How Renaissance Painting Smoldered with a Little Known Hallucinogen | Hacker News Reader

How Renaissance Painting Smoldered with a Little Known Hallucinogen

hyperallergic.com

21 pointsprismatic8 comments

Just in case anyone's reading this and thinking "man, I've got to get me some of that sweet ergot": that's probably not the best idea.

"The symptoms [of ergotism] can be roughly divided into convulsive symptoms and gangrenous symptoms.

"Convulsive symptoms of ergotism

"Convulsive symptoms include painful seizures and spasms, diarrhea, paresthesias, itching, mental effects including mania or psychosis, headaches, nausea and vomiting.

"Gangrenous

"The dry gangrene is a result of vasoconstriction induced by the ergotamine-ergocristine alkaloids of the fungus. It affects the more poorly vascularized distal structures, such as the fingers and toes. Symptoms include desquamation or peeling, weak peripheral pulses, loss of peripheral sensation, edema and ultimately the death and loss of affected tissues..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergotism

if you want the good parts of ergot and you extract them you get...

LSD

Funny enough, I recently came across an old old recipe for ergot wine.

Link:https://www.reddit.com/r/DrugNerds/comments/718biw/real_worl...

*this is not an endorsement.

See also S4E13 (“Never Again”)[0] of The X-Files.

There is also a common theory that the Salem witch trials were at least in part motivated by ergot, but there is at least a circumstantial case[1] against it.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Again_%28The_X-Files%29

[1]: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/witches-curse-clues-evidence...

Or: how modern rationalists reinterpret historical records of psychic imagery through a matierialist causality predicated on psychadelic chemicals, because 1960s.

Are you suggesting that Bosch would have had no knowledge, or that outbreaks during his life would have had no influence on his work? He was from a town with a church dedicated to Saint Anthony, who was associated at the time with ergot poisoning. The paper isn't even suggesting that he consumed ergot (as that would have likely killed him), but that feverish hallucinations of its victims may have influenced his visions of hell.

Thanks for commenting this. I'm sure there is some relation, sure. But, the correlations in this article and many other articles on hyperallergic are utterly materialist, unimaginative and limited. This is not to say they are wrong but I think they are a cumulative distraction from the understandings art history beholds.

The article gets so lost in drawing material correlations that a newcomer to art history would be drawn to overlook the human correlations.

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