Witchcraft in Early North America - Alison Games [44]
The possessed women at Salem fit this general profile. Salem featured twenty-four possessed accusers who were over the age of sixteen (not including, for example, Parris’s daughter and niece and one other young accuser). Of these twenty-four, extant evidence survives about the families for twenty-one, and of these, seventeen had lost one or both parents. This pattern was unusual for the place and the time and set these women apart both from other accusers and from their peers. Moreover, these women had lost their parents in a very particular set of circumstances, one unique to their residence in a colonial settlement. Most of the parental deaths transpired during New England’s Indian wars. Without their parents, and with family property mostly destroyed during the same attacks that killed parents, these young women had moved south, away from the frontier, to Salem, Andover, and other towns to stay with relatives or family friends who took them in. But their futures, like their pasts, lay in shambles, as prospects for marriage were tied to family fortune and to the dowries in livestock, household goods, or real property that loving and attentive parents tried to provide.
Scholars in many fields have struggled to explain the Salem possessions. Scientific approaches seek medical causes of the behaviors that manifested themselves as possession. A biologist named Linnda R. Caporael argued in 1976 that the symptoms of possession derived from ergot poisoning.185 Ergot is a fungus (Claviceps purpurea) that grows on certain cereal grains. One such grain is rye, which the people of Salem cultivated and used to make bread. Ergot flourishes in damp conditions, and such conditions were in place in Salem in the spring and summer of 1691. Caporael suggested that the rye harvested in the fall and then baked—with its ergot fungus—into bread produced the convulsions that match the clinical symptoms of ergot poisoning. In 1982, Mary K. Matossian refined aspects of Caporael’s argument, suggesting that it was a cold winter, followed by a cool growing season, which enables ergot to flourish.186 Like Caporael, she found historical explanations insufficient. Ergot poisoning induces a variety of symptoms. In their mild form, a sufferer might endure giddiness, feelings of pressure in the head, nausea, and pains in the limbs. More severe cases produce acutely uncomfortable sensations: that ants are crawling underneath one’s skin (a condition called formication), twitches, and spasms of the tongue and facial muscles. The most acute cases might leave sufferers prostrate as if dead for up to eight hours, and they can experience numbness, delirium, and loss of speech.187 In the very worst cases, patients die. All of these symptoms sound a lot like the sufferings that were endured by the possessed accusers at Salem. But other medical causes might explain these symptoms. In 1999, Laurie Winn Carlson argued that Salem suffered from an encephalitis lethargica epidemic. Also known as sleeping sickness, encephalitis lethargica attacks the brain, making patients lethargic and, in acute cases, putting them in comas.188
Ergot poisoning—and indeed any scientific or medical explanation of possession and witch beliefs—is very appealing to twenty-first-century readers. It is difficult to read descriptions of people who suffered the terrible physical afflictions of possession and not reach for the array of medical and psychological diagnoses that we have at our fingertips. It is easy to see the gratifying appeal of such explanations—indeed, the relief they engender—as, finally, we find a material explanation for inexplicable behaviors.
Yet the ergot theory, like other medical interpretations, falls short from a historical perspective. Scientific explanations might well offer tantalizing suggestions about medical conditions (such as epilepsy or neurological disorders) that produced the physical symptoms of possession, but they do not help us understand the content of the possessed victims’ visions or why