The Witches' Ointment

by Thomas Hatsis

  And Holda wasn’t the only goddess villagers worshipped. Around 1277 Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun wrote their famous poem of courtly love, Le Roman de la Rose (Romance of the Rose). Here, Dame Habundia (Lady Abundance) is mentioned as an aspect of folk life. The poem reinforces one of Ratherius’s earlier claims that “at least one third are of her nature wild and weird,” revealing the poets’ mingling of canon law with folk tradition.23

  Burchard’s question 90 deals with the aforementioned wild ride of the goddesses Diana and Herodias. This passage stands out from the others in terms of length and by the attention Burchard gives to the subject. He attributes this delusionary belief to the power of the devil to mislead the mind in sleep: “Now with joy, now with sadness, now showing unknown persons, [Satan] leads it through strange ways. . . . The unfaithful mind thinks that these things happen not in the spirit but in the body.” He ridicules the belief in the goddess by repeating an example given in Regino of Prüm’s Canon Episcopi, which points out that many people see strange things in their sleep: “[W]ho then is so foolish and stupid that he supposes that those things which take place in the spirit only, happen also in the body?” Question 170 again asks if the confessant believes in women who, “in the silence of deepest night,”

  while thou art in bodily form thou canst go out by closed doors and art able to cross the spaces of the world with others deceived by the like error and without visible weapons slay persons who have been baptized and redeemed by the blood of Christ, and cook and eat their flesh and in place of their hearts put straw or wood or anything of the sort and when they are eaten make them alive again . . . ?24

  Burchard, in his “Corrector,” says Christians should reject the notion that some women believe they can fly through the night to do battle—the earliest surviving mention of night-flying combat by an ecclesiastic in the Middle Ages.25 Moreover, they should not believe that there are wild woodland women who sneak into homes and defile men as they sleep, an obvious allusion to succubi (although the specific term succubi is not specifically mentioned in Burchard of Worms’ “Corrector,” which instead uses sylvan, meaning “forest women”). But perhaps the carnal nature of the sylvans was already understood to mean that they were indeed succubi. After all, centuries earlier St. Augustine revealed that these sexually insatiable woodland creatures “are commonly called Incubi.”26 Later commentators would tack on their own distinctions to this general description.

  Like most men of his day, twelfth-century canon lawyer Gervase of Tilbury (ca. 1150–1228) believed these woodland creatures to be mere hallucinations. But to “gratify popular belief and [his] listeners’ ears” he merged the concept of the night-goers with a few other legends to create a single entity that belonged to the “wretched lot” of women and men who “cover great distances in swift nocturnal flight . . . enter houses, torment people in their sleep, and inflict distressing dreams upon them . . . [They further] drink the blood of infants.”27 A century later, by 1313, the Veronese humanist Giovanni de Matociis (the man who determined that there had existed two historical Plinys, the Elder and the Younger) attested to the belief held by Northern Italian layfolk in “a nocturnal society headed by a queen: Diana or Herodia.”28 And a few centuries after Giovanni, the Dominican witch theorist Bernardino of Como (d. 1510) wrote that some of those kinds of people in his area belonged to “the game of the good society.” This society would meet “in certain villages at certain times, especially Friday, when the devil would make an appearance in human form.”29 It seems that the complex of widely disparate ideas that had been derived from the original Canon Episcopi by later writers had not strayed too far from the original.

  THE SOCIETY OF THE GOOD WOMEN OF THE NIGHT

  Had Sibillia de Fraguliati thought even for a moment that the beliefs she confessed to on April 30, 1384, were actually crimes, she might not have been so candid to the inquisitor of Upper Lombardy, Friar Ruggero da Casale, when describing them. Somewhat naively, she told him of her weekly meetings with her mistress:

  “Be well, Madam Oriente,” Sibillia would say as she genuflected.

  “Welcome, my daughters,” Madam Oriente always replied.

  It would be a Thursday, and as had been customary every week since her childhood, Sibillia gathered with other women to pay homage to their mistress. Madam Oriente was a seer who fielded any questions her congregation might ask. These question-and-answer sessions allowed Sibillia to, in turn, guide and inform others in their daily lives. Two of every type of animal would attend these meetings except for donkeys; this animal was excluded because it had carried Jesus gloriously into Jerusalem, and also later helped him carry his cross (at least according to the society).*12 This animal was of colossal importance not only to the society but to the whole world; had even one gone missing, Sibillia assured Friar Ruggero, all of Earth would be cosmically razed. Ruggero had heard enough from this silly and confused woman. Two red crosses were affixed to her clothing, which she had to wear daily. This punishment, while not severe, meant an additional burden she didn’t need.30

  Sibillia’s confession coincided with another given that same year by Pierina de Bripio, a Milanese woman who admitted to participating in the sect of Madam Oriente every Thursday night since the age of sixteen. She had joined the society to take the place of her aunt, who would not be allowed to die until replaced by a new member.31 Pierina’s story, which bore some striking similarities to Sibillia’s story, also included some demonstrable differences: first, Pierina’s crowd was gender neutral; the Madam didn’t greet her followers as her “daughters” (filie mee), as Sibillia had attested, but rather as “good people” (bona gens). The flock was also joined by the souls of decapitated and hanged persons—the dead. When Oriente called her followers to gather, Pierina and the other members would transform themselves into foxes, donkeys, or the walking dead.†13 32 Together the members of this society wandered through houses eating food and drinking beverages left for them by residents. After sating themselves they cleaned the houses and received Oriente’s blessings. Other times the group would dine on cattle, after which they would reassemble the bones beneath the hides; Madam Oriente would then resuscitate the animals (perhaps referencing a fertility rite), although they would no longer be able to labor in the fields. Finally, Oriente taught her disciples magic.*14

  Such a complex of beliefs could confuse even the most sincere investigator, to say nothing of a more perfunctory inquisitor like Friar Ruggero’s successor, Friar Beltramino da Cernuscullo, who called the two women back for questioning in 1390. The charge? “Relapsed heresy.” Attempting to make sense of these eccentric beliefs Beltramino defaulted to the Canon Episcopi, inserting the name of Diana in place of Lady Oriente. Although neither Sibillia nor Pierina ever mentioned the Roman huntress in their 1384 confessions (which come down to us only in fragments), Beltramino condemned the two for believing they had joined “the game of Diana whom they call Herodias,” and in so judging he willfully reinterpreted the “Good Society” as the Dianic game. Now Pierina was also confessing to some other curious charges, charges most probably absent from the 1384 record as well: copulation with the demon Lucifello.33

  Consorting with demons might not have been the only notion affixed to Pierina’s true beliefs. Her confession is unmistakably reminiscent of the legend of Saint Germanus of Auxerre (ca. 378–448), a bishop in late antique Gaul chosen to visit Britain on behalf of a Gaulish assembly of bishops. So the tale was spun: after dining with a family Germanus witnessed the homeowners reset the table. When he asked why, they replied that they were expecting a visit from the “good women of the night,” who always appeared to them in the likeness of their neighbors. These women weren’t always as good as their name implied. In fact, they could be downright nasty. If not placated by these offerings of food and drink they would, like the bona gens, ransack the household. Propitiation, however, resulted in blessings.

  The family went to sleep. Determined to uncover the truth of such claim
s Germanus remained awake and on watch. To his shock, demons disguised as women entered the home during the night. He awakened the family members, presented the demons, and then brought them to their neighbors’ homes, where they all lay fast asleep. At this point, the demons could only admit their trickery.34 The tale is an ecclesiastical exemplum, of course, serving its usual moral purpose: to warn people not to have faith or trust in anything or anyone other than the One True God. The story was also obviously reinterpreted by later pens. Its original version, composed by Constance of Lyon around 475–480 CE, doesn’t mention demons at all.35 They do appear, however, in Italian chronicler Jacobus de Voragine’s story of St. Germanus in his Golden Legend (ca. 1250), a collection of hagiographies that was a medieval bestseller.

  THE MIRACLE OF THE BONES

  Other aspects of Pierina’s confession are wholly derived from the realm of folklore. The “miracle of the bones”—the ability to feast on cattle and have them magically resurrected—wasn’t relegated solely to Pierina’s beliefs. Tales of a similar nature could also be found in the Upper Alps in the Wallis Valley. One told of a cowherd whose cow had wandered into the deep valleys of the range. By nightfall the cowherd eventually located her near an encampment. Deciding it was too late to travel home he bedded down at the empty camp. Around midnight he awakened to the hustle and bustle of a group of strange people who were busily cooking a meal. The cowherd watched this bizarre scene until one of the strangers noticed him.

  “Hey, you up there in the bunk, don’t you want some meat?” the visitor asked.

  “Yes, I’d like some,” the cowherd replied with both trepidation and intrigue.36 He climbed down from his bunk and sat among the strange group. The meat was quite tasty, the company polite. But then the cowherd looked over at his cow. He noticed that she was missing a large chunk of her flesh from the side of her body. Saying nothing about this odd marvel he joined the others in playing music and dancing, even learning how to play the flute on the spot for the occasion. As the sun rose over the alpine peaks the curious consortium carried itself into the dawn, leaving a cowhide stretched across the door of the hut and the cowherd not a little bewildered by what he had experienced. When the sunlight fully soaked itself into the sky the cowhide vanished. As the cowherd gathered his things for the journey home he noticed that the cowhide had appeared back on the bovine as if never gone at all.

  Scholars have shown that this particular aspect of folk belief, this miracle of the bones as it is called, has a traceable passage from the torture chamber to demonology treatises, seen most clearly in the Lamiarum sive striarum opusculum (A Brief Work of Lamia, or Witches, ca. 1460), written by Dominican friar Hieronymus Visconti, wherein the author, along with thoughts about witches and night flight, discusses the bone miracle.*15 37

  Such esoteric beliefs make it difficult to determine where the truth of Pierina’s statements ends and the inquisitive friar Beltramino da Cernuscullo’s interpretation of her truth begins. Indeed, the very Germanus who exposed the “good women of the night” as demons also had his own miracle-of-the-bones moment while doing his missionary work in Celtic lands: A swineherd housed Germanus for the night, going so far in hosting his esteemed guest as to feed Germanus his only calf. After feasting heartily Germanus assembled the bones over the skinned animal’s hide. As he prayed over the skeletal outline the animal stood up, totally revived from the dead. One author has argued that the bones miracle motif predates Christianity altogether, originating with the Egyptian god Osiris: after his death Isis, his sister and wife, gathered his body parts and resuscitated him in the underworld.38

  Although Pierina makes that curious reference to Lady Oriente, who taught her the virtue of herbs, neither she nor Sibillia mention magical ointments or potions of any kind in the surviving records; nor do the ointments appear in conjunction with miracle of the bones lore in general. Tales of night-roaming “good women” loomed large in the complex of quotidian folk beliefs. The subtle differences between Sibillia and Pierina’s accounts indicate that even people who lived near one another (though there is no evidence that these two women knew each other) had variations on the story based on personal beliefs within a single larger theme. Indeed, these good women of the night were hardly the only beings, real or imagined, roaming the darkness.39

  AFTER THE MANNER OF PAGANS

  Watching through a crack in the door, Lucius gasped as the Thessilian witch Pamphilë undressed and covered herself “from the ends of her toenails to the hairs on the crown of her head” with an ointment. Looming over a lamp she whispered charms into the flame. Though Thessilian witches were renowned for their sorcery Lucius hardly could have predicted what would happen next: Pamphilë’s body began to tremor and gyrate; her arms thickened into long wings, her nose crooked into a beak, and feathers sprouted from her body. Pamphilë turned into an owl and flew away.40

  This scene is found in the fictional story by Apuleius (Lucius Apuleius of Madaura) titled The Metamorphosis of Apuleius. Apuleius, a Platonist and mystery school initiate, was a second-century Latin-language writer and philosopher, a Numidian Berber living under the Roman Empire who also dabbled in magic, both in his prose and in his life. Romans punished the practice of magic with death, and Apuleius found himself before the tribunal of Maximus. Charges brought against him by slanderers like Aemilianus were dismantled in a “brilliant defense” composed by Apuleius himself, in which he wed the magical impulse to priestly and philosophical desires.41

  The story of Pamphilë’s transformation into an owl is a tempting morsel for a literary origin of our witches’ ointment, but the connection, as we shall see upon closer inspection, seems merely coincidental. Apuleius clearly based the character of Pamphilë on the ancient idea of the mythological bird known as the strix. The strix, from the Greek meaning “to screech” (Italian strigae), was a peculiar kind of owl-like bird that roamed the night sucking the blood of babies and feasting on their flesh.*16 Authorities had definitely imposed strixlike characteristics on Matteuccia di Francesco; though her ointment had nothing to do with these literary features found in strix lore (Novello Scudieri makes no such connection). Ovid gives us a general outline of a strix in Book 6 of his Fasti, an incomplete six-book exploration of Roman religion with a calendar structure.

  Their heads are large, their eyes stick out, their beaks fit for tearing, their feathers are grey, their claws hooked. They fly by night, attacking children with absent nurses, and defiling their bodies, snatched from the cradle. They’re said to rend the flesh of infants with their beaks, and their throats are full of the blood they drink. They’re called screech-owls, and the reason for the name is the horrible screeching they usually make at night.42

  He adds that these creatures might be born as birds or they might be women transformed into birds. Petronius, a contemporary of Ovid, adds that these women, after devouring children, leave straw dummies in their place. In Pamphilë’s case the strix is also a relentlessly carnal woman who kills those who reject her advances. The third-century Roman savant and man of letters Quintus Sammonicus Serenus remarked that the strix would lead a baby to suckle her breast milk, which was, in fact, poison. There existed a multitude of remedies and protections against this kind of supernatural being: Ovid recommended a mixture of bean and ham soup to stop a strix from devouring a person’s innards43; a parent could set up a branch of whitethorn and offer up an animal in lieu of the strix choosing an infant*17; hanging garlic over the cradle was another common defense as were later Christianized remedies such as placing an image of Christ on the child; and, of course, the surest lifetime guarantee of protection was the sacrament of Baptism.44 Roman authors, for the most part, didn’t believe that the strix actually existed and used them more as literary devices in their stories and poems.45

  But the strix did exist in other texts outside of ancient poetry. The earliest known work of Germanic law, the sixth-century Lex Salica, or Salic law, is resolute on this matter: strix—women who can turn into terrifyin
g birds of prey—are real. So real, in fact, that not only were there punishments for being a strix, an indicter could also face penalties for falsely accusing someone of being a strix. Furthermore, a person bringing a cauldron to the strix with which to cook their prey also paid a hefty fine.

  A fantastic reversal occurred once these laws became Christianized in later centuries. One skeptical edict warned against the preemptive eating of women thought to be strix—apparently people so believed in the reality of strix that they would eat suspected women for fear of being eaten by them first! The Lombard law code, the Edictum Rothari (643 CE), dismissed the idea of cannibalistic women as sheer fantasy.46 Likewise, in the next century the Lex Saxonum (Law of the Saxons), a series of laws issued by Charlemagne in 785 as part of his plan to subdue the Saxon nation, lists the killing of a woman believed to be a strix as a capital crime.47

  The populace at large, however, seems not to have adopted this skeptical position,48 and the prevailing belief in the existence of strix was real enough to, at times, result in mob violence against those innocent and unfortunate women thought to transform into these terrible creatures.49 A certain Cathwulf, in a letter to Charlemagne dated 775, implored his king to take legal action against strigae (i.e., strix), equating them with sorcerers, adulterers, pagans, and those who did not pay tithes.50 Charlemagne’s response to the folk belief of cannibalistic strix can be seen in his Capitulare Saxonicum (Capitulary of Saxony), which was issued twelve years after the Lex Saxonum, and in which Charlemagne shows less brutality and issues simple edicts regarding misdeeds that formerly resulted in death. In this he affirms the idea of flesh-eating witches as fallacious: “If any one deceived by the devil shall have believed, after the manner of pagans, that any man or woman is a witch and eats men, and on this account shall have burned the person, or shall have given the person’s flesh to others to eat, or shall have eaten it himself, let him be punished by a capital sentence.”51 So far as concerned the Christianized Carolingian king, the strix wasn’t real and any violence perpetrated against a person thought to be one meant a forfeiture of the assailant’s life.