The Witches' Ointment

by Thomas Hatsis

  The Sassen boy was lucky, for so strong was the fruit of Atropa—a name that derives from the Greek fate who cut the thread of life—that the plant for which she was named sprouted poisonous berries, five to ten of which whose juice was enough to kill a person. The root, too, contains these alkaloids. Dioscorides records that one drachm (3.4 grams) of the root mixed in wine is enough to cause hallucinations; upping the dose to four drachms is fatal.74 Even nonfatal doses run the risk of unexpected hallucinations, the kind that might have caused a person to believe she or he had been bewitched. The lore and allure of this particular solanum is that which we have come to expect from that family of plants.

  This bewitching plant found utility in a variety of ways. In the early eleventh century the Earl of Macbeth—the very Macbeth on whom William Shakespeare would model his infamous character—decided on one last effort to expel the invading Norse from Scotland. After surrendering to King Svein Knutson and taking refuge in Perth, Macbeth sent provisions to his conquerors. “A great quantity of bread was therefore sent, together with wine and ale into which had been infused a poisonous herb . . . commonly called sleeping nightshade”—a shrewd form of medieval psycho-chemical warfare. The results did not disappoint: Macbeth sent Lord Banquo and his army to seize the enemy camp; the panicked and intoxicated Norsemen stood no chance. Other soldiers remained asleep, perhaps not even awakened by Banquo’s sword piercing their stomachs. Knutson probably imbibed the bulk of the spoils; he couldn’t be roused and had to be quickly “thrown like a burden over a baggage horse.” However, Macbeth had already dispatched forces to the harbor. That was the end of King Svein and his brief victory over the Scots.75

  Women found uses for nightshade in the beauty products of the early modern period. The word belladonna (beautiful mistress) probably came from the red juice of the berries that was used as rouge.*42 76 A second plausible explanation behind the name might come from the other use of the nightshade berry’s juice: as an eyedrop to enlarge women’s pupils to make them more attractive.77 This latter beauty practice, however, seems to have been local to Venice, as there is scant indication that it existed elsewhere in Europe.78

  In the Old English Herbarium, nightshade is called solata and has various uses—to assuage swelling, to soothe earache and toothache, and to stop bloody noses. This volume recommends eating the leaves directly and dripping the berry juice into the ears.79 Likewise, leechbook M.136 endorses various medications made from nightshade. One is an ointment that includes as ingredients nightshade, pennyroyal, wild thyme, and other herbs; it is rubbed on the foreheads of those who have suffered traumatic head injury.80 Another recipe contains nightshade, crumbs of sour bread, avens (Geum), and knapweed (Centaurea), and is to be seethed in ale and used for “felon” (possibly referring to an abscess on the finger).81 Another involves making a “plaster of barley meal and sengreen [houseleek], nightshade, and vinegar” for “the liver that is sick.”82 True to its solanaceous character, nightshade is also included in a knockout potion; mixed in ale with opium, lettuce, and several other herbs into a juice, it will “make a man sleep all day” when drunk.83 There is even a hot compress made with nightshade and linseed for use by those whom Hildegard’s and Hispanus’s antilust prescriptions failed; it should be rubbed on chafed “privy members.”84 Another recipe for “boils on women’s teats” includes nightshade, egg oil, and bean meal.85

  In Bald’s Leechbook, ointments prepared from henbane, hemlock, and the curiously named “enchanter’s nightshade,” among other ingredients, were recommended for everything from toothache to leprosy and “elf disease.” This latter problem integrates some Christian folklore in the following recipe.

  [L]ay these worts under the altar, have nine masses sung over them, incense, holy salt, three heads of cropleek, the netherward part of enchanters nightshade, helenium; take in the morning a full cup of milk, drop thrice some holy water into it, let the man sup it up as hot as he can: let him eat therewith three bits of enchanters nightshade and when he hath a mind to rest let him have in his chamber gledes [live coals or embers], let him lay on the gledes . . . and elfthone, and reek him therewith till he sweat, and reek the house all through . . .

  This, we are instructed, should be done for nine mornings and nights.86

  Nightshade’s reputation seems to have attracted criticism. It was said by Ardoyni that eating the root of “solatro”*43 “in sufficient amounts . . . causes insanity, or synesthesia . . . a kind of foolishness . . . bizarre color patterns . . . speech impediments or talkativeness . . . hiccups . . . chest pain, and spasms . . . [and] death.”87 Like other psychoactive drugs already mentioned it is also listed as a sex inhibiter.88

  And yet the drug remained in use. The Macer floridus de viribus herbarum (On the Strengths of Herbs), a late ninth-century catalog of seventy-seven herbs and their supposed medicinal properties written in a kind of vulgar Latin verse, contains some pithy plant descriptions.89 The Greeks called nightshade strignum (a linguistic association with strix), and said that a plaster made from it helps eye ulcers, headaches, “St. Anthony’s Fire and stinging herpes.”90 Some medieval medical faculties recommended belladonna as a counteraction to incubi possession, a holdover from ancient Greece dating back to as early as 460 BCE.91

  Deadly nightshade was also found in sleep ointments and potions, this practice resulting in a highly unstable medicine. Even a safe quantity of the juice mixed with vinegar or wine and rubbed on the temples “causeth sleep,” “troubleth the mind, [and] bringeth madness” to users.92 Drunk by children to treat “hooping-cough,” a measurement that “exceeds ever so little the proper dose . . . occasion[ed] the most painful dreams.”93 Italian scholar, scientist, polymath, and playright Giambattista della Porta (ca. 1535–1615) warned of belladonna’s powers: “So that it is a most pleasant spectacle to behold such mad whimsies and visions, which is also cured by sleep. . . . Nevertheless, we give this precaution, that all those roots or seeds which cause the takers of them to see delightful visions, if their dose be increased, will continue this alienation of mind for three days. But if quadrupled, it brings death.”94

  DATURA

  (Datura stramonium)

  The panicked chambermaid, suffering particularly strong hallucinations, rushed back to the room crying aloud, “Look! All the devils of hell are coming!” Unbeknownst to her and the other diners in the household, the meal of lentil seeds they had eaten a short while ago accidentally (or deliberately) contained foreign seeds—seeds of the charlatan, the trickster, the gypsy. The household descended into madness. A lacemaker “exhibited an unusual zeal and fussiness, [and] threw the weaving cone to and fro and entangled everything.”

  The others fared no better:

  A servant carried all the wood into the secret chamber under the pretext that he had to distill liquor. Another hit two hatchets together and said he was chopping wood. Another crept about on the ground, and dug up and scratched the earth and the grass with his mouth like a hog with its snout. Another imagined he was a wheelwright and wanted to pierce and bore holes in all the wood. . . . Another went into the smithy and cried for help to catch the fish which he imagined to be there in enormous numbers.95

  The most likely culprit advanced as the cause of this descriptive scene is the thornapple, or datura as it is widely known. Datura’s wide-reaching distribution (as far west as the Americas, as far east as China) makes locating its place of origin almost impossible. Datura also comes in twenty varieties,96 amplifying a taxonomical nightmare that has existed in the West since the days of Dioscorides.97 While it was once believed that datura first entered Europe via explorers returning from the New World in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, three species of the plant are known to have existed in the Old World prior to the Columbian Exchange: Datura stramonium (originating in Eurasia); Datura metel (India, South and West Asia); and Datura ferox (China). One pre-Christian name for this plant is the Lithuanian dievažolynis, meaning “God’s herb.” A popular term in
that same language, Durnarope, comes from the Baltic durna, meaning “drunk” or “high.”98 In Europe datura’s status as “God’s herb” seems to have been localized to some areas of Lithuania. Third-century Greek poet Theocritus mistakenly believed one of these types of datura to be the elusive “hippomanes,”*44 an unknown but powerful additive to love philters; though his postulation does not seem to have been widely accepted by others99 I mention it here only as evidence for the antiquity of datura’s acknowledged hallucinogenic properties.

  If not a love philter additive, D. stramonium certainly found its way into the early Arabic medical sources, which first turn up around the early ninth century. Datura, therefore, more likely came into Europe proper centuries before the Age of Exploration by way of Arabic learners living in Al Andalus (i.e., modern Spain). Islamic physician Gregorius Abu’l-Faraj ibn al-‘Ibri wrote in 1285 that Al Andalusians regarded gawz mathil (datura) as “the soporific plant.” Arabic sources placed great emphasis on the plant’s intoxicating and fatal effects. By the mid-sixteenth century, Dawud al-Antaki, aka David of Antioch, a blind Syrian physician and pharmacist, called datura the active ingredient in a medical ointment used to alleviate hydropsy, tumors, and other skin diseases; he further recommended its oral ingestion as a cure for insomnia.100

  Across the Atlantic the Aztec civilization held views closer to those held in Lithuania. A species of datura, Datura caratocaula, called Atlinan by locals, was so highly esteemed for its vision-producing properties that only priests were allowed to ingest it.101 Soon after tales of the New World reached the shores of Europe, Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún (1499–1590) traveled to Mesoamerica in hopes of helping Christianize that “heathen” area. Once there he commented on the effects of this local inebriant: “[Datura] is intoxicating and maddening. . . . Those who eat it have visions of terrible things. Wizards or persons who wish to injure someone administer it in food or drink.” De Sahagún also remarked on datura’s medicinal virtues for alleviating gout. A century later Mexican-born priest Jacinto de la Serna, a doctor of theology and three times the rector of the University of Mexico, wrote that the Aztecs “had great superstitions regarding [datura and peyote] . . . which they venerate as though divine. For in drinking these herbs they consult them like oracles. [They revere] these seeds . . . as if they were God.”102

  Other exotic places employed datura for wholly different, surreptitious reasons. India was still another world to most Europeans during the early modern period; indeed, in his Buch der natur (Book of Nature), first published in 1475, Konrad von Megenberg (1309–1374) fancied that some Indian women had dog heads, developed six arms, or grew beards. Men could be born with their feet facing backward or with two heads.103 Noting some other curiosities of the Orient, Johann Weyer (1515–1588), Dutch physician and demonologist, and disciple of Agrippa, warned that certain people in India “put this flower [datura] (and also the seed) into the food of those they intend to rob. And those who have partaken thereof appear disoriented . . . dissolved in laughter; with perfect nonchalance they allow the thieves to remove whatever they wish.”104 Such practices probably prompted another German writer to remark that datura was the “tool of brothel-keepers, seducers of young girls, depraved courtesans, and shameless lechers.”105 Portuguese physician and natural historian Cristóbal Acosta (Cristóvão da Costa, 1515–1594), whose long life spanned almost the whole of the sixteenth century and who traveled extensively in the East Indies, also warned of such practices among Indian harlots who drugged wine with datura seeds, as reported in his Tractado de las drogas y medicinas de las Indias orientales (Treatise of the Drugs and Medicines of the East Indies), published in 1578. The Hindu enamoradas carried the powdered seeds to drug their victims: “[H]e who partakes of [datura] is deprived of his reason . . . for a long time laughing, or weeping, or sleeping . . . at times he appears to be in his right mind, but really being out of it and not knowing the person to whom he is speaking nor remembering what has happened after his alienation has passed.”106

  Though datura does not seem to have been popularly used the way, say, other psychoactives thus far discussed were, it is also clear that in the British Isles some leeches certainly knew how to use it; the plant appears in four separate recipes in the fourth-century herbal Herbarium Apuleii Platonici (sometimes translated as “The Old English Herbarium of Psuedo-Apuleius”).107 In Ardoynis’s Opus de venenas only one species of datura makes an appearance: D. metel of India,108 about which he writes with all his usual deterrents: it stupefies, causes vertigo, redness in the eyes, and drunkenness, followed by wheezing and a profound sleep.109 Folk and learned medicine aside, datura seeds might also be used toward more fatal ends in Europe, as assassination and “knockout drops”—a technique perhaps learned from stories that came back from exotic worlds.110

  Natural philosophers like Giambattista della Porta declared that datura “will make one mad, and present strange visions, both pleasant and horrible.” Moreover, “three fingers full” of datura seeds crushed into powder and swallowed caused a “pleasant kind of madness for a day.”111 Writing in 1784 Prussian toxicologist J. S. Halle became one of the first writers to praise the drug for stirring the artistic mind: “[M]ixing the ground seeds [of datura] with wine will produce an artificial, magic and fantastic tincture; if a poet would drink [this blend], it would provide him with his most exalted flight in odes.” This datura-wine elixir will “fire the pictures of imagination in the most vivid manner, swirling the natural impulse of the muse beyond all enthusiasm of wine.”112

  It should be noted that other hallucinogens and poisons outside of those belonging to the Solanaceae family also appear in some early-modern descriptions of folk medicine and love philters. These drugs were largely harvested from opiate bulbs, amphibian toxins, and other herbs of equal psychoactive intensity as those of the Solanaceae family.

  OPIUM

  (Papaver somniferum vars. album et nigrum)

  French naturalist and explorer Pierre Belon (1517–1564) stood in awe at the fifty-strong camel caravan. Around the 1540s, the wayfaring Belon had made his way around Asia Minor, Arabia, Egypt, and a host of other exotic lands, outlining those places in his 1553 work Les observations de plusieurs singularitez et choses memorables trouvées en Grèce, Asie, Judée, Egypte, Arabie et autres pays étrangèrs (Observations of Several Peculiar and Memorable Things found in Greece, Asia, Judea, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other Foreign Countries). This camel caravan, according to the adventurer, was loaded with countless pounds of the finest Turkish opium, a good portion of which was destined for Europe.113 Belon was well acquainted with the effects of opium from the medical works of such Western greats as Galen, Pliny, and Dioscorides.114

  Opium is perhaps the oldest known and most widely used drug in our pharmacopeia. The Ebers Papyrus, which dates from around 1550 BCE, lists špenn for opium, and presents it under the title “Remedy to prevent the excessive crying of children.”115 Hippocrates, the earliest Westerner to mention opium, recommended it for thirteen different ailments, nine of which dealt with gynecological matters. That midwives usually worked with such troubles probably means that women in antiquity had a greater familiarity with opium than did men.116

  Many writers of antiquity distinguished between white poppy (var. album) and black poppy (var. nigrum), which probably stemmed from Pliny’s Natural History. Pliny wrote of three kinds of poppy. White poppy was roasted and served with honey or sprinkled in egg yolk and poured on top of country loaves. It had a further use as an additive to wine (for a soporific drink) and the seeds supposedly cured elephantiasis. The second kind he mentions, black poppy, was soporific by virtue of the juice it produced; the Romans made lozenges of this creamy residue. The third kind Pliny calls “wild poppy,” which the Greeks called rheoas.117 According to Pliny, this poppy was “possessed of more active properties than the other two in every respect,” though this statement is unfounded. Too much partaking of opium resulted in death, he says.

  But
Pliny only collected the ideas of others. Dioscorides had a different approach: experiment and observe the plants and herbs and then describe. His diligently produced De Materia Medica leaves us a richer picture of opium’s use in antiquity, including everything from proper cultivation to how to spot imitation opium.118De Materia Medica presents a larger debate about opium and its virtues, suspending the view of other physicians who claimed opium was dangerous and could cause blindness. “These opinions are false,” Dioscorides tells us, “disproved by experience, because the efficacy of the medicine bears witness to the work of it.” He knew as well that the seeds contained no narcotic properties whatsoever (he recommended that black poppy seeds be crushed and mixed with wine to alleviate immoderate menstruation and excessive excretion). However, the juice, he says, holds well-known psychoactive properties and was rubbed on the finger and inserted into the rectum or vagina to induce sleep. It was used in a variety of other ways too, as a “pain-easer, sleep-causer, and digester.” But it could also make one lethargic or even lead to death.119

  The poppy must have had a strong impact on Roman society. Its image appears alongside wheat on Roman coins during the reign of the emperor Vespasian in the first century CE. His predecessor, Nero, also had the image of this plant placed on coins, as indicated by an Egyptian silver tetradrachm that features the snake of Agathodaemon, the Greek spirit of the vineyards and grainfields, wearing an Egyptian crown, surrounded by poppy and wheat. Opium’s use as a medicine, recreational drug, soporific, and vision-inducing agent has existed in at least one or more of these capacities in every culture familiar with it. It is mentioned countless times in numerous herbals from the medieval and early modern periods, and unlike many of the drugs already mentioned, opium is still used in both its natural and synthetic forms for its medicinal, recreational, and visionary attributes.