraft caused by a Puritan belief system in which people really did believe that witches and the Devil were capable of infiltrating ordinary people’s lives. Although the Western world may view these beliefs as ludicrous now, these were sincere beliefs in the early modern period. This didn’t mean that accusations of witchcraft were always believed – that’s why they had trials. But it does suggest that these young women were very convincing to those in charge of the proceedings.
As I was studying the similarities between the Salem accusers and other young female accusers, I noticed a particularly unusual aspect of the Salem accusations. Along with witchcraft, at least 17 people were also accused of murder by these young women. In their accusations, they claimed to see the visions of relatives (usually former spouses or children) that had been murdered by the accused witches. These visions often appeared to them in “winding sheets” and cried out for revenge for what had been done to them. Some of these deaths had occurred before the young accusers had even been born, and it is likely that they were the result of gossip in the community.
This reoccurring theme seemed too large to ignore. Not only were the accusers accusing people of consorting with the Devil, but they were also accusing them of non-supernatural violence. In a way, this accusation may have seemed out of place in a witchcraft trial but it brought social context into their accusations. It also tells us a lot about what these young women perceived as a ‘bad’ person, the violence they feared, the deceit they felt, and the justice they wanted to see.
Taking young female accusers seriously is not letting them “off the hook” for their actions. Their actions caused the death of many innocent victims and it is likely that, at some point, some of them must have realised this. The reason that the Salem girls are treated differently to other young female accusers is probably because they accused so many people over a long period of time. However, to treat them all as either ‘mad’ or ‘bad’ is to ignore a long history of similar behavioural characteristics and emotional responses among young female accusers. Behaviour such as fits, unexplained pain and bodily contortions are present across witch-trials involving young female accusers in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England and New England. Aside from these physical characteristics, there are also similarities in emotional responses and reactions to these events, particularly anger, fear and compassion, which reveal similar concerns about young women’s future and their fears in the present. I believe these similarities are important to acknowledge, because they are evidence of something beyond mere coincidence which cannot be categorised as either a physical or psychological imbalance, or deliberate deception. By taking young female accusers seriously, we can more aptly acknowledge the agency that young women exhibited in witch-trials, while also acknowledging that witchcraft accusation often arose as a consequence of a religious belief system which compelled a sincere belief in the supernatural.
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About the Author: Isabelle Laskaris recently completed a Master of Arts degree at the University of New England in New South Wales, Australia, where she primarily researched emotions in New England witchcraft. She is currently completing an Honours thesis on slave resistance in eighteenth-century New England at Monash University, and also works as a Liaison Librarian at Deakin University. She is the author of ‘Agency and emotion of young female accusers in the Salem witchcraft trials’, Cultural & Social History, published online 4 March 2019.
The Last Of Us 'bread theory' echoes a deadly psychedelic fungus outbreak from history
The latest episode of The Last of Us, HBO's brilliant zombie thriller, explains in detail how a cordyceps fungus got into the food system and caused a global disaster. Last week we learnt that the fungus had mutated to live in humans. This week, Joel (Pedro Pascal) told his young charge Ellie (Bella Ramsey) that it had spread around the world via the global food supply (known to the show's fans as the 'bread theory' before the most recent episode spilled the beans on the source of the apocalyptic outbreak).
The relentless, wriggling cordyceps of The Last of Us remains in the realms of speculation. Our body temperatures are too hot for those fungi to survive. But the plot is based in fact: history provides a chastening reminder of how a fungus can get into the food supply, with devastating consequences. One fungus with a rich lineage is ergot, which grows on rye grasses. Ergot has a range of effects on humans, some health-giving – it produces alkaloids that have been shown to treat migraines and stop post partum bleeding in new mothers. It was while researching lysergic acid, which is derived from the alkaloid ergotamine, that the Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman stumbled across lysergic acid diethylamide, better known as LSD, in 1938.
At the same time, however, ergot comes with great risk. Ingest too much and the condition, known as ergotism, can be horrible, even fatal. “Ergotism is horrendous,” says Dr Merlin Sheldrake, a biologist and the author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures. “You have twitching limbs, a sense of unbearable burning, terrifying dreams and nightmares and delirious visions. It’s a horrendous state to be in. That’s why there’s a lot of fear there.” Long-term ergot poisoning has been associated with mystical or spiritual experience, both revelatory and nightmarish. Various historic episodes of delirium, madness and death have been blamed on ergot poisoning, usually through the consumption of contaminated rye bread.
Ergotism was also called St Anthony’s Fire, for the burning sensation experienced by sufferers. (The St Anthony reference is to the order of monks who would offer its victims solace.) A single outbreak, in Aquitaine, France, in 944 AD, is thought to have killed as many as 40,000 people. Gangrene was possibly the worst of ergotism's many symptoms. During that outbreak, the French historian Flodoard wrote that: "Several men had their limbs afflicted by sores in Paris and neighbouring towns. The limbs, burnt bit by bit, were consumed until death ended the torment.”
Ergot is a fungus that grows on rye grasses, and has a range of effects on humans – some health-giving; some horrific Credit : iStockphoto
Ergot thrives on a cold winter followed by a wet spring, and some studies have pointed out that periods of rapid depopulation in Europe have coincided with wet conditions favoured by the fungus. In 1976, an influential paper suggested that ergot might have been involved in the Salem witch trials of the 17th century, as depicted by Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, although subsequent research has debunked it.
Whatever its presence in witchcraft, ergot – and ergot poisoning – has been entwined with civilisation, possibly for as long as we have cultivated grain. “[Ergot] has a brutal horrendous part, the life-saving human reproduction part, and the psychedelic part,” Sheldrake adds. “It’s a rich subject.”
One man who agrees is Brian Muraresku, an American writer and lawyer whose book, The Immortality Key, details his decade-long quest for a specific variety of ergot, thought to have been used in a potion used by initiates at Eleusis in Greece, who would have wild visions. Some academics – especially a classicist called Carl Ruck – had speculated that this potion was an ergotised beer drink, but nobody had been able to prove it. After more than a decade, Muraresku discovered that researchers had found evidence of hallucinogenic drinks at a site in Spain.
Ergotism had become less common in Europe since the 19th century, when farmers had learned how to spot infections and treat them. After Hoffman’s discovery of LSD, ergot came back into discourse via the counterculture. For Muraresku, this may be one reason why scientists were slow to pick up on their therapeutic properties.
Hallucinogens such as psilocybin, found in magic mushrooms, are getting the headlines while little research has been carried out into ergot Credit : iStockphoto
“In the 1960s and 70s psychedelics were not the province of august men,” he says. “They came in through the counterculture, and they were demonised, something to fear.”
“But these things are reviled on the one hand, but also inspire awe and reverence,” he adds. “Much like raw ergot. It has been responsible for mass poisoning and hallucinations, but there’s at least one chemical from it, LSD, which sometimes results in mystical unitive experiences.” The politics of earlier decades have had an effect on Muraresku. Unlike many other researchers into psychedelics, he has never tried them himself.
Even in the current fertile environment for fungi research, with well-funded psilocybin start-ups and research papers from serious universities around the world, ergot remains overlooked.
“There has been very little clinical research into ergot,” he says. “It’s understudied, and under-talked about. There are three types of psychedelics: tryptamines are psilocybin, DMT, etc. There's the phenethylamines, which is mescaline. Then there are ergolines. And we tend to focus a lot on the tryptamines and the phenethylamines. But there’s very little on the ergolines.”
With fungi-derived meat on supermarket shelves, fungi-derived drugs in our research labs, and mutated fungi making terrifying zombies on our screens, perhaps this will change. Growing on individual ears of wheat, ergot might be a little fungus but it has had an outsized effect on history.
Related Topics- Pandemics and epidemics,
- Witchcraft,
- The Last of Us,
- Drugs
The Salem Witchcraft Trials and Ergot, the "Moldy Bread" Hypothesis. (Virtual)
On April 2, 1976, Science Magazine published an article by Linnda R. Caporeal which posited that during the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692, the visions of specters and painful physical sensations described by the girls who claimed to be afflicted by witches could have been caused, instead, from eating bread made with flour tainted by ergot, a naturally occurring fungal hallucinogen that grows on rye grain under certain growing conditions.
It was debunked immediately and soundly by experts because the historical and medical data used to support the hypothesis was cherry-picked. More than four decades later, however, this interpretation is still pervasive.
Margo Burns, a historian specializing in the Salem witch trials and an Associate Editor and Project Manager of the book Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt, will explain how this lurid chapter in American history was born and how it became cemented in the public imagination. It’s a case study in how people come to believe myths about historical events.
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01/27/2021 19:00:00 01/27/2021 20:00:00 America/New_York The Salem Witchcraft Trials and Ergot, the "Moldy Bread" Hypothesis. (Virtual) On April 2, 1976, Science Magazine published an article by Linnda R. Caporeal which posited that during the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692, the visions of specters and painful physical sensations . Salem Historical Tours (ONLINE), Salem, MA 01970 false MM/DD/YYYY
One of the main arguments against the ergot hypothesis is the lack of recorded cases of ergotism in the affected region during the time period of the trials. Historical records from nearby towns and villages do not indicate any widespread outbreaks of ergotism or similar symptoms. Additionally, there is little evidence to suggest that the symptoms experienced by the accused witches were consistent with ergotism.
Witnesses and accounts from the trials described behaviors and afflictions such as fits, contortions, and unusual behavior, which do not align closely with the symptoms of ergotism. Furthermore, the ergot hypothesis fails to explain the social and cultural factors that played a significant role in the Salem Witch Trials. The trials were fueled by a combination of religious fervor, social tensions, economic pressures, and a longstanding belief in witchcraft. The accusations and subsequent trials were not solely based on signs of physical illness or hallucinations, but rather on the supposed act of making a pact with the devil and practicing witchcraft. Ergotism does not account for these complex dynamics and motivations. In conclusion, while the idea that ergot poisoning played a role in the Salem Witch Trials has gained attention, it has been widely debunked by historians and researchers. The theory lacks concrete evidence, fails to explain the lack of recorded cases of ergotism, and overlooks the social and cultural factors that drove the hysteria. The Salem Witch Trials remain a complex historical event, requiring a deeper understanding of the societal and psychological factors that contributed to the tragedy..
Reviews for "The Devil's Grain: Exploring the Ergot Hypothesis in the Salem Witch Trials"
1. Emily - 1 star - This book is an absolute disappointment. The author attempts to debunk the historical events surrounding the Salem witch trials, but fails to provide any substantial evidence or convincing arguments. Instead, they rely on conspiracy theories and baseless assumptions to support their claims. As someone who is passionate about history, it was frustrating to see such a poorly researched and poorly written book. I would not recommend it to anyone who is genuinely interested in understanding the truth behind the Salem witch trials.
2. Alex - 2 stars - I had high hopes for this book, but unfortunately, it fell short of my expectations. The author's writing style was lackluster, and the book was filled with repetitive information. Furthermore, their arguments lacked depth and credibility, making it difficult to take their claims seriously. I was hoping for a well-reasoned and informative exploration of the Salem witch trials, but instead, I found myself questioning the author's motives and expertise. Overall, I would not recommend this book to those seeking accurate and well-researched historical analysis.
3. Jessica - 2 stars - I found "Ergot Salem Witch Trials Debunked" to be an unconvincing and poorly structured book. The author's attempt at debunking the witch trials is flimsy and lacks supporting evidence. Their arguments often rely on conjecture and speculation rather than solid historical research. Not only did I find it difficult to trust the author's claims, but their writing style was also tedious and repetitive. For anyone seeking a thorough understanding of the Salem witch trials, I would suggest looking elsewhere for a more credible and insightful resource.
4. Thomas - 1 star - What a waste of time and money! This book offers nothing more than baseless theories and unfounded claims. The author completely disregards the extensive historical evidence we have regarding the Salem witch trials and instead presents their own wild and implausible explanations. The arguments put forth lack coherence and are often contradictory. I was thoroughly disappointed and would strongly advise against wasting your time on this book. There are far better resources available for those interested in exploring the truth behind the Salem witch trials.