Rye Grandmothers


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.