The Witches' Ointment

by Thomas Hatsis

  Bernardino of Siena, the traveling preacher mentioned in chapter 1, referred to the tregenda (the horde) during a sermon delivered in Florence two years before his Todi visit in 1424. Some years later he wrote about it in a later work, De idolatriae cultu (The Cult of Idolatry). Yet the term appears nowhere in a series of laws, De pena de incantatorum et facturariorum (The Penalties of Incantation and Sorcery), which he introduced into a body of statutes in Todi. In his Florentine sermon Bernardino makes passing reference to this gathering, supplying few details: it occurs on Thursday night; it is associated with witches, spells, and incantations; and in the skeptical tradition of the Canon Episcopi, it is merely “a dream and diabolical illusion.”63

  Later, however, when Bernardino expounds on the tregenda in De idolatriae, the passage is (perhaps not surprisingly) closer in detail to the Canon Episcopi—nearly word for word, in fact, though there are some differences. For example, some texts referencing the later Italian tales of the tregenda are gender-neutral, whereas the earlier Canon only mentioned women. Bernardino says the meetings take place Thursdays and Sundays, and in addition to Diana and Herodias (both are mentioned by name), followers of the tregenda also revere a certain “Iobaina.”

  In a sermon given to the citizens of Siena in 1427 Bernardino offered the story of a cardinal’s page who accidentally finds himself at a nightly gathering “of women and children and young people,” whom he identifies as “enchanters.” These enchanters danced through the night until the matins bells rung, at which point the carousers disappeared. Despite the page’s initial reticence he intrepidly joined the dance and even kidnapped one of the young women by holding her hand as the others vanished into the dawn. This particular dance assembly, Bernardino tells us, took place in Benevento. It is clear that this story is merely a reproduction of an earlier story found in Walter Map’s De nugis curialium (Trifles of Courtiers, ca. 1180 CE), in which the main character, Eadric Wild, stumbles upon a similar gathering and, like the cardinal’s page in Bernardino’s story, kidnaps one of the revelers. But this is not the only place that Bernardino mentions nocturnal gatherings among his many orations.

  He also remarks on the barilotto—the “folk of the keg”—during the same Sienese sermon. Their “cursed practice” is one that must have struck fear into the hearts of his listeners: just after nightfall, certain women and men in the Piedmont region would gather in the home of one of the members in a room lit by a single lamp. At the right moment the light would be extinguished and the congregation would descend into an orgy. These Piedmontiene people probably were comprised of Waldensians.

  If this feature of the folk of the keg didn’t stir his flock to move against such licentious people, Bernardino had even more gruesome specifics about their nocturnal activities:

  [A]t a certain time of year they will take a young boy child and throw it from one to another . . . so that it is killed thereby. Then being dead they pound it into powder, and put this powder into a keg, and then from this keg they give to drink to each one . . . because they say that then it will not be possible for them to reveal any of those practices which they perform.64

  Bernardino assures us that his information is sound, coming as it did from a friar of his own order (probably meaning the Observants) who had once been a member of the folk of the keg, and told him all of these gruesome particulars. He ends his tirade with a caveat to women: they must not fall prey to any man who invites them to join such a “ribald crew.”65 This kind of man, the preacher cautions, has as his sole motive the wish to see women naked!

  The essential elixir in the keg from which the folk drank was, of course, a literary embellishment à la our heretics’ potion. However, such evidence as the love philters of Marcus, the heavenly food, and Bilia’s brew inclines me toward a historical as opposed to literary basis for the drinks. Consider this suggestion as tentative, to be revisited once all the other evidence has been explored; indeed, things that seemed implausible will appear as quite reasonable.

  In any case, some ecclesiastics certainly believed the heretics’ potion existed, and their prejudices against it would be evident not only in the later, larger witch trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but in the very witches’ ointment we seek to understand.

  As with Matteuccia, the origins of the more fantastic details of her case have become clear: the allegation that she sucked the blood out of children clearly derives from literary ideas about strix; her ability to traverse the night reminds one of those magical healers, the “Good Women,” and those followers of Diana or some other fertility goddess; and her congregating with others to worship demonic forces obviously derives from theological ideas about heresy (though orgies never played any role in Matteuccia’s record).

  But what of Matteuccia’s ointment? Bernardino’s De pena does not anticipate it at all. Might it have contained something psychoactive that brought about an experience that the authorities could stigmatize, as they did Bilia’s toad potion? For this possibility to be considered it must first be determined whether such drug ointments even existed outside the context of any heretics’ potion. Without them, moving forward would only be an exercise in futility.

  The possibilities of bufotenine potions existing were touched on earlier. As will be shown in the following chapter such elixirs are merely the surface of a much deeper reservoir of veneficia. Let us now meet the candidate ingredients that might have caused surreal visions when mixed in ointments and drinks—ingredients that folk practitioners like Matteuccia di Francesco called magical, or even sacred, but which the impending witch stereotype castigated as demonic.

  4

  ROOTS OF BEWITCHMENT

  There is another kind of natural magic which is termed, “witching” or “medicinal” which is done with potions, charmed drinks for love, and diverse poisonous medicines.

  HEINRICH CORNELIUS AGRIPPA

  One thing does not contain a single virtue, but several.

  PARACELSUS

  THE VENECOPEIA

  The phenomenal bond tying magic to medicine during the Middle Ages is well attested to.*33 1 The soporiferis medicamentis (sleeping medicines) and pocula amatoria (love potions) mixed by persons with knowledge of veneficia ranged from the innocuous to the fatal, and derived largely from the Solanaceae, or nightshade, family, which includes several soporific, psychotropic, and hallucinogenic flora. The most infamous among these are mandrake (Mandragora officinalis); henbane (Hyoscyamus niger); deadly nightshade (Atropa belladonna); and datura or thornapple, (Datura stramonium). The psychoactive alkaloids found in Solanaceae family plants are atropine, hyoscine (scopolamine), and hyoscyamine—anticholergics that when ingested cause physiological reactions such as dry mouth, impaired speech, light sensitivity, headache, sexual arousal, and sleepiness, as well as other more dangerous side effects such as loss of motor function, spasms, vivid hallucinations, delirium, and in higher doses, death.2 Other non-Solanaceae family plants such as hemlock (the Apiaceae or Umbelliferae family) and the notorious soporific/hypnotic opium (Papaver somniferum) were also used. As we have already seen, the European toad (Bufo) was a source of a strong nonbotanical hallucinogen, bufotenin, used for magic, homicidal, or religious purposes.

  Some of these drugs have a long magical-medicinal tradition with origins stretching back to before the rise of Western civilization.*34 As such, there was some confusion in early Western plant prose regarding the identity of these powerful flora. For example, according to some researchers several of the plants we are about to meet might have all referred to a single species. As only one illustration of this muddle we have the mandrake of Greek physician-botanist Theophrastus, the stryknos manikos (or anthos melan, “dark flower”) of Dioscorides, and the strychnos (Solanum) of Pliny, which at least one author believes all refer to one plant—the deadly nightshade.3 To catalog all the different opinions of modern researchers as to the true identities of these plants is beyond the scope of this work. What we seek is a consistent viewpoint that mirr
ors the classical, medieval, and early modern period understanding of these poisons, along with regularity in the classification of physiological and psychological reactions to a certain class of drugs, regardless of what their common names were.

  As it turns out, such a consistency exists.

  To understand what might have been in Matteuccia’s ointment we must first familiarize ourselves with the candidate psychoactive plants and amphibian additives themselves, and understand how our medical progenitors saw them. Their views are important as they set a precedent for usage, belief, and superstition that was still widely accepted by druggists of all social strata during the early modern period. I will first discuss the family of plants known as the Solanaceae; they are not only the most consistent psychoactives mentioned in the texts, their effects, as we shall discover, sound remarkably similar to those produced by the mid-fifteenth-century “flying ointments.” I will then discuss non-solanaceous drugs such as opium, hemlock, and toad poison, which are equally powerful. They all cause soporatum—that curious word used by some inquisitors that means a sleep so deep that the accompanying dreams seemed so real as to have actually happened.4 Those experiencing soporatum sleep so soundly that they appear dead to onlookers, all the while lucidly dreaming fantastic visions from beyond—this was the essence of the psyche-magical state.

  MANDRAKE

  (Mandragora officinalis)

  Antiquity has left literature littered with myriad myths about the maddening mandrake. Although the legends evolved over the eras, varying slightly from one time and place to another, one tradition that spanned Western civilization necessitated a ritualistic reaping of the mandrake from the soil.5 The first Western description of the plant’s peculiar plucking practice was penned by Greek author Theophrastus (ca. 371–287 BCE), in his Historia plantarum (Enquiry into Plants). He confessed doubt regarding the rite but recounted it nonetheless:

  [I]t is said that one should draw three circles round mandrake with a sword, and cut it with one’s face towards the west; and at the cutting of the second piece one should dance round the plant and say as many things as possible about the mysteries of love.6

  This is one of the West’s earliest allusions to mandrake’s prized aphrodisiacal effects—not surprising, considering Theophrastus counted mandrake as not only effective against gout and sleepiness, but also as an effective additive in love philters.7 But these uses weren’t the exclusive privilege of humans. Medieval bestiaries described the behaviors and traits of animals worthy of Christian observance. The text supposes a curious practice by elephants, those animals seemingly with “no desire to copulate.” If they wanted offspring both male and female should travel “eastward, toward Paradise . . . [where] there is a tree called Mandragora.” The female elephant must seduce the reluctant male into eating the mandrake, after which they mate. The unknown second-century author of Physiologus continues:

  The elephant and his wife represent Adam and Eve. For when they were pleasing to God, before their provocation of the flesh, they knew nothing of copulation nor had they knowledge of sin. . . . When [Eve] ate of the Tree of Knowledge, which is what Mandragora means, and gave one of the fruits to [Adam] . . . they had to clear out of Paradise.”8

  This story leaves us with one of the earliest stabs at identifying the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge: the mandrake, at least according to this anonymous author, was responsible for humankind’s admittance into self-awareness, carnal knowledge, and fecundity—and subsequent expulsion from Paradise as punishment for these accretions.

  Like most solanaceous intoxication the mandrake experience depends largely on dose: small amounts cause mild visuals followed by a somnolent effect; medium doses lead to hallucinations and a frenzied state; higher doses result in delirium, coma, and death.9 Because of the stimulating and psychotropic effects occasioned by the first and second phases, mandrake was one of the more widely used drugs in pocula amatoria by the time Dioscorides wrote his De Materia Medica (ca. 60–70 CE).10 This has led some historians to speculate that it was such a mandrake-infused love philter that caused that most infamous of Caesars, Caligula, to go mad.11 The first-century Roman historian Suetonius recorded that Caligula, having apparently drunk a hallucinatory drug (ironically, to “clear his brain”) became restless, “terrorized by outlandish apparitions,” and “imagined that he was holding conversation with a vision of the sea.”12 Caligula’s experience was not an isolated incident; Julian the Apostate commented about mandrake’s stupefying effects in a letter to Callixeine.13

  The Greeks responded logically, naming the mandrake’s berries “love apples,” a borrowing from the Hebrew dūdā’īm (apples of love).*35 Arabs called them “Devil’s apples” for the same reason.14 While the etymological root of mandrake remains planted in labyrinthine linguistics, modern efforts have marshaled several competing origins. A feasible Greek derivation is Mandra agora (usual meeting place), perhaps pointing to mandrake’s annual growing cycle: after the flowers and berries wither and die the root lies dormant, springing forth new flora each year. A pair of promising Persian possibilities are mardumgiyah (plant man) and/or mardom (magic causing).15 Both names speak to widespread recognition of two of the mandrake’s most famous attributes: the humanlike shape of its root and its enchanting powers. Such ideas were not lost to the Greeks; Pythagoras (ca. 570–695 BCE) called the plant Anthropomorphon because of its shape; later, Dioscorides (ca. 40–75 CE) said that some people called it Circeium (or Circe), believing mandrake to be the chief ingredient in that goddess’s bewitching potions.16 Germanic languages called mandrake alarūna, which one linguist interprets as “keeper of secrets” (a coupling of Old High German ala, meaning “beget,” and rūna, meaning “secret”).17

  Greek and Roman physicians took note of the psychoactive potential of solanaceous plants early on when they marveled at the untoward effects of some of their medicines. Around 400 BCE, the Greek physician Hippocrates warned all who prepared mandrake drafts to be cautious and mix the berry juices “in a smaller dose than will induce mania”; alternatively, he prescribed burning a responsible dose around a convulsive person to alleviate her or his seizures.18 The anti-Christian commentator Celsus carefully mixed mandrake with other powerful psychoactives and soporifics, like henbane and opium (two psychoactive drugs of the veneficia that will be discussed in this chapter), to induce a deep sleep.19 That the mandrake was largely seen as a panacea, and the abundance of mythology surrounding it suggest a diaspora of mandrake usage and knowledge.20 It even appears as the title of one of Greek playwright Alexis’s erotic comedies, Mandragorizomene (The Mandrake-Drugged Woman). Unfortunately, Alexis’s play survives only in fragments.

  Owning much to mandrake’s widespread magical reputation, charlatans or thiefs might whittle innocuous roots into homunculus shapes, passing such a magical figurine off as the real thing.21 In some areas people believed that mandrake brought money, and they happily paid real money for this deception. Mandrake is even mentioned in the trial records of Joan of Arc. She told her inquisitors that some layfolk believed it attracted wealth (a belief she didn’t share), and that it was a “dangerous and evil thing to keep.”22 Joan’s allusion to the mandrake’s ability to bring fortune and plentitude to its keepers was not the only contemporary reference to this sympathetic magical practice.

  But superstitious practices like these do not establish that mandrake’s psychoactive properties were known during the Middle Ages; what matters is whether lay and educated physicians composed mandrake-containing recipes during those centuries with full knowledge of the plant’s hypnotic and soporific effects. One of our best sources for answering such a question is the common leechbook of the medieval and early modern period. A leech—an archaic term denoting a physician—was an itinerant health practitioner who straddled both learned and folk medicine. It is for this reason that the leechbooks of this time offer a treasure of medieval folk remedies. The Old English Herbarium, ca. 1000, an Anglo-Saxon translation of the older fourth-cent
ury herbal, the Pseudo-Apuleius Herbarius, identifies mandrake as a plant that “shines at night like a lantern.” A train of uses follows: “[f]or headache and for that one may be able to sleep, take the juice, smear the face, and the plant soothes the headache . . . you will marvel at how quickly sleep comes.” Imbibing mandrake with wine or water alleviated ear pain, foot disease, and tightness in the tendons. One could also drink “three-pennies” weight of mandrake mixed in water to cure “devil-sickness,” (i.e., madness).23

  Another source that makes use of mandrake is worthy of mention here as well, as it was intended for leeches and other local healers. One could call it a popular leechbook although the author was not a leech. The thirteenth-century physician Petrus Hispanus left to posterity a medical treatise titled Thesaurus pauperum (Treasury for the Poor, ca. 1250–70), filled with cures and aids that mostly deal with women’s health, intended for the general public. As evidenced by its translation into several vernacular languages (English, Portuguese, Spanish, German, and Italian) and numerous surviving editions, Thesaurus pauperum was by all accounts a widely used lay medical treatise.24

  Hispanus gives several preparations made from mandrake in conjunction with other known hallucinogenic plants such as opium and henbane.25 One cure for “frenzy” mixes mandrake with opium and storax balsam; parts of these plants, the author says, should be ground into powder and bespattered on the patient’s head.26 Hispanus also knew of solanaceous plants’ use as powerful soporifics; another chapter, devoted to curing wakefulness, recommends taking the seeds of mandrake to extinguish headaches.27 Another recipe in Hispanus’s herbal endorses anointing the forehead with a violet ointment that contains mandrake, opium, and henbane to lull the patient into a deep sleep.28