Secrets of the Dead II

Be afraid, be very afraid: the ergot theory of the Salem witch trials is back. The claim that tainted bread caused the events of 1692 is one of history's undead. The hypothesis first appeared in Science in 1976, resurfaced in American Scientist in 1982, and took book form in 1989. Long discredited by historians and scientists alike, it gets its silliest airing yet in this hour-long shock-u-mentary. The premise is simple. To scholars who have offered multilayered and competing explanations for what happened in Salem—arguments focusing on gender relations, town politics, Indian wars, and fraud—Witches Curse offers a one-line rejoinder. To paraphrase James Carville, “It was the rye, stupid.” To reach this facile conclusion, Witches Curse turns Linnda Caporeal, an academic psychologist who pioneered the ergot theory during her undergraduate days, into a detective. “If the Salem trials were today,” the narrator, the teen heartthrob Liev Schreiber, asks, “could

Art · Biology · Curse · Epistemology · Literature · Political science · Premise · Skepticism · Theology · Witch · Archaeology and Natural History · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · History · Law · Mormonism, Religion, and History · Philosophy