As to yet another explanation for the hysteria, Cawthorne points out one of the theories claiming that in Europe and America there spread a kind of fungus whose activity was similar to some hallucinogenic substances. People who ate it, passed into a state of hallucinations, unconsciously giving themselves up to behaviour that awoke suspiciousness among the other villagers (1). Maple states that in 1946 a doctor, Letitia Fairfield, analysed the data from the old witch trials and diagnosed the complaints from which people accused of witchery suffered. The identified diseases, such as cerebral haemorrhage, malaria, rheumatic fever, gangrene, a disease of rye, etc., and the demeanour they brought on, could not be comprehended by primitive medicine and thus was put down to witchcraft (190-191).
Turning to the case of New England specifically, the American continent was bound to build up a belief in the supernatural since it was inhabited mostly by Puritans who were escaped Englishmen and the witchcraft myth had already been long steeped in England thanks to the Saxons. They introduced the worship of their gods and spread the conviction that wild women, Valkyries, flying in the sky during stormy nights, existed, which
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These were the times when many people faced trials, lost their reputation due to unwarranted accusations or were condemned to death, just as was the case in the seventeenth-century Salem. Miller explained that persecution of witchcraft was a manifestation of fear and panic which emerged when the balance of power in Salem was violated. The increasing tension caused by colonists and church authorities being at variance brought about hysteria, because the established order in which the Puritan society lived, had been disrupted (par,