DEADLY BEANS ....
The deadly poisonous calabar bean - also known as the Ordeal Bean or
Doomsday Plant - was once used to hunt down witches.
Anyone accused of dabbling in the supernatural was forced to
eat a crushed sample of the purple-coloured bean.
If a person was innocent, their body would react and vomit up
the treacherous bean within half an hour.
But if a person died from eating the calabar, it proved and
punished their guilt.
When the bean - which has no taste or smell - is ground into a
powder and served with water, it can kill a human within an hour.
The calabar bean is derived from a west African woody vine in
the pea family which stretches up to 50ft high.
In spring, the inch-thick vine produces long wisteria-style
clusters of purple flowers which fall to the ground, leaving six-inch
brown seedpods to develop.
When these pods ripen, they split to reveal two- or three-inch
purple-brown seeds, known as beans.
The kidney-shaped beans, also known as Esere, were also used
in a form of tribal duelling - two opponents would divide a bean in half
and eat it - but often this level of poison would kill both adversaries.
When the British colonised western Africa, they disapproved of
the witchcraft trial and banned the growing of the beans.
By the middle of the 19th century they outlawed the use of the
bean completely, but it is still used in some tribal rituals to this day.
Calabar beans were first introduced into Britain in 1840 and
planted in the Edinburgh Botanical Gardens in 1846.
In 1863, the medical attributes of the deadly bean were
examined by Sir Thomas Fraser.
It has since been cultivated in medicine and is the source of
the drug physostigmine which is a powerful stimulant of muscular
contractions.
Calabar beans kill by contracting the heart, the diaphragm and
the pulmonary muscles to rigid paralysis.
In medicine, this controlled contraction can be used to
stimulate the muscles after surgery as well as in ophthalmology.
Physostigmine is a miotic which causes the pupil of the eye to
contract and helps to reverse the build-up of pressure inside the eye that
can lead to blindness from the disease glaucoma.
Physostigmine is also currently being studied in connection
with Alzheimer's disease.
Chemicals derived from the bean have previously been used in
agricultural insecticides and chemical warfare nerve gases.
Author: Caroline Gammell
http://www.paganality.com/pagan-article-cultural-issues-obstacles-to-faith-deadly-bean-used-in-witchcraft-trials
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