Unsurprisingly, the scholars of the Enlightenment era were keen to discover the mechanisms of how folkloric superstition may have had a lethal impact on people’s state of mind as well as their physical body. They were in no way ignorant or dogmatically captive; quite the contrary, they took a progressive approach to the phenomenon and tried to reach rational conclusions.
Michael Ranff, for example, in De masticatione presents a gradual, mostly psychological structure: a) a sudden and violent death takes place; b) this evokes visions and illusions in the living; c) the kin of the dead become overwhelmed by sorrow and anxiety, grief and mourning; d) these emotions give rise to melancholy, insomnia and nightmares; e) this then debilitates the body and spirit; f) they fall ill; and g) they die.
This sequence is of my own devising to emphasise the logic and causality behind it. Despite some simplicity, the gradual development represents a coherent and holistic understanding of the connection between the mental and physical condition.
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