The Plague and Ergot
Education train comin’ on through.
Today’s topic is: Europe and the Scientific Method
When the plagues swept through Europe, it worked like pesticide. In some villages, every single human being died within four days. In others nine out of every ten children died, and in some villages, only two or three people fell sick at all. Close to fifty percent of Europe’s population perished in cataclysmic events that would leave generations scarred and shocked by the sudden, gruesome deaths of their loved ones.
So why didn’t Europe recover?
Why did it take hundreds of years for the populations to rebound? No matter how terrible, why didn’t the children of the survivors quickly fill the void with their new, more powerful immune systems? How did a plague take root in Europe twice?
Let us remember that wheat is hard to farm. It’s fussy and requires more work, though it responds with extremely high protein content and a lot of calories. What follows behind wheat, however, is a common grass that is hardier, but is less calorically dense and much less palatable than wheat: rye. What grows on rye? A fungus called ‘ergot’. Ergot is a fascinating fungus, and its co-evolution with human beings has caused it to reveal some of its stranger effects on our consciousness.
Consider the following: if one takes rye (easier to farm and more tolerant of the damp, cold winters that coincidentally happened around the greatest outbreaks of plague) and grinds it up, being too hungry to care about some odd brown crud on the rye, then if one consumes bread made with that flour… well, to put it bluntly you’ll get high as balls. You’ll hallucinate devils coming in the windows, your ancestors talking to you, or anything else your subconscious can dream up. Or maybe you won’t, because there wasn’t enough ergot in your slice of bread to add up to all the ergot you’ve eaten all week…
So as you can see, around the years that the plague struck, people hallucinated devils and serpents attacking them from all sides, God talked to every other peasant who had a big breakfast, and even animals were affected sometimes. The rich, who continued to eat the non-ergot contaminated, expensive wheat-bread, could watch the peasants going balls-to-the-wall insane on a regular basis.
When half the population is dying and most of the peasants have fits of madness, wouldn’t you be interested in cold, hard facts? Wouldn’t you try to rely more on official, rational mathematics than the hysterical, emotional rantings of Farmer Willhem, who ate a big dinner and hallucinated that a demon was fucking his prize mare?
Ergot poisoning, by the way, depresses the immune system, which means that few children would live to age five, and few adults would live past age forty. The ones who lived are the ones who had rugged enough immune systems to overcome the ergot’s handicap, and could tolerate long, life-time doses of a highly toxic, extremely potent hallucinogenic fungus. No wonder smallpox, which destroyed First Nations populations on North America, made Europeans grunt and shrug.
Can you imagine the terror of those times? The peasants, too weak to farm the healthier wheat, resort to eating rye as the plague sweeps across the land. Entire villages would perish in a weekend, and a major city would be gutted with forty to seventy percent of their populations dying over a week. Then the madness takes hold when there aren’t enough people to farm wheat, and a population scarred by the sudden, traumatic mass-deaths begins to unwittingly eat powerful, toxic hallucinogens. The nobility are frightened and revolted by the waves of madness that crash over the peasants, and they attempt to tighten their control over the ignorant, sickened lower classes. Later in European history, these lower classes would strike back, and outright class warfare would change the world forever.
The people of those times weren’t stupid. Science simply wasn’t advanced enough to let them know that the rye was infected with ergot, and now ergot poisoning is virtually unknown, except in textbooks or a few isolated cases once a decade in remote regions.
What sort of influence do you think the diet of today has on our bodies? What ergot poisoning are we missing? Could our greed or hatred be augmented by the foods we eat?
What do you think?
Today’s topic is: Europe and the Scientific Method
When the plagues swept through Europe, it worked like pesticide. In some villages, every single human being died within four days. In others nine out of every ten children died, and in some villages, only two or three people fell sick at all. Close to fifty percent of Europe’s population perished in cataclysmic events that would leave generations scarred and shocked by the sudden, gruesome deaths of their loved ones.
So why didn’t Europe recover?
Why did it take hundreds of years for the populations to rebound? No matter how terrible, why didn’t the children of the survivors quickly fill the void with their new, more powerful immune systems? How did a plague take root in Europe twice?
Let us remember that wheat is hard to farm. It’s fussy and requires more work, though it responds with extremely high protein content and a lot of calories. What follows behind wheat, however, is a common grass that is hardier, but is less calorically dense and much less palatable than wheat: rye. What grows on rye? A fungus called ‘ergot’. Ergot is a fascinating fungus, and its co-evolution with human beings has caused it to reveal some of its stranger effects on our consciousness.
Consider the following: if one takes rye (easier to farm and more tolerant of the damp, cold winters that coincidentally happened around the greatest outbreaks of plague) and grinds it up, being too hungry to care about some odd brown crud on the rye, then if one consumes bread made with that flour… well, to put it bluntly you’ll get high as balls. You’ll hallucinate devils coming in the windows, your ancestors talking to you, or anything else your subconscious can dream up. Or maybe you won’t, because there wasn’t enough ergot in your slice of bread to add up to all the ergot you’ve eaten all week…
So as you can see, around the years that the plague struck, people hallucinated devils and serpents attacking them from all sides, God talked to every other peasant who had a big breakfast, and even animals were affected sometimes. The rich, who continued to eat the non-ergot contaminated, expensive wheat-bread, could watch the peasants going balls-to-the-wall insane on a regular basis.
When half the population is dying and most of the peasants have fits of madness, wouldn’t you be interested in cold, hard facts? Wouldn’t you try to rely more on official, rational mathematics than the hysterical, emotional rantings of Farmer Willhem, who ate a big dinner and hallucinated that a demon was fucking his prize mare?
Ergot poisoning, by the way, depresses the immune system, which means that few children would live to age five, and few adults would live past age forty. The ones who lived are the ones who had rugged enough immune systems to overcome the ergot’s handicap, and could tolerate long, life-time doses of a highly toxic, extremely potent hallucinogenic fungus. No wonder smallpox, which destroyed First Nations populations on North America, made Europeans grunt and shrug.
Can you imagine the terror of those times? The peasants, too weak to farm the healthier wheat, resort to eating rye as the plague sweeps across the land. Entire villages would perish in a weekend, and a major city would be gutted with forty to seventy percent of their populations dying over a week. Then the madness takes hold when there aren’t enough people to farm wheat, and a population scarred by the sudden, traumatic mass-deaths begins to unwittingly eat powerful, toxic hallucinogens. The nobility are frightened and revolted by the waves of madness that crash over the peasants, and they attempt to tighten their control over the ignorant, sickened lower classes. Later in European history, these lower classes would strike back, and outright class warfare would change the world forever.
The people of those times weren’t stupid. Science simply wasn’t advanced enough to let them know that the rye was infected with ergot, and now ergot poisoning is virtually unknown, except in textbooks or a few isolated cases once a decade in remote regions.
What sort of influence do you think the diet of today has on our bodies? What ergot poisoning are we missing? Could our greed or hatred be augmented by the foods we eat?
What do you think?