AN ACCOUNT OF THE WITCH CRAZE IN SALEM, WITH REFERENCE TO SOME MODERN WITCH CRAZES

The Salem Witch Project

The received view is that the grammar of meaning claims is descriptive. It is our purpose in what follows to deny this consensus.. . . We offer, instead, a radically normative position on meaning claims. That is, we do not content ourselves with the relatively common view that part of the pattern characterized in ascribing meanings is the structure of socially accepted norms of a society. Rathe...

Salem Witch Trials: The Fungus Theory Witch or Psychedelic Trip?

During the winter of 1692 eight girls came down with a mysterious and terrifying illness in the colonial town of Salem, Massachusetts. They vomited, screamed incomprehensibly, claimed to see things that weren’t there, felt the crawling and pricking of invisible needles against their skin, and convulsed and contorted into impossible positions. Physicians were called to examine the girls, but the...

Witchcraft or mycotoxin? The Salem witch trials.

BACKGROUND The Salem witchcraft trials of 1692 have been studied by many historians looking for the complex social, political, and psychological determinants behind the community-wide hysteria that led to a travesty of justice and the deaths of 20 innocent Puritans. Recently, ergot poisoning has been put forth by some as a previously unsuspected cause of the bizarre behaviors of the young adole...

Ergotism and the Salem Village witch trials.

Witch-hunt

Beginning two years ago, the US Dept of Health and Human Services began "special reviews" of all current research grants that involved harm reduction, sex and drugs, and continues its ban on funding of needle exchange. With Bush's second term, the campaign was extended to all US funded international programs that dealt with these issues and populations. And, most recently, the US has again unde...