Hi ya’ll. J. Michael Reiter here. Listen, folks, I just read the article on The Salem Witch Trials and the root cause of them not being from Ergot or Ergotic Alkaloid ingestion. I think you are all wet, for it not to be… At least with the first cases. The later cases, however were more than likely what you discoursed about in your article.
J. Michael Reiter.
jmr :smack: :dubious: :o
MODERATOR NOTE: This thread from 2005 is revived Oct 2013 in post #31. We’re OK with that, I just don’t want anyone responding to a 2005 post thinking it was yesterday. Some of those posters may no longer be posting, some may have forgot what they said, etc. – Dex
Welcome to the SDMB, J. Michael Reiter. A link to the article we are discussing is usually a darn good idea so we are all on the same page, and here it is.
What specific evidence do you have to counter the conclusions of the report?
The people of Salem (or, at least those that passed as doctors in those days) had seen ergot poisoning. The condition was called “St. Anthony’s Fire”. If the Salem girls had St Anthony’s Fire, it would have been recognized as such, and not called witchcraft (unless there were other reasons to be suspicious, such as a paticularly ironic case, or a malediction from an unpleasant woman).
While the initial sickness of the girls remains mysterious, I’d put money that it was pyschosomatic, perhaps from the stress of being a young girl in a Puritan town, with major divisions over Church politics, and the very real threat of Indian attacks.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/050114.html
We’ve discussed the Salem Witch Trials on this Board before. There have been a lot of books, especially in the past twenty years or so, speculating on this. The two I’d recommend are Boyer and Nissenbaum’s Salem Witchcraft and Chadwick W. Hansen’s Witchcraft at Salem. The former does a sociological study of the situatioon – the maps at the back of the book plot out where the accused witches and their accusers lived, where the rich and the poor lived, where supporters of Rev. Parris and detractors lived, etc. It’s amazing how the people are so completely polarized into two camps. There was a lot of tension from various sources – not just Indians, but the turmoil over the Colony’s Charter, where authority lay, who was responsible for supporting the clergy, etc. There were an awful lot of petty court cases. As Chadwick Hansen said in his book (which dates from the 1970s) “The Histotry of petty malice in Essex county has not yet been written.” (For the record, I think it has by now, but I can’t recall by who. They were a litigious and catty bunch.)
Hansen’s book is a revisionist hisdtory, but I think it’s a good one. He challenges the claim that Salem Witchcraft was “got up” by a theocratic elite trying to hold onto its fading power (a view he traces back to Samuel Wentworth Upham, whose 19th century 2-volume history of Salem Witchcraft was for a long time the standard history. I think Dover still has it in print). Hansen makes a good case for a lot of the history being misinterpreted in this light. He also makes a pretty good case that witchcraft was practiced at Salem – but not in the way the accusers madfe it out to be. Hansen draws intriguing parallels between the “hysterics” studied by Charcot and others in the 19th century, and sees the witchcraft hysteria as a case of literal Mass ysteria. Reading his cites from the original trial documents, it’s hard to believe that the girls were just making it up, or faking it. his was deadfly serious business, and people really did seem to have physical reactions to it. The witches, after all, were said to be atytacking the colony’s food supply, and they weren’t much above subsistence as it was. People were genuinely terrified.
I could see ergotism being a trigger for this sort of thing. Read Hansen’s book, and you’ll see that there were plenty of visions that might have been caused by hallucinatory ergotism (people have made much of similarities between ergot and LSD), but it’s not the only possible source. Mennochjio – it’s my understanding that “St. Anthony’s Fire” is caused by ergot poisoning. That’s the claim made by supporters. See also the book The Day of St. Anthony’s Fire about an outbreak in southern France, caused by tainted bread.
That’s what I meant. If the girls had St Anthony’s Fire / ergotism, they would have been diagnosed as such, not as victims of an unknown and possibly supernatural ailment. The Salem folks would have recognized ergotism. This wasn’t it.
Ben Ray, who put it together, told me that the most interesting thing to him was the way Tituba’s character changed. She is usually referred to as a West Indian slave or servant, but he said the documents don’t call her that. My memory is failing me, but I think he said she was Native American (or maybe African? this conversation was before yesterday, and the “People” section of the website is down right now).
In any case, the site has trial transcripts, maps, and all kinds of fascinating stuff. Check it out!
I never bought the ergot theory and I was disgusted by PBS supporting it.
I recommend “Satanic Panic: The Creation of a Contemporary Legend” by Jeffrey S. Victor. It isn’t about Salem but he examines how and why people can be caught up in a “satanic panic”.
I read something once (unfortunately I can’t remember where) that said that there were similar Witch scares in other town in the same time period. But in the other towns the courts wouldn’t hear the cases. Salem was a big deal because people actually got killed.
I think you really need to look at the larger issues. If you say it was caused by “a bedrock belief in the reality of witches held by a theocratic society having only a superficial acquaintance with the rule of law.” How do you explain the Satanic panic in western New York State in the 1980s? A better explanation is a few symbolic urban legends supported by “experts” fit the unconscious needs of a community stressed by changing social structures and an uncertain economic future. That explains the burning times in Germany and France in the 1500s, the Salem trials 1691-2, the McCarthy hearings 1953-54, and the Satanic ritual abuse cases in the 1980s.
See Hansen’s book (cited above in my earlier post) – he talks quite a bit about earlier cases of supposed witchcraft and possession in New England. A few of the cases come from Cotton Mather’s own books, especially More Wonder of the Invisible World. Mather reports on his treatments of the afflicted women (almost invariably women). Note that, although popular memory has Mather at the center of the witchcraft hysteria, and some historians even blame him for “getting it up”, Mather actually had very little involvement in the Salem cases, and was a voice of moderation where he did appear.
The Salem cases were remarkable for being so great in number – most other instances were much snmaller “outbreaks”, but in Salem a great many opeople were accused at the same time. It’s also remarkable, as you note, because people were actually killed, ultimately a result of the court’s acceptance of “Spectral Evidence”. It’s worth noting that this was an extraordinary step at the time, and that the court repented of it a year later, publicly apologizing (although that did no good to the nineteen hanged and one pressed victims). Whatever the ultimate cause of the witchcraft mania, the resulting deaths were due to a panicked court system responding inappropriately.
As for Tituba, my recollection is that she and her husband came from Jamaica with Rev. Parris (or whoever their owner was), and that she was a Carib Indian. Her husband’s name, in fact, was “John Indian”. In an awful lot of fiction based on the trials (not to mention in some of the plays and exhibits in the town of Salem , Massachusetts), she is portrayed as black, however.
Note that there is one thing which few consider- that perhaps one of the accused (maybe Tituba) was in actuality a 'witch". Not capable of real magic, of course, but one who thought she was or pretended to be so. Fortune tellers- even those that claimed they have 'demon familiars" were not unknown then… or now.
Thanks to WCStyles I actually made it to the people section. In Tituba’s biography, the writer comments that the first girls picked up were telling fortunes, which was considered Satanic and forbidden. ( They were dropping egg white into a glass of water and looking to see what shapes formed.) It’s unclear whether they were playing a silly game or whether they actually thought they were doing something. The writer also comments that all the specific acts of witchcraft were culturally European, not African or Afro-Caribean. This makes it unlikely that Tituba was a leader of the practices.
Well, yes- but VooDoo and similar practices look a lot like witchcraft to the un-initiated, and the witchhunter dudes of the day wouldn’t care about the significant culteral differances.
And this would be why you don’t write the Straight Dope.
The ergot poisoning idea is a pseudo-intellectual answer to a great mystery. By that I mean something phrased in scientific-sounding words that superficially matches some minor features and is then offered up as the One True Solution and swallowed by the gullible public even though it doesn’t make sense to the actual facts of the topic. For others see the ideas that werewolves were people who suffered porphyria (although ergot poisoning is offered up as a pat solution there as well), Atlantis was [fill in the blank of some geographic location], Noah’s flood was based upon catastrophic Black Sea flood (or the same tsunami that supposedly got Atlantis), vampires were albinos (or also porphyria), and so forth and so on.
Look again. I said “the specific acts of witchcraft.” Tituba, for example, pled guilty to “riding about on a pole,” an act that has a long history in European witch beliefs, but no counterparts in African or Afro-Caribean practice. The inference is that she pled guilty to whatever she was accused of, reasoning (correctly) that her chances of survival were much better that way. A further inference might be that she wasn’t guilty of anything, but YMMV.
While I agree with the general gist of your post, we should remember that sometimes the glib pseudo-intellectual sounding answer turns out to be the right one. One case is the Dinosaurs being killed by an asteroid. This sounded a lot like the list of ideas in your post and was (IIRC) a pretty controversial opinion at first. Now it is the mainstream view.
The West Memphis three looks more like a simple case of scapegoating using socially acceptable stereotypes, then a full blown Satanic panic. Three children were killed so there was a crime that needed to be investigated. And I didn’t see anything about widespread mob fear of Satanist in the area.
I think it’s worth mentioning that The Holy Bible clearly has something to do with perpetuating the idea that witches exist. If you believe the Bible to be the divine word of God, then it follows that you not only believe in witches but also that they should be killed simply for being witches. Exodus 22:18 states - “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” This is a statement made by “God” to Moses during his famous Mt. Sinai speech. An obvious problem: how do you identify the witches? Clearly this presented a problem for the religious freaks in Salem, but believing in their duty to kill witches, they apparently improvised. It’s amazing to me that intelligent people in this day and age could subscribe to the Bible at all since this is but one example of the superstitious hogwash contained therein.
I would love to hear from a Jew or Christian who could defend their belief in witches and/or this passage from the Bible. Please inform me - how do you identify witches
:dubious: :o