Very good compare/contrast of the available evidence. Sometimes things that may seem plausible on one hand don’t seem so relative on the other. Overall this is a great example of how I prefer to research things - by examining both sides of the story. I find that oftentimes the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
It's certainly a clear example of how things may seem truthful based on the evidence provided. In Carporael's case her argument may appear rather convincing if not for some research into ergotism and a few ambiguities that make her hypothesis seem rather appealing.
It's likely a dash of various factors were at play which will never be fully answered as most of the evidence has been lost with those first witnesses.
I will say that if I hadn't looked at some of the evidence beforehand my perspective would have been different. It's an example of how our perception is framed based on the evidence we have and how sometimes that can lead us down the wrong path.
It certainly played a factor. As I mentioned in this post and the prior post the gaining prominence of Christianity and Catholicism likely fed a lot of the persecutions as many so-called witches may have been people who practiced pagan rituals that may have run counter to the church's beliefs.
It would at least play a big factor in the superstitions surrounding witches. Most likely it's a combination of different circumstances that culminated in the persecution of others, including fear, political tension as noted in Salem, and more than likely social contagion and groupthink. That's without taking into account the physiological effects of compounds such as ergot and other compounds as well.
I meant to write a little more in my earlier comment, but I couldn't come up with words. It's still difficult. I had Puritan ancestors, by the way, and I have encountered quite a bit of it in the modern church as well.
Puritanism is one of those things that begins well but can devolve into terrible things. The Hindu caste system might be another example. I don't know how well this will come out, but purity should be about our own thinking and behavior. What it can devolve into is making ourselves better than "those people", and avoiding them. Keeping up appearances. Saying things about others that shouldn't be said. Condemning rather than reaching out to help. Doing everything we are warned not to do, and calling it "pure".
After a while it can begin to resemble the Mosaic purity laws. "Purity" can convey very different meanings.
And now we have "'vaccine' Puritanism -- "must be fully vaxxed and boosted to attend our church/gathering".
Thanks for the response ClearMiddle. It appears I misunderstood you but let me see if I can understand your position.
Rather than it being the juxtaposition between religions individuals and pagans, Puritans may have taken to using witches as a scapegoat for those they deemed not to be the proper level of religiosity or worthiness? And so some may have targeted others they didn't deem to be righteous enough, or they may accuse others to appear more righteous themselves?
If that's the argument I think it certainly can come about that way as well. As you mentioned with vaccines there's an idea that the more boosted the more righteous one is in tackling COVID. It serves almost as a way of gatekeeping others unless they show that they are deserving of entry into X.
Hopefully that's a better comment about your first post. Apologies for misinterpreting your comment.
"To the pure, all things are pure; but to those who are defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure, but both their mind and their conscience are defiled. They profess to know God, but by their deeds they deny Him, being detestable and disobedient and worthless for any good deed." Titus 1:15-16
This is a problem of human nature that can lead to witch trials and murders, without any help from hallucinogenics. Church history is littered with it, and with the dead bodies of the victims. The above was written two millennia ago and was part of the sacred writings of the people of Salem.
The name translated "Salem" is related to the Hebrew word for "peace". It appears in English Bible translations in Genesis 14:18, possibly a shortened form of "Jerusalem". Salem, Massachusetts changed its name to this, in preference to the original name of "Naumkeag" (Native American, possibly meaning "fishing place"), but now it is remembered for its witch trials.
I also remember the region as one where my direct ancestors fought so successfully to wipe out the original inhabitants, whom they viewed as detestable, disobedient heathens. They were quite proud of themselves, and one of my ancestors who had been branded on the forehead after being caught in adultery, later repaired his standing in his community by killing many "Indians". I don't think this problem is gone from the planet, and it is definitely not fungal.
Was there an attempt to shift blame from human nature to a fungus?
This has been an interesting dig. Now I think I'd better get back to work. Thank you!
Very interesting ClearMiddle. Thanks for sharing even further! Wow, so your family lineage traces back to possibly the beginnings of this country's founding? That's pretty amazing, and such an interesting story to be able to share!
To not go into too much detail, my family recently lived under communism so unfortunately we don't know much about our family history, possibly due to how much information my parents could take over and pass on verbally.
I do find it ironic that Salem's name went counter to the actions during the witch trials. The term witch trials exists even to this day for a reason, and it's a constant reminder that othering and divisiveness continues. If it's not COVID, it's politics. If not politics, it's media. It will always be something that we fight each other over.
I was able to to trace several branches back to the founders, on both sides of the family. To royalty too -- all illegitimate.
About a third of my ancestors appear to have been Northern Irish, however, from several centuries back, and those lines can't readily be followed back very far, although the genetic signatures are there.
My mtDNA line is Irish, and I've never found a family tree connection with anyone that matches my full mtDNA sequence or nearly so, and there are a number of people that do. That's not too surprising, though, because mtDNA doesn't follow surnames, and apparently because people that spend their money on these tests often don't know their own family trees or for whatever reason don't share them with others doing mtDNA research.
With Ireland, the situation is similar to yours, with lost and destroyed records, and stories that nobody wished to repeat. Most branches trace back only to the ocean voyages, or to the lives of the people that were able to make them. My housemate has the same problem or worse with her paternal Jewish ancestors that left Poland at the end of the 19th century. She was able to find a little more about them by actually going to Poland (pre-Covid!), traveling with an experienced researcher, and digging through local records there. I don't have the resources or health for that.
So, much of the family history remains a mystery, beyond these borders.
You're welcome. I was unclear at first, being rather at a loss for words but wanting to raise the subject. I do see certain expressions of Puritanism as a potential direct cause for witch trials. My interest is not just historical. This is something that has greatly affected my life.
I am seeing something in those earlier Puritans, some of them possibly my distant cousins, that I think corresponds with something I have seen in my own church experiences as a child and as a younger (middle aged) adult. It is still hard for me to put into words, but I think you have the general idea. The details can vary from group to group. In my earlier reply I threw out a few examples from my experiences.
With regard to "vaccine" Puritanism, I am horrified to see two of my former churches and one annual women's gathering "all in" on it, and all of the people as well that I knew there or counted as friends. I would add a third church that didn't go quite as far, but I wasn't there long enough to make friends, and it's difficult anyway to make friends when everyone is masking and social distancing in order to "obey the authorities" as they imagined they were commanded to do. I just shudder.
I still belong to a church, although my relationship with it is significantly different than with the former ones, given all that has transpired. In 2020-21 I read a stack of books about various problems with churches, and I learned that one way to examine a church is in terms of its culture. Some churches have healthy cultures, and some have toxic cultures. Mine has its share of problems, and plenty of vaxxed members (and multiplied disease and death since 2021), but it has a relatively healthy, transparent culture that it has sustained across 60 years. And it tolerates well those of us that feel compelled to warn those that will listen about what is going on, and those that are not inclined to comply with evil edicts.
My former churches as an adult all had major cultural issues that I didn't recognize when I was there. I would now venture that those Puritans conducting witch trials were influenced by highly toxic church cultures!
That's very interesting. I was actually fortunate enough that, in my daily life my vaccination status wasn't a serious issue. However, as I mentioned in previous posts, my lack of vaccination became a worry in certain situations such as visiting hospitals.
I'm not too surprised that vaccine Puritanism overlaps with Puritanism in churches. It's almost similar to how some churches have essentially become "woke". I think there's a human need to always seem cool or better than others so we will use ideas to make it so. Again, whether it's vaccines, religion, culture, we need to seem better than others and shame those who aren't to "do better".
I guess to some degree we all never really moved on from high school.
What is one supposed to think when the churches that professed to be the most "welcoming" before 2020 ended up being the ones most likely to require visitors to be "fully vaxxed" (and possibly boosted)! At best, they might require the unvaxxed to wear masks of shame. I would tell you what I think of it, but I don't use that kind of language. I just stay away, knowing that I am no longer welcome.
I'll repeat the caveat, though, that this is Northern California, what's left of it (people who can are leaving in droves, some for their kids' sakes, some because they can't afford to stay, some because they want to be around real people again). It's not a good sample of the country as a whole.
There's plenty of other factors to cover here, but I left it at the ergot and the support/criticisms of this hypothesis in particular as the post would probably go on for pages more if I tackled every topic.
In my prior post I mentioned in one of my footnotes some of the studies on LSD. As I mentioned here, although LSD is a hallucinogen it doesn't appear to present with visions of apparitions or other figures, which casts doubt that the lysergic acid and the derivatives from ergot may have been the reason for those visions.
But like I said, I have never taken LSD or any hallucinogen so I don't have any personal way of rebutting these claims. 🤷♂️
I understand your contexts and appreciate your candor and specificity. The idea of visions, in terms of semantics and an individual's definition of a "vision", may vary from person to person. Not to mention how language and metaphor have evolved over time. A person's "vision" or "apparition" in the 1700's might be a person's "hallucination" in the 1960's. Great topic!
That's certainly true. Visions and hallucinations are highly subjective so we can never know what one means when they describe things that they consider to be bewitchment. The accounts can't be taken as being candid as there could be concerns if one were to seem sympathetic to witches.
There's a lot that is missing, but when working with the symptoms of LSD and the notion that people seemed to have seen witches then we can at least make some ties to whether people who have taken LSD can make out actual figures, and that doesn't appear to be the case.
But overall, yes we're dealing with a lot of subjectivity and we may never know the details of ones visions unless we see them for ourselves, and in that case we may never know if we would be able to describe them accurately regardless. It's like dreams in some regard and how they can seem so clear when we are having them but afterwards when describing it we can miss out on a lot of details that otherwise seemed so clear before.
Discernment is a never-ending process of discovery. I'll be digesting various details of the article for sometime. In a sense, the witch hunts during the 1700's are not much different from any witch hunt today involving a PsyOp.
Very good compare/contrast of the available evidence. Sometimes things that may seem plausible on one hand don’t seem so relative on the other. Overall this is a great example of how I prefer to research things - by examining both sides of the story. I find that oftentimes the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
It's certainly a clear example of how things may seem truthful based on the evidence provided. In Carporael's case her argument may appear rather convincing if not for some research into ergotism and a few ambiguities that make her hypothesis seem rather appealing.
It's likely a dash of various factors were at play which will never be fully answered as most of the evidence has been lost with those first witnesses.
I will say that if I hadn't looked at some of the evidence beforehand my perspective would have been different. It's an example of how our perception is framed based on the evidence we have and how sometimes that can lead us down the wrong path.
Might Puritanism have been a cause of witch hunts?
It certainly played a factor. As I mentioned in this post and the prior post the gaining prominence of Christianity and Catholicism likely fed a lot of the persecutions as many so-called witches may have been people who practiced pagan rituals that may have run counter to the church's beliefs.
It would at least play a big factor in the superstitions surrounding witches. Most likely it's a combination of different circumstances that culminated in the persecution of others, including fear, political tension as noted in Salem, and more than likely social contagion and groupthink. That's without taking into account the physiological effects of compounds such as ergot and other compounds as well.
I meant to write a little more in my earlier comment, but I couldn't come up with words. It's still difficult. I had Puritan ancestors, by the way, and I have encountered quite a bit of it in the modern church as well.
Puritanism is one of those things that begins well but can devolve into terrible things. The Hindu caste system might be another example. I don't know how well this will come out, but purity should be about our own thinking and behavior. What it can devolve into is making ourselves better than "those people", and avoiding them. Keeping up appearances. Saying things about others that shouldn't be said. Condemning rather than reaching out to help. Doing everything we are warned not to do, and calling it "pure".
After a while it can begin to resemble the Mosaic purity laws. "Purity" can convey very different meanings.
And now we have "'vaccine' Puritanism -- "must be fully vaxxed and boosted to attend our church/gathering".
Thanks for the response ClearMiddle. It appears I misunderstood you but let me see if I can understand your position.
Rather than it being the juxtaposition between religions individuals and pagans, Puritans may have taken to using witches as a scapegoat for those they deemed not to be the proper level of religiosity or worthiness? And so some may have targeted others they didn't deem to be righteous enough, or they may accuse others to appear more righteous themselves?
If that's the argument I think it certainly can come about that way as well. As you mentioned with vaccines there's an idea that the more boosted the more righteous one is in tackling COVID. It serves almost as a way of gatekeeping others unless they show that they are deserving of entry into X.
Hopefully that's a better comment about your first post. Apologies for misinterpreting your comment.
I came across a scripture quote in Kimberly Milhoan's post this morning that contains a passage pertaining to purity that somehow feels relevant (https://kdmilhoan.substack.com/p/biblical-daily-prayer-for-monday-5f6). The passage reads:
"To the pure, all things are pure; but to those who are defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure, but both their mind and their conscience are defiled. They profess to know God, but by their deeds they deny Him, being detestable and disobedient and worthless for any good deed." Titus 1:15-16
This is a problem of human nature that can lead to witch trials and murders, without any help from hallucinogenics. Church history is littered with it, and with the dead bodies of the victims. The above was written two millennia ago and was part of the sacred writings of the people of Salem.
The name translated "Salem" is related to the Hebrew word for "peace". It appears in English Bible translations in Genesis 14:18, possibly a shortened form of "Jerusalem". Salem, Massachusetts changed its name to this, in preference to the original name of "Naumkeag" (Native American, possibly meaning "fishing place"), but now it is remembered for its witch trials.
I also remember the region as one where my direct ancestors fought so successfully to wipe out the original inhabitants, whom they viewed as detestable, disobedient heathens. They were quite proud of themselves, and one of my ancestors who had been branded on the forehead after being caught in adultery, later repaired his standing in his community by killing many "Indians". I don't think this problem is gone from the planet, and it is definitely not fungal.
Was there an attempt to shift blame from human nature to a fungus?
This has been an interesting dig. Now I think I'd better get back to work. Thank you!
Very interesting ClearMiddle. Thanks for sharing even further! Wow, so your family lineage traces back to possibly the beginnings of this country's founding? That's pretty amazing, and such an interesting story to be able to share!
To not go into too much detail, my family recently lived under communism so unfortunately we don't know much about our family history, possibly due to how much information my parents could take over and pass on verbally.
I do find it ironic that Salem's name went counter to the actions during the witch trials. The term witch trials exists even to this day for a reason, and it's a constant reminder that othering and divisiveness continues. If it's not COVID, it's politics. If not politics, it's media. It will always be something that we fight each other over.
I was able to to trace several branches back to the founders, on both sides of the family. To royalty too -- all illegitimate.
About a third of my ancestors appear to have been Northern Irish, however, from several centuries back, and those lines can't readily be followed back very far, although the genetic signatures are there.
My mtDNA line is Irish, and I've never found a family tree connection with anyone that matches my full mtDNA sequence or nearly so, and there are a number of people that do. That's not too surprising, though, because mtDNA doesn't follow surnames, and apparently because people that spend their money on these tests often don't know their own family trees or for whatever reason don't share them with others doing mtDNA research.
With Ireland, the situation is similar to yours, with lost and destroyed records, and stories that nobody wished to repeat. Most branches trace back only to the ocean voyages, or to the lives of the people that were able to make them. My housemate has the same problem or worse with her paternal Jewish ancestors that left Poland at the end of the 19th century. She was able to find a little more about them by actually going to Poland (pre-Covid!), traveling with an experienced researcher, and digging through local records there. I don't have the resources or health for that.
So, much of the family history remains a mystery, beyond these borders.
You're welcome. I was unclear at first, being rather at a loss for words but wanting to raise the subject. I do see certain expressions of Puritanism as a potential direct cause for witch trials. My interest is not just historical. This is something that has greatly affected my life.
I am seeing something in those earlier Puritans, some of them possibly my distant cousins, that I think corresponds with something I have seen in my own church experiences as a child and as a younger (middle aged) adult. It is still hard for me to put into words, but I think you have the general idea. The details can vary from group to group. In my earlier reply I threw out a few examples from my experiences.
With regard to "vaccine" Puritanism, I am horrified to see two of my former churches and one annual women's gathering "all in" on it, and all of the people as well that I knew there or counted as friends. I would add a third church that didn't go quite as far, but I wasn't there long enough to make friends, and it's difficult anyway to make friends when everyone is masking and social distancing in order to "obey the authorities" as they imagined they were commanded to do. I just shudder.
I still belong to a church, although my relationship with it is significantly different than with the former ones, given all that has transpired. In 2020-21 I read a stack of books about various problems with churches, and I learned that one way to examine a church is in terms of its culture. Some churches have healthy cultures, and some have toxic cultures. Mine has its share of problems, and plenty of vaxxed members (and multiplied disease and death since 2021), but it has a relatively healthy, transparent culture that it has sustained across 60 years. And it tolerates well those of us that feel compelled to warn those that will listen about what is going on, and those that are not inclined to comply with evil edicts.
My former churches as an adult all had major cultural issues that I didn't recognize when I was there. I would now venture that those Puritans conducting witch trials were influenced by highly toxic church cultures!
That's very interesting. I was actually fortunate enough that, in my daily life my vaccination status wasn't a serious issue. However, as I mentioned in previous posts, my lack of vaccination became a worry in certain situations such as visiting hospitals.
I'm not too surprised that vaccine Puritanism overlaps with Puritanism in churches. It's almost similar to how some churches have essentially become "woke". I think there's a human need to always seem cool or better than others so we will use ideas to make it so. Again, whether it's vaccines, religion, culture, we need to seem better than others and shame those who aren't to "do better".
I guess to some degree we all never really moved on from high school.
What is one supposed to think when the churches that professed to be the most "welcoming" before 2020 ended up being the ones most likely to require visitors to be "fully vaxxed" (and possibly boosted)! At best, they might require the unvaxxed to wear masks of shame. I would tell you what I think of it, but I don't use that kind of language. I just stay away, knowing that I am no longer welcome.
I'll repeat the caveat, though, that this is Northern California, what's left of it (people who can are leaving in droves, some for their kids' sakes, some because they can't afford to stay, some because they want to be around real people again). It's not a good sample of the country as a whole.
There's plenty of other factors to cover here, but I left it at the ergot and the support/criticisms of this hypothesis in particular as the post would probably go on for pages more if I tackled every topic.
A fascinating topic! Fast forward to Langley's LSD experiments and distribution of the mind-altering substance on college campuses.
In my prior post I mentioned in one of my footnotes some of the studies on LSD. As I mentioned here, although LSD is a hallucinogen it doesn't appear to present with visions of apparitions or other figures, which casts doubt that the lysergic acid and the derivatives from ergot may have been the reason for those visions.
But like I said, I have never taken LSD or any hallucinogen so I don't have any personal way of rebutting these claims. 🤷♂️
I understand your contexts and appreciate your candor and specificity. The idea of visions, in terms of semantics and an individual's definition of a "vision", may vary from person to person. Not to mention how language and metaphor have evolved over time. A person's "vision" or "apparition" in the 1700's might be a person's "hallucination" in the 1960's. Great topic!
That's certainly true. Visions and hallucinations are highly subjective so we can never know what one means when they describe things that they consider to be bewitchment. The accounts can't be taken as being candid as there could be concerns if one were to seem sympathetic to witches.
There's a lot that is missing, but when working with the symptoms of LSD and the notion that people seemed to have seen witches then we can at least make some ties to whether people who have taken LSD can make out actual figures, and that doesn't appear to be the case.
But overall, yes we're dealing with a lot of subjectivity and we may never know the details of ones visions unless we see them for ourselves, and in that case we may never know if we would be able to describe them accurately regardless. It's like dreams in some regard and how they can seem so clear when we are having them but afterwards when describing it we can miss out on a lot of details that otherwise seemed so clear before.
Discernment is a never-ending process of discovery. I'll be digesting various details of the article for sometime. In a sense, the witch hunts during the 1700's are not much different from any witch hunt today involving a PsyOp.
Very interesting. 🤔