The Witches' Ointment

by Thomas Hatsis

  In other cases we know exactly which drug from the pharmacopeia was used in witchcraft. Ergot-induced witch phenomena occurred during the seventeenth century in Finnmark, Norway, a picturesque northern port village that boasts calm seas and aurora-sparkling skies, making for good seafood and even better poetry. The district governor of Finnmark, Hans Hanssen Lilienskiold, was such a staunch believer in the validity of witchcraft that after taking his position in 1684 he recorded with great detail the trials of eighty-three people accused of maleficia since the 1620s. Although not every case involved ergot poisoning,*48 the first recorded instance of someone falling victim to witchcraft via a food or beverage in Finnmark occurred in 1625. The unlucky defendant, Gunnele Olsdatter, ate a piece of bread given to her by the daughter of one Skrepp-Ane. As Olsdatter chewed the loaf, Skrepp-Ane cried out, “Now the devil got into you!” Shortly thereafter, Gunnele felt abdominal pain “as if something living had entered her.” Later she hallucinated a visit from Satan in the form of a black dog.

  Other records from Scandanavia allude to the disturbing psychoactive properties of ergotism: Bårne Villats ate a flour-based soup given to her by Smeld-Ane. After finishing her meal “her mind became so queer; she had great pains, and felt as if she was flying through the air.” Another, Sigri of Steinsland, gave bread to at least two women, Marthe Rasmusdatter, and Mari Thomasdatter. Marthe became “so disturbed that she could not help thinking she was in hell.” As for Mari, eating the bread “made the earth run around with her [i.e., caused vertigo], and at once the devil came to them.” Several records indicate that those who “learned witchcraft” after drinking milk or beer found something “black . . . the size of barley grains,” in the bottoms of their bowls and cups.21

  The influx of rye grain as Finnmark’s main cereal source is well established. While village reports often didn’t specify grains by name, complaints filed after importation did. One name in particular comes up often in these complaint sheets—rye. Another instance in which rye was mentioned by name comes from East Finnmark’s Vadsø district. A cleric there, Ludvig Paus, purchased sixty-four barrels of grain from Poland, of which sixty-two contained rye grain. Finally, rye grain aside, the only other grain available in the cold northern hemisphere was wild lyme grass, which is, like rye, highly susceptible to the ergot fungus.

  SPIRITS’ HERBS

  “Through a variety of singular accidents” Italian Renaissance Mannerist painter Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571) found himself standing in a magic circle drawn in dirt on the Roman Colosseum floor. Beside him a necromancer ordered Cellini’s friends Vincenzio Romoli and Agnolino Gaddi to throw more “precious perfumes . . . and drugs of a fetid odor” onto the fire. The smoke filled the air, creeping down into their lungs, inspiring the visions of demons that swarmed across their eyes. Vincenzio, the closest to the burning fumigations, began to “quake like an aspen leaf.” Cellini’s shaking hands desperately clutched a pentacle, which he held over the head of a young virgin boy who was “shriek[ing] out in terror that a million of the fiercest men were swarming round and threatening” the group. These visions were followed by hallucinations of giants. The older men managed to keep their composure; the boy, however, was losing control of the phantasms and began to cry that the giants were infiltrating the magical circle. He panicked: “This is how I will meet death, for we are certainly dead men!”

  Cellini, holding back the desire to scream in horror, finally had enough. He ordered Agnolino to quickly throw asafetida onto the flames to drown out the drugs and perfumes and thus counteract the spell. Agnolino was so scared he couldn’t control his bowels, and when he turned to the fire he “let fly such a volley from his breech” that the entire demonic ritual descended into uproarious laughter at the noise trumpeting from his underside. The boy’s psyche had been saved by that most primitive and magically mirthful toot: the human fart.22

  Solanaceous drugs were hardly relegated to a village magician’s malefic uses of bewitchment, enchantment, and murder. It has been argued convincingly that there existed a necromantic “clerical underworld” in Western Europe during the late Middle Ages, which still existed into the early modern period. Necromancy involves calling on the dead to serve the needs of the conjurer. During the early and later Middle Ages, the term implied the invocation of demons.23 I do not mean to suggest that all rituals of this kind involved psychoactive or hallucinogenic drugs like the one Cellini experienced, but some of them certainly did. Albertus Magnus openly addressed henbane’s visionary properties for use in necromancy in his De vegetabilis.24 Famed Renaissance magus Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa not only used mandrake as an aphrodisiac but also wrote of its visionary uses in his De Occulta Philosophia (Three Books of Occult Philosophy): “There are also suffumigations under opportune influence of Stars that make the images of spirits forthwith appear in the air or elsewhere.” The herbs to be burned and inhaled are listed as henbane, hemlock, coriander, and smallage. A second entheogenic recipe in Agrippa’s Three Books mixes “juice of hemlock and henbane,” along with opium and other innocuous plants (red sander, for example), to “make spirits and strange shapes appear.” These herbs, the magus records, are called “spirits’ herbs.”25 This spell has all the workings of an entheogenic experience: powerful drugs, a mind readied to accept the apparitions, and a sacred ritual of invocation. Outside this entheogenic use, Agrippa also believed these herbs to be so strong that a similar fumigation could be used to keep thieves away from hidden treasures: “[F]ume the hiding place with coriander, saffron, henbane, smallage, black poppy . . . tempered with the juice of hemlock, that which is so hid shall never be taken away.” If someone tried to steal these “precious things” she or he would “fall into frenzy.” This spell only worked, though, during an eclipse.26 In the magus’s two veneficia spells, we greet the same poisonous suffumigations used for different ends, mostly depending on celestial alignments. As far as Agrippa was concerned, whether toxins like henbane caused visions or frenzy could be read in the stars.

  Looking at the descriptions of henbane’s psychological effects found in the medical literature of the time offers us more clues. Perhaps the “detachment from reality,” “madness,” “synesthesia,” “vertigo,” and physiological changes to the body found in the medical writings were reinterpreted as magic by sorcerers and magi of various sorts. Necromancers and spirit conjurers might require assistants but there is no evidence that they called on these supernatural beings collectively. Most were probably solo practitioners.27 Indeed, some books, like The Munich Manual of Demonic Magic, a fifteenth-century grimoire manuscript, even warn the necromancer to practice this art secretly.28

  And then there was Zoe (ca. 980–1050 CE). The Byzantine empress ruled with her sister, Theodora, from November 1028 to June 1050. It was no secret that Zoe understood the properties of poisonous and intoxicating plants. Upon the death of her predecessor, Emperor Roma-nus III, the philosopher-monk Michael Psellus wrote that it was “universally accepted” that Zoe had “bewitched [Romanus] with drugs,” a point repeated in the works of another contemporary Greek historian, Georgius Cedrenus. She did, in fact, have an entire laboratory dedicated to mixing the latest and most expensive perfumes, potions, and ointments from the most exotic plants and herbs obtained from India and Egypt. What exactly she used all these mixtures for remains uncertain, though at least one scholar trusts that she used them for some kind of divinatory purposes.*49 29

  There are also those few accounts where it is impossible to determine if a certain psychoactive plant was used deliberately or accidentally. Swiss pathologist and pharmacologist Johann Jakob Wepfer (1620–1695) gives an amusing account of an accidental poisoning in 1649 at the Convent of Rhinon, Germany; several residents had eaten henbane leaves inadvertently (or intentionally) mixed in their dinner salads. The next morning, one person experienced soporatum and could not be awakened (apparently he had helped himself to seconds). Those who did wake up experienced bizarre hallucinations at morning Mass: “The visi
on . . . was so disordered that they thought insects were crawling over their books, and employed themselves in blowing and brushing the intruders off. Others, instead of praying, uttered nonsense.” All the monks fully recovered by the next day, save one tailor: his vision had become so distorted by the experience that thereafter anytime he tried to thread a needle he saw three “ghost-like duplicates.”30

  Another episode, in an off-the-cuff comment from Oxford physician Robert Burton (1577–1640), concerns a group of men who stopped at a tavern in Agrigentum, Sicily. Although Burton doesn’t claim to know what was in the patrons’ drinks, he hypothesizes that it was probably henbane, hemlock, mandrake, or deadly nightshade, because after imbibing the men “began to be so troubled in their brains, that their phantasies so crased [sic] that they thought they were in a ship at sea.” Fearing they would capsize by a large storm the men (to avoid drowning) decided to throw all the furniture out of the tavern to lighten the load of the basement, or as they saw it, the cargo. They were brought to court while still under the trance; one man threw himself at the mercy of the court, beseeching his judges that if they would save him he would build an altar in their honor. Burton ends the tale with a warning to his readers: “Many such accidents frequently happen, upon these unknown occasions. Some are so caused by philters.”31

  As the elements of the witch stereotype were coalescing, a certain ointment was said to cause one to fall into a deep sleep, usually accompanied by visions that seemed real to the user. Such a state of being acquired a prominent place in the inquisitorial script: soporatum.32 This was the “profound sleep” found in medical texts, described in the previous chapter, caused by plants such as mandrake, henbane, deadly nightshade, hemlock, and opium. The mid-sixteenth-century apothecary text (and international bestseller during the Renaissance) Secrets of the Reverent Maister Alexis of Piemont lauded mandrake and henbane ingestion as a way to “see in the night goodly things in your dreame.” But such highly volatile plants needed to be handled with care.33 Yet evidence suggests that the opposite was true. The inflammatory sixteenth-century physician Paracelsus launched his characteristically acerbic aspersions against those “dirty ointment-vending quacks . . . [who] have not learnt even the beginning [of the medical arts], and yet health and safety are to be sought from men such as these. What do you find in them but desire for money and thirst for goods? It is all the same whether their medicines do good or harm.”34

  This chapter outlined a general survey of how regular people might have used or misused drug ointments and potions for love, revenge, or both in tandem. Also glimpsed was the ceremonial use of special poisons like that employed by Cellini’s necromancer and Agrippa, to say nothing of the toad extracts found in Bilia’s potion from a previous chapter. Yet none of these practices tell us much about what those professional mixers—those veneficae who would later be accused of witchcraft—might have used the brews and unguents for in a private ritualistic setting. It is therefore imperative that we get as close as we can to their world, their psyche-magic, and see how these drug ointments fit into the larger folk beliefs discussed in chapter 2. Perhaps a few of the discussed psychoactive, hallucinogenic, and soporific plants and herbs caused such a surrealistic experience, expecially if a certain mindset guided by incantations and expectations supplemented the drug. Maybe some of these psychoactive substances comprised a part of the broader concept of veneficium that included private psyche-magical visionary journeys—the kind of journeys Matteuccia di Francesco might have been familiar with; the kind of journeys that could be (mis) interpreted by a fanatical clergy.

  It is time to turn to the chronicles, trials, and demonological texts that focused on the deeds and beliefs of those local magicians like Matteuccia to see (with admittedly limited vision) what she might have thought about her magical ointments. As we delve through the dossiers please bear in mind that as early as 1322, a century before the formulation of the witch stereotype, Parisian layhealer Jacquelin Félicie was accused of sampling her own potions.35 Perhaps we can get some insights into the underlying truth of Matteuccia’s ointment by looking at reports of how other local magicians likewise self-anointed for psyche-magical reasons—reasons that could be misconstrued and demonized by an obsessed clergy as a trip to the Sabbat.

  6

  SOPORIFIC SPELLS

  That which comes by nature is abused by their superstitions.

  GIAMBATTISTA DELLA PORTA

  There is sufficient evidence to show that the [witch’s] body does not leave. They are removed in mind, so that they fancy that they are flying away.

  HANS VON VINTLER

  HERBAL IDOLATRY

  Daybreak would soon catch up to and then supersede the slowly dissipating nocturnal horizon; the matins bells would ring, prompting the Sun’s faithful rotation around Earth. Lurking in the shade of the silvery predawn glow Finicella found her way to the Piazza of St. Peter’s. She needed to obtain an ointment—surreptitiously, of course. Abundia smiled; in the piazza at that hour, one could procure ointments made from herbs picked on the holy days of the Ascension and St. John the Baptist—the finest and most powerful herbs indeed! For herbs picked on the mornings of those special days absorbed all the magic that the morning dew baptized the landscape with, or so commoners believed.

  Regrettably for Finicella, Bernardino of Siena had just been cleared of all charges of heresy and sought to quickly show his gratitude. The best way he could accomplish this would be to cleanse the Eternal City of all witchcraft, superstition, and other related magical arts. It would begin with a sermon in St. Peter’s Basilica . . .

  Bernardino had left Todi for Gubbio in the spring or summer of 1426.1 While there, Pope Martin V had summoned him to Rome to sit before a panel of fifty-two ecclesiastics to answer to charges of magic, heresy, and idolatry, including one such charge positing that Bernardino was “the beast of the Apocalypse” incarnate. Bernardino’s eventual acquittal came with no small thanks to John of Capistrano, a “highly regarded” churchman and friend of the accused. However, the malicious rumors didn’t cease with Bernardino’s initial exoneration and some years later Pope Eugene IV finally silenced them with a bull issued on February 7, 1432, regaling Bernardino as a “most acute and rigorous eradicator of heresy.”2 Between the years of his indictment and his final acquittal Bernardino worked diligently to prove that his peers could count him among the devout. Consequently, he set about warning people of the trials of life and the hell that awaited those who failed.

  Finicella had failed.

  Taking the pulpit, Bernardino’s warnings of sorcery and its prideful implications of saintly renunciation in exchange for satanic jubilee echoed off the finely carved sculptures of the basilica, creating a sound so big it fell on the congregation from all corners. Yet even this grand acoustic effect wasn’t enough to instill the fear of sorcery and enchantment in his listeners. Some of those in the audience even laughed, quietly mocking Bernardino; others stared in simple confusion. As far as these parishioners were concerned, enchanters might have been fairly eccentric folks but they simply didn’t worship the devil. Bernardino, they mumbled among themselves, must have “dreamed all this of which [he] spoke.”

  The Sienese preacher’s frustration grew at his audiences’ indifference to the scourge of diabolical witchcraft—of course enchanters allied themselves with Satan! He decided to switch tactics, opting for an old standard in the Catholic tool kit: guilt. Bernardino cried out, “Whosoever person knowing a man or a woman who [practiced sorcery], if he did not accuse them, he would be guilty of the selfsame sin”3—a tactic no doubt influenced by his understanding of Isaiah 58:1.4 According to Bernardino, not long afterward a “multitude of witches and enchanters” were reported to the authorities by the Roman citizenry, though the rush of accusations resulted in only “the most important of these women . . . those who had done the worst” actually standing trial.5 Of this unknown number only two women were burned. One of these two, Finicella, is named specifically in sev
eral early modern period accounts written in both Italian and German.

  There is a familiar resonance in the pattern of Finicella’s supposed misdeeds: she engaged in a host of acts that included infanticide, heresy, diabolism, and medicinal sorcery—allegations similar to those thrust on Matteuccia. Infanticide and heresy were seen as one and the same act (such as with the folk of the keg); she was accused of murdering her own son to create powders from the pulverized body parts, “which she gave people to eat in these practices of hers.”6