By 1410 medieval historian Dietrich of Niem (ca. 1345–1418) wrote confidently in his lugubrious De schismate (On the Papal Schism) that “many deluded Germans call in common parlance the ‘Gral,’ claiming that many . . . people are living in this mountain . . . given over to dancing and wantonness and the practice of magic arts.” He makes no mention of Venus, and like others of his time sets the mountain in Italy (Pozzuoli). But his words also indicate a shift in idiom. Indeed, a German lexicon dated 1425 defines Gralus as “a mythical place of which it is said that a king is there and that the people are living a life of joy until the day of judgment.”40
In just a hundred years the bejeweled castle of the Grail paradise, where chivalry and honesty once ruled, had descended into a school of magical arts and carnal temptation: Venusberg, a mountain ruled by a highly Roman conception of Venus as a goddess of lust. The moniker first appears in church reformer Johannes Nider’s final work, Preceptorium divine legis (Teachers of the Divine Law, ca. 1438), in the form of a question: “Is there any truth to what they say of Venus Mountain, where they say men live a life of luxury and beautiful women offer lustful pleasure?”41 A few years later, an astronomer-physician employed by the Duke of Saxony wrote to Aenus Sylvius (later Pius II), inquiring if he knew the location of Venus Mountain. In an undated letter (probably ca. 1440–45) titled “De Monte Veneris,” the future pope responded that he did not know where that legendary land lay. He does offer up a suggestion though: a cave within the mountainous region that overlooks the ancient settlement of Norcia, Italy—about a day’s walk from Todi—might be the place. Sylvius had also heard that people “learn the magic arts” while there.42 Around 1453 Hermann von Sachsenheim (1365–1458) composed his poem Die mörin, which tells the story of a knight who must stand trial before Venus for neglecting to follow her rules of courtly love. The poem gives a brief description of the heathen paradise, Venusberg, as common folk understood it at that time:
How in the Venus Mount there stayed,
Both dames and knights and dwarf and maid,
In many sports they while the time
With harp and song and ancient rhyme.43
Von Sachsenheim does not attempt to pinpoint the whereabouts of the extraordinary land. Though, his incorporation of elephants, magical unicorns, and a general Eastern ambiance has led one scholar to suspect von Sachsenheim believed Venus Mountain was located in the Orient.44
Another poem dated around 1464 (but probably containing older oral material) speaks of a man who travels through a forest and meets an elven queen. She takes him to her kingdom, found inside a hollow mountain. Once inside her paradisiacal realm, while elves play knightly sports, the elf queen seduces the hero.45 Traveling through Cyprus around the 1480s Dominican theologian Felix Faber (or Fabri) brought back to Europe tales of Venus worship among the inhabitants of that island. The citizens of Cyprus supposed that Venus’s “pleasure garden” was “sown with lust-making plants.” She had “dug out the inner-mountain herself, consecrating it in her name, and setting up different rooms for revelry or Adonis worship.”46 As will be shown, it was this picture of Venusberg as a heathen pleasure garden of infinite luxuries, sexual encounters, ceremonies, and, of course, magical instruction, that would provide the base elements for the formulation of the concept of the witches’ Sabbat in the German and Swiss territories during the early- to mid-fifteenth century.
A NIGHT ON HAY MOUNTAIN
Despite the host of mountaintops where witches were rumored to convene, most German commoners at the dawn of the fifteenth century would not have recognized the name Venusberg, a literary creation of the educated class. Even the infamous Blocksberg, perhaps the most famous “witch mountain” throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, doesn’t yet appear in writing at this early date. If anything, early-fifteenth-century Germanic peoples might have referred to the Heuberg, that is, “Hay Mountain,” in Swabia (southwestern Germany). With printing still eighty years in the future early references to the Heuberg are scarce, though there is enough to paint a picture, albeit with limited colors. Again, poets supply our best information: Heinrich von Wittenweiler writing around 1410 tells us of the Höperg, a supernatural land populated by giants, heroes of myth, and dwarves that witches flew to join.47 The Heuberg served as the meeting place for witches in German lore and, unlike Venusberg, the Heuberg was (and still is) an actual place in Swabia—only these witches did not sojourn to the Heuberg to service the devil in flesh and dine on cadavers. Regrettably, we don’t know exactly what early modern period Western Europeans believed about witches supposedly flying to the Heuberg, but latter-day evidence offers some possibilities. Perhaps the witches met up to dance and worship the gods of yore in secret; perhaps they needed a remote location to practice their magic; in any event there isn’t a trace of devil worship at the Heuberg in early-fifteenth-century sources.
Theologian Martin Plantsch (1460–1533) would describe the Heuberg in a little-known text, Opusculum de sagis maleficis Martini Plantsch concionatoris Tubingensis, 1507 (A Brief Book of Magic Observed by Martin Plantsch, Tübingen Preacher). His fusion of the Heuberg legend with both Venus Mountain and the folk of the keg is apparent.
Accordingly, this kind of damnable person, who tries through witchcraft to change locations . . . [this magic] calls for the use of dogs, or other beasts, [pitch]forks, or the handles of brooms to ride to the cellars of the wealthy where they enjoy their wines with moral abandon, or [they ride] to the mountain of hay that commoners call the Heuberg, where in playful happiness, they celebrate [with] banquets.48
About a decade or so before Johannes Nider preserved the earliest reference to Venusberg in his Preceptorium divine legis, he compiled a series of homilies into one collection, hereafter referred to as Predigten, “Sermons.” In Predigten (ca. 1430) Nider makes passing reference to a woman that he calls unholda,*54 affirming that she is a social nuisance. Here, he refers to the puckish village sorceress, the kind of woman (like Matteuccia) that his congregation would recognize. He relates how the unholda tried to “fly away” and “travel to the Heuberg.” She did this by placing a large bowl on a bench, and climbing inside “in the devil’s name,” though she didn’t really fly. In fact, just the opposite—she fell, both from the light of God (as Nider saw it) and off the bench, onto the floor, ending with the trough falling onto her head. Nider offers this story as an aside for a larger sermon on the First Commandment. Idolatry, considered among the gravest of errors, usually resulted in, at the very least, penance. And yet Nider regarded this unholda as worthy of ridicule.49 Yet it is here, between the chuckles of this preacher, that we finally get a break in our case! For Nider also relates why these mischief-making, Heuberg-traveling unholden believed they were able to fly: because of “the ointments they make.” One is reminded of the night-stalking unholda outlined in Bur-chard’s “Corrector.” Only this woman wasn’t frightening and imaginary at all,†55 she was comical and all too real.
VETULA FORMICARIUM
We needn’t question the Dominican’s revulsion to the “demented old hag” (vetula), or whoever approached him in a town along the Rhine’s “southern swath of German-speaking lands.”50 Unclean, uncouth, emaciated, stupefied, yet not lacking in pomp, she had a fantastic story to tell the Dominican theologian, as accounts of wild flights through the air with the ancient Roman huntress-goddess Diana floated from her mouth on stale, rusty breath.
The friar scoffed at such notions. After all, Diana was a false goddess, nothing more than the spiritual ruins of a fallen pagan empire.51 But the vetula was as persuasive as she was “out of her senses,” and sought to prove her aerial journey to him. The friar could only humor her. “Allow me to be present when you depart on your next occasion,” he requested.
“I agree to it and you will observe my departure,” she replied, adding that he may bring others to witness her fantastic powers.
Some days later the friar and several “trustworthy townsfolk” showed up at her home, h
oping to “convince this fanatic of her madness.”52 They mused among themselves, poking fun at this obviously delusional vetula, until she placed a kneading bowl on a stool and climbed into it. This got their attention. They watched as she smeared herself with an ointment, enchanting the goop with magical gibberish. A network of cuts collected through the travails of daily life crossed her arms. If these scores didn’t absorb the ointment, then the pores covering her forearms, opened by the frantic rubbing of her hands, surely did.*56 Soon afterward the woman began to shake “under the operation of demons.” She flailed her arms and cried out; then, falling into a deep sleep, she tipped the kneading bowl off the stool, banging her head on the floor. The impact did not rouse her; she lay there in a stupor.
“May I ask where you think you are?” the friar cried out when she finally awakened. “You were not with Diana . . . you never left this bowl.”
The story ends happily. We are told that through “thoughtful exertions,” the friar was able to remove this particular heresy from the vetula’s “abominable soul.”53
Johannes Nider preserved this story for us in his Formicarius (The Anthill, 1435–37), a thick tome written between the productions of his Predigten and Preceptorium divine legis, which represents that crucial period just before the finalization of the witch stereotype.54 If Nider isn’t referring to the same woman described in Predigten as he is in Formicarius, he is at the very least describing the same kind of practice. That is, people being fooled into believing they are in the presence of the divine, by what was to him nothing more than an experience generated by the power of an ordinary narcotic. Nider, a student of Jean Charlier de Gerson, French scholar, reformer, and the man largely responsible for declaring that all magic was wicked,55 was a “key transitional figure” in the development of witch theory. Yet Nider was not a witch-burning fanatic but rather a “moderate, tempered, and reasonable” friar who neither hunted nor tried a single witch; and Formicarius is not the misogynistic, “witch-script” that was the Malleus maleficarum (Hammer against Witches, 1484) of five decades later, but rather “a rich picture of the moral and spiritual landscape of Europe,” of which witchcraft was only constituted a small part.56 Further still, modern scholars are fairly certain that Formicarius is “rooted in folkloric stereotypes.”57 Furthermore, like Abraham of Worms’ sober attestation, what Nider understood about the vetula’s ointments didn’t amount to witchcraft, as he doesn’t retell this story in Book 5, “On Witches and their Deceptions” (De maleficis et eorum deceptionibus) but rather in Book 2 “On False Dreams and Visions” (De falsis et illusoriis visionibus).
Additionally, one cannot help but notice the interesting and traceable digression of emphasis found between the lines of Nider’s writings. First, in Predigten, in his earlier mention of the ointment the woman is the kind of folk sorceress his audience would recognize: a mischief-making unholda, mixer of salves, who then uses them to travel to the Heuberg. The passage, while spiritual in its injunction, is uncharged with diabolism. In Formicarius, produced only a few years after Predigten, there are two noticeable shifts in emphasis: first, the woman’s status as a witch is more defined from a theological perspective.58 The superstitious village folk sorceress, or unholda, has now become a witch, a vetula, who claims she can fly great distances with Diana but only dreams of Venusberg. Moreover, this time Predigten’s avian ointment occurs ominously oiled onto the epidermis, coupled with folk chants to fill out the vetula’s sleep and dreams of Venusberg, the paradise of debauchery. Due to the popularity of the goddess Holda in Germany we can assume that Nider knew the difference between the Heuberg and Venusberg and possibly changed the name to appeal to his audience; in all probability he read his masterwork, Formicarius, aloud to the attendees while attending the Council of Basel in the mid-1430s.59
In his final work, Preceptorium divine legis, produced between writing the last book of Formicarius in early 1438 and his death later that year, Nider reinstates the vetula one last time. Here he snubs the devil and Diana, redundant players in the narrative.60 Furthermore, the incantations and ointments of Formicarius have been exorcised as well, needless accessories to a belief he found offensive; in the later work the woman has simply been “fooled in sleep . . . saying she can transvect with Herodias or Venus.”61 By the time of Preceptorium Nider makes a general statement about the widespread belief in some kind of licentious and magical mountaintop: Venusberg. The woman has been distilled down to a deluded vetula who dreams of Herodias and Venus and demons disguised as women à la the Canon Episcopi.
By now the psyche-magical ointment’s role in validating the vetula’s visions vis-à-vis Venus’s venery veers. A “witch’s” mode of travel, psyche-magical ointment or otherwise, mattered not to the theologian. Nider is firm: Venusberg doesn’t actually exist, with or without a magical flying ointment. This is a candid admission of an obscure but nonetheless real use of a hallucinogenic ointment. Should this exemplum have a basis in reality, the ointment might have served as an entheogen. One is reminded of the local spirit Matteuccia adjured while performing her abortion sorcery for Catarina and the way it was interpreted as the “Great Demon” during her trial. In fact, when Matteuccia performed whatever rite she did with her ointment, it was said that Satan sent demons to her service.
But Book 5 of Formicarius is not completely without mention of a magical ointment. Nider deals with it when discussing the Simmental trials of the 1390s as recounted to him by Peter of Greyerz, the inquisitor in that area. The ointment and the heretics’ potion in Book 5 are made of the usual clerically contrived concoctions mixed from the bodies of unbaptized children, showing a mingling of magical drugs with heretical prejudices. The ointment was used for “rites and transmutations”; the elixir was one of the heretics’ potions. The ointment is a new addition to the heresy script, and is not only absent from all earlier heresy records (as outlined in chapter 3), but is also absent from a follow-up story in Formicarius concerning a married couple burned for similar heresies, which features the heretics’ potion. The couple went to a church with the masters of the sect and there renounced the “Catholic Church.” They then paid homage to the devil, drank the diabolical draught, and became members of the sect.62
The ointments in Book 2 and Book 5 of Formicarius, when placed side by side tell two unique stories. None of the heretical archetypes play into the vetula’s sleeping ointment, which merely caused her dreams to seem more real (although, apparently “false”) than ethereal. Hers is no heretics’ potion; it is something else. It is clear that as late as 1436–1437 Nider didn’t equate the two ointments; the vetula’s flying ointment and the heretical stereotypes present at Simmental existed independent of each other yet simultaneously. Furthermore, the vetula’s flight was imaginary; the heretics’ meetings were real. Peter of Greyerz, who told Nider the story of the Simmental witches, clearly believed these ointments were one and the same. In his recording of those witches Nider inadvertently brought these separate realms closer together.
All this leads to a specific observation: Nider was condemning the belief in the Heuburg/Venusberg, not use of the ointment, which was merely an aside, an inadvertent acknowledgment of a perhaps not widely practiced but nonetheless real use of different medical narcotics to achieve altered states of consciousness for psyche-magical reasons. Like Abraham of Worms’ account, the descriptions of these ointments in Predigten and Formicarius are striking for how undiabolical they read. There is no devil or witches’ Sabbat. In light of the readily available soporific ointment recipes already discussed there is little reason to doubt that Nider’s vetula doesn’t reflect a general caveat against the use of real psyche-magical ointments, dolled up in Dianic dress for an accessible ecclesiastical exemplum. One overlapping theme in all three accounts is Nider’s insistence that this act was laughable (lachen) and even somewhat pathetic—the dogma of depraved dupes. Nider was not warning against Satan but rather warning against chicanery. Both the Linzian witch’s and the vetula’s attempt
s to demonstrate their powers of flight “failed” in the eyes of their audience.
Failed, that is, only if we see it from the perspectives of the Hebrew mystic and the theologian. But if we look at this from the unholda’s point of view, there might be something more going on: if she used these kinds of psyche-magical ointments for some obscure folk-religious purpose that was dismissed as a pagan rite by churchmen and therefore subject to the superimposition of theological concepts like the Dianic society,63 then the experience can rightly be called entheogenic. In any event these kinds of things were too far removed from Nider’s worldview to have had a chance of being understood properly. And while he might have chosen different words (unholda/vetula, Heuberg/Venusberg) depending on the class of his listeners, as a sensible reformer Nider was unlikely to make up a story just to scare his audience.64
WICKED RITUALS AND OINTMENTS
Alonso Tostado (ca. 1400–1455), bishop of Ávila, was a Spanish theologian and exegete who left us two separate descriptions of these ointments, one in his Commentary on Genesis (1435–36), and the other in his Commentary on Matthew (1440). But it is in his interpolations from one commentary to the next that we encounter one of the clearest leaps from soporific drug spells to witches’ ointment. While only making passing mention of the ointments in his later Commentary on Matthew, he expands on their psychoactive nature in the earlier work, Commentary on Genesis, as part of a larger argument about the creation of Eve from Adam.
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