Fact of the Day More Information Europe in the Middle Ages (where a witch is most commonly associated) saw a time of Roman Catholic totalitarianism. The church banned "witchcraft" at the time, as it had since the time of Jesus. What the church deems witchcraft can be found in the first chapters of Genesis.
Witches brought with them the some-what pharmacological knowledge of the ancient pagan world and of mystics from the East. This knowledge was simply the effects of certain plants on humans. This knowledge was common when humanity was strictly hunter-gatherer. Witches knew of psychedelic mushrooms, bufotine containing frogs, opiates, etc.
In ancient Greece, the temple of Demeter was frequented by Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and others. This temple worshiped the Mother Earth and religiously ate funky mushrooms. The knowledge of bufotine containing toads (toad licking) is now commonly associated with Haitian zombis. The know-how to curse and even resurrect the dead must have made the witches pretty scary to the faith-blinded inhabitants of Christendom. Like the fugu puffer fish of Japan, bufotine is scientifically proven to actually make a human clinically dead to western medicine temporarily. It is not foolproof, but there have been many cases where people are unassistedly catapulted back to like after as much as 3 days of being beyond comatose. The mystics of the East used opiates and witches utilized the aura of these to gain their dark feel and image.
In Salem, Massachusetts the witch trials were a result of ergot fungus on their grain supple. Ergot is where LSD comes from. The entire town was delusional, and the supposed witches were tripping hard on LSD with the added gloom and illness that the actual fungus brings along.
In getting back to Genesis, the serpent tells Eve that surely nothing bad could happen to her had she eaten from the tree of knowledge. When she does she and Adam realize they can now see all of the good and evil in the world and can think like gods. God acknowledges that this is true and spitefully makes women subservient and pregnancy unbearable. God wants his subjects ignorant in order to control them. Hence banning witches and their mushrooms, or trees of knowledge.
relatedFAQs: LSD and St. Anthony's Fire, Shrooms and Revolutionary Thought, Literally Berserk, Opium Poppy, Helen of Sparta & Troy, December 25th, God's Flesh or Class-A Drug, Psychedelic, Fugu Fatale. View All Facts View Images View Maps Blog
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