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Note: The following essay is not a transcript of the above video vignette but investigates the same topic in more detail. It also includes links to Internet sites that open windows into the vast world of information available there. The professors do not endorse these sites or their content but offer the links as a first tier of study opportunities into the topic at hand.

Salem Witch Incident

The infamous Salem Witchcraft incident in 1692 Massachusetts has attracted the attention of many historians and other social scientists who try to understand what seems to be a runaway case of mass hysteria and dire superstition. Before the episode had run its course, some thirty people, mostly middle-aged women, had lost their lives, most by hanging but at least one crushed to death under heavy weights. For the intense Puritan believers of the time, the cause of it all was simply that these unfortunate victims had been “entertaining Satan” and thus required removal from the midst of the God-fearing community in which they had allowed his influence to thrive. Although certainly the most serious example of witchcraft frenzy, the Salem events were not isolated, inasmuch as there were numerous albeit less extensive incidents of people becoming convinced that there were among them folks who had been bewitched and possessed of evil spirits. As a matter of fact, such beliefs continue to the present day, not only in less developed countries but across the globe. A large percentage of Americans, for example, believe that the Devil has the power to possess the bodies of humans. Motion pictures such as The Exorcist have portrayed such possessions to great box-office success. In addition, there are many people today who actually practice a religion based on the reality of witchcraft.

As scholars, playwrights, and others have tried to leave the supernatural out of their studies when they attempt to understand such events and particularly the startling Salem occurrence, their often complicated explanations range across the spectrum from mere mysogyny to a general condemnation of religion as the root of too much evil in the world. What they usually miss in such examinations is the very real possibility that a microorganism played a major role in the affair and others like it. In 1951, for example, a small town in France experienced a frenzy not at all unlike the one that afflicted colonial Massachusetts three centuries before. At Pont-St. Espirit, people began to believe that evil spirits had begun to inhabit their bodies. They saw terrible visions and ran panicky through the streets. Some eventually died in grotesque agony. Conspiracy theorists suggested that the CIA had laced the community’s water with LSD. Eventually, investigators identified the malady as a modern eruption of St. Anthony’s Fire, a common illness in the Middle Ages we now call ergotism.

Rye kernels can host the fungus Claviceps purpurea that produces ergot poisons that persist into bread and other products made from the diseased grain. Such toxins can produce certain psychedelic responses, because of compounds in them related to the drug LSD. When we examine the events surrounding the Salem witchcraft episode and similar events, a fascinating possibility arises that ergot poisoning may have played a significant role in the behaviors some of the victims exhibited that led to their trials and executions. The consumption of rye certainly was common in that time and place, so the possibility of this fungus stimulating wild visions and strange actions among the so-called witches of Salem is at least plausible. Although is it impossible to know for certain that ergotism was the cause of the tragedy, and while there were certainly other factors involved, microbiologists might make a strong case to suggest that the witches’ delusions may have had a fungal origin. So in combination with superstition and other societal factors, did a microorganism cause the infamous Salem Witch Trials?

This essay is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.