Of the other kinds of “ointments of sorcerers,” Nynauld counts a most astounding new addition to the ingredients, a substance certainly popular today but nearly absent from the medieval and early modern pharmacopeia: magic mushrooms, or rather “sleepy” and “maddening” mushrooms.56 These fungi, along with henbane, opium, deadly nightshade, and other drugs, were “used by the devil to disturb the enslaved mind . . . [cause] various figures and representations on the senses . . . [and] show the shadows of the underworld.”57
“Look,” said Pierre Gassendi, “you must show me the drugs you use to travel to your infernal assemblies, for I wish to accompany you.”
The shepherd smiled. “I can bring you there tonight when the clock strikes midnight.”58
It was a time of new understandings about the universe. Signs of this change could be seen peppered into the chaos of early modern period life, from Galileo’s eye to the starry skies above; from the quill tips of Erasmus of Rotterdam to the revolution in orthodox thought in the form of Protestantism. Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655), scientist and free-thinking intellectual, an admirer of Galileo, truly adopted this new spirit of science, looking out not toward the heavens, but below into the atoms. Like others of this new scientific worldview, Gassendi eschewed the common trend of lengthy philosophical conjecture for a more hands-on approach to experimentation.59 He had been a priest, a professor, and an astronomer, but he is most remembered for his reintroduction of Epicurus’s molecular theories to science.
There is something of a contemporary academic rumor that took root around the time Pierre Gassendi came into contact with magicians and their magical ointments.60 A source is never cited by these scholars, least of which one that originates from Gassendi himself. There is only a letter from French philosopher and writer Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, the Marquis d’Argens (1704–1771), in his The Jewish Letters (mid-1730s) wherein he claims Gassendi was an “eye-witness to the errors of false magicians.”61 D’Argens claimed his letters were authentic reprints that he translated into French from the original Hebrew. Though such a claim is difficult to accept, the narrative has value as an indication of how popu-lar the concept of the witches’ ointment was as the seventeenth century gave way to the eighteenth. The Jewish Letters was a bestseller; half a century after its initial publication it had sold two hundred thousand copies in France alone—an unprecedented number for any book in those days.
So goeth the story:
Gassendi had traveled to a small village to read and relax (he apparently had some kind of summer home there). But the scientific mind finds intrigue in every terrain (as the intellectual bent of wayward geniuses can attest) and someone of Gassendi’s curiosity couldn’t escape his own predilections even while on vacation. Seeing a crowd of people gathered, the famed philosopher-scientist invited himself into the mob, which had gathered around a man in chains, a shepherd by profession. He inquired as to what crime the man had committed.
“Good sir,” replied a peasant in the crowd, “he is a sorcerer. We have arrested him, and are bringing him to justice.”62
Gassendi was even more intrigued now, the concept of magic stirring both his scientific and his theological propensities. He ordered the crowd to release the prisoner to him. The authorities obliged and delivered the man to Gassendi’s custody. Once they were alone at Gassendi’s lodgings he inquired if the magician had made a pact with the devil, and if so, how he had managed that diabolical deal. He further promised that if the man told him everything he wanted to know, he would see to it that he was set free; if not he would be delivered back to the provost for sentencing.
Asked how he flew to the Sabbat the man replied, “Sir, I have been a sorcerer for three years. I go to the Sabbat daily. One of my friends gave me the balm to swallow.”63
Midnight slowly crept up on the unlikely pair. The shepherd pulled from his pocket a container of opium and pinched a “walnut-sized nug” off the gummy ball for himself, gave the same amount to Gassendi, and told him to swallow it and lie down in the fireplace.64 A demon would appear in the shape of a large cat to take Gassendi to the Sabbat. The magician waited for a demonic horse.
Knowing that he could never observe whatever was about to occur while under the influence of a soporific, Gassendi pretended he wanted to disguise the bitter taste of the opium. He went into the pantry in the next room and grabbed jam, bread, and made a sandwich, all the while secretly disposing of the drug (in what fashion is not explained in the text). He then joined the shepherd at the fireplace. Soon after eating the opium the shepherd appeared “dizzy, like a drunken man.” Then he fell asleep, though reveling in all the delights of the Sabbat: “[H]e continued to speak,” remembers Gassendi, “and rattled off a thousand extravagances while holding conversations with a swarm of demons. He also spoke to his comrades, the other magicians.” Many hours later, the shepherd regained full consciousness.
“You must be happy with how the goat received you!” the magician enthusiastically blurted out. “It is a great honor to kiss his underside, and be admitted [to his sect] on your first time!”65
Gassendi was, of course, less ebullient, though sufficiently moved “by the state this poor man was in” to disabuse him of his error. To demonstrate the emptiness of this experience to the magician, he gave another morsel of the opium to a dog, which simply fell asleep.
FROM WITCHCRAFT TO SCIENCE
Tempted by the excitement and mystery of the witches’ ointment, German folklorist Will-Erich Peukert (1895–1969) stirred an effective dose of henbane, mandrake, and datura into a test tube. If sixteenth-century literates would write about, but certainly not partake in, the experience of the witches’ ointment, twentieth-century folklorists and toxicologists enthusiastically sought to unlock this experience in their laboratories—and in their minds.
Peukert was a somewhat perfect specimen to take on the witches’ ointment. Growing up in Töppendorf, a rural village in Lower Silesia, he had heard many tales of witches and devils throughout his life; the occult had been a “natural part of his childhood.” He and a friend had experimented with these drugs in their youth. The two would lie in a trance for hours, dreaming of “flying . . . festivals . . . [and] all kinds of erotic adventures.” Therefore, when he dosed himself with the ointment years later he harbored the proper mental set necessary to experience all the promises of his expectations. Falling into soporatum for a full day the professor “dreamed of wild rides, frenzied dancing, and other weird adventures . . . connected with medieval orgies.”66 While speaking at a conference in 1959 Peukert admitted to trying the witches’ ointment himself. A scandal followed him for about a year afterward. His colleagues and the media reacted in revulsion at the mad witch professor who “[flew] through the air under the influence of drugs.”67 Others wanted to know more. In his later years, Peukert allowed a film crew into his basement and prepared della Porta’s recipe on camera for the first time in history.
But he wasn’t the first modern researcher to try the lamiarum unguentum. An earlier experimenter, German occult scholar Karl Kiesewetter (1854–1895), mixed together an ointment based on della Porta’s recipe that made him “dream [that] he was flying in spirals.”68 Other trials weren’t as promising. One conducted by German psychiatrist Otto Snell (1859–1939) ended with nothing more than a headache. A recent case resulted in death: On the summer solstice, 1966, Robert Cochrane ingested a terminal dose of whiskey, deadly nightshade, and sleeping pills. Some believed that Cochrane’s death was accidental, an unplanned overdose that occurred during a ritual. Others think that the death was of a sacrificial nature, and that Cochrane was offering himself up to the gods. There were still others who agreed with the suicide theory but attributed it not to any grandiose and ritualized exit strategy, but to a failed marriage and bungled love affair.69
We can imagine the experiences of these people—Peukert, Snell, Kiesewetter, and Cochrane—as modern analogies for how witch accusations might have originated when a psychoactive drug played
a role in village magic. A successful experience like Peukert’s would not have roused the suspicion of authorities, should they have even been aware that a drug had been taken by a local resident.*70 There is no reason this act would produce an accompanying trial record. His neighbors might have thought him a little kooky, but no one would have condemned his ontological experience as demonic. Peukert’s mind was prepped, the setting was right, and he didn’t take too much so as to overdose. But Snell’s bout with a magical ointment demonstrates that even with safeguards in place (proper mindset, environment, and dosage) there was no guarantee that an otherworldly realm would present itself. Snell’s experience was more or less neutral: no one likes a headache, but given the strength of these poisons it could have been much worse, which brings us to the latest example, that of Robert Cochrane. It seems likely that, should Cochrane’s untimely accident have occurred around the early modern period, his death might have resulted in a witchcraft accusation—especially considering that his passing was tied to a botched love triangle and a magical drug found in love potions.
9
MORNING ON BARE MOUNTAIN
Information underrepresents reality.
JARON LANIER, YOU ARE NOT A GADGET
By studying the intoxicants in societies radically different from our own, [we] can counteract the tendency to perceive our own practices and values as universal models of human behavior.
RICHARD RUDGLEY, THE ALCHEMY OF CULTURE
In 1428, the first recorded case of a person executed for the crime of applying an ointment to the skin as an act of psyche-magical witchcraft—and perhaps the first case where a witch is mentioned flying in the air to meet Satan—ended when Matteuccia di Francesco was burned at the stake. Throughout this book I have shown how the “diabolical congregation” that Matteuccia purportedly participated in presents a composite of various notions, which were attached to her confession by secular authorities using inquisitorial procedures—i.e., torture. The individual threads that come together to comprise the prevailing stereotype of the satanic witch were cobbled together from a variety of sources: folk beliefs about nocturnal flight, fertility goddesses, and strix; theological ideas about demon invocation and heresy; and the object of our inquiry, psyche-magical drugs—Matteuccia’s supposed mode of transport to a proto-Sabbat under a walnut tree in Benevento. The question hounding modern scholars (well, some of them) is whether this magical drug in the form of an ointment, and the experience it engendered, arose from the minds of demonological theorists or had an actual basis in an obscure form of folk belief and practice. The answer in general terms is that these “flying ointments” were part of the pharmacy of local village sorcerers/sorceresses, while the “witches’ ointment” was a purely learned literary concept.
Given the time during which Matteuccia di Francesco’s trial took place there is every reason to believe that she used her magical drug ointment on herself for some kind of esoteric psyche-magical purpose,*71 which, after her torture, looked closer to what an overzealous inquisitor might imagine to be a mind “corrupted by Satan.” Sadly, the secrets of Matteuccia’s arts are lost to us due to the debasement of recorded knowledge about the folk use of magical drugs. We can’t get behind the dossiers. We can, however, place Matteuccia’s trial within the context of the development of the concept of the witches’ ointment. This progression presents itself in approximately three phases dating from the early to mid-fifteenth century.
The first phase in the progression occurs approximately between 1400 to the 1420s, during which time trial records and other accounts (sermons, stories, etc.) mention love philters and drug ointments that can cause detachment from reality, imagined flight, madness, sexual excitement, or even death, depending on the dose and the ripeness of the ingredients.*72 The ointment was rubbed directly on the skin and/or ingested in some way that caused a psychic reaction, for good or ill, though no one associated this practice with diabolical trimmings. It is also evident at this time that the ointments contained plant-based psychoactive medical drugs as noted by Alonso Tostado and Abraham of Worms (and certainly implied by Johannes Nider and Bernardino of Siena). Matteuccia di Francesco’s magical ointment would become the first recorded instance of these folk drugs being associated with Satanism, a confession that came as a result of torture administered by the State.
In the second phase, occurring approximately between the 1430s and 1450, demonologists, judges, and other learned persons further reinterpreted these psyche-magical ointments. In this iteration of the story, the ointments weren’t ingested, but rather rubbed on sticks, fenceposts, and brooms that were then used as flying vehicles.†73 Witches rode to the devil, who instructed them in the mixing of other unguents to be used for folkloric purposes (transvection, transmutation), maleficent deeds (to cause storms), and venefic spell-casting (to cause sickness, insanity, love, and death)—essentially the trade of a typical village sorceress like Matteuccia. The tail end of this phase saw ecclesiastics like Jean Vincent recognizing the natural psychoactive properties of these ointments and rather than focusing there, disregarding this in lieu of some sort of demonic influence. After that the witch trials quieted down, relatively speaking, until the mid-sixteenth century when, during the height of the executions, clerics’ notions of the witches’ ointment and their zealous persecution of persons deemed to be witches would ignite opposition by a rising class of humanists.
This leads to the third and final phase in the development of the concept of the witches’ ointment, which coincides with the writings of mid-sixteenth-century physicians, who condemned the accusations of witchcraft against deluded or otherwise mentally ill persons. Nowhere are such descriptions of the “visionary” effects of hallucinogenic drugs so clearly outlined than in the texts of these mid-sixteenth-century men, who in this heated atmosphere were themselves not safe from accusations of witchcraft. On an unprecedented scale the doctors of this era took the flying ointments out of the torture rooms and into current conceptions of magic; they popularized the idea of numinous drugs by introducing magical drug recipes to a wider audience. This once-obscure sorceress’s folk rite was now being practiced by a host of curious adventurers.
Of greatest interest during this time is the fact that in many instances persons found to have been under the influence of these psychoactive plants utterly believed in the reality of their experiences, even when others—specifically, the witch-hunters—did not. A case from Lauffen in 1631 featured a man, Hans Jacob, who apparently took such a hefty dose of a “hallucinogenic salve” that he imagined himself flying through the air “on a rod.” Later, to keep warm, he broke into a jailhouse and then imagined he was dancing with twenty-five companions. He woke up alone the next morning in a cell. It was only then that the jailers found him. Hans later spoke of these ointments without being pressured by the authorities; torture was not used to extract this information. And instead of superimposing fantastical diabolical theories onto Hans’ experience, the local magistrates tried to get him to admit that he was lying.1 Hans seems to have been nothing more than a lost and wandering soul, a low magician, a murderer, and a thief.
THE ARGUMENT FROM SILENCE
Those modern-day academics skeptical of the reality of magical drugs demonized as witches’ ointments by learned theorists of the early modern period have mostly argued from a position of silence. The “silence” comes from the observation that these ointments, should they have existed outside the pages of demonological and medical texts and sermons, are absent from the trial records before theologians crafted the witch stereotype in the 1430s. They contend (rightly) that the ointments are absent from the “superior records” (i.e., those dossiers dated to before the 1430s); therefore, the witches’ ointment is merely a literary device, no more real than the Sabbat itself.
There are two problems with this viewpoint: first, modern scholarship has shown that the literate class even as late as the High Middle Ages was generally ambivalent toward recording the private visionary expe
riences of common folk. This changed in the early fifteenth century, when such trances became a “crucial constituent” of witch theory.2 Indeed, for some they were absolutely necessary to prove that a person could lie immobile, all the while attending a Sabbat; for others the ointments were equally necessary to prove that witches didn’t fly at all. Both sides took for granted that such ointments existed. In this we encounter a problem not uncommon in history: no one wrote about magical ointments or the experiences they might have affected in a local magician or layperson because no one who could write cared about commoners enough to record their private matters. During this time this kind of magic had nothing to do with evil or the devil and thus was not worth recording. Early trial records for cases involving magic mostly revolved around political prosecutions involving elite men and not the ecstatic experiences of wise women.3 In fact, the few records we have dating back to the Middle Ages portray clergymen actually protecting women who had been accused of witchcraft from angry mobs.4
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