31 lines
1.9 KiB
Plaintext
31 lines
1.9 KiB
Plaintext
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In 1692, nineteen villagers were put to death in Salem, Massachusetts. The
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reason for conviction was the torment of teenaged girls by supernatural means:
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witchcraft. These teenagers had experienced "pricking" and "pinching"
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sensations, and some contorted into strange bodily positions, reaching unusual
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postures of extreme rigidity. The village doctor blamed the abnormal behavior
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on the supernatural; he delared, "An evil hand is on them."(1) With those words
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began the greatest witchhunt in America's history.
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In 1976, Linnda Caporeal from the University of California at Santa Barbara
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explained the actions of the girls as the effects of an illness resulting from
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the ingestion of ergot--a fungus with LSD-like properties that resides in rye.
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Perhaps this is not the true cause of the strange behavior, but to the
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twentieth century world, it is a justification more believable than that of the
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village doctor.
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It is a human tendency to jump to conclusions without knowing all of the
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facts. In the case described above, the village doctor probably did not feel
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that he was jumping to conclusions because of the abundance of "witches" in
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those days. Even today, with the abundance of knowledge about the way things
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work, some hasten to postulate "God's doings" as the answers to all of our
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unanswered questions. Are we on this earth because "God put us here"? Was it
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a chance arrangement of amino acids in a molecular pool which evolved into a
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human being? Or does the answer lie in some different theory that only time
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will reveal? Whether it be in the case of medicine, religion, history, or
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anything requiring judgement, even gossip, one must realize that reality is
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impossible to pin down. Although we may be sure that two parallel lines could
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never meet, there may be someone named Lobachevski who is sure that they can.
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(1) Alice Dickenson, The Salem Witchcraft Delusion (New York: Franklin
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Watts, Inc., 1974), p. 16.
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