"The fact that neuro-toxins cause frightful hallucinations is no different in origin than similar but less violent or pathological or pleasurable 'in-the-brain' experiences such as 'god experiences', alien abductions, visions of saints, and states of surreal ecstacy. Visions are visions, hallucinations may be pleasurable or horrible, they both originate within the brain, within the structures of the temporal and frontal lobe, the areas of the brain that produce and process emotion, memory and perception. Such 'in-the-brain' experiences are diverse and universal, they can be produced and reproduced by taking hallucinogenic drugs, be they LSD, ergot, heroin or opium; the DT's of alcohol poisoning, febrile states, and altered states of consciousness such as can be induced by hypnosis. What is more they can be produced by electromagnetic stimulation of these areas of the brain in the laboratory situation, as has been demonstrated over the last decade by Professor Michael Persinger of the Laurentian University of Canada⁵."

The Real Lesson of the 17th Century 'Great Witch Trials'

Try looking up 'The Suffolk Witch Trials' or 'The Witch-Finder General' in popular old English encyclopaedias and you will find little if anything about it, titbits of biographical, geographic information about any number of obscure places, minor politicians and aristocrats, yes, but little or nothing about what has been called "one of the worst episodes in English Judicial History". How many of us learned of it at school? Now however with the Internet you can type in "The Suffolk Witch Trials" or "The Witch Finder General" and get web-sites on this period of infamous religious persecution in England in the 17th Century. It is likely that the example of East Anglian Puritans, and their conduct of the Suffolk and Lowestoft Witch Trials of Amy Denny and Rose Cullender, led to the Salem Witch Trials later in 1692 in the US 1

In a documentary, using transcripts of court documents and published contemporary reports Jonathan Hacker described 'The Suffolk Witch Trials' - as "one of the worst episodes in English Judicial History". ²

In 1645 during the English civil war, two puritan fundamentalists, Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne combed East Anglia, for witches. Their prey was mostly women, poor women, women who did not comply with the conventions of the time or fell foul of vindictive enemies who would denounce them for perceived 'oddities' or real or imagined actions put down to supernatural powers. The same primitive, punitive superstitious thinking that created the violent religious activity of the time, both at home and abroad, produced then this 'great witch hunt' remnants of which can still be seen today in many forms much of it fed by misogyny and religious fervour. Racism, fear and ignorance of mental illness and physical disability, and the deserving and mostly these days 'the undeserving poor' can frequently be traced back to religious superstition.

Put simply, if you worship an omnipotent god, you have to find a way of explaining all the ills and evil in the world. The popular belief was (and still is for many) in the traditional religious method that God gets the credit for 'good', and Satan gets the blame for anything bad! This belief sustained popular scapegoating then as now.

Although the victims were mostly old, poor women, and a few children, some men if they displayed 'odd' behaviour or opposition to the witch hunters were also targeted. They were seized and 'covert' forms of torture, with euphemistic names that belied their real terror, 'swimming' or 'floating' similar to the methods of earlier 'trial by ordeal', 'walking' (until they could not stand), and 'waking' - (sleep deprivation) were used to extract confessions. (The law forbade 'conventional' methods of torture such as thumb screws and the rack thought acceptable in other circumstances!). They were stripped and their bodies were searched for 'proof', (skin lesions such as warts which were supposedly there for nurturing 'devils' or 'imps').

Hopkins and Stearne, self appointed Witchfinders were initially motivated by their fervent Puritan religious fundamentalism, Hopkins himself was the son of a minister, following the biblical injunction that 'No Witch shall be allowed to live'. Later, as they began to charge for their services, they were to realise, as is usually the way with religious cults and sects, that it could also be a lucrative business.

Among those who were tried and hanged were Elizabeth Clarke, Anne West, Anne Leech, Elizabeth Gooding, Priscilla Hollick, Helen Clarke and Susan Stegold. There were a few dissenting voices , that of the Reverend John Lowes vicar of Brandleston who supported some of the women and was hanged, and John Gaule, vicar of Great Stoughton in Huntingdonshire who launched an attack from his pulpit on the work of Hopkins and Stearne and the popular superstitions about witchcraft. He also published and distributed a tract condemning Hopkins.3

Many of those accused of Satanism would undoubtedly have been mentally ill, or possibly under the influence of hallucinogenic agents such as wild mushrooms or Ergot (a fungus found on grain crops in some years) - This fitted with another traditional religious concept that has linked mental illness with 'the devil'. Even today in England (and many more in the US) there are Christian sects even some Church of England clerics who practice exorcism ⁴

At the height of their reign of terror, an 18 month orgy of religious fanaticism, as many as 200 prisoners at a time were held in Colchester and Chelmsford jails. Suffolk, Norfolk, Sussex Cambridgeshire and villages all around this part of Eastern England contributed to the death toll by employing Hopkins and Stearne. Apart from those who were actually hanged, many died in the appalling jails of the time, from disease, malnutrition and suicide.

Neither Hopkins nor Stearne were ever brought to book for these crimes. Hopkins is reputed to have been caught and treated to one of his forms of punishment, being 'swam' (ducked in water), he died of Tuberculosis in 1647. Sterne retired and became a consultant in his art of witch-hunting.

Over the last 50 years scientific research has shown that some of the clusters of these phenomena, were the result of contamination of grain by the naturally occurring fungal poison Ergot - a nerve poison - one of the main symptoms being horrific hallucinations.

The lesson humanity should learn from the explanation of 'Great Witch Tryals' of Suffolk, Lowestoft and Salem is not, just, that it is OK now that we know that these particular people were not witches or their victims; that their symptoms were caused by poisoned bread, and put it down to ignorance; but that superstition leads to distorted thinking and that distorted thinking leads to distorted behaviour.

The people of the Middle Ages, educated or not, were superstitious. Christianity had taught them to believe implicitly in gods and devils. This belief coloured their thinking, which in turn resulted in their behaviour; it produced 'trial by ordeal', harsh, punitive and autocratic biblical attitudes characteristic of the religions, and in this case the pursuit of witches, by Puritans such as Hopkins and Sterne in East Anglia in 1645.

The fact that neuro-toxins cause frightful hallucinations is no different in origin than similar but less violent or pathological or pleasurable 'in-the-brain' experiences such as 'god experiences', alien abductions, visions of saints, and states of surreal ecstacy. Visions are visions, hallucinations may be pleasurable of horrible, they both originate within the brain, within the structures of the temporal and frontal lobe, the areas of the brain that produce and process emotion, memory and perception. Such 'in-the-brain' experiences are diverse and universal, they can be produced and reproduced by taking hallucinogenic drugs, be they LSD, ergot, heroin or opium; the DT's of alcohol poisoning, febrile states, and altered states of consciousness such as can be induced by hypnosis. What is more they can be produced by electromagnetic stimulation of these areas of the brain in the laboratory situation, as has been demonstrated over the last decade by Professor Michael Persinger of the Laurentian University of Canada⁵.

These 'in-the-brain' or 'god experiences' as Persinger calls them, are as real to the person who is undergoing them as anything else they experience. As 'real' to them as any other shared real world experience or perception. Like the false perception of pain where there is no apparent physical cause for it, illusion, or delusion or other neurotic or psychotic experience they are very real to the individual experiencing them. Interestingly the images are, and are described in the language, of the culture. They exist, but only within the brain of that person, they have no existence as such in the real or outside world. People who have hallucinations are not witchesor their victims, devils, saints or disciples, God or Jesus, they are not mad or bad; they are just people having 'in-the-brain' experiences.

What is really important is to recognise this and apply the knowledge to all forms of superstition and reassess all the old beliefs and behaviours that stem from them in this new light. Centuries of superstitious belief has seriously skewed our interpretation of our world and ourselves and has ingrained distorted thinking that contaminates how and what we think and how we behave as a result. This applies to the individual, the family, the community, the state and internationally.

Had the people of East Anglia, and Salem (even Provence in the mid 20th century) not been the product of centuries of religious indoctrination, brought up to assume that everything good or bad, was the result of god or the devil, they may have reached a stage of development in which they would have been able to consider the strange upsurge in bizarre behaviour in so may people within their communities in a totally different light and look for rational explanations. They may have been willing and able to look at the evidence of geographical, scientific, cultural or other such possible causes, for something that they must even then have had some knowledge i.e. that the symptoms were very similar to poisons they already knew quite a lot about, herbs, mushrooms and berries, even then. Instead they automatically jumped to the conclusion that it was evidence of the devil.

Without these centuries of superstitious interpretation human beings might well have progressed much further, much quicker as a rational species, than the intellectually stunted creatures of superstitious belief.

Anne Shaw

¹ More information on the witchhunting activities of the Puritan Christians in East Anglia can be found on a web-site dedicated to the memory of Amy Denny and Rose Cullender victims of the 'Lowestoft Witch Trial' by Ivan Bunn's:- http://www.clickme.force9.co.uk/lowestuffed/ibunn/ from which the following quotations come:-

"Then, in the year 1660 another "menace" seemed to appear in their midst when, in the minds of some, the ugly spectre of "witchcraft" reared its head. Two elderly widows, Rose Cullender and Amy Denny, were suspected of being "witches" - and after some months they were arrested, accused and tried at the Lent Assizes held at Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk on March 13th 1662. Both were found guilty and hanged".

and

"It is arguable that without the trial of the Lowestoft Witches and the publication of the trial report, then the infamous witch trials at Salem in 1692 might never have happened. Cotton Mather states that when the Magistrates at Salem were looking for a precedent in allowing so-called "spectral evidence" they consulted the "Tryal of Witches" booklet. Upon discovering that no lesser person than Sir Matthew Hale had permitted this evidence to be used in court, they accepted its validity and the trials proceeded.

The details of their trial and the accusations against them were recorded at the time and twenty years later published in a small booklet entitled "A Tryal of Witches".

² 'The Witch Finder General' produced and directed by Jonathan Hacker - Secret History - Channel 4 - 20/6/02

³ In a current film called 'The Witch-finder General' the efforts of these clerics who were men of letters, are rightly celebrated, it will no doubt add to the general view that once again evil was vanquished by religion. Many will ignore the fact that it was religion that brought it about in the first place.

http://www.edhouse.clara.net/films/hopkins6.html

⁴ Many evangelical sects such as the UCKG (Universal Church of the Kingdom of God) who thought Victoria Climbie 'possessed' by the devil as she suffered the most cruel abuse and was eventually killed by her aunt and her aunt's partner in 1999, also members of the UCKG .

⁵ 'Neurolopsychological Bases of God Beliefs 'Dr Michael Persinger Praeger First Published 1987

⁵⁵⁵Other sources are:

http://www.syllysuffolk.co.uk/htm/thrandeston.htm

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/8713/TimeNF.htm

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