Hallucinations, Recollections, and Illusions in Childhood
No. 1037,
Rye Ergot and Witches
The
object study for this experiment is a typical grouping of residential and
transient Americans in the target age range necessary for the psychological
implementation of memory. Each subject
has no knowledge of the test and targets were retrieved under the guise of an
advertisement to attend a theatre screening of experimental films. The subjects
were gathered within 100 to 135 feet of the transmitter. For the purpose of the experiment
Hallucinations will be defined as false perceptions in the absence of sensory
stimulation, dependent on two processes: (1) the recollection of stored
information and (2) its false interpretation as an extrinsic experience
entering through sensory inputs.
Today
we ask: is it from God? Is it from the
Devil? Or is it from the bread we
eat? The
College of Engineering would like to welcome you here today, this series
is about the machines that make our civilization run, and the ingenuity that
has created them. By the mid 1970’s evidence was offered that the Salem witch
trials followed an outbreak of rye ergot.
Ergot is a fungus blight that forms hallucinogenic drugs in bread. Its victims can appear bewitched when they’re
actually stoned. As such, many symptoms
of the plague are similar to childhood.
Current technology allows a modification of the natural method ergot
touches external reality by the transmission of
physical and chemical event surroundings into electrical and chemical
sequences at the sensory receptor level. The brains of the subjects are not in
touch with the environmental reality but with its symbolic code transmitted by
and stored within neural pathways.
Ergot
thrives in a cold winter followed by a wet spring. The children of ergot might suffer paranoia
and hallucinations, twitches and spasms, cardiovascular trouble, and stillborn
children should they be allowed to marry under current laws. Ergot also seriously weakens the immune
system and can lead to nasal bleeding and seizure. The implanted childhood of these memories will not seem to be preserved
as single items but as inter-related collections of events, like the pearls on
a string, and by pulling any pearl we have access to the whole series in
perfect order or can cause the string to unravel like the mind of a donkey
encountering a mouthful of peanut
butter.
Diving
for these pearls in the history of weather, we see diets dominated by the
hallucinogenic wafer of ergot rye. As
the medieval Friar Henley reported during his stay at the Paris hospital in the
spring of 1347, on the eve of the Black Death, “Thus, excitation with
leeches of a point may produce a series of related visionary experiences with
differing specifics, as was the case in the peasants observed. The following
phenomena have been investigated in the peasantry: (1) illusions (visual,
auditory, labyrinthine, memory or déjà vu, sensation of remoteness or
unreality), (2:) emotions (loneliness,
fear, sadness), and (3) psychical hallucinations (vivid memory or a dream as
complex as life experience itself.)”
The
most common feature in the study of the present group was the sensation, that
the words, ideas, or situation they are in right now is similar to a previous
experience. There is no new perception, only the interpretation of a novel
input as one already known and familiar. There is no anxiety or fear in the
perception of these illusions, and the apparent effect is one of interested
surprise with a rather pleasant, amusing quality which makes the subjects more
alert and communicative. Like
spontaneous memories, the induced recollections bring back the emotions felt at
the time of an original experience, suggesting that neural mechanisms keep an
integrated record of the past, including all the sensory inputs and also the
emotional significance of events.
So
now we’re left to wonder just how we cope with the diseases and mental
processes we don’t understand, like today.
I read our kinship with those old ergot suffers in something Kipling
never wrote:
I have eaten your bread and it tasted of cake. I have drunk your water, the wine of your lake. The deaths ye died I have watched besides, as words
led illusions of mine.
