Witches' Ointments
Information About Witches' Ointments
From The Encyclopaedia of Psychoactive Substances
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© Richard Rudgley
Largely due to the fact that most of the records we have concerning the practices and beliefs of the European witches are from hostile sources, such as the Inquisition and the witch finders, they have long been portrayed as evil conspirators and collaborators with the demonic world.
It seems that witchcraft was not so much anti-Christian as pre-Christian in its beliefs. Central to the shamanistic ceremonial life of the witches was the preparation and use of the so-called flying ointments.
These salves, or ointments (usually described as green or greenish in color), when rubbed on the naked body of the witch were said to enable her to fly. In the mountains of Afghanistan the use of a similar ointment, containing the hallucinogenic fly-agaric mushroom, is reported from recent history.
In Uzbekistan and other parts of Central Asia adjacent to Afghanistan, cannabis extracts are rubbed on the skin in the form of a kind of massage oil. The topical administration of psychoactive substances was also practised by the Aztecs whose ointments included tobacco, poisonous insects and hallucinogenic plants among the ingredients.
The making of such ointments is known to be very old. Ovid in his Metamorphoses (XV: 356) describes Scythian women using magical salves in order to transform into birds, a distinctly shamanic activity. Pamphile, a malevolent sorceress in the Golden Ass of Apuleius (written in the second century AD), turns into an owl with the help of a flying ointment.
The flight of the witch was not, of course, literal but was rather a hallucinatory experience induced by psychoactive substances in the ointment. Yet so vivid and so powerful were the sensations caused by the drugs that many seemed to believe the experience to be actual flight and transportation of the physical body.
Travelling On A Broomstick
Travelling on a broomstick, or by transforming into a bird or other creature, the witch would find her way to the sabbats, the name given to the nocturnal gatherings of witches, demons and other spirits, at which frenzied dancing and sexual orgies took place.
In many accounts the witch is said to have applied the flying ointment all over her body, but some modern researchers have questioned how effectively the drugs could have permeated the skin and so intoxicated the user (although the experiments of Peukert, cited below, suggest that this is adequate).
Nevertheless, it has been suggested that the psychoactive effects would have been intensified if the ointment were introduced through the sensitive vaginal membranes by means of an anointed staff or broomstick. Not only does this help to explain how the ointment worked on a chemical level but also explains the frequent sexual fantasies of the sabbat.
Another common experience of the witches, at least according to their accounts before their inquisitors, was that when they had sexual intercourse with the 'devil' his penis was painfully cold. This may refer to the insertion of the broom, accompanied by rapid changes in body temperature caused by the initial effects of the drugs.
Whilst the vaginal method of administering the hallucinogenic ointments may well have been a common means, it is also possible that anal administration was practised. Many of the heretical enemies of the Church were accused of propagating anal intercourse - the Manichaeans, the Albigensians, the Cathars and the Bogomils among them.
In fact, the English word 'buggery' derives from Bulgarus (Bulgaria), the home of the Bogomils. Certainly the use of enemas or clysters (glysters) for administering medicines (including henbane) was known in Europe long before medieval times. The insertion of hallucinogenic substances by way of an enema is a fairly common practice in native South American cultures.
There are numerous accounts of the use of flying ointments in the annals of witchcraft, but only a fraction of these give more than a hint of what ingredients actually made up the ointments themselves.
It seems likely that witches, like present-day shamans, kept their own recipes secret, not only for fear of persecution but also to enhance their own status and reputation among their own kind. A number of reliable formulae for the composition of flying ointments do remain.
Among a welter of bizarre and often sinister admixtures, such as human fat, cat's brains and bat's blood, there are a few particular plants which recur in the brews again and again and which are also known to have hallucinogenic properties.
So, chemically speaking, the visions and sensations of the witches' flights were induced by a small number of key plants, most of them closely related members of the potato family.
The most important were the 'infernal trinity' of saturnian herbs (Henbane, Belladonna, Mandrake and Satumian/Satumine herbs). Other hallucinogenic and narcotic plants that made up the ointments include thorn-apple (Datura), black hellebore, sweet flag (Acorus calamus), opium and cannabis.
Wolfs bane or aconite is almost invariably included in the recipe of the ointments and this plant is supposed to make the user feel that they have fur or feathers. This may go towards explaining the bird transformations alluded to above, as well as the legend of the werewolf.
As a number of early observers were aware that the witches' flights were caused by psychoactive substances, so the idea that lycanthropy (the apparent transformation of a human into a wolf) was an effect caused by drugs is no modern discovery.
In 1599 Chauvincourt wrote that such metamorphoses were illusions caused by: powders, potions, and noxious herbs, which are able to dazzle all who come under their baneful and magic influence.'
Jean de Nynauld, writing at the beginning of the seventeenth century, not only concurred with Chauvincourt on the hallucinogenic origins of werewolf transformations but also gave details of the specific type of ointment used to turn into an animal.
The ointment included amongst its ingredients parts of snakes, toads, hedgehogs and other animals mixed with plants and human blood.
There has been little investigation of the human and animal ingredients of the ointments and it has been generally presumed that their inclusion in the brews was for their 'magical', not chemical, effects.
However, with the comparatively recent discovery of the possible extent of psychoactive fauna, the idea that some animal parts may have been used for chemical effects needs investigating.
The toad was one of the most important of the witches' familiars and the now well-established fact of the hallucinogenic properties of certain species makes it the prime candidate.
Alfonso Tostado, the Bishop of Avila and the greatest Spanish theologian of his time, gave the opinion in 1436 that the witches' sabbat was a delusion caused by the drugs in the witches' ointments.
The enlightened Spanish doctor Andres Fernandez de Laguna (1499-1560), physician to Emperor Charles V and Philip II, believed that the users of the ointments were suffering from a kind of mental illness.
De Laguna undertook his own experimental work on the effects of such ointments by obtaining a supply of a salve from a friend who was a constable. He did not use the ointment on himself but:
In the city of Metz I had the wife of the public executioner anointed with it from head to foot. She through jealousy of her husband had completely lost power of sleep and had become half insane in consequence . . . no sooner did I anoint her than she opened her eyes wide like a rabbit, and soon they looked like those of a cooked hare when she fell into such a profound sleep that I thought I should never be able to awake her . . . after a lapse of thirty-six hours, I restored her to her senses and sanity.
Her first words were 'why did you awaken me ... at such an inauspicious moment? Why I was surrounded by all the delights of the world.'
What is made clear from this account is that the ointment certainly worked, even though it does not seem to have been administered into the vagina. De Laguna is of the opinion that the commonly reported sensation of excessive cold attributed to the devil's penis is actually due to the physiological effects of the ointment, which makes the user feel cold to the marrow of their bones.
Such experimental attitudes to the ointments, if not exactly commonplace, were certainly more frequent than might be supposed for an era too often portrayed as entirely dominated by superstition and bigotry.
The French philosopher and astronomer Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655) massaged some unwitting peasants with a psychoactive salve, who promptly fell into a deep sleep; on awakening they reported that they had visited the sabbat. John Baptista Porta, in his sixteenth-century work Natural Magick, reports on the strange behaviour of some men (the ointments were not exclusively a feminine preserve) who were under the influence of such a powerful witches' potion.
He describes one case in which a man thought himself changed into a goose and would eat grass and beat the ground with his teeth in imitation of a beak, singing whilst clapping his hands as if they were wings. Another believed he was a fish and would swim on the ground diving and surfacing as he went.
Such bizarre and ludicrous behaviour is reminiscent of the accidental mass Datura intoxication experienced at Jamestown (Datura). Whilst the individuals described by Porta may simply have been using the drugs in a recreational fashion it is possible that they may have been seeking magical transformation into an animal spirit, a practice of shamans throughout the world.
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon (1561-1626), one of the founders of modern science, notes that the 'imaginings' (i.e. hallucinations) of both the ancient witches of Thessaly in northern Greece and their later European counterparts were caused not by incantations or ceremonies but by ointments which are 'opiate and soporiferous'.
He said that these were such 'potent medicines' that if they were taken internally the result would be fatal. He also recognized that only some of the ingredients were actually psychoactive. According to Bacon, the 'soporiferous medicines' included henbane, hemlock, mandrake, moon shade, tobacco, opium, saffron and poplar leaves.
Sometimes observers who were aware that the flights of the witches were caused by psychoactive substances tried to rationalize with the users of the ointments, successfully in a case described by Johannes Nider in a book published in 1692:
I shall . . . show how so many people are deceived in their sleep, that upon wakening they altogether believe that they have actually seen what has happened only in the inner part of the mind.
I heard my teacher give this account: a certain priest of our order entered a village where he came upon a woman so out of her senses that she believed herself to be transported through the air during the night with Diana [the pagan goddess] and other women. When he attempted to remove this heresy from her by means of wholesome discourse she steadfastly maintained her belief. The priest then asked her:
'Allow me to be present when you depart on the next occasion.' She answered: 'I agree to it and you will observe my departure in the presence (if you wish) of suitable witnesses.' Therefore, when the day for the departure arrived, which the old woman had previously determined, the priest showed up with trustworthy townsmen to convince this fanatic of her madness.
The woman, having placed a large bowl, which was used for kneading dough, on top of a stool, stepped into the bowl and sat herself down. Then, rubbing ointment on herself to the accompaniment of magic incantations she lay her head back and immediately fell asleep.
With the labour of the devil she dreamed of Mistress Venus and other superstitions so vividly that, crying out with a shout and striking her hands about, she jarred the bowl in which she was sitting and, falling down from the stool seriously injured herself about the head.
As she lay there awakened, the priest cried out to her that she had not moved: Tor Heaven's sake, where are you? You were not with Diana and as will be attested by these present, you never left this bowl.' Thus, by this act and by thoughtful exhortations he drew out this belief from her abominable soul.
There do not seem to be accounts of accidental self-poisoning by witches using these ointments, which is quite striking bearing in mind the great number of potentially toxic plant extracts contained in them.
This may suggest that the recipes were handed down so that the health risks were minimized. Karl Kiesewetter, who seems to have been the first modern investigator to try out the ointment recipes on himself, accidentally died as a consequence of administering a lethal preparation.
Professor Will-Erich Peukert, a scholar of folklore from Gottingen in Germany, concocted a flying ointment based on a mixture of belladonna, henbane and datura, and, along with some colleagues, he experimented with it by rubbing it on the forehead and armpits.
They fell into a twenty-four-hour sleep in which they experienced wild dreams. Terrible faces floated before their eyes. The initial hallucinations were followed by sensations of flying for miles through the air, periodically falling at great speeds before soaring off again.
In the last phantasmagorical phase of their trip they saw images of an orgiastic feast with grotesque sexual excesses. Whilst the contents of their hallucinations can be put down to their desire to re-live the witches' sabbat, the rapid soaring and descending sensations are clearly fundamental effects of the ointments.
An eccentric English experiment is rather tame by comparison. In 1939 Gerald Gardner, the founder of the modern witchcraft or Wicca movement, was initiated into a coven that used to perform its rituals in the New Forest m the south of England.
The members of the coven made an ointment from bear's fat, not for the purpose of flying but to keep themselves warm in the forest at night, whilst performing their rituals 'sky-clad', that is to say naked.
The ointment does not seem to have been particularly successful as on one cold night in 1940, whilst the witches were performing a ritual designed to thwart Hitler's planned invasion of Britain, several of the older members died, apparently of pneumonia, thus giving their lives, albeit in the most bizarre of ways, for the war effort.
It is, however, unlikely that the RAF shall ever have to share the honour of winning the Battle of Britain with these patriotic but earthbound witches.
There are good reasons to believe that the witches' ointments demonstrate that psychoactive preparations were very significant in European cultures.
That there are numerous accounts of their use in a number of European countries and that the use of such salves is about 2,000 years old (if not longer) suggests that they may have played a central role in the pre-Christian religions of Europe.
The considerable number of plants (and animals) used shows a complex and sophisticated tradition at work, and in this sense the witches' preparations can be compared with the shamanistic use of hallucinogens in other regions of the world, such as Mexico and the Amazon.
The psychoactive substances taken by the witches became degraded to satanic plants under the ascetic rule of the Church. The subsequent names given to such plants in folk botany bear witness to the relegation of these plants from entheogens to demonic drugs.
Would-be witches and werewolves are cautioned against experimenting with any of the recipes detailed above; the cautionary tale of Karl Kiesewetter should be sufficient deterrent. Many of the plants used in such ointments are poisonous and their consumption can be fatal.
Regular use of psychoactive species of the Solanaceae family can cause damage to the mind, largely due to the presence of the alkaloid scopolamine in these plants.
The use of psychoactive substances by the witches was not limited to ointments; there are also accounts suggesting that, like the sorcerers of Haiti (Zombi Drug) they used both poisonous powders and antidotes to the same. Francesco-Maria Guazzo, a fanatical friar of the early seventeenth century, reports in his Compendium Maleficarum ('Handbook of Witches') the tale of a woman who sought revenge on a baker who had refused her credit.
She called on the devil who: Eager for any chance of doing ill, gave her some herbs wrapped in a paper, telling her to scatter them in the place most often used by the baker and his family. She at once took them and spread them in the doorway by which they had to go to the village, and the baker, and after him his wife and children, walked over them and were all afflicted with the same sickness.
And they did not recover until the witch, moved by pity, obtained from the demon another herb to restore them. This she hid secretly in their beds, as she had been told to do, and they were soon all restored from sickness to their former health.
Guazzo fails to explain why the devil who is so eager to cause sickness should be equally willing to supply an antidote to restore the health of his victims!
Books How Do Witches Fly?
A practical approach to nocturnal flights
Ever wondered if witches really flew on their brooms? The book offers a practical approach to the question. It shows that witches anointed themselves with the flying ointment before they flew to their gatherings on special nights of the year.
Scientifically dissects the ointment and reveals its ingredients and biochemical components. It offers recipes of the ointment and advances a biochemical theory on the mechanisms of the ointment action on human senses and perception.
Reference book for students of herbalism, biochemistry, Mediaeval history and occultism of various ages and education.
How Do Witches Fly?... The Encyclopaedia of Psychoactive Substances
Gives up the goods on well over 100 drugs, plants, and animals capable of altering mood and thought. Did you know there are species of hallucinogenic fish? That ants have been used in vision quests? That barbiturates were named for St. Barbara?
Not technical enough to bore the average reader, the book pulls together little-known facts from a variety of literature and produces cohesive, well-documented entries equally well suited to the student and the regular person interested in the subject.
The Encyclopaedia of Psychoactive Substances
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