The skeptics’ claim is anachronistic: whatever these sorceresses were dreaming or imagining as a result of the effects of the magical ointments they were dosing themselves with wouldn’t arouse the interest of the literate classes any more than would the rantings of a drunken person. The ointments existed but, like the later idea of broom-riding, hadn’t yet been swept up into a witch stereotype. A modern analogy would be comparing these deluding ointments with the plethora of opiate-based sleep aids used today. Millions of people all over the world rely on these medications; and yet, because there is no law against using them we are not going to hear about any court cases that include them—unless someone used them for criminal purposes, for example, to drug someone in order to rape them. And at that point it would become a sexual assault case, not a drug case. If, however, we were to enact a law that criminalized the dreams a person experienced under the influence of such an opiate-based sleep aid, we would then have an accurate analogy for what occurred when the church began to demonize the village sorceress’s drug experiences. While drugs used for criminal magical purposes spanned antiquity all the way up to the early modern period (and afterward), drug laws against self-dosing were nonexistent until the mid-1400s. And even here, what mattered was not the medications themselves but what a person believed about the experiences garnered while under the influence of these hallucinogenic and soporific drugs. Once these visionary experiences became a part of the theological debate over the “new sect” of witches, they were lumped together with various other elements of paganism including the arch-pagan goddess Diana. Fortunately, several writers during this time did leave us a glimpse at what these kinds of psyche-magical experiences might have been like for those who dabbled in these hallucinogenic substances.
During the Middle Ages and even into the fifteenth century there existed a legal safeguard against “malicious or frivolous accusations,” known as the talion. The talion is that age-old, seemingly universal human law that most everyone, even schoolchildren, commonly know as “an eye for an eye.” With regard to witchcraft accusations, however, the talion also meant that an accuser would suffer the very punishment the defendant would have endured, had the accuser won the case. By what rationale would a plaintiff go through the hassle of taking someone to court over something that wasn’t illegal and caused no personal injury, only to potentially lose the case and be burned or hanged?5 There would be no reason for magical ointments and stories of flying, transforming, or similar kinds of magical experiences to appear in the trial records—and they didn’t until these experiences were deemed illegal (at least in a theological sense) during 1430s.
In short, we find that there were no laws against self-dosing with hallucinogens dating from the time before the formulation of the witch stereotype. The existent laws only forbade dosing another person and causing her or him harm. And yet, modern skeptics use the lack of self-dosing prosecutions during this early period (the “silence”) as a way to argue against the reality of these magical ointments. Right around the time the ointments begin to appear in the records with any detail, the new witch stereotype was just emerging, coloring peoples’ perception of them. Recall that it was during this time that some theologians desperately sought to explain how people could congregate by the thousands, undetected, to meet the devil, all the while remaining asleep in their beds.
The history of the witches’ ointment isn’t as hidden as some skeptics suggest. The most telling account demonstrating the existence of these magical ointments prior to the emergence of the witch stereotype is also the most controversial. It appears as a tale told by Abraham of Worms, about a witch he met in Linz with whom he shared a magical experience using what he calls a “sleeping ointment.” The skeptics’ contention surrounds the dating of Abraham’s famous magic manual The Book of Abramelin, from which this story derives. The earliest existent manuscript of this work is dated 1608 (despite its author having lived almost two centuries earlier). The late date of this manuscript has led some scholars to conclude that the story originated in the seventeenth century.6 The most recent translation of Abraham’s original work, The Book of Abramelin: A New Translation—the first modern translation of this magical work since Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers’ original translation more than 100 years ago, by German esoteric scholar Georg Dehn—places the end of Abraham’s life around the 1450s. Dehn believes Abraham was a pseudonym and that the actual author of the original work was rabbi and Talmudist Jacob ben Moses ha Levi Möllin (1365–1427), which would place his death to just prior to the formulation of the witch stereotype.7 Because the account is so damaging to the skeptic’s argument it has been either dismissed or ignored or explained as a later forgery.
I would therefore like to add further support to Dehn’s earlier dating of Abramelin. Abraham’s journey lasted seventeen years, meaning he returned to Mainz by at least 1414, and by 1417 he was advising Pope Martin V. Abraham’s story about his encounter with the witch of Linz, described in chapter 6, is striking for its candidness, perhaps even a little naïve in this regard, as it would have been dangerous—nay, downright foolish—if, at the height of the witch trials (the time that modern skeptics say the story originated), Abraham, a Jewish mystic, would essentially admit to engaging in witchcraft. So it makes more sense historically to date Abraham’s account to the time when such practices weren’t considered diabolical witchcraft at all, when they didn’t even catch the attention of most theologians.
This leaves three possibilities for the composition of Abraham’s story: it is either an actual account of an early fifteenth-century encounter (which is how it reads); a forgery dating from the seventeenth century (which raises a lot of questions of anachronism); or Abraham wrote it nearly two centuries after he died. I tend to shave off the latter two possibilities using the finely sharpened principle of Occam’s razor.
Moreover, as noted in chapter 2, stories about strix and other nightly earth-crossers abound in folklore, and yet none of them say that an ointment was required in order to fly, transform, or transport. Even as the witch stereotype was beginning to materialize in the 1430s, ointments weren’t necessarily a standard feature of the convention. There is also a lack of consistency in the earliest descriptions of how these ointments and potions were used, pointing to a deeper reality in lay magical and/or religious culture than in any theological literary invention.
Certain modern researchers have shown that the ointments served a “structural role” by linking the “new concept regarding nocturnal flight . . . [with] worrying practices related to witchcraft.” These researchers also rightly, in my opinion, point out that it was a way to connect infanticide to the new crime of witchcraft,8 demonstrating that early chroniclers, drawing from previous sources, added the idea that the ointments of the village sorceress contained the remains of dead children whether they did or not.
As disclosed in chapter 7, the use of torture is a significant contributing factor to the numerous confessions that were extracted by authorities during the seventeenth-century witch scares.9 But without something tangible to fasten the witches’ ointment onto, theologians would have been unable to convince the public of the dangers of practicing witchcraft. Bernardino of Siena and Johannes Nider wrote of transformation and flying ointments in their vernacular sermons, trying to reach their lay audiences. If such ointments didn’t exist what exactly were they warning their congregations about? There was neither reason nor need for theologians to invent a flying ointment as an explanation for nocturnal excursions.
And yet, there it is.
The concept of self-dosing with a hallucinogenic substance for magical and obscure religious purposes narrowly missed appearing in records of the the early modern period in an unadulterated form. Before that time any number of local magical practices that involved drugs were recorded in a variety of terms. Even as late as 1648 a woman gave a handful of henbane buttons (probably the seeds) to a commoner so he could find his lost ox. Perhaps the man was supposed to swallow them an
d find his ox through some kind of magical remote viewing akin to how the witch of Linz used her ointment. In any event, the official record files this occurrence under “divination.”10 In another source, this one dating to 1460, we read how “fortune-telling,” “harmful magic,” and “witchcraft” may all involve “love powders or [love] drinks or love confections given to them by the demon . . . which cause many to be poisoned.”11 Puritan theologian William Perkins (1558–1602) summed it up this way: “by Witches we understand not those onely [sic] which kill and torment: but all Diviners, Charmers, Juglers [sic], all Wizzards [sic], commonly called wise men and wise women.”12
This is not meant to suggest that all instances of divining (or other magic) involved ingestion of these psychoactives; it is merely to assert that there are some cases wherein poisonous potions and ointments may have been used, despite the case being labeled with a nonveneficia term or a vague catchall word like sorcery. Indeed, Alonso Tostado, the bishop of Ávila, called the women in Genesis who used medical drugs not veneficae, practitioners of poisoning (as one might expect), but as maleficae, practitioners of ill-intent.*74 Therefore, when two unnamed women were banned from Strasburg in 1353 for “sorcery” we can only guess fruitlessly about what that implied.13
And then there are records of cases that do mention the use of poisons for magical ointments, powders, and potions, but that unfortunately do not go into much detail. Like unearthing the psychoactive roots of the plants themselves, a certain amount of digging is needed, especially since the opposite can also be true: henbane could be worn around the neck as a charm, a magical ritual that includes a powerfully hallucinogenic drug, but has nothing to do with ingesting it.
Besides the argument from silence, the skeptics have another baseless bias against the idea that drugs played a significant role in European magical history. Their argument involves a slight mis-historization, beginning with Margaret Murray (1862–1963), prominent English Egyptologist, archaeologist, anthropologist, and folklorist. Murray asserted in The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) that early modern period women and men met up in covens to participate in some kind of trans-European “witch-cult” that originated before the rise of Rome and survived into the early modern period.*75 But modern scholars know that most people executed as witches at the height of the hunts (1550–1650) were neither witches nor folk sorceresses but were simply ordinary people who had been name-dropped as a result of the torture of some unfortunate soul in an Arras-style kangaroo court. Notably, the witches’ ointment wasn’t even a major aspect of Murray’s thesis; she mentions it a mere three times in passing, and erroneously dates the first reference of the ointments to 1537—a century after Tostado’s candid admission that medical drugs formed the basis for some psyche-magical experiences.14 Also absent from Murray’s book are the writings of Johannes Nider, Abraham of Worms, Girolamo Cardano, Andrés Laguna, and others. Neither does she mention the Canon Episcopi, the unholden, the heretics’ potion, how folk beliefs about night flight played into theological concepts of the Sabbat, or the range of available magical ointments.
There was a good reason for Murray to selectively exclude all these items: mentioning them would have destroyed her theory, as she imagined the Sabbat as a real, corporeal, and terrestrial event—much the way some early modern period demonologists did! One skeptical critic put it clearly, if not rather harshly: “[Murray’s] . . . knowledge of European history was superficial and her grasp of historical method was nonexistent.”15 In short, Murray’s skeptics are right: she knew very little about early modern period witchcraft. As modern scholars have shattered her larger, spurious thesis pertaining to the European “witch cult,” the ointments, insignificant as they are to that theory, went down with her entire premise.16
ROMANTIC CONJECTURE
It can be argued that a fourth stage in the development of the concept of the witches’ ointment occurred, not in early modern times but just a few decades ago in our own time. This is the romantic view in its most extreme form. It holds that women and men smeared brooms with hallucinogenic ointments that were then inserted into the vagina or rectum to induce trance, thereby carrying on a ritual that has existed since antiquity.
While certain aspects of this theory have a historical foundation (i.e., anointing one’s vagina with a hallucinogenic drug to induce trance, “fly,” “transform,” or experience some other kind of psyche-magic), the overall idea that people rubbed hallucinogenic drugs on broom handles and masturbated with them appears nowhere in the early modern period records. Not a single word of this manner of introducing the ointments into the body, i.e., via some kind of broomstick dildo, was recorded until 1973, with author Michael Harrison’s The Roots of Witchcraft. Harrison offers speculation but zero evidence for this claim. Anthropologist Michael Harner repeats this faux pas in his essay “The Role of Hallucinogenic Plants in European Witchcraft,”17 dated that same year.
I contend that until the early seventeenth century the use of these ointments for some kind of spirit flight was fairly unknown by the larger European population (some learned magicians notwithstanding), who might have been in contact with everyday magic but certainly didn’t understand the deeper arts of veneficia. They, of course, used these potions and ointments—vended to them by women like Matteuccia—in at least four ways: recreationally, as love philters; mercenarily, as a way to “bewitch” a pesky neighbor or abusive spouse; passionately, to enchant an unrequited lover; or medically, as a cure for everything from insomnia to indigestion. These veneficae sold their love philters to their clients while using similar drug mixtures on themselves, but with the addition of incantations (and thus a different mind-set), thereby stimulating a different, perhaps visionary, experience.
When early modern period ecclesiastics started to pay attention to localized forms of drug-inspired magical experiences, they looked to ancient literature and saw love potions containing the remains of dead children in Horace’s epodes18 and Pamphilë’s transformation ointment in Apuleius’s Metamorphosis (The Golden Ass). As outlined in chapter 4, there was, in reality, a variety of readily available hallucinogenic and soporific plants that were probably in use rather than the imagined infant corpses. The rich historical tradition of eating child’s flesh could only have pushed its association with the witches’ ointment into a stronger relationship. What’s more, we have reason to believe that sometimes people really did seek out the flesh of dead infants for their magical efficacies.19 And yet, our earliest and best accounts of these ointments, from the time immediately prior to the formulation of the witch stereotype (i.e., Johannes Nider, Alonso Tostado’s Genesis commentary, and Abraham of Worms), make no such heinous connection. The ointments’ context in these writers’ works had everything to do with folk religion and magic and nothing at all to do with insurgent cults of devil-worshipping witches. Even Bernardino of Siena, who preached against the practice of infanticide for magical purposes in his sermons, did not associate Finicella’s cat-transformation ointment with child murder—a point he would not have hesitated to make if he truly believed it. Why bring up the ointment in the first place?
As for transformation ointments in ancient literature, Pamphilë’s transformation into an owl in Apuleius’s Metamorphosis (discussed in chapter 2) has recently been used to serve as a literary origin for the witches’ ointment (in lieu of a folk foundation).20 I believe this is true, but only to a certain extent: the early modern period flying ointments weren’t the product of ancient fiction, although ancient fiction certainly directed the ecclesiastics’ interpretation of them. A drug potion, powder, or ointment that allowed a person to shape-shift into an insect or animal might have reminded a literary cleric of Pamphilë’s transformation. But that doesn’t mean that the ointments and their use for psyche-magical experiences didn’t exist. Giambattista della Porta, who knowingly dosed his mates with a drug so as to watch them shape-shift, makes no mention of Apuleius’ comedy at all. As demonstrated in chapter 4, Solanaceae family plants hav
e a seemingly timeless association with magic, witchcraft, and medicine. Apuleius’s ancient comedy might have shaped the ecclesiastical interpretation of the ointments in the early modern period but it certainly did not create them. The history of the witches’ ointment begins not with an unbroken link stretching back to an ancient witch cult that rubbed hallucinogenic oils on brooms and inserted them in available human orifices, but over a development in theological and physiological debate that occurred during the early modern period regarding nocturnal flight. This debate disseminated the knowledge of these plants, while it also (and perhaps more importantly) popularized the association of Solanaceae family plants with transcendent magical experiences. This then entered the historical record in earnest around the late sixteenth century. And while there wasn’t really a witches’ ointment, there was a variety of mystifying mixtures made for myriad means that involved psyche-magical visionary experiences, the true breadth and nature of which remain unknown today. Before the formulation of the convention of the witches’ ointment, which began in the early 1400s, those who knew of and used these substances can only be described as a scattered minority, so few that they are impossible to fully track historically.
In some cases it seems these psychoactive drugs may have been a way to lull oneself into a twilight sleep, allowing one to walk freely and lucidly about the dreamscape. Within the larger theological debate, the otherworldly state of mind caused by the ointments—that state beyond the veil—served as a way for the so-called witches to fly to the devil “in spirit” (instead of corporally). So while skeptics like Norman Cohn and Richard Kieckhefer are correct that the witches’ ointment is the product of learned demonologists, they are wrong in asserting that psyche-magical drug ointments didn’t exist and weren’t used for a variety of purposes, whether for visionary journeys or recreational escapes.
The Witches' Ointment Page 23