This might explain witchcraft trials...

[High on Death]

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1700 ... 37898.html

Interesting thread. Not posting the entire thing here check out the link above if you're hooked

sometimes it feels like there are like 100 people on earth that know the material reality of why the salem witch trials happened

so many myths. was not based on the testimony of children. many people confessed themselves to being witches. i have their letters in books upstairs
people write entire books about the salem witch trials without explaining why someone would point blank tell people they were a witch traveling to black sabbaths and hanging with demons

men confessed to being werewolves. they literally were like “i am actually a werewolf”.
reflection: many cultures have some form of what we call shamanism wherein people use psychoactive plants to interact with spirits and do what they call magic, and such things

question: what was this in western culture?

to keep it brief, consider that the conventional narrative of the salem witch trials fits very well into modern narratives: religion bad, people in the past are stupid, large groups of people are often prone to total hysteria - its very easy to accept and fits in perfectly.
to answer the above question, 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. its embodied in the witch. the witch is basically the shaman of europe, if you think about it.
if “witch” were a gender neutral term, this would be more obvious. but its not, so, in my opinion, this is rarely fully realized. theres a lot we could go into there but lets keep it moving

many parts of that archetype such as potions, charms, etc., have a real historical aspect
that real historical aspect, and this whole tale, dovetails with what psychoactive substances were available to people in europe, and later, colonial america.

last piece of hard info is between two classes of drugs: psychedelics and deliriants / dissociatives.
not looking up which D term im thinking of, sorry. those days are behind me.

the relevant distinction here is that on psychedelics you almost always know youre on drugs.

on deliriants, you do not. thats a big difference for ethnographic study purposes. example:
someone takes mushrooms. they see their blanket patterns moving. 99% of the time, they are aware that this is a hallucination.

on a deliriant, if you are in your closet hallucinating that you are at 7/11, you actually think you are at 7/11.

okay. so, whats the point.
the point is that deliriants, what i would call solanaceous plants like… datura, henbane, belladonna… etc., were available to there people (western culture) (wypipo) (and beyond but, we’re not talking about that)

so, thats the missing piece. people were using those plants

but it goes beyond that, because apparently (how you explain that apparently is going to depend on your metaphysics), the experience isnt random. it has certain patterns and archetypes, such as: flying, shadow people, going to dark “events”, basically all the “witch stuff”.
so, people were making ointments out of these plants and using them and hallucinating that they were doing witch stuff (flying around, meeting demons, etc). however, the crucial distinction is that they were not aware that this was a drug experience. they didnt know that.
from their point of view, they’d put the ointment on in a barn, then fly out of the barn, and go on a journey.

in “real life” they would just pass out on the floor of the barn.

thats why they told people they were witches doing that stuff. they actually thought that they were.

[XanaX]

it would have been nice if you had given credit to whomever you were quoting...
I guess I'll have to wait until I'm "hooked" enough to follow the link. <sigh>

I posted the link. Not sure how to credit it its threadreader, whatever that is.

[High on Death]

Weird, my comment appended onto yours?

I didn't edit it... anyways, link is listed, the thing was from threadreader, whatever that is.