To be brief, consider that the conventional narrative of the Salem witch trials fits very well into modern narratives: religion is bad, people of the past are stupid, large groups of people are often prone to outright hysteria; it is very easy to accept and fits. in perfectly
To answer the question above, a missing piece of most people’s understanding of Western cultural archetypes, in my opinion, is that Western culture has an indigenous form of shamanism. is embodied in the witch. the witch is basically the shaman of Europe, if you think about it.
it goes further, because apparently (how you explain this will depend on your metaphysics), experience is not random. has certain patterns and archetypes such as: flying, shadow people, going to dark “events”, basically all “witchy stuff”.
therefore, people made salves from these plants and used them and hallucinated them doing witchy things (flying, meeting demons, etc.). however, the crucial distinction is that they were not aware that this was a drug experience. they didn’t know that.
since you never know who is reading what you write online, I will say two things. a) I would obviously say that it is very logical to assume that there is some metaphysical or spiritual aspect at play here, be it “pure hallucinations” or not, or some middle ground.
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