The Witches' Ointment

by Thomas Hatsis

  Toads were interesting as far as ecclesiastics were concerned. For Ardoyni, they retained poison in both their blood and saliva, although he felt the latter secretion to be a “more powerful drug agent than the former.”163

  Like the aforementioned flora, toads were also used for strictly symbolic magical purposes. In 1391 Macete, a local Parisian “diviner and sorceress,” performed a complicated ritual intended to cure someone stricken with the evil eye. The spell required placing two toads into earthenware jars and feeding them on bread and breast milk:

  When she wanted to hurt her husband [and/or others] . . . before uncovering the jars she would call Lucifer’s name to her service three times. Then she recited the Gospel of John three times, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ave Maria. Thereafter, she opened the jars and pierced the toads with long needles . . . the person she intended to hurt would feel the pain of the toad.164

  Another instance dated 1329 found Carmelite monk Petrus Recordi imprisoned for trying to invoke love in a woman “[by] making, five different times, waxen images at various times and places.” He mixed his own saliva with “a large number of poisons,” including toad blood, “extracted in a terrible and horrific way,” and covered a wax puppet with the blend. Recordi then placed the puppet under the front door of the woman’s house; now, should she resist the monk’s advances she would be plagued by demons. Finally, Recordi would sacrifice a butterfly to the demon.165

  The whole trial seems to have been a farce.166 However, other instances were dangerously real. During a period of upheaval in Laon, France, in 1112 CE, the Benedictine monk and historian Gilbert of Nogent scribed a squabble that took place between a peasant and a priest in the town of Beauvais. Their feud had caught the attention of others (vitriolic as it was) and so the unnamed peasant could not openly attack the priest. He therefore sought justice through a veneficium. The peasant caught a toad and cut it up into small scraps. Sneaking into the church one night, he dumped the toad parts into the jar that housed the sacred wine. When that next Sunday the priest arrived to conduct his sermon, he “performed the sacred mysteries with that poisoned wine.” Immediately falling ill and terrified by outlandish mental apparitions bewitching his mind, he felt disgusted by the sight of food or drink and began to waste away inside. Thankfully, the church retained a magical lore all its own, and when a friend advised the priest to mix in a cup of water “the dust . . . from the grave of Marcel, bishop of Paris, or from his altar” and drink, all marveled at the priest’s recovery.167

  Toads do begin to appear at the first lights of the witch stereotype and slowly unfold further into the sources that developed during the early modern period. French inquisitor Bernard Gui (1261–1331), while composing his infamous 1320 handbook for inquisitors, Practica inquisitionis haereticae pravitatis des inquisitors (A Practical Inquiry of Heretical Depravity for Inquisitors), chose to disclose some of the practices of those soon-to-be-accused heretics, village sorceresses, in his chapter “On Lot-Casters, the Divine, and Invoking Demons.” Here, Gui relates how witches revered demonic forces:

  [One of them] fashions two images made from wax and lead . . . and then they gather (with these images) secretly in certain areas to collect flies, spiders, frogs and toads, and the skin of serpents to invoke demons . . . then, at the place of sacrifice, they then take blood from any body part and mix it with the blood of the toads and offer gifts, oblations, and invoke the demons whom they revere.168

  Incidentally, according to Gui these are the same women known as the “good women of the night” who, while collecting herbs kneel toward the East and recite the Lord’s Prayer.169

  Professor of civil law at the University of Cahors, Peter Gregory of Toulouse recorded an incident from 1460 in which an unnamed priest from the Soissons surreptitiously sought a sorceress’s service to settle a score against his nemeses. She advised him to capture a toad, name it John, feed it a consecrated host, baptize it “in the custom of Christian ceremony,” and bring it to her. Thereafter, she tore the toad to pieces and used the remains as active ingredients in her potion. The veneficium apparently worked, as those who drank the potion died in anguish; the sorceress and the priest (now excommunicated) joined them soon after, consigned to the flames for their dealings.170

  A case from Breslau, Germany, implicated Anna Brommenhansinn in 1481 for use of toads in her sorcery. She would boil the toads in water and give it to people to drink (whether they were victims or clients is not mentioned in the record). She was said to have “learned this magic from a known witch, Zyesse Magdalena.” Anna was tried and drowned.171

  Toad cameos in fourteenth-century records (and earlier) would give rise to that amphibian playing a major role in the theater of those years that saw the most intense witch burnings. By the seventeenth century the toad was a staple as a witch’s familiar in the English records.172 But, as shown previously, this was hardly the case when the Waldensian preacher Galosna spoke of Bilia’s toad potion mixed on the Eve of the Epiphany for use in the Waldensian synagogues. The symbolic date of preparation offers another clue: Christians celebrated the Epiphany as the manifestation of God in the human form of Jesus. Should Bilia and her congregation have been trying to manifest that same appearance in themselves, the possibility that the toad was used as an entheogen becomes even more plausible. Behind this obscure rite bubbles a blending of folklore, drug knowledge, and assumptions of both orthodox and heretical observances.

  We sought a consistency in how these drugs were viewed in western history. Although uses of solanaceous plants and other intoxicants did vary in times and places and truly evolved over a millennium, an awareness of the chemical effects of these substances nonetheless remains unbroken—an archetype with which Matteuccia seemed familiar (considering the descriptions of her potions on some peoples’ minds). This continuity and archetype rests in the three most famous attributes of solanaceous plants: they are intoxicating and hallucinatory, followed by soporific effects. If any drugs are to be found in the witches’ potions and ointments, these are the most likely.

  We can only peer through the brush that separates us from the venecopeia and the herbarium, and do not want, with limited sight, to see the plants for the garden. Herbalists, veneficae, and other folk doctors, and even impostors, employed a variety of potions, powders, ointments, and medicines that contained no soporific, hallucinogenic, or otherwise psychoactive plants at all. These innocuous recipes are found side by side with the ones discussed in this chapter. And indeed, some of these poisons were even believed to be magical without ingestion. It is important, therefore, to avoid concluding prematurely. The appearance of nonpsychoactive recipes used in medical folk and learned magic does nothing to discredit the venefica’s knowledge of psychoactives; it only shows us that the psychoactive spells were part of a broader system of magic that included nonpsychoactive plants (and/or sympathetic magical objects and ingredients).

  Furthermore, there are numerous examples from the early modern period that demonstrate the magical use of these poisons specifically for their inebriating and confusing (often interpreted as “bewitching”), and even lethal properties. Cases that make mention of the use of poisons usually refer to them in terms of homicide, botched love magic, or attempts to sway another person. Understanding their role in the village venecopeia will give us a better historical backdrop out of which to see how the witches’ ointment arose.

  5

  VENEFICIA

  These poisons more effectively lead a man away from his true self—the dread poisons which enter deep within and harm not the body, but savagely wound the mind.

  ANICIUS MANLIUS SEVERINUS BOETHIUS

  I freely acknowledge that I have dwelt upon this point . . . because there is much in common between philters and frenzy induced magically.

  JOHANN WEYER

  The man’s senses overwhelmed him—was he going insane?

  He had only sought relief from the worms he believed crawled through his teeth. They caused an unbearable
ache. He would have much preferred a trained physician but he lacked the funds to pay one. He had instead searched for a healer or some other keeper of the magical secrets of medicine. Perhaps from a local person he could procure some remedy for a small fee. Sadly, what he found was a thief—a charlatan posing as a dentist who knew how to dupe such a patient with veneficium. The swindler had burned henbane seeds beneath the victim’s mouth, careful not to breathe in the poisonous smoke himself lest he too fall victim to its spell.

  Among other authors, Petrus Forestus (1521–1597), one of the most prominent physicians of the Dutch Republic, had warned the ignorant masses that “these pretended worms are no more than an appearance of worms, which is always seen in the smoke of henbane seed.” Indeed, John Gerard (ca. 1545–1612), an English herbalist, believed that once a victim of this fraud was sufficiently intoxicated by the henbane, the thief would drop broken lute strings—the so-called worms—on the ground as proof.1 The illiterate peasant would never have read these warnings; just before slipping into oblivion, as his muscles numbed and slowly shut down, his mind drifted off into an inebriated giddiness. He could swear that he saw tiny worms falling from his mouth . . .

  The above scenario depicts one of many ways a person used powerful psychoactive drugs in a malefic veneficium. Henbane, among other poisons, was used for criminal purposes as well as love magic throughout the early modern period. Regarding the latter use it appears that a case was brought to trial if potential or actual harm was perceived. It was for this reason that Alice Perrers, an English royal mistress, found herself before the courts in 1376 for bewitching Edward III. She had asked a Dominican magician to devise ways of gaining Edward’s affections; one of the methods involved “juice of powerful herbs.”2 One man in Velay was killed in 1390 by a love philter given to him by a folk-herb specialist, Jeanette Neuve.3 In 1406, a woman in Lucerne was charged with using a love potion; another trial that same year in Nürnberg had the municipal court banishing two women for using powders to persuade love. Over in Basel a group of women burned for using spells and potions to cause love, sickness, and death. In 1420 Appenzell authorities beheaded a woman for killing another woman with a poison apple.4 Later that decade Matteuccia burned for unbelievable charges like infanticide and cannibalism and more believable things like practicing medicine and toying with venomous herbs. Another wise woman from Perugia, Filippa da Città della Pieve, found herself standing trial for love magic in 1440; attempting to seduce a tailor named Giacomo, Filippa had buried a bale of “noxious substances” near an area she knew he would walk past. However, Filippa left nothing to chance, giving Giacomo a pocula amatoria as well, a drink made of an unnamed herb, semen, and her own menstrual blood.5 In 1439 in Draguignan one Catherine David tried to manipulate her father by giving him a potion she received from sorcerers who, in turn, supposedly obtained it from Satan.6 An anonymous author writing not twenty years later made reference to the pocula amatoria of the sortilegia (fortune teller) that “poison many people.”7 In 1461 a sorceress in the Putten region of The Netherlands was fined for driving her lover crazy after he drank a potion that was supposed to stimulate his carnal instincts.8 In a case from Württemberg (year unknown) Johanna Fehlen drank a glass of wine at her wedding that contained “white residue from a powder or herb.” She soon after complained that “everything in her whole body . . . was turned around.” She grew weak and soon could no longer stand; then “her head became so confused that she no longer knew where she was.”9 A similar case from 1685 featured Anna Maria Rippen, a sixteen-year-old servant who drank a glass of wine that contained an unspecified ingredient. Anna experienced pain in her abdomen and then a stream of hallucinations that she could not determine was a dream or reality. Though she recovered, the officials assigned to her case called her ordeal an “example of how simple women and girls are led astray into witchcraft.”10 A sorceress might even instruct a clergyman in veneficia: in 1460 a woman showed a priest how to baptize a toad for use as a poison.11

  It would seem that some clergymen did know about the powers of these drugs. In Bern in 1509 four Dominican friars of the Order of Preachers perpetrated a most sinister plot. A certain Doctor Stephanus (and three others) decided to drive one of their lay brothers mad with “some such poisonous potion.” One conspirator dressed up like the Virgin Mary and drove a nail through the drugged monks hands, subsequently “impress[ing] upon his feet and hands and body the four wounds of Christ.” He was placed on an altar in the church “dazed and immobile,” while Stephanus, from behind statues of Jesus and Mary, carried on a conversation with the stupefied brother. The hoax was eventually found out; all four monks were burned.12

  Around 1567 a more involved con via drugs was hatched by a “remarkably wicked physician” living in Gelders. This case is of particular interest because it demonstrates how a charlatan might use popular beliefs about magic to mask veneficium. When Elbert, the chief minister of a nearby castle, asked the physician to cure his sickness, the scoundrel responded that Elbert had been bewitched. Worry not, he assured him, for this “physician” practiced “secret methods of healing unknown to all other doctors.” First, Elbert must cut his hair and the hair of everyone in his household (including the animals) and bring it to him. Further, Elbert and his wife must beg their twenty-year-old daughter to bring him the hairs and obey his every whim. Desperate for a cure, Elbert did as told, and not a few days later his daughter came knocking on the physician’s door. The deception:

  She was taken in private to a room where the doctor pretended to recite a lengthy secret prayer and then opened a book which was on the table and placed two knives in it in the shape of an X. This was accompanied by much mumbling and dreadful conjurations and the marking of characters of one sort or another. Finally, he drew a circle upon the ground and ordered the girl to stick into it one of the knives (cursed by him with adjurations). Then after whispering some unintelligible words he handed her the other knife to stick into the circle in the same way.

  Then the “true witchcraft” was revealed:

  [H]e gave the distraught girl a morsel to eat . . . [a]fter taking the morsel she seemed to be disturbed and confused . . . she was losing control of her senses. Thereupon he commanded her to bare her bosom. After much kissing and fondling of her breasts . . . [he] threatened her father’s death would follow most assuredly and she herself would suffer the same malady or one even worse unless she complied, and he tried to convince her that a mutual contact of the flesh was required.13

  Unfortunate tales like this also appear in popular literature. Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533) surely knew about the powerful psychoactivity of opium, as outlined in an unfortunate scene in his epic poem Orlando furioso (Mad Orlando, earliest version 1516). Here, the princess Angelica, who has been sought the world over by men, succumbs to the powerful potion of a lusty abbot. He pulls from his side a “liquor of poppies,” doses poor Angelica, “and deceitfully made her fall asleep. . . . He embraces and touches her to his heart’s content . . . Now he kisses her breast, now her mouth . . .”14 The anticlerical overtones are unambiguous.

  The scene might have been influenced by an earlier story found in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, a collection of 100 tales scribed in 1353,*46 told over a period of ten days by a group of seven young women and three young men sheltering in a secluded villa just outside Florence to escape the Black Death. In the eighth story, on the third day, Boccaccio tells the tale of an abbot and a rich farmer, Ferondo, whose “very handsome woman to wife” the abbot took a fancy to. So that he may biblically know her the abbot concocted a beaker of wine with “powder of marvelous virtue” in order to send Ferondo “to purgatory.” The powder was rumored to have come from a great prince of the Levant, and be the same one used by the Old Man of the Mountain, “whenas he would . . . send any one [sic], sleeping, into his paradise.”†47 15

  In another passage, Boccaccio relates how Ruggieri da Jeroli, a noble from Salerno who harbored “a rakish dispositio
n,” snuck into famous surgeon Master Mazzeo della Montagna’s house to bed his much younger wife. He accidentally drank a medical elixir Montagna had recently prepared, which caused him to “[fall] into a profound doze.” The unnamed mistress was not in the mood for such shenanigans when she let herself into the bedchamber: “Get up slugabed! [If] thou hadst a mind to sleep, thou shouldst have betaken thee to thine own house and not come hither!” she shouted as she slapped him off the bench on which he sat. But Ruggieri didn’t wake up and only slumped onto the floor as if dead. The lady grew concerned, pinching him, pulling hairs out of his beard, burning him with a candle, and eventually giving up, as “the enchantment was too strong.”16

  Leaving the hypothetical sphere, evidence exists pointing to nightshade’s use among commoners for its psychoactive effects during the early modern period. Just as Matteuccia gave a woman an “undocumented herb” that drove her husband insane for a few days, so too in 1611 did Styrian sorceress Lenggo Frauhelmbin use the juice of a black berry (likely nightshade berries) to drive her neighbor “senseless.”17 In 1651 a woman complained that another woman had given her “bitter almonds” to eat, save some of the juice, which should be spit onto a cloth and rubbed over her body. The woman grew ill, suffered convulsions, and eventually fell into a deep sleep. The woman’s symptoms considered, the “bitter almonds” were probably nightshade berries.18 Of course, what was recorded as being “bitter almonds” makes it difficult to determine what exactly the woman actually ate. However, an incident in which someone accidentally died after eating nightshade berries led to a law being passed in Württemberg two decades later that was appropriately titled “Decree Concerning the Partaking and Propagation of Nightshade.” The law specifically targeted consumption of the plant and ordered its immediate eradication.19 Like Matteuccia’s ointment, other concotions refer to a drug utilized, but offer no further details. Such a clear case occurred ca. 1494 when a local midwife’s daughter, Anna in der Gasse, gave Cunrat Kurman an apple to stew to cure his chills. The braised apple caused Cunrat to fall “on the floor . . . unconscious for two hours. . . . knowing nothing, bereft of reason . . . sensless, and was no longer like a Christian person.” Further charges were also brought against the pair (and the father, Hans, too) that involved simple maleficia like causing lameness in children and raising storms magically. In the encounter with Cunrat a poison that was supposed to act as a medicine had an adverse result. Anna and her mother Benedicta were tried for sorecery.20