Convulsive ergotism may have been a physiological basis for the Salem witchcraft crisis in 1692.

Linnda R. Caporael
From Science Vol. 192 (2 April 1976)

    Numerous hypotheses have been devised to explain the occurrence of the Salem witchcraft trials in 1692, yet a sense of bewilderment and doubt pervades most of the historical perspectives on the subject.  The physical afflictions of the accusing girls and the imagery of the testimony, therefore, are dismissed as imaginary in foundation.  One avenue of understanding that has yet to be sufficiently explored is that a physiological condition, unrecognized at the time, may have been a factor in the Salem incident.  Assuming that the content of the court records is basically an honest account of the deponents' experiences, the evidence suggests that convulsive ergotism, a disorder resulting from the ingestion of grain contaminated with ergot, may have initiated the witchcraft delusion.
    Suggestions of physical origins of the afflicted girls' behavior have been dismissed without research into the matter.  In looking back, the complexity of the psychological and social factors in the community obscured the potential existence of physical pathology, suffered not only by the afflicted children, but also by a number of other community members.  The value of such an explanation, however, is clear.  Winfield S. Nevins best reveals the implicit uncertainties of contemporary historians (1: 2, p. 235).

   I must confess to a measure of doubt as to the moving causes in this terrible tragedy.  It seems impossible to believe a tithe of the statements, which were made at the trials.  And yet it is equally difficult to say that nine out of every ten of the men, women, and children who testified upon their oaths, intentionally and willfully falsified.  Nor does it seem possible that they did, or could invent all these marvelous tales, fictions rivaling the imaginative genius of Haggard or Jules Verne.

The possibility of a physiological condition fitting the known circumstances and events would provide a comprehensible framework for understanding the witchcraft delusion in Salem.
 

Background

    Prior to the Salem witchcraft trials, only five executions on the charge of witchcraft are known to have occurred in Massachusetts (3, 4).  Such trials were held periodically, but the outcomes generally favored the accused.  In 1652, a man charged with witchcraft was convicted of simply having told a lie and was fined.  Another man, who confessed to talking to the devil, was given counsel and dismissed by the court because of the inconsistencies in his testimony.  A bad reputation in the community combined with the accusation of witchcraft did not necessarily insure conviction.  The case against John Godfrey of Andover, a notorious character consistently involved in litigation, was dismissed.  In fact, soon after the proceedings, Godfrey sued his accusers for defamation and slander and won the case.
    The supposed witchcraft at Salem Village was not initially identified as such.  In late December 1691, about eight girls, including the niece and daughter of the minister, Samuel Parris, were afflicted with unknown "distempers" (1, 4-6).  Their behavior was characterized by disorderly speech, odd postures and gestures, and convulsive fits (7).  Physicians called in to examine the girls could find no explanation for their illness, and in February one doctor suggested the girls might be bewitched.  Parris seemed loath to accept this explanation at the time and resorted to private fasting and prayer.  At a meeting at Parris's home, ministers from neighboring parishes advised him to "sit still and wait upon the Providence of God to see what time might discover" (6, p.25).
    A neighbor, however, took it upon herself to direct Parris's Barbados slave, Tituba, in the concocting of a "witch cake" in order to determine it witchcraft was present.  Shortly thereafter, the girls made an accusation of witchcraft against Tituba and two elderly women of general ill repute in Salem Village, Sarah Good and Sarah Osborn.  The three women were taken into custody on 29 February 1692.  The afflictions of the girls did not cease, and in March they accused Martha Corey and Rebecca Nurse.  Both of these women were well respected in the village and were covenanting members of the church.  Further accusations by the children followed.
    Examinations of the accused were conducted in Salem Village until 11 April by two magistrates from Salem Town.  At that time, the examination were moved from the outlying farming area to the town and were heard by Deputy Governor Danforth and six of the ablest magistrates in the colony, including Samuel Sewall.  This council had no authority to try accused witches, however, because the colony had no legal government--a state of affairs that had existed for 2 years.  By the time Sir William Phips, the new governor, arrived from England with the charter establishing the government of Massachusetts Bay Colony, the jails as far away from Salem as Boston were crowded with prisoners from Salem awaiting trial.  Phips appointed a special Court of Oyer and Terminer, which heard it first case on 2 June.  The proceedings resulted in conviction, and the first condemned witch was hanged on 10 June.
    Before the next sitting of the court, clergymen in the Boston area were consulted for their opinion on the issues pending.  In an answer composed by Cotton Mather, the ministers advised "critical and exquisite caution" and wished "that there may be as little as possible of such noise, company and openness as may too hastily expose them that are examined" (2, p.83).    The ministers also concluded that spectral evidence (the appearance of the accused's apparition to an accuser) and the test of touch (the sudden cessation of a fit after being touched by the accused witch) were insufficient evidence for proof of witchcraft.
    The court seemed insensitive to the advice of the ministers, and the trials and executions in Salem continued.  By 22 September, 19 men and women had been sent to the gallows, and one, Giles Corey, had been pressed to death, an ordeal calculated to force him to enter a plea to the court so that he could be tried.  The evidence used to obtain the convictions was the test of touch and spectral evidence.  The afflicted girls were present at the examinations and trials, often creating such pandemonium that the proceedings were interrupted.  The accused witches were, for the most part, persons of good reputation in the community; one was even a former minister in the village.  Several notable individuals were "cried out" upon, including John Alden and Lady Phips.  All the men and women who were hanged had consistently maintained their innocence; not one confessor to the crime was executed.  It had become obvious early in the course of the proceedings that those who confessed would not be executed.
    On 17 September 1692, the Court of Oyer and Terminer adjourned the witchcraft trials until 2 November; however, it never met again to try that crime.  In January 1693 the Superior Court of Judicature, consisting of the magistrates on the Court of Oyer and Terminer, met.  Of 50 indictments handed in to the Superior Court by the grand jury, 20 persons were brought to trial.  Three were condemned but never executed and the rest were acquitted.  In May Governor Phips ordered a general reprieve, and about 150 accused witches were released.  The end of the witchcraft crisis was singularly abrupt (2, 4, 8).
 

Tituba and the Origin Tradition

        Repeated attempts to place the occurrences at Salem within a consistent framework have failed.  Outright fraud, political factionalism, Freudian psychodynamics, sensation seeking, clinical hysteria, even the existence of witchcraft itself, have been proposed as explanatory devices.  The problem is primarily one of complexity.  No single explanation can ever account for the delusion; an interaction of them all must be assumed.  Combinations of interpretations, however, seem insufficient without some reasonable justification for the initially afflicted girls' behavior.  No mental derangement or fraud seems adequate in understanding how eight girls, raised in the soul-searching Puritan tradition, simultaneously exhibited the same symptoms or conspired together for widespread notoriety.
        All modern accounts of the beginnings of Salem witchcraft begin with Parris's Barbados slave, Tituba.  The tradition is that she instructed the minister's daughter and niece, as well as some other girls in the neighborhood, in magic tricks and incantations at secret meetings held in the patronage kitchen (2, 4, 8, 9).  The odd behavior of the girls, whether real or fraudulent, was a consequence of these experiments.
        The basis for the tradition seems two-fold.  In a warning against divination, John Hale wrote in 1702 that he was informed that one afflicted girl had tried to see the future with an egg and glass and subsequently was followed by a "diabolical molestation" and died (6).  The egg and glass (an improvised crystal ball) was an English method of divination.  Hale gives no indication that Tituba was involved, or for that matter, that a group of girls was involved.  I have been unable to locate any reference that any of the afflicted girls died prior to Hale's publications.
        The other basis for the tradition implicating Tituba seems to be simply the fact that she was from the West Indies.  The Puritans believed the American Indians worshiped the devil, most often described as a black man (4).  Curiously, however, Tituba was not questioned at her examination about activities as a witch in her birthplace.  Historians seem bewitched themselves by fantasies of voodoo and black magic in the tropics, and the unfounded supposition that Tituba would inevitably be familiar with malefic arts of the Caribbean has survived.
        Calef (7) reports that Tituba's confession was obtained under duress.  She at first denied knowing the devil and suggested the girls were possessed.  Although Tituba ultimately became quite voluble, her confession was rather pedestrian in comparison with the other testimony offered at the examination and trials.  There is no element of West Indian magic, and her descriptions of the black man, the hairy imp, and witches flying through the sky on sticks reflect an elementary acquaintance with the common English superstitions of the time (9-11).
 

Current Interpretations

        1) Fraud.  Various interpretations of the girls' behavior diverge after the discussion of its origins.  The currently accepted view is that the children's symptoms of affliction were fraudulent (4, 8, 12).  The girls may have perpetrated fraud simply to gain notoriety or to protect themselves from punishment by adults as their magic experiments became the topic of rumor (2).  One author supposed that the accusing girls craved "Dionysiac mysteries" and that some were "no more seriously possessed that a pack of bobby-soxers on the loose" (8, p.29).  The major difficulty in accepting the explanation of purposeful fraud is the gravity of the girls' symptoms; all the eyewitness accounts agree to the severity of the affliction (6, 10, 11, 13).
        Upham (4) appears to accept the contemporaneous descriptions and ascribes to the afflicted children the skills of a sophisticated necromancer.  He proposes that they were able ventriloquists, highly accomplished actresses, and by "long practice" could "bring the blood to the face, and send it back again" (4, vol.2, p.395).  These abilities and more, he assumes, the girls learned from Tituba.  As discussed above, however, there is little evidence that Tituba had any practical knowledge of witchcraft.  Most colonists, with the exception of some of the accused and their defenders, did not appear even to consider pretense as an explanation for the girls' behavior.  The general conclusion of the New Englanders after the tragedy was that the girls suffered from demonic possession (2, 6, 9).
        2) Hysteria.  The advent of psychiatry provided new tools for describing and interpreting the events oat Salem.  The term hysteria has been used with varying degrees of license (2, 8, 9, 14), and the accounts of hysteria always begin in the kitchen with Tituba practicing magic.  Starkey (8) uses the term in the loosest sense: the girls were hysterical, that is, overexcited, and committed sensational fraud in a community that subsequently fell ill to "mass hysteria."  Hansen (9) proposes the use of the word in a stricter, clinical sense of being mentally ill.  He insists that witchcraft really was practiced in Salem and that several of the executed were practicing witches.  The girls' symptoms were psychogenic, occasioned by guilt at practicing fortune-telling at their secret meetings.  He states that the mental illness was catching and that the witnesses and majority of the confessors became hysterics as a consequence of their fear of witchcraft.  However, if the girls were not practicing divination, and if they did indeed develop true hysteria, then they must all have developed hysteria simultaneously -- hardly a credible supposition.  Furthermore, previous witchcraft accusations in other Puritan communities in New England had never brought on mass hysteria.
       Psychiatric disorder is used un a slightly different sense in the argument that the witchcraft crisis was a consequence of two party (pro-Parris and anti-Parris) factionalism in Salem Village (14).  In this account, the girls are unimportant factors in the entire incident.  Their behavior "served as a kind of Rorschach test into which adults read their own concerns and expectations" (14, p.30).  The difficulty with linking factionalism to the witch trials is that supporters of Parris were also prosecuted while some non-supporters were among the most vociferous accusers (2, 14).  Thus, it becomes necessary to resort to projection, transference, individual psychoanalysis, and numerous psychiatric disorders to explain the behavior of the adults in the community who were using the afflicted children as pawns to resolve their own personal and political differences.
        Of course, there was fraud and mental illness at Salem.  The records clearly indicate both.  Some depositions are simply fanciful renditions of local gossip or cases of malice aforethought.  There is also testimony based on exaggerations of nightmares and inebriated adventures.  However, not all the records are thus accountable.
        3) Physiological explanations.  The possibility that the girls' behavior had a physiological basis has rarely arisen, although the villagers themselves first proposed physical illness as an explanation.  Before the accusations of witchcraft began, Parris called in a number of physicians (6, 7).  In an early history of the colony, Thomas Hutchinson wrote that "there are a great number of persons who are willing to suppose the accusers to have been under bodily disorders which affected their imagination" (12, vol. 2, p.47).  A modern historian reports a journalist's suggestion that Tituba had been dosing the girls with preparations of jimsonweed, a poisonous plant brought to New England from the West Indies in the early 1600's (8, footnote on p.284).  However, because the Puritans identified no physiological cause, later historians have failed to investigate such a possibility.
 

Ergot

        Interest in ergot (Claviceps purpurea) was generated by epidemics or ergotism that periodically occurred in Europe.  Only a few years before the Salem witchcraft trials the first medical scientific report on ergot was made (15).  Denis Dodart reported the relation between ergotized rye and bread poisoning in a letter to the French Royal Academie des Sciences in 1676.  John Ray's mention of ergot in 1677 was the first in English.  There is no reference to ergot in the United States before an 1807 letter by Dr. John Stearns recommending powdered ergot sclerotia to a medical colleague as a therapeutic agent in childbirth.  Stearns is generally credited with the "discovery" of ergot; certainly his use prompted scientific research on the substance.  Until the mid-19th century, however, ergot was not known as a parasitic fungus, but was thought to be sun baked kernels of grains (15-17).
        Ergot grows on a large variety of cereal grains--especially rye--in a slightly curved, fusiform shape with sclerotia replacing individual grains on the host plant.  The sclerotia contain a large number of potent pharmacologic agents, the ergot alkaloids.  One of the most powerful is isoergine (lysergic acid amide).  This alkaloid, with 10 percent of the activity of a D-LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), is also found in ololiuqui (morning glory seeds), the ritual hallucinogenic drugs used by the Aztecs (15, 16).
        Warm, damp, rainy springs and summers favor ergot infestations.  Summer rye is more prone to the development of the sclerotia than winter rye, and one field may be heavily ergotized while the adjacent field is not.  The fungus may dangerously parasitize a crop one year and not reappear again for many years.  Contamination of the grain may occur in varying concentrations.  Modern agriculturalists advise farmers not to feed their cattle grain containing more than one to three sclerotia per thousand kernels of grain, since ergot has deleterious effects on cattle as well as on humans (16, 18).
        Ergotism, or long-term ergot poisoning, was once a common condition resulting from eating contaminated rye bred.  In some epidemics it appears that females were more liable to the disease than males (19).  Children and pregnant women are most likely to be affected by the condition, and individual susceptibility varies widely.  It takes 2 years for ergot in powdered form to reach 50 percent deterioration, and the effects are cumulative (18, 20).  There are two types of ergotism--gangrenous and convulsive.  As the name implies, gangrenous ergotism is characterized by dry gangrene of the extremities followed by the falling away of the affected portions of the body.  The condition occurred in epidemic proportions in the Middle Ages and was known by a number of names, including ignis sacer, the holy fire.
        Convulsive ergotism is characterized by a number of symptoms.  These include crawling sensations in the skin, tingling in the fingers, vertigo, tinnitus aurium, headaches, disturbances in sensation, hallucination, painful muscular contractions leading to epileptiform convulsions, vomiting, and diarrhea (16, 18, 21).  The involuntary muscular fibers such as the myocardium and gastric and intestinal muscular coat are stimulated.  There are mental disturbances such as mania, melancholia, psychosis, and delirium.  All of these symptoms are alluded to in the Salem witchcraft records.
 

Evidence for Ergotism in Salem

        It is one thing to suggest convulsive ergot poisoning as an initiating factor in the witchcraft episode, and quite another to generate convincing evidence that it is more that a mere possibility.  A jigsaw of details pertinent to growing conditions, the timing of events in Salem, and symptomology must fit together to create a reasonable case.  From these details, a picture emerges of a community stricken with an unrecognized physiological disorder affecting their minds as well as their bodies.
        1) Growing conditions.  The common grass along the Atlantic Coast from Virginia to Newfoundland was and is wild rye, a host plant for ergot.  Early colonists were dissatisfied with it as forage for their cattle and reported that it often made the cattle ill with unknown diseases (22).  Presumably, then, ergot grew in the New World before the Puritans arrived.  The potential source for infection was already present, regardless of the possibility that it was imported with the English rye.
        Rye was the most reliable of the Old World grains (22) and by the 1640's oat was a well-established New England crop.  Spring sowing was the rule; the bitter winters made fall sowing less successful.  Seed time for the rye was April and the harvesting took place in August (23).  However, the grain was stored in barns and often waited months before being threshed when the weather turned cold.  The timing of Salem events fits this cycle.  Threshing probably occurred shortly before Thanksgiving, the only holiday the Puritans observed.  The children's symptoms appeared in December 1691.  Late the next fall, 1692, the witchcraft crisis ended abruptly and there is no further mention of the girls or anyone else in Salem being afflicted (4, 9).
        To some degree or another all rye was probably infected with ergot.  It is a matter of the extent of the infection and the period of time over which the ergot is consumed rather than the mere existence of ergot that determines the potential for ergotism.  In his 1807 letter written from upstate New York, Stearns (15, p. 274) advised his medical colleague that, "On examining a granary where rye is stored, you will be able to procure a sufficient quantity [of ergot sclerotia] from among that grain."  Agricultural practice had not advanced, even by Stearns's time, to widespread use of methods to clean or eliminate the fungus from the rye crop.  In all probability, the infestation of the 1691 summer rye crop was fairly light; not everyone in the village or even in the same families showed symptoms.
        Certain climatic conditions, that is, warm, rainy springs and summers, promote heavier than usual fungus infestation.  The pattern of the weather in 1691 and 1692 is apparent from brief comments in Samuel Sewall's diary (24).  Early rains and warm weather in the spring progressed to a hot and stormy summer in 1691.  There was a drought the next year, 1692, thus no contamination of the grain that year would be expected.
        2) Localization.  "Rye," continues Stearns (15, p.274), "which grows in low, wet ground yields [ergot] in greatest abundance."  Now, one of the most notorious of the accusing children in Salem was Thomas Putnam's 12-year-old daughter, Ann.  Her mother also displayed symptoms of the affliction and psychological historians have credited the senior Ann with attempting to resolve her own neurotic complaints through her daughter (8, 9, 14).  Two other afflicted girls also lived in the Putnam residence.  Putnam had inherited one of the largest landholdings in the village.  His father's will indicates that a large measure of the land, which was located in the western sector of Salem Village, consisted of swampy meadows (25) that were valued farmland to the colonists (22).  Accordingly, the western acreage of Salem Village, may have been an area of contamination.  This contention is further substantiated by the pattern of residence of the accusers, the accused, and the defenders of the accused living within the boundaries of Salem Village (Fig. 1).  Excluding the afflicted girls, 30 of 32 adult accusers lived in the western section and 12 of the 14 accused witches lived in the eastern section, as did 24 of the 29 defenders (14).  The general pattern of residence, in combination with the well-documented factionalism of the eastern and western sectors, contributed to the progress of the witchcraft crisis.