The Salem Witch Trials: Sociopolitical Hysteria, Systematic Persecution of Women, or Ergot Poisoning?

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...

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...

Ergotism and the Salem Village witch trials.

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...

Ergotism and the Salem witch panic: a critical analysis and an alternative conceptualization.

The controversial hypothesis that the Salem witchcraft panic of 1692 resulted from ergot poisoning was recently defended by Mary Matossian. She argued that (a) weather conditions in Salem were conducive to the growth of ergot, (b) new evidence concerning the age distribution of ergot sufferers is consistent with the ages of those who exhibited symptoms at Salem, and (c) the symptoms displayed a...