Actually not as unlikely as you might think. Stuff like this has happened all over Europe in the Middle Ages, look up St. Anthony’s Fire.
Basically, there’s a fungus called ergot that grows on wheat and causes insane hallucinations (and eventually death) when eaten. Before this was known, when the harvest got infected, the entire town sometimes ate from it and were all raptured away with crazy visions of either heaven or hell.
This the same fungus that Albert Hoffman later used as the basis for synthesizing LSD.
You're right, and wrong at the same time. You're correct about your historical examples of crazes, but you're wrong about hallucinations. When people hallucinate, or groups of people affected by the same chemicals/drugs/fungus etc., they do not see the same thing. There is no such thing as a "mass hallucination".
Actually not as unlikely as you might think. Stuff like this has happened all over Europe in the Middle Ages, look up St. Anthony’s Fire.
Basically, there’s a fungus called ergot that grows on wheat and causes insane hallucinations (and eventually death) when eaten. Before this was known, when the harvest got infected, the entire town sometimes ate from it and were all raptured away with crazy visions of either heaven or hell.
This the same fungus that Albert Hoffman later used as the basis for synthesizing LSD.
You're right, and wrong at the same time. You're correct about your historical examples of crazes, but you're wrong about hallucinations. When people hallucinate, or groups of people affected by the same chemicals/drugs/fungus etc., they do not see the same thing. There is no such thing as a "mass hallucination".