The Witches' Ointment

by Thomas Hatsis

  The end of Matteuccia’s trial record is most bizarre. Tacked on to her common folk spells are confessions of pacts with the devil, sucking blood out of nursing infants, and attending “Night-Doings” with other witches at Benevento, an area in Southern Italy infamous for its ties to magic and superstition. These witches didn’t travel on foot to these “Doings,” but rather rubbed an unguent over their bodies while reciting, “Ointment, ointment, bring me to the Night-Doings at Benevento, over water, over wind, over all bad weather.”62 After anointing themselves, the witches were prepped for the main event. They continued chanting—this time to invoke the devil: “Oh Lucibel, demon of hell, after you were released you changed your name and have the name of Great Lucifer, come to me or send me one of your servants.” Lucifer complied and sent demons in the form of black goats to carry the witches away to the night-doings. Matteuccia turned herself into a mouse, mounted a goat, and flew “over graves, like a shriek of lightning,” to Benevento. Once there, the “Enemy of the Human Race” instructed those amassed to continue collecting the blood of babies to mix into their magical ointments. This Matteuccia allegedly did many times between the years 1422 and 1428 in several villages in and around the Todi area.63

  After her conviction Matteuccia was symbolically placed on a donkey with a miter over her head, her hands tied behind her back. The knight associate, Sir Giovanni of Lord Antonio de San Nazario of Pavia, led Matteuccia to the “customary public place of justice.” To the ringing of the church bells crowds gathered to delight in the execution of the witch among them.64

  Scudieri also provides us with one final minor (but crucial) detail: “Beyond what has just been said,” he tells us regarding Matteuccia’s supposed visits to suck the blood of infants, she was able to fly to the night-doings by herself “while asleep,” three days a week (Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday), six months out of the year (December, March, April, August, and September).65 These trips were separable from her jaunts to collect infant blood to use in making more ointments, as her destination on those nights was always Benevento—not the home of a burgher.

  To the crowd listening to the charges leveled against Matteuccia, Benevento made perfect sense; everyone knew that witches gathered there around a walnut tree. Before the coming of Barbatus to Benevento in 663 CE, the people of that duchy remained seized by their “fool-ish and degrading superstitions.”66 One of the last vestiges of paganism stamped out of the burgeoning Christian Europe, Benevento, a duchy in Southern Italy with an infamous past, had a long history of involvement with magic, and this probably accounts for its inclusion in the records.

  This chapter recounts how and why Matteuccia’s supposedly diabolical ointment originated.*9 Sulla’s law couldn’t be more explicit about the use of drugs in the love philters and magical ointments and potions in earlier times. These kinds of drugs were taken for granted in later laws that recognized their inclusion in magic and we can see them still used in some of Matteuccia’s magic. Most modern scholars maintain that “witchcraft,” as identified during the early modern period, represents a mingling of various myths cobbled together by the literate class. These myths are largely based on several noticeable subdivisions borne out in Matteuccia’s trial record: folk beliefs about magic, night flying, congregating with demons to commit blasphemous rites, and knowledge of hallucinogenic and soporific drug potions and ointments. By taking apart and reassembling all the aspects of these early modern period phenomena we will see how between the years 1430 and 1450 overzealous theologians amassed all of these ideas into a single theological conceptualization, that of the satanic witch. In the process, the origin of the witches’ ointment presents itself. While we cannot get behind the clerical prejudices found within the texts that describe these ointments, we can follow descriptions of these ointments historically and note the changes made in literary sources and trial records, as filtered through the lens of the new theologically motivated witch stereotype.67

  As will be shown, these ointments, like other aspects of the witch stereotype, are part of that hazy intermediate zone where folk beliefs and learned ideas collided, inspired, and reinforced one another.

  And so now our journey begins, as tales of witchcraft and diabolism often do . . .

  2

  IN THE SILENCE OF DEEPEST NIGHT

  Whence many foolish children declare

  That men by night, mere phantoms are

  Who forth with Dame Habundia speed,

  For, of all children born, indeed.

  GUILLAUME DE LORRIS AND JEAN DE MEUN,

  THE ROMANCE OF THE ROSE

  That Diana they say is Fortune, [called] in the Italian language Richella, that is, the mother of riches and good fortune.

  NICHOLAS OF CUSA

  NIGHT DOINGS

  Matteuccia’s neighbors were hardly surprised by stories of night travelers.1 Such tales date back to the nascent days of magical beliefs and span cultures the world over.2 What needs to be determined is whether or not these beliefs involved the use of magical drug ointments. For our purposes, we need to travel back to the early tenth century CE, when Benedictine abbot Regino of Prüm composed his corpus of clerical callings, Libri de synodalibus causis et disciplinis ecclesiasticis (Of Synodical Cases and Ecclesiastical Discipline), ca. 906. Regino, a Benedictine abbot, compiled this two-volume work under the orders of Radbod, archbishop of Trier, who had employed several “synodal witnesses” (both clerical and secular) to identify and inform him of various folk beliefs that he wished exorcised from the rural townships and backwoods areas of medieval Germany.3

  Regino’s collection of canonical writings, the Libri de synodalibus, includes the infamous Canon Episcopi, which addresses the problem of those “who have abandoned their Creator and seek favors from the Devil,” such as fortune tellers and other such “criminals” (maleficae). Included among these misfits of the magical arts were “certain wicked women” who, having reverted to worshipping Satan, rode alongside other women who were really nothing more than demons in disguise:

  Seduced by the fantastic illusion of demons, [they] insist that they ride at night on certain beasts alongside the pagan goddess, Diana, and many other women; they cross vast distances in the silence of deepest night; they obey the wills of the goddess as if she were their mistress; on particular nights they are called to wait on her.4

  Diana (Artemis in Greek) had the reputation of being a rather “schizophrenic deity” who at once guarded animals but also turned lovers into beasts for slaughter. She was a goddess of both the sky and the earth—more accurately, the moon and vegetation—and insured the fertility of fields and females.5

  The goddess Diana’s first appearance in Western Christendom is found conveniently in the Bible. As Paul of Tarsus—the Apostle Paul—continued his journey to Macedonia by way of Ephesus, his converting of polytheists to monotheism started to rouse the ire of Demetrius, a local silversmith whose core business rested in forging shrines of Artemis (Diana). Fearing both a spiritual and a financial loss should his customers turn away from the goddess, Demetrius rallied other silversmiths and various artisans to put a stop to Paul’s missionary activities. “[T]here is a danger . . . [that] Artemis will be scorned,” he yelled before an angry mob, “and [that] she will be deprived of her majesty that brought all Asia and the world to worship her.”

  At this, the mob seized Paul’s Macedonian companions, Gaius and Aristarchus, and began chanting, “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!” (Acts 19:28). They commandeered the local theater, shouting obscenities and threatening the two terrified Trinity-touting travelers. A man named Alexander tried to speak before the mob in an effort to calm them down. He met with some success until someone revealed that he was Jewish. This only further incensed the angry mob.

  The riot was eventually quelled two hours later by a local clerk who rather pragmatically informed the crowd that since it “cannot be denied” that Artemis ruled Ephesus, someone should just take Gaius and Aristarchus to court over the matter (A
cts 19:36). Once preliminary passions passed, however, the crowd simmered down and eventually dispersed and Paul’s companions were released to him. Many within the crowd, it turned out, didn’t even know what they were protesting. Paul summoned his Ephesian disciples, said farewell, and resumed his journey to Macedonia to continue spreading the new and highly controversial Christian message. Although modern scholarship has shown this passage in the Bible to have probably been a forgery,6 it was regarded as authentic throughout the Middle Ages.

  The belief in Diana was persistent; tenth-century common folk still worshipped her or believed they roamed the night with her as the Canon Episcopi alleged. And Diana wasn’t alone among deities. Several surviving sources survey rites of fertility goddesses and gods meant to ensure abundant yields. Fifth-century Christian historian Sozomen recounts how the Thervingian Goth king Athanaric would parade a wooden idol around the countryside in a wagon, burning all Christians who wouldn’t offer homage.7 Sozomen does not say the gender of the idol but Gregory of Tours mentions the procession of an explicitly female deity, Berecynthia, through fields and vineyards to encourage abundant harvests as the locals danced and sang before her.8 In some respects these fertility deities were carried into Christianity in the form of the Virgin Mary, who was sometimes depicted as a “preserver of fertility.”9

  Whichever fertility goddesses medieval people believed in and worshipped, ecclesiastics like Regino of Prüm got sufficiently worked up over these “superstitions” to go through the trouble of rooting them out.10 It seems that the church found Dianic folk beliefs particularly resistant to Christianization. However, other than this imagined journey of the night-goers, which Regino didn’t really believe actually took place, there was nothing outstandingly “wicked” about these women insofar as they were not flying into peoples’ homes and sucking the blood out of sleeping children like Matteuccia purportedly had done. Their only offense was that they believed in the divinity of a being that wasn’t the Christian God; since there was only one other supernatural force operating in the world, Regino saw no other option than to consider that these women had been seduced by Satan.

  In an earlier version of the Libri de synodalibus, Regino made no mention of Diana at all. He was dubious, never once giving credence to the reality of such a venture, reproving not the actual practice of the Diana cult, but rather the belief that such a group existed. Therefore, this condemnation was dualistic: people were not only forbidden to believe in Diana, they were forbidden to believe that some people were capable of joining her congregation.11 Any reports of women traveling the night with Diana were to be treated as a delusion. In the Canon Episcopi, Regino at once bastardized this localized rite and at the same time wed it to superstitious practices, demoting Diana (or her folk equivalent) to the ever-expanding catalog of demons in Satan’s service.12 Once this had been established theologians could ascribe any belief in this goddess to diabolism.

  THE HEAD OF JOHN THE BAPTIST

  But the Canon Episcopi was missing something—or so thought the elderly Burchard of Worms (ca. 955–1025) as he sat by the candlelight composing his eleventh-century oeuvre, the Decretum Burchardi (The Doctrine of Burchard). It was nigh a hundred years after Regino of Prüm had first mentioned those satanic women who rode on beasts with Diana, and things had changed; beliefs had readapted and evolved as time slowly unfolded into the unpredictable present. In Book 19 of the Decretum, titled “Corrector,” Burchard assembled questions to ask the contumacious sinner during interrogations. It is here that with a stroke of the pen he composed a cocaptain of the cavalcade, coupling with Diana the figure of Herodias, another wicked (yet human) woman from biblical lore (Mark 6:17–29; Matthew 14:1–12).

  Herodias was passionately crafty. Once married to the provincial governor Herod Philip, with whom she birthed a daughter that some traditions call Salome, she left her husband for his brother, Herod Anti-pas, whom she had met while visiting Rome. John the Baptist intervened in the love triangle on moral grounds, at which point Herodias had him arrested, imprisoned, and ordered executed. Herod Antipas, however, was rather fond of John’s teachings and staved off the execution, though the Baptist remained in prison (Mark 6:20).*10 Herodias’s machinations might have ended in naught had she not used her signature shrewdness to devise a way to rid herself of this Christian pest even as he rotted away in the fortress of Machaerus.

  An opportunity presented itself later that year during her husband’s birthday party. No doubt to the accompaniment of much wine and merriment Antipas watched Salome dance for him and his guests at his palace in Tiberius, the city of his founding, on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. Enthused by Salome’s gyrations he let his guard down and promised the girl anything she wished for. Salome consulted her mother, who devised a quick plan to silence John the Baptist for good. Knowing her husband would never embarrass himself in front of his guests by breaking a promise, she cunningly told her daughter to request John’s head on a platter. Salome confidently walked back into the dining hall and told Antipas her wish. The drunken king sent a guard to the fortress of Machaerus with the orders. As promised, the guard returned a little while later, presenting Salome with a large dish on which sat the severed head of John the Baptist.

  Burchard of Worms might have heard other, nonbiblical legends of a worshipped Herodias from Ratherius of Verona (890–974), a brilliant but troubled exile and wanderer. While in prison (for reasons unknown), Ratherius penned his Praeloquia, a six-book treatise describing holy living and the profane condition of the Italian bishops. It is here that he openly disdained those worshippers of Herodias.

  What shall I say of those impious people who utterly forgetful of their immortal souls, do reverent homage to Herodiad, the murderess of Christ’s precursor and Baptist, and acknowledge her as their sovereign, nay as their Goddess. In their lamentable de-mentation, they claim that the third part of the world is subject to her sovereignty. As if this was a fit reward for the murder of the prophet. It clearly appears that the demons have their hand in the matter, who by their hellish prestiges delude the unhappy women, and sometimes even men, who deserve more severe censure than the women.13

  To Ratherius, Herodias was no regular villainess of Christian mythology; she was the killer of Christ’s forerunner, one step short of herself having hammered the nails into the Savior’s cross at Calvary. Her legend was bound to evolve. One twelfth-century poem features Salome (though here she is named after her mother) falling in love with John the Baptist. In this version, when his head is presented to her, she cries over it and kisses it. John’s lips begin to blow a strong wind that blasts Herodias into space, doomed to forever float in “empty air.” However, from dusk to dawn, she may rest on oak trees and hazel brush.14 In penitentials like those written by Burchard of Worms, she joins Diana in her new role as coleader of a troupe of demons disguised as women who prowl the earth while the pious sleep. But these demonic women following in the trail of the biblical villainesses were not the only nocturnal menaces Christians feared. Indeed, there were a host of other specters, wandering souls, and sex nymphs stalking by moonlight.

  WOMEN THAT WALK AMONG THE DEAD

  Burchard’s “Corrector” is an assemblage of 194 questions that catalog a host of folk beliefs, many of which are contradicted by Christian theology. A handful of his questions deal with different castes of women who have reverted to worshipping Satan. He agrees with Regino, fancying all these things as nothing more than delusions of the impious, though he still marshals five questions that deal specifically with those groups of women who bedeck the night.

  Question 70 asks confessants if they believe that women ride on animals on appointed nights with “a throng of demons transformed into the likeness of women,” with a witch called Holda by commoners.15 Holda was a fertility goddess of Northern Germany who went by many names.16 One early thirteenth-century reference to the goddess describes her as the “Queen of Heaven.” Some people would set the table for her on Christmas Eve so
that she would bless them.17 Throughout the Middle Ages her name was associated with a Hebrew baby-naming ritual dubbed Hollekrisch, wherein a secular name was given to a newborn. In this ritual, celebrants raise the cradle three times and call out Holle’s (Holda’s) name.*11 18 Like Diana, Holle was a goddess of the sky and the earth, and so traversed the night during the Christian Ember days, four separate sets of three days within the same week—specifically, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday—found within each of the four seasons, which were set aside for fasting and prayer.

  Unlike Diana, Holda’s ventures were aerial rather than terrestrial. Riding on storms she led a trail of the dead, blessing well-kept households and unleashing her wrath on unkempt ones. Her retinue was called the unholden—another term for witch.19 Around the eighth century unholden connoted goddesses and gods of ancient Germany, the likes of which Christians castigated as demonic.20 So fearful of this company were the inhabitants of Southern Germany that during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries they left food and drinks out four times a year during the Ember nights to pacify the spirits.21 Preacher and heresiologist Stephen of Bourbon was lucky that a certain woman had joined the flying cortege that visited his house one night; seeing Stephen lying naked in bed she quickly covered him with blankets. Had the goddess seen him in such a state she would have ordered her companions to beat him.22