The Psychedelic Nightmare of Ergotism

now modern day France. Now what do you expect to find? It's such a monastery. How is your education and entertainment prepared you for such a place? Pious robed brothers praying before elaborate altars, studious monks secluded in their libraries and scriptoriums ah. But here you encounter the stinch of illness and corruption. You hear the cries of the pain than

the mad. You find the hospital brothers of Saint Anthony as they tirelessly treat victims of plague, skin disease, and especially that condition known as Saint Anthony's fire or urgic poisoning. As you make your way through the monastery, you glimpse of blackened limbs, you hear psychotic cries, voices describing hallucination straight from some surrealistic vision of hell, and as you enter the sanctuary yourself, you glimpse and altar unlike anything

you've imagined before. Behold the Eisenheim altarpiece of Matthias Grunwald in its current configuration. The great folding work of art presents a familiar motif, Jesus Christ crucified at Golgotha, but it's easily the most grotesque image of Christ you've ever seen. You'd be tempted to think it blasphemous, even for Christ's skin is dark at times, greenish, gangrenous, covered in sores

in addition to the familiar wounds of execution. Because this work of art, this interpretation of absolute human death and suffering, emerges from the ravages of ergotism. Ergotism, so that's going to be the subject today. But I've seen this work of art you're talking about, You've called attention to it before Gruenwald's Diseased Christ, and it looks like something that is, as you pointed out, intended to be blasphemous. It looks

like something from a metal album insert. Like, you know, you're flipping through the pages of the CD insert and it's got a pentagram, and it's got like a you know, crucified goat with blood everywhere, and then it's got this diseased Jesus with with you know, sores and this greenish body. It doesn't look like your traditional image of the of pious Christ, right, Yeah, it's and it's it's fascinating and it it is. When we get into it, you'll see

that it is a very pious image. It was not created out of any sense of you know, blasphemous outrage, but it does look like zombie Jesus. Yeah, So what is Ergot And what in the world would something called Ergot have to do with a diseased Christ from a metal album insert? So imagine you're walking through a grain field with tall stalks of rye all around you, and so we're not all that close to the agriculture that sustains our lives anymore. Rye might actually need some explanation.

It is a cultivated grass crops, so it's like wheat or barley, and we can use rye to make bread's beer, whiskey. The scientific name of this plant is secale cereal l A. I think secale and then like cereal with any at

the end. So you're a body meeting a body coming through the rye, and you notice that on some of the stalks of the grass of the rye, where the little rye grains would normally be poking out of the stalk, there are instead these long, dark, purple to black fingers reaching into the air like twisted, deformed little uh mockery's of the seeds that should be in this plant. One are these things? Well, each of these little fingers is an ergot, or another name for them in science would

be the sclerotium. It's a piece of fungal tissue, so it's mushroom in nature fungus, and it grows when the grain is infected with the fungus Claviceps perpurea, and that's a parasite that infects the ovaries, the female sex organs of the plant. In grasses and the host is most soften rye, but other grasses and grains can fall victim

to ergot. This is so common in rye that people actually thought it was a part of the grain up until the eighteen fifties when we really began to understand the true fungal nature of the ergot, which is something to keep in mind as we discussed the problems that are mgered from human consumption of ergan. Exactly right. And so we're gonna get to the human consumption in a minute,

because that's central to the podcast. But first we should actually talk about what this thing is, what does it due to the plants because nobody, nobody cares about the plants. They're the ones that really suffer. So the urga itself, what is this thing's little black, purple black finger poking up out of the rye stalk. The urg it itself

is what's known as an overwintering structure. It so it's this protective architecture that allows the fungus to survive through the freezing season and make it to the next stage in its reproductive cycle. Uh and clavisups produces both sexual and asexual spores to spread and infect new hosts. When the fungal infection cycle begins, you'll often see do forming

on the ovaries of the host plants. You know where where the seed and grain structure is, and this sticky residue is a mixture of the plant's own sap and then a sexually produced fungal spores called canidia. And these a sexual spores can in effect other hosts when they're spread by physical contact, so on the bodies of insects, or even by the splashes of rain drops. I don't know if you've seen anything about how some parasites spread

from plant to plant by the rain. And the rain hits the plant, it splashes the parasite everywhere onto the plants next to it, So that's one method of transmission. But then as the seed head matures, some of it's normally healthy grains are replaced by these ergo it's or sclerotia, which are designed to keep the fungal parasite alive through

the cold months. When the spring arrives, the surviving ergot sprout multiple stromata, which are these stalks with little knobs at the end, and they look more like what you

think of when you hear the word mushroom. There the stromata singular stroma produced sexual spores as opposed to the a sexual spores produced at the earlier stage called asco spores, and once the spores are developed, they get spit out into the air to carry on the circle of life of fungus, and so, like wind driven pollen, they get caught in the stigma of other host plants and go on to infect new grass ovaries. So that's the story of Claviceps purpurea. It's not trying to get into you.

It's trying to get into the rye. It wants to spread from plant to plant like a plague upon the earth and become the zombie virus that that is the rye apocalypse. But that is not actually the end of

the story. Because let's say we're back walking through this field of infected rye, and instead of just walking through the field, you're walking through the field with a scythe and you're harvesting these ergan infested stalks, fungus fingers and all, and you take it home and you turn it into some delicious rye bread for you and your family to eat,

pastrami sandwiches. On what's going to happen to you? Well, some bad stuff can happen um And in this we get into sort of the complexities of of ergotism and ergot poisoning, because we have essentially two different forms of ergotism that can occur. Yeah, so in these overwintering structures. Uh, these little black fingers, they're toxic alkaloids and they can have various types of effects. Right, Yeah, there are essentially there are different strains of the of the organism that

have different effects when consumed. So on one hand you have gangrenous ergotism, which is as horrible as it sounds. So the idea here is that ergotism is essentially a vase of constrictor, so it constricts the blood vessels, so it can severely limit the blood flow to the extremities,

which can result in a range of symptoms. Um, you can get nausea, limb pain and this, Uh, this particular pain in the limbs is often described as having a burning sensation, which earned it the nickname ignis say holy fire and this and it can also cause the skin

to appeal. Blisters to you occur all over and then this can essentially even lead to to to gang green occurring because again the blood vessels are constricted, it's less blood reaching the extremities, and these extremities can then turn black and mummified, causing the infected limbs to spontaneously break off at the joints. But there's no pain involved in this because it's just been cut off, so it's already dead. Yeah, it's just dead tissue at this point, but it's still rotting.

It's still that the stinch can still be just completely unbearable. Yeah, so just imagine that, because you ate the regular food from your regular food supply coming in maybe through your town bakery or something like that, you end up with mummified feet or mummified hands and you're still alive, but you've got blackened limbs that burn it first, then turn black like a mummy and fall off. Yeah. It's what

kind of surreal life is this? It's terrifying, especially when you think about it coming from consuming because we so often don't think of bread as being this dangerous thing because it's such an artificial food substance, right, right, it's not like maynnai is left out in the sun that you can just you know, we quickly think of as like that's going to be a problem in your body, Right, it's bread, what could go wrong? Okay, So that's gangernous sarchetism.

But then there's also convulsive evergotism, and this is the nervous dysfunction variant UH, and this can also result in a host of horrible things such as vomiting, diarrhea, lethargy, the sensation of ants and spiders crawling all over your body, what painful seizures, twitching, spasms, convulsions, blindness, deafness, um and

generally that the gastro intestinal symptoms that I mentioned. Those proceed a full blown central nervous system condition, and in its in extremes, you're also encountering hallucinations, mania and psychosis. Can you get both strains at the same time? Oh? Yes, that's where it gets even because I'm one, hay. Do you have the mummified stinking flesh rotting variant, then you have the madness, spiders all over me, and I'm in just a psychotic collusiontory state. And indeed, um they can

occur concurrently, so you can get a mixed form. Though historically we tend to see geographic areas in Europe with greater tendency towards one form of the these versus the other, because again we're looking at slightly different strains of the fungus causing either a convulsive organginous organism. And then there's Also this the ergic stage of the fungus contains a storehouse of various compounds, ranging from the benign to even

as well discussed beneficial uh. And since the proportions of the compound vary even within the species, the same person might experience different symptoms on a subsequent consumption of the same ergic strain. So you're just kind of rolling the like awful dungeon master dice every time you come across

some erg it in your bread. That's so scary. And also just combine this with the fact that it was so common in the medieval period, and you can just imagine the confusion and the terror that went along with all of this suffering. Yeah, because you have in areas where there is a big dependency on rye bread for food, and so you're gonna have Also, you have areas where like one baker may be providing the entire town's bread. So you have cases where entire medieval towns suffered from

this um. I mean, it was it was an epidemic. Um. On top of that, it tended to target the poorer um portions of the population because the dirty your grain, the less choice you have in your your grain source and your bread. Uh, the more likely you are to to encounter urgotism. Well, you know, that made me wonder, actually how long ergotism has been a problem for grass eating animals on Earth. Because one of the things that is certainly true is it's not just humans that get it.

I mean, people don't just get it from rye cereals and rye bread and stuff. Animals get it. Livestock can suffer from gangrenous ergitism just from eating infected grasses and grains. And apparently this might go back a really long time. I was wondering just how long his old clavicep has been attacking hungry grass eaters with its overwintering structures. Well, we know the existence of ergot is tied to the existence of its host, which is grass, And until recently,

we actually didn't know exactly how old grass was. I thought that was kind of weird, but that was true. We didn't know exactly how far back this plant went. According to a report in the journal Paleo Diversity, a chunk of amber from Mayan Mark contains a preserved sample of fungus structure very similar to ergat atop a grass spikelet.

That's a structure at the top of the grass. You know that we uh where the argot would be manifest and this positions urget fungus around a hundred million years old,

so well within the Cretaceous period, which means dinosaurs. Okay, so we don't know exactly if dinosaurs ate this stuff, and we don't know exactly what effect this stuff would have had on dinosaurs who ate it if they did eat it, but if they reacted anything like the mammals who eat it, that leads us to imagine a bizarre landscape of Cretaceous herbivores like triceratops at twenty thou pounds having nightmarish hallucinations and doing the st Vitus dance. Wow,

I mean, I shouldn't laugh, poor poor creature. But but at the same time, you have to imagine this uh, this psychotic substance that we uh. We end up focusing a lot on how it affects the human mind and perception of self and even our religion. But to imagine a dinosaur, or encountering at a dinosaur essentially uh engaging in a dangerous um psychedelic substance, It's ah, it's pretty mind blowing, mind blowing. Would be a word for it. Now.

Of course, the human relationship with ergotism also seems to go back very far. Oh yeah, it gets it gets interesting because you know, you also deal with the situations where, all right, if it is every it's only going to show up in places where you actually have civilizations consuming a lot of rye Um. There are Assyrian tablets from around the six hundred BC that speak of a quote

noxious pustule in the ear of grain. There um. We also see South Asian zoroastron texts that right of quote grasses that cause pregnant women to drop the womb and die in childbirth, and those are from around four hundred

BC to three hundred BC. But then, you know, we turned to the Greeks and Romans, who we often depend on for, you know, accounts of of happenings in the ancient world, and they were not big on rye bread, so they make no mention of it um, which of course really cuts into our ability to track it through

the ancient world. And yet the Greeks do, and this is kind of arguable, but the Greeks do give us the myth of the temple of el Usus, devoted to the cult of Demeter and Persephone a literal descent into hell. If you remember that story with Persephone abducted by Hades, etcetera. On the temple is a literal descent into hell. No, no, no, that the myth is a little exactly yeah. Um, but but they're they're concerned with with this story. Uh, the

myth of the Temple's right. Yeah, so not to to rehatch the whole story, but of course it involves essentially springtime and summer being kidnapped by Hades and the inevitable cycles of seasons that of course ties into agriculture. And this is an old agrarian cult. And in order to enter this temple, you had to fast, you had to rest, you had to make sacrifices, and you also drank something

called kai kion, which is a strange purple potion. Um. And again think of clouds proparia resulting in tears, hallucinations, tremors, and sweats and so some suggest that this might have been derived from cloud steps proparia. And uh and who better than an ancient agrarian cult to utilize the reality warping powers of a crop fucus? Right, Yeah, this points

out one thing that's especially scary. I think I couldn't quite put my finger on what it was earlier in this episode, but the way in which agriculture is so deeply tied to civilization, Like in some ways, agriculture is sort of the definition of civilization. When do civilization arise, it's when we settle down and grow crops, and what

are our main crops their grains. Then also there is the fact that much like you're pointing out here, many of the world's religions, and especially many ancient religions, have deeply agricultural themes that are based on grains. That you know, there are death and rebirth cycles of the gods and of the ancient heroes that are based on the cycles of seasons, the growth of crops in the harvest. Yeah, indeed, I mean you see that transition from the old gods

of the hunt, the chaotic gods of the hunt. I don't know what my next meal is going to reach me. It depends entirely on what kind of animal I can kill, to this more dependable, cyclical nature in the very the grarian gods that go with it. Yeah, So it's obvious that over time the notion of agriculture has been deeply ingrained in us, like pun not intended, deeply sort of injected into our minds and and into our cultures, so that it even shows up in our mythological and magical symbols.

So the idea that our grain can be corrupted in a way that that makes us sea hell, you know, and feel burning in our bodies is so is so perverse and unpleasant and disruptive of what society should be, which is safty instability. Yeah, of course, during the fact that agriculture itself is kind of a perversion of a natural process for our benefit. Yeah, that's a good point. So anyway, it's not until the Christian era that urgantism

is actually described in surviving accounts. Again, uh, and this is around the time when rise introduced into Western Europe. So are very early outbreaks of urgotism. We see them documented in the Rhine Valley in the year eight fifty seven. And again it disproportionately affects the poor, who had less choice about you know, their grain sources and their how

dirty their grain is. Um and urg It was most common when a harsh winter followed a cool, wet spring, because many would exhaust their food supplies and they'd be forced to eat the infected grain. Okay, so they knew something might not be great about the grain that had lots of erg it in it. Yeah, just the the dirtier grain. Yeah, there was. They weren't able to like completely put everything together, but there were there was some

ideas about it. Um. And then from around nine hundred uh ce when records uh evidently became more common in what is now France and Germany, to around uh hundred, see you see severe epidemics of urgotism affecting large areas every five to ten years. Yeah, and of course it becomes such an issue that in ten ninety three you see the founding of a religious order, the Order of hospital Ers of Saint Anthony, founded in southern France to

help those afflicted. Uh. Saint Anthony is of course the patron saint of skin diseases, and that the malady itself was named Saint Anthony's Fire. Uh. Anthony of course is said to face supernatural temptations kind of hallucinatory U encounters. So this is of course a favorite subject in Western art from the medieval period onward, which makes him even more suitable for this so the monks built over three hundred seventy hospitals, and those who came often found some

relief from urgotism. Uh, though it's kind of you can kind to get into the situation. How much of it is they're treating of the skin ailments, and they also treated other skin ailments beside or beside organism. But then also while you're under their care, you're probably not continuing to consume that rye bread while you're under the care of the hospitalers, so that can contribute to your recovery. Then you go back home and you're back restarted. Yet

another reason. It seems like we're all rather fortunate we don't live in medieval Europe. Um. And of course you have other things that are occurring of probably due to organism as well as all of our Sacks points out in his excellent book Hallucinations. Uh. Some historians attribute organ poisoning as a possible factor much later, with the Salem witch hysteria in the New World, but it may also explain the dancing plagues reported between the fourteenth and seventeenth

century as well. So individuals suddenly behaving erratically in mass Uh. You get into arguments, is this mass hysteria. Is this more of a you know, a social contagion, or is it indeed tied to the consumption of ergot and and and and suffering from convulsive ergotism. Yeah, and obviously we don't have the answer there. I think a lot of people are skeptical of the idea that ergot caused the dancing manias. If you're not familiar, you should look these

up there. They're crazy, the the ideas that you know, in random places throughout Europe in the medieval period, you'd have suddenly lots of people would just start dancing and it seemed they seemed possessed in some way like that they couldn't stop, and people were afraid they didn't know what was going on. And now, I mean, I don't really see phenomenon like that occurring today, so I don't

even really know what I could compare it to. Well, there you do see accounts of mass hysteria um and we actually have an episode on this off the link to on the the landing page of this episode. You do see accounts where you'll say, I have a group of school children at at at a academy somewhere, and they all believe they'd come down with an illness when there's actually no this that sort of thing. Um uh.

Also in the past, you know a few centuries accounts of everyone in a particular area claiming to see some sort of supernatural event, to all really see it or is it just kind of this this group, you know, this collective hysteria that's taking over them. Yeah, So the general hypothesis is that it might have had something to do with some of these dancing manias. We don't know. But the specific one about the Salem which trials is interesting.

How exactly does the does the ergot theory come in here? Yes, some historians feel that it's entirely possible that Elizabeth Paris, the first girl to to fall ill, actually suffered from some sort of ergot poisoning and then the rest of the girls um took the opportunity to stave off their boredom uh and and engage in this kind of persecution.

It it kind of drives home like the problem of pointing out any kind of strange occurrence in the past and saying, oh, well, this was this poisoning, or this was a psychedelic or or what have you, because ultimately the social dynamics of these situations are airly complex and there can be multiple energies feeding into them. Yeah. Yeah, psychohistory is a very difficult thing to try to do. Didn't Josh Clark write something about this for the website?

He did? He wrote where the American Colonists drugged during the Salem Witch Trials? And in it he he points out that, you know, one of the criticisms with some of these the theories, uh, you know, raises the question why only the girls, why not the others? Why only six two? Why not previous years? In later years? So when you start trying to say, you know, say urgantism

is the is the smoking gun here? Uh, there's just so many additional questions that arise, like bread, like bread, just to make sure we get another vacant well, terrible puns. But I mean whether or not it had any role to play in dancing manias or the Salem witch Trials, it certainly was a real phenomenon that was psychedelic and horrifying. Yeah. Now, we mentioned that by the eighteen fifties we had a pretty good understanding of how archetism were the last reported outbreak,

and this is by no means conclusive. There are alternative theories for this as well. Um. The last reported outbreak occurred in nineteen fifty one in pont Standard Spreit in southern France, in which more than two cases were reported along with four deaths. But again that's not cut and dry either. So we mentioned the various compounds that are that are that are in the uh, the fungus, right, they have these alkaloids in them that can cause terrible

symptoms and diseases. But they can actually be used or maybe derivatives from them can be used for legitimate medical purposes, can't they They can? Yeah, I mean it's it's kind of one of the you know, underlying ideas that any kind of particularly powerful substance produced by nature, uh, it can be utilized efficiently if if properly managed. Yeah. One of my favorite technology stories is how to use animal venom in medicine, like using scorpion venom in medicine to

treat diseases. Yeah, I mean, we we we have numerous cases where we can take something that is in nature, uh, this deadly substance, then we can use it for our own benefit in a medicine or say a spice of flavoring. Um. You know what, what is a spicy pepper added to your your taco salad? But for a fun way to see something unusual. Yeah, exactly. So with there we get. We have a few different compounds of note UM. There's ergonovine.

This is a compound produced by clavisups Papyria that we've used for centuries and even today to um to speed up labor prevent postpartum bleeding. And we see it uh we and in this we see the uh. The the vaso constrictive properties of of er get put to good use, and this is typically administered during the third stage of labor. And then there's ERGOTAMINEU. This is useful with migraine headaches

because it reduces extra cranial blood flow. It's also a serotonin agonist which can help alleviate the headaches as well. And on top of that, they're scientists have looked into the possibility that it could be used treating Parkinson's disease since ergo is a dopamine agonist, meaning that it increases the effects of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain UH.

In Parkinson's patients, dopamine transmitting neurons die off. So ergic derivatives are helpful in boosting the signal between nerve cells and the brain. And of course researchers can continue to explore uses for compounds produced by the claviceps fungus as well. That's right, I mean muscle relax here is potentially a treatment of various circulatory diseases UM, and it might even work as a possible anti tumor drugs. So you know,

the work continues. Again, it's a it's powerful substance, and scientists continue to continue to come back to it and look at possible uses for it. Right, But of course we would be remiss if we did not discuss at some length the relationship between ergot and psychedelic drugs. That's right, Um, l s D in particular. Yeah, so urge actually plays a role in the scientific isolation and discovery of L

s D by the Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman. Right. So yeah, Back in the nineteen thirties, researchers at the Rockville Institute in New York isolated lesurgic acid from an ergic compound, and the research was the basis for Albert Hoffman's work at Sandas a pharmaceutical company. And uh, and so the the roots of LSD, the the roots of of lesergic

acid lie in the isolation of the compound within it. Yeah, so Albert Hoffman was actually the one in in the late nineteen thirties to derive LSD twenty five lessergic acid uh diethyla minde. And if we believe the story, it was not originally created for the purpose of causing acid trips, now that the pharmaceutical companies had other things in mind. But but I believe the story is that Hoffman a sedentally dosed himself with this while working with it in

the lab and began to feel weird. He began to feel the effects of an LSD trip, and after experiencing that once, he was like, oh, that was kind of interesting, maybe worth doing some more research, And so he synthesized a batch to test on himself, basically right. And so I know, you know a number of people are probably wondering, what does that mean. I can grow ergic, I can cultivate ergic and uh and therefore create my own LSD. Well disclaimer, we're not recommending you do this, no, not

at all. And uh, even if you would you wanted to, I think you would probably stall out on this process. But uh, according to the vaults of Rowind, which is a nonprofit educational organization that provides information about psychoactive plants and chemicals, Uh, it's easier to do this than depending on morning Glory or Hawaiian baby wood rose for the surgic acid amides that you need. Now, we're not gonna walk you through the process because it's um it's a

long process. And and by the way, it includes the recommendation quote avoid prolonged contact with the errogant compounds as they are poisonous and can be fatal. But suffice to say that involves a lot of sterile and chemically specific handling of clavists purpruria as a first step in a long road to synthesizing lsd YA. So in addition to the disclaimer, it's probably gonna be difficult, difficult, and you my poison yourself. So maybe just you know, go watch

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas again instead. There you go. Yeah, but I want to get back to that disease, Jesus, Oh, yes, get back to the The Eisenheim altarpiece of German Renaissance paider painter at Matthias Gruenwald lived a fourteen seventy through and uh, as with a number of these you know older masters. You know, we don't know a whole lot about his life. Uh. Most mostly his his work is

what still speaks to us. Right. So one panel illustrates the temptation of St. Anthony in grotesque detail, with his demon tormentors displaying clear skin ailments that are that are clearly inspired by the skin ailments dealt with by the hospitallers. Yeah, what were the details so that temptation My recollection is that he basically went into the into the desert, into the wilderness to to pray as you do, and so

kind of like Christ in the in the Gospel. Yeah, but I I don't recall them making any particular offers, like like the whole temptation of Christ. Of course, the devil offers the you know, for Jesus to be the king of the world and all that. Uh, there's there's more of the death and offer on the table where I think, uh St Anthony was just plagued by demons. Do we get to turn these breads into stone? Or now you might want to turn these breads into stones

if they are urgan infested deeds. Um. So yeah, so St. Anthony is very much a part of the altarpiece. But then we see this vision of the suffering Christ, which we already mentioned, who clearly displays symptoms of the individuals that were suffering in the monastery, covered with sores, gangernous flesh. Even his hands and feet, uh, even though they're you know, pierced by by nails. Uh, they're twisted and convulsed as

if one was suffering from convulsive right. And so it's not part of the religious tradition of any Christians that Christ actually suffered from margate poisoning. Like, that's not in the Bible. That's not particularly a belief. This was just sort of an interpretive lens of Gruenwald's right. Yeah. In fact, I mean up until the thirteenth century, the predominant style was was to depict Christ not even really suffering at all.

He would just be up there with his you know, his eyes eyes open, seemings seemingly impervious to the physical torments. It is only after that that you start displaying Jesus as actually suffering, as a human would up there, as opposed to just being above it like a God Um.

So really um, Gruenwald was just taking this uh to the local level, you know, because he's surrounded by individuals that are are suffering from urgotism and other scan elements, and so historians believe that he actually used those patients as his subjects, capturing clinical details UH and their abnormal postures and using that as the model for not only the demons assaulting St. Anthony, but but the suffering of

Christ himself. That's actually kind of a moving way of thinking about how these people were grappling with their religion. So if their idea is that, you know, what is the significance of Christ, that it's you know, the powerful God coming down to earth to suffer with humanity, it would make sense that they would they would impart to their vision of the suffering Servant, the suffering God, the

same things they were suffering from. It's sort of like a bonding relation and ship they can form with the God that they worship. Yeah, I mean, because ultimately you're laying there on the floor, you're suffering from urgetism, You're being attended to by these hospitallers. What kind of suffering Christ do you want to look up at? You? Want to see the serene like, oh, I hardly noticed I have nails in me. You want to see the Oh I'm I'm I'm crucified, but I'm you know, really buff

and otherwise healthy. Or do you want to see a Christ that is suffering as you suffer? He knows what it's like to have the limbs blacken and and to feel the igny sassare. Yeah, yeah, I mean I agree. I ultimately find it, you know, really really poignant. It also makes me wonder how come we don't see like a sort of modern first world problems version of Christ on the Cross says most of us can't relate to severe, um,

you know, fleshly torment. Perhaps there's like a vision of Christ that could be created where he just doesn't have enough bars on his cell phone or is his phone running out of batteries, you know, and because that kind of suffering the modern millennial can you can relate to, Let's not paint that picture. Uh speaking of painting pictures though, Um, there are various other artistic interpretations of urgotism. Uh, there's one that came up that I was really taken with.

Then it's just a minor when it's a woodcut, uh titled St Anthony's Fire Ergotism by Johannes Vichland and this is from around four nine, probably thirties, somewhere in there. And we see a man with a flaming ganger in his hand, appealing to St. Anthony. So it looks kind of like like it reminds me the hand of Glory, you know. Oh I haven't seen this. Yeah, yeah, here it is. Here's the copy of it. Oh, that is amazing.

So you have the saint is very tall, and then there's like a child sort of at knee level reaching up with the crippled limbs, but a flaming hand on fire beseeching the saint. And then uh, then there's also of course U Hieronymous Bosh, who is an even more towering figure in the history of Western art. Yes, so the idea here is a little bit different, not so much that the artist was inspired by a world of people suffering from argotism, but perhaps that the artist might

have been suffering from argotism himself. Indeed, though, I mean there are there are some works by Bosch, such as the Procession of the Cripples, which features a number of afflicted bodies uh, and at least three of them uh seemed to be suffering from organtism. So he did a little bit at least of observing argotism in the world

around him. Sure, I didn't mean to rule that out, no, no, no, um And just to put Bosch in his place historically fourteen fifty to fifteen sixteen, early, highly highly influential, a Netherlandish painter known for his surrealistic, nightmarish and cryptic imagery. Um. And this was very much a time when argotism was epidemic uh in the Netherlands. Yeah, if you haven't seen Bosch's paintings, actually you probably have seen them. Here's here's

the clue that you're looking at a Bosch painting. Are there lots of little people in it? And is it crazy? Yeah? Are there like crazy bird demons, chamber pots on their head? Like just those just surrealistic visions of medieval hell coupled with the detailed depictions of peasants and stunning realistic landscapes. Like that's pretty much Bosch in a nutshell. And you would probably see his work uh on like like one

out of five college dorm room walls. Not to I mean not not just to say his work isn't brilliant, because it is. I mean, I still I still can get. You can just lose myself staring into a Bosch painting because there it's also it's just cryptic. There's so many symbols at play, many of which would make more sense to a contemporary viewer, particularly in the clergy or you know, a lay patron. There may be a little more lost

on us today, but there's a lot going on. Uh and in our mind just has to grapple with it. When we were one of his paintings, Yeah, they're they're dark and highly imaginative. They make a rob zombie music video look dull by comparison. In fact, he has been His work has been a reference in a couple of music videos. I think Metallica did one where they had some uh some some Bosch imagery going on, and then Buckethead did a music video that is just basically one

of Bosch's paintings animated. Yeah, it's it's pretty pretty stunning. So so what's the argument here, Well, if you look at Bosch's own Temptation of St. Anthony triptych, you'll see that it features people with amputated and mummified feet. You also see a half human, half vegetable tree woman creature. Uh. You see an egg shaped structure belching smoke and flame.

And there's an argument here that in the sort of the the code of the painting, that the vegetable human is actually a man drake, which is if you if you've ever seen the works of Guermo del Toro, you know the man drake or a ry Potter, Right, It's it's kind of human looking. The root and the herb was used to alleviate the pains of Saint Anthony's fire by the hospitalers. So and then on top of that, the egg shaped structure was possibly an apothecaries retort the

distillery used to reduce medical herbs. So do you actually think Bosh was suffering from the like the hallucinatory visions of ergan poisoning? Um? I can to think not. I mean, some some people make a you know, rather impassioned argument for that, or even I've seen some arguments that he maybe used some sort of ergic derived potion as part of some sort of a cult he was in. Maybe he was aligned with the Cathars. Uh. Yeah, that's almost

like what would be the Renaissance equivalent of steampunk. I don't know alchemy alchemy, I guess, yeah, I mean certainly there are a lot of you know, arguments of involving Bosch's involvement with with alchemy. But but yeah, I think it's the kind of gets back to the whole Dancing Mania Salem Witchcraft thing, right, like the to to point it to Ergotism is the single smoking gun for this uh, for this artist and his his imagination. It's it's too easy,

and it's it's kind of limiting, you know. Yeah, with with a lot of these hypotheses, I think very often you have to say, well, that's interesting, but I mean we we just don't really know, yeah, and we ultimately

know very little about the Hieronymous Bosh's life. It's just he's ultimately kind of a blank canvas, and you can in his room enough on that point canvas to put in anything you want to be a uh, you know, involvement in some sort of a strange uh um, you know, psychedelic cult or you know, some some ergot poisoning in his time, which is certainly possible given where he lived

and when he lived. But it's also just as possible that he was just a really imaginative, creative, highly skilled artist who was also who was working with with with many established symbols and motifs but also embellishing them, uh, in just a purely creative way. It's also entirely possible that he did suffer from some sort of hallucination or another. But there are so many reasons that you could experience

an hallucination. There's so many ways that you could enter this altered mind, uh mind space that don't involve the consumption of ERG or any psychedelic sustenance. Sure, and then of course there's just the hypothesis that, like Gruenwald, this

was his environment. He was living in a world of of mummified limbs falling off of human you know, like still living people, and people suffering from madness thinking that spiders were all over their skin, right, I mean you know, yeah, I mean, as we see in with the procession of the cripples. In other words, I mean, he was very interested in the common man and what the common man dealt with and suffered with in life, and uh, and so that's shading his depiction of these very religious motifs.

But again, we'll never know for sure, because Bosh doesn't say anything about it. The only way he speaks with us is through these these these brilliant works of art that are still just as powerful today as they were back when he was alive. Isn't it strange that such a tiny little organism UH that doesn't even directly attack humans, you know, like it's target is the rye, Yeah, which

is collaterally exactly where collateral damage. This little purple witch finger extending out of a out of a plant has caused so much trouble for humanity and for their you know, all the other animals. Indeed, all right, so there you have it. Organism in a nutshell. Um, look at the way it is UH has influenced our history, our our biology,

our art and religion. Um. Really fascinating stuff. If you would like to see some of these images that we've been discussing here, check out the landing page for this episode at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's also the way you will find all the other episodes we've done. Will find videos, you'll find blog posts. You'll find links out to our social media accounts such as Twitter, Facebook,

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