Of Loaves & LSD
John Merson
Throughout the early centuries of this millenium, rural communities in Europe and the Americas were beset by visitations. Large numbers of people would suddenly find themselves having visions. Depending on the political climate, those people were defined as being possessed by angels or devils. In the latter case, the usual outcome was the auto-da-fé, or burning at the stake.
However in 1951, in a remote village in southern France near the border with Spain, a remarkable event occured which may help to explain some of these visitations. At the Easter celebrations in the local church, a visitation by the Virgin was reported. Many people saw her, while others claimed to have had visions of a whole pantheon of saints. Others, after hearing voices, set off on pilgrimages to one or another of the holy shrines scattered through the region. Otherwise psychologically stable individuals began to show signs of disorientation and other forms of illness.
All this was claimed by the local priest to be a miracle, but the local doctor, who was not a religious man, was so concerned by the range of bizarre neurological symptoms exhibited by his patients that he began to look deeper into the phenomena to try to find some explanations.
With the help of biochemists from the local university, he explored the possibility that the village's water or food had been contaminated. Finally, after exhaustive research, they discovered the cause, a condition that had been known since the Middle Ages as St Anthony's Fire.
The local baker held off using flour ground from his local store of rye and wheat, which, because of a very wet winter, had become moist and somewhat mouldy.
The baker held off using the worst of the grain until his stockpile had reached its lowest point, which each year tended to coincide with Easter - a good reason for the traditional Lenten fast. The problem was that the rye grain had been contaminated by an ergotamine fungus. Lysergic acid, or LSD, is derived from ergot. In reality, what the villagers were getting with their daily bread was a daily "trip".
During extremely wet winters in Europe, this contamination of bread was more severe, and so were the consequences for those who ate it. Occasionally, villagers suffered not only hallucinations, but severe convulsions. In extreme cases, their hands and feet would go black and gangrenous and eventually these victims would die.
A mild form of ergotamine poisoning may have played a role in some of the more bizarre outbreaks of religious fervour, such as the Children's Crusade of 1212 that saw brigades of children heading off to conquer the Holy Land by love, not force. Most died before they reached their own borders.
In 1374 at Aixe-la-Chapelle, groups of villagers who had eaten contaminated bread were found dancing wildly, foaming at the mouth and screaming about wild visions. When ergotamine poisoning did not kill people, it may well have led to the first rave parties of the millenium.
