I've recently discovered that the whole Salem witch trials and all this was all bout the ergotism from that bread they was eatin
not true. ergot is destroyed in heat and they needed to heat the dough to make the bread. small amounts would survive because of the low temps of their ovens, but still, the ENTIRE TOWN would have suffered, not isolated cases. Ive read thoroughly into this and it's not quite possible. read more and youll see the same.
ergot actually thrives in heat....don't get this confused with the lysergic acid. Ergot is simply part of the makeup. also, the reason it wasn't everyone was cause the not everyone ate from the same source of wheat. the ergot only showed up on this one part of town where the 'lower class' was growing their wheat in the 'shittier' of places (a swampy area). this wasnt like something i just thought up....... http://www.hbci.com/~wenonah/history/ergot.htm http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/case_salem/clues.html i gotta run right now, but i glanced at these articles real quick and didnt see 1 of the main evidences I've seen and heard when I first learned of this. They've actually recovered a skeleton of one of the people that actually died of the poisoning and they indeed found the amounts of ergot in the body.
i heard that young teen girls, with a much lower body weight than the rest of hte community, were more affected by the ergot, hence the fear the "witches" just something i heard
girls were hallucinating and they were eating bread that could have possible contained ergot and proboly did thast enough info for me
mm. actually, i was reading about this last nite. apparently women would often make solves using lysergic acid and oils of some kind and rub the solve on a broomstick. they would then put the broomstick in their hoo-wah and thus absorb its halucinogenyness. eeu, but theres one way the broomstick myth came up. these women were put to death as witches of course.
snelio37, they did that with datura oil. they did not have the proper equipment or knowlage to CREATE LSD back then.
The witch trials held in the U.S. had nothing to do with ergot. You are confusing it with the wereworlf trials in eastern Europe in the 1500s and 1600s. There were strong frosts in the areas that most of the trials took place in. The frosts were theorized to cause their rye to become infected with ergot. Rye was their primary crop, so it therefore was made into bread. The theory isthat when everyone in a town with infected crops starts eating ergot infected rye bread, they may have had a mass hallucination. Hense over 30,000 werewolf trials
They didn't burn any witches at Salem, they were mostly hung, and 1 man was pressed. The burnings happened in Eurpoe not the US. There is a theory that the Ergot did have something to do with the hysteria but that doesnt account for everything. I have been to Salem a few times and I have seen on the walls where they explain how Ergot was a factor but not the only one.
Im not confusing it with anything. Im simply stating the recent finds, the theory, and the evidence that I saw on the show I watched on PBS by the lady that heads this ... investigation, i guess we could say. I posted the links to a few informative sites of this 'theory' ... check 'em out.
