The Witches' Ointment
Page 21
And yet Weyer didn’t feel the need to censor himself when discussing other decidedly nonpoisonous magical ingredients such as clothing shards of the deceased, wax from candles, and other funerary accoutrements. He writes that these objects “have more frivolity than truth about them, whereas [he has] preferred to bury in silence the natural and all-too-effective poisons.”29 His take on the “witches’ ointment” is unique though, and two differences in his reproduction of Cardano’s theories are rather telling: first, Weyer quotes Cardano’s De subtilitate verbatim until its author mentions the physiological effects of the ointment: “illness, death.”30 Here Weyer inserts a subtle difference, diverging from describing the bodily effects in favor of a psychological description, maintaining that the mental makeup of the person using them affects the experience.31 And second, Weyer’s take on these ointments bordered on both medical and theological theories: the drugs served to weaken the minds of those who took them, which made it easier for Satan to enter into one’s consciencness.32 These people needed help, he argued, not torture and death sentences.33
The backlash was immediate; Weyer had inadvertently given the game away. By admitting that these ointments, at the very least, could delude the mind enough for the devil to enter the psyche was too careless an admission, which his detractors seized upon. The viewpoint had originated a century earlier with the Malleus maleficarum, and though the author (or authors, depending on your point of view) ignored the use of drugs, similar arguments were made about Satan’s ability to enter weak minds. Weyer’s adoption of that theory gave credence to a demonological belvedere.34 Additionally, this new cadre of demonologists living at the end of the sixteenth century had all the literature from the fifteenth to review for their rebuttals.
The earliest counteroffensive comes from Grand Judge of St. Claude Henry Boguet (1550–1619), as outlined in his Discours exécrable des sorciers (An Examination of Witches, 1602), in which he rather masterfully uses Weyer’s argument against him, meshing it with that posited in the Malleus maleficarum: the ointments “deaden and stupefy the witches’ senses so that Satan may more easily have his way with them.” Because of Weyer, Laguna, and Cardano’s exposés, though, Boguet couldn’t just ignore the drugs’ role in the witches’ ointment: “[A]t other times, the Evil Spirit mixes with it some ingredients which causes deep sleep, such as mandragora.”35 Suppressing the names of the drugs had become moot by the turn of the sixteenth century, so demonologists simply argued around them.
French magistrate and witch-hunter Nicolas Remy (1530–1616) broke convention in his Daemonolatreiae libri tres (Demonolatry, 1595) by eschewing the common practice of using “poetic fiction” as a point of argumentation: “I shall be content to adduce such instances as are provided by everyday use and experience. . . . Surgeons know the use of such narcotics when they wish to amputate a limb from a man’s body without his feeling the pain of it.” Among those drugs named, Remy includes hemlock, nightshade, mandrake, and opium.36 Despite Remy’s knowledge of these drugs’ effects, he, like Bergamo a century earlier, still attributed the power of the ointments and potions made from them to be secondary to the influences of demons. The witch must first serve demons for a lengthy period of time, after which they will teach her how to turn into a cat, a mouse, a locust, “or some other small animal,” so that the witch may penetrate households to spread her maleficia.37
Later, Italian priest Francesco Maria Guazzo (1570–16??) borrowed heavily from Remy, asserting in his witch-hunters’ manual Compendium maleficarum (Book of Witches, 1608) that the ointment is composed of “natural soporific drugs . . . known and used by chemists,” such as nightshade, mandrake, and opium.38 The chief ingredient, of course, comes from our heretics’ potion: child’s flesh. By now, the heretics’ potion had fused with the sorceress’s flying ointment to become that newest addition to demonological theory, the lamiarum unguentum, the witches’ ointment. Guazzo gives the example of a barber named Bertrand, whose wife knocked him out with such an ointment, after which she anointed herself with the same “when she wished to go to the Sabbat.”39 These same drugs could be used to “bewitch” a person by swallowing, anointing, or inhaling them. Again, the theology that holds the demon’s power over that of the poison is striking.40 By this time, the Sabbat itself, however, had undergone a series of noticeable changes.
DANCING BACKWARD
Elizabeth eagerly rubbed the ointment over her flesh, laughing all the while. Society had spurned her, called her most cherished beliefs “errors.” The festival culture, where townsfolk gathered to vent their frustrations in the form of carnivalesque debaucheries, was necessary to keep the lower classes placated. But Elizabeth had been banned from participating. Her only solace could be found in the furthest reaches of her mind wherein she controlled some aspect of her life—controlled those who abused her. There, she retained the powers and divine mysteries of nature and conversed with the spirits; there, she was something more than her chauvinistic neighbors thought of her—not just a lost soul gone off to meet the devil, as they saw her. She was not a member of the Benandanti cult, or any other protector of folk fertility who entered natura-ontological trance states on appointed nights, which arise from cultural programming.
Or maybe she knew nothing of traditional magic or folk spells and merely needed an escape. The relentless whispers of gossip had reached her ears. This was a way to alleviate the mind and body for a while, a way to reconcile the fact that while some of the clergy lived in splendor despite preaching the sanctity of poverty, she had to wait until death to receive her just rewards—that is, of course, if she managed to live her unimaginably difficult life without caving in to emotions. Otherwise, she could only expect the pits of hell to open before her at the hour of her death. Christian justice.
Elizabeth waited until an hour or two before midnight, the time “chiefly notorious for specters and hideous ghosts,” to apply her salve. The natural forces within the drugs, delivered by the ointment as it seeped into her skin and flushed through her blood, slowly crept into her awareness, which was inexorably overtaken by the revelries found in the furthest depths of her subconscious mind. And lo, before she knew it she was flying through the air, sailing across the sky in an ecstatic bliss! Eventually touching down in an expansive field far removed from the normalcy of her social order, she and the others bowed before the devil seated on a throne—a testament that he is their king. Elizabeth stepped in line behind the others. One by one, those in front of her approached Satan and took turns kissing his backside, while offering him black candles and umbilical cords. He accepted their gifts and pulled them deeper into his control, impacting their depraved souls to a lifetime of supernatural powers in exchange for an eternity of torment come the Final Judgment. Elizabeth cared not, and sat at a large table beside her “own Familiar Spirit.” Demons served entrées of baby corpses. Wine, “black like stale blood,” touched the rims of Elizabeth’s goblet. A hellion led the diners in grace, though this prayer was “composed of blasphemous words in which [Satan] himself is acclaimed the Creator and Giver and Preserver of all.” Elizabeth sipped her wine, but quickly pulled the chalice away from her lips. There was no taste at all. Puzzled but by no means deterred from the festivities, she picked up a fork and knife—finer versions than the jerryrigged utensils she was used to in her ordinary life—and carved a slab of meat from the cadaver. This particular child was a village brat, whom she was all too happy to see dead and consumed by the congregation. And yet, she never felt satisfied. Like the wine, the infant meat could not satiate her cravings. She would always need more, and gnawed away at the flesh uncontrollably.
Under a harvest moon set before a deep orange sky, a sectarian carrying a “bawdy bagpipe” lifted himself into the trees above, so high he disappeared among the gray, portentously low-hanging clouds. He nestled himself amid the branches and put his lips to the chanter, exhaling the first profane notes of the hymn to the Morning Star. Then “each demon [took] by the hand the discipl
e under his guardianship.” Elizabeth and the others gathered in a circle and began to dance, not forward as good Christians would, but backward “like frantic folk,” singing a blasphemous refrain that celebrated their inversion of the natural order. Elizabeth stopped dancing and raised her bottom to her demon lover, who hungrily mounted her. The coldness of the demon’s penis sent shivers through her spine, condemning her eternal soul deeper into depravity with every blasphemous thrust.
They stopped only as the first rays of sunlight started to crawl over the treetops. The music ceased and the bagpipe player climbed down from the branches above; the dancing came to an abrupt halt; the demons that once swarmed the meadow began to dissipate into the last shadows of the night. Elizabeth and the others straddled their brooms and were whisked back to their homes, where they would be bedridden for a few days after the Sabbat.*68
The above is a depiction of the Sabbat as it typically appears in literature between the mid-sixteenth century and the late seventeenth century. It was this imagined script that allowed untold numbers of women and men to be tried and burned for the crime of witchcraft. Giambattista della Porta discovered this when he was brought before the Inquisition twice: once in 1574, and again in 1580, over his Natural Magick. Although della Porta had completed his work in 1558, a debate between Johann Weyer and the French jurist and demonologist Jean Bodin (1530–1596) found della Porta in the middle of this spat three decades later. By arguing that the persecution of witches was an abomination, Weyer had cited della Porta’s ointment account in De Praestigiis as a natural explanation of witches’ hallucinations. In this debate Bodin condemned Weyer for sorcery in the former’s De la démonomanie des sorciers (Of the Demon-mania of the Sorcerers, 1580) and brought della Porta into the clash. Della Porta wisely removed the ointment story and the recipe from later editions of his book.41
But this didn’t stop della Porta from chronicling other wondrous uses for these drugs. In Natural Magick, he describes the solanaceous (and other) plants’ fantastic effects in subchapters like “How to Make a Man Out of His Senses For a Day,” which describe the properties of opium, henbane, mandrake, deadly nightshade (called Hypnoticon), and datura. Datura, he says, “will make one mad, and present strange visions, both pleasant and horrible.” Deadly nightshade has similarly marvelous effects, to which della Porta adds a caveat regarding dosage: “[I]t is a most pleasant spectacle to behold such mad whimsies and visions. . . . 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.”42 He even comments on how a friend who, using solanaceous drugs—specifically datura, henbane, and belladonna—“as often as he pleased, knew how to make a man think he was changed into a bird or a beast.” Should the desire to become a fish or a goose entertain his fancy, he would drink his own potions and enjoy the pleasant madness by “beat[ing] the ground with his teeth” and flapping his wings.43 Attempting to understand such a concept—he was, after all, laboring “earnestly to discover the secrets of Nature”44—della Porta procured some of these plants, and in Natural Magick he rather bluntly admits to having experimented on his roommates while in school. One lad ate belladonna on his steak and experienced visions of bulls chasing after him (though he did not become one himself). Another sprawled out on the floor “endeavoring as it were to swim for life.” Whether he thought himself transformed into a fish or not, della Porta does not say. As the drug faded he wrung out his hair and clothes, believing he had just returned from the ocean. The experiment was a success. “These and many other pleasant things, the curious enquirer may find out. It is enough for me only to have hinted at the manner of doing them,” the physician concluded.45 Mention of the drugs’ wondrous properties didn’t matter to demonologists—they knew that any person with a little medical training was aware of the profound effects such plants had on the mind. However, to some like Jean Bodin, mentioning the drugs’ role in the lamiarum unguentum was a different issue because it left no room for the devil’s trickery.
GIRLS GONE WILD
Margaretha didn’t grow udders, horns, or a tail; her face, too, remained that of a girl, not that of a calf. And this certainly wasn’t the Heuburg! The four teenage girls hadn’t left the strawberry patch in Haberösch at all, the surroundings of which digressed into distressing distortions as the landscape began to “swirl around.” Magdalena’s magic had failed and now Margaretha ran about the field “completely wild, as if out of her senses.” The “peculiar piece of bread” that Magdalena had given Margaretha to eat only served to terrify the bewildered girl. University students, it would seem, weren’t the only ones privy to della Porta’s “manner of doing” animal transformations.
In Vöhringen, Germany, in 1663, two women found Margaretha in this state of despair and brought her back to their village, Rosenfeld. While there, authorities discovered that Magdalena had boasted that eating her bread would turn her into a calf, and “insisted that . . . [Margaretha] should travel with her to the Heuberg”—charges that Magdalena did not deny. She stayed around to help Margaretha recover and then fled to an adjacent village where she had grown up. Eventually caught and detained, she was again asked about the incident.46 It is the second line of questioning that is of interest to us. When prodded, her testimony strangely conformed to what was believed about Sabbats: “[Magdalena] tearfully acknowledged [that] . . . five years earlier she had been led astray by Leonberger Hansen’s deceased wife . . . traveled with her to witch dances . . . [at] the Heuberg,” and gave herself to the Devil, who pressured Magdalena to harm Margaretha. The case becomes diabolically derivative with one deviation: it was not Satan who taught Magdalena the use of whatever hallucinogenic drug was in the bread, but Hansen’s wife. Authorities filed the case as a “magical poisoning”; Magdalena was executed for veneficium.47
Medieval theologians explained transformations of this type as mind-forged and generally viewed tales from yore (notably the transformation of Odysseus’ company into swine by the dreaded witch Circe) as having “involved delusions of the senses.”*69 When discussing those Italian innkeepers who transformed travelers into pack animals, St. Augustine attributed such magic to a “poison in [a] piece of cheese” that these sorceresses fed to unfortunate passersby. One rover ate this cheese, fell into a deep sleep, and could “by no means be roused” for a few days. Upon awakening, the victim claimed to have become a sumpter horse who spent the past few days carrying soldiers’ provisions as far away as Rhoetia (modern-day Switzerland).48
As shown earlier, mandrake was called Circeium by some, indicating its role in transformation ointments and potions (it could have been the active additive in the potion of Finicella, the cat woman of Rome). And there is every indication that ominous notions of poisonous potions survived into the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. As was sometimes the case, the artists of these times told the stories that the religious elite would not. Depictions of Circe from humanist Hartmann Schedel (1440–1514), one of the first adepts in the use of the printing press (he reproduced the works of many of the artists of his time) and the German draftsman and printmaker Virgil Solis (1514–1562), among others, show that this magical potion was still considered the true source of her powers.49
But just as the author(s) of the Malleus Maleficarum omitted the poisonous ingredients in the account of magical flying ointments, so too would they ignore the role of these substances in transformation magic. They tell the story of a wanton young man who turned a girl into a horse after she refused his advances. Although no magical ointment (or drink) is mentioned, the spurned lover sought out a Jew “to work a charm against [the girl].” Yet the girl never really changed physically; her equine body “was not an actual fact but an illusion of the devil, who changed the fancy and senses of the girl herself.”50 Kramer and Sprenger further declared that incidents of personal shape-shifting (like Matteuccia’s and Finicel
la’s) were more common “in our part of the world” (i.e., Western Europe), and those in which transformation of others was used as an act of revenge occurred more often in the East. Even humanists like mathematician Hermann Witekind (aka Hermann Wilken, 1522–1603) followed this lead, writing about animal transmutation as nothing more than the byproduct of diabolical illusion in Christlich bedencken und erinnerung von Zauberey (Christian Memory about Witchcraft, 1585), his book against the persecution of witches. Thus, when he pondered whether witches “could transform into cats, dogs, wolves, and donkeys,” he offered myriad illustrations but refuted them as merely symptoms of “melancholie” and demonic trickery.51 Witekind was familiar with Weyer and even came to his defense when the latter was denounced by theologian, physician, and plague survivor Thomas Erastus (1524–1583).52 Weyer does mention the use of opiates and solanaceous roots in conjunction with lycanthropy (werewolfism), though not as a way to transform into a wolf but rather as a way to sedate someone who suffers from that condition.53
Others held a different opinion, claiming that werewolfism was just another fantasy caused by taking a hallucinogenic ointment. Commenting on Witekind’s werewolf work, German writer and journalist Joseph Görres (1776–1848), being the enlightenment man he was, couldn’t accept satanic trickery as a reality. He not only attributed animal transformations to drug use, he even told of an incarcerated woman he knew, accused of witchcraft, who had “wolf-like desires.” She asked her jailors to rub her with her magical ointment (gesablt). She fell into a three-hour sleep, and upon waking claimed to have turned into a wolf, traveled to another town, and killed a sheep and a cow.54 Perhaps Görres had read the works of earlier theorists like seventeenth-century French physician and werewolf theorist Jean de Nynauld, who wrote of these drugs during the ointment exposé of the sixteenth century. A chapter in Nynauld’s 1615 treatise on werewolfism, De la lycanthropie, transformation et extase des sorciers (On Werewolfism, the Transformation and Ecstasy of Witches), titled “On the third kind of sorcerer’s ointment,” names toad vemon as the active ingredient in werewolf ointments.55