The Witches’ Ointment: The History of Psychedelic Magic
This month I decided to look at mind expansion, starting The Witches’ Ointment: The History of Psychedelic Magic by Thomas Hatsis. So lets do this.
Gonna start this with a fun fact: for centuries, the biggest witches’ holiday was NOT Samhain, aka Halloween. It was Walpurgisnacht, aka Beltane, aka the evening of April 30/May 1st. It was Beltane Eve that Claire walked through the standing stones in Outlander and found Jamie Fraser. So, The Witches’ Ointment is seasonally appropriate.
Where does the idea of the Witches’ Ointment come from? Originally, the idea of a Witches’ Ointment was said to have originated in 1537—a date provided by folklorist Margaret Murray in her work, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, published in 1921. Murray’s work has been roundly debunked for a variety of reasons, namely that modern witches can trace an unbroken lineage back to the beginning of time, that they were not satanists but early pagan religions worshiping a horned god that Christians bastardized into an image of Satan. I mean…there’s SOME truth to that supposition, which is why it still has legs and is a fable repeated into the 21st century, but by and large her work has been destroyed by modern scholars. Anyways, that is not the point of this book, so let’s depart from Ms. Murray’s selective citations from original sources.
Hatsis does an extensive deep dive into the trial of Matteuccia di Francesco of Ripabianca, and her subsequent witch trial. In the 1420’s. Which is unfortunate for adherents of Ms. Murray, because this is the new earliest known date of use of Witches’ Ointments. But he also goes further back, bridging the gaps between Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age and Brian Muraresku’s Immortality Key. Like truly, Hatsis does an outstanding job showing how loss of knowledge during the dark ages led to a knowledge blank for almost 1,000 years until the trial of Matteuccia in the 15th century. And that knowledge gap is what Muraresku tried to fill in with his Immortality Key.
So where DOES the idea of an ointment come from? Well, Hatsis painstakingly traces the history of magical ointments in general, through the dark ages into modern paganism, showing conclusively that ointments, in general, have been used for thousands of years. Magic or not is basically irrelevant to the point of whether or not ointments have been used. Ointments are used TODAY, medically if nothing else, and even over the counter. Look at Vick’s VapoRub, which is used to open up congested airways. It works via absorption through the skin. The skin is the largest organ and substances applied to the skin are absorbed through the skin, so much so that poisoned garments were urban legend up until the 19th century, when the introduction of arsenic salts as a dying agent resulted in literal arsenic poisoning among classy ladies who wore green dyed clothing…. dyed green with arsenic.
So, with that knowledge firmly established, Hatsis shows that ointments were used for a variety reasons, from love philters, to medical purposes, to…flying ointments. How could an alleged witch fly with these ointments? Well…they didn’t. They THOUGHT they were flying. Through the use of entheogens, aka hallucinogens. Hatsis specifically cites the following as known hallucinogens which have been used, at least according to texts from the 15th through 17th centuries, in ointments, possibly for witchy purposes:
Mandrake, Henbane, Deadly Nightshade aka Atropa Belladonna, Datura, Opium, Hemlock, Ergot, and Toad Poison.
Of those, Poppy (opium), Henbane, Belladonna, Mandrake; were included in a book called The Witching Herbs by Harold Roth. And of course, Ergot was THE topic of The Immortality Key…which also mentioned lizards…not toads, but the connection to animal psychedelics is interesting. Ergot was not directly the subject, but rather LSD, which is made from Ergot.
So, any and all of these have been known to be used in hallucinogenic salves. What happened when the “witches” in question used these salves. Well, that’s interesting, and this is why I say this book bridges the gap from Nixey’s Darkening Age to dovetail neatly with Muraresku’s work.
Hatsis includes reported tales of how pagans would kill small children and eat the bodies…except, and this was clever, he includes how those stories started out being about Christians. It was sometime during those dark ages before the rise and consolidation of Christian power, that the eating of babies came to be associated with witches and pagans. Hatsis traces how the details of what was a black sabbath came to exist, largely through the torture of innocent men and women, who were pressured to provide details and names under excruciating circumstances.
Hatsis lays out that the ointment would have been sufficient unto itself to produce hallucinations of flying….and no doubt they were simply hallucinations. He included citations from source documents of people who would observe those who used the ointments and saw they never actually left the room, but those people would waken from sleep and recount detailed stories of flying through the air and attending these satanic masses. The reason I say sufficient unto itself, is because in the 1970’s, the idea was floated that witches in the middle-ages would smear the ointment on to broomsticks and then….insert….the broomsticks….phallically. Hatsis easily debunks that myth based on good god common sense, having to do with brooms were usually just tree branches, and the splinters would have made any such use unfeasible. Moreover, source documents from the time reveal the more common flying instruments were chairs and, interestingly, piles of manure.
Which raises another interesting possibility for psychedelics. Hatsis specifically cites horse and donkey manure. And while psilocybin is prevalently found in cow manure, it has also been known to grow in horse manure. So, I kind of feel like he missed an obvious connection there.
He does include anecdotes from 19th and 20th century explorers who used some of these original ointments and reported on their findings….at least, two of them did. The third, Robert Cochran, died as a result of his experiments, of a concoction of whiskey, nightshade, and sleeping pills. Now…it’s of course entirely possible that the whiskey and sleeping pills would have resulted in the same regardless, but the presence of nightshade should not be discounted as inconsequential. Atropa belladonna is called Deadly Nightshade for a reason. But, since use of flying ointments did not always lead to death, one could also say the Latin maxim, dosis sola facit venenum, holds true. Only the dose makes the poison. Sometimes that dose is zero. And sometimes it’s not. If you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s best to steer clear of experimenting. If you’re going to insist on it anyway, at least leave accurate notes near your body, so the doctors know what to do when they haul your dumbass into the hospital….or what to test for at the morgue.
This book was interesting. A little repetitive in parts, but overall good. Hatsis wasn’t setting out to prove anything about the witches’ ointment, other than it existed and was known to exist. Largely that it did not exist as a long, unbroken line of historical tradition, using phallic symbolism for application, and it was not a means to meet a horned god in a romanticized history of witchcraft either. It exists probably as an older medical tradition, which was argued as such as early as the 16th century by famed occultist Henry Cornelius Agrippa when he defended an accused witch in court…and was in turn accused of being a witch himself. A medical tradition that was lost in the dark ages.
And ironically, as various doctors and scholars proved that no actual flight or mass was taking place, the ecclesiastical courts of the day took it to mean that using these ointments, weakened the spiritual defenses of people, opening them up to Satan’s dark calling. Which, as I said earlier, dovetails neatly with Muraresku’s theories on the earliest war on drugs, propagated by the church. It was less about the drugs, and more about the loss of soul, the church was worried about. And so, to keep the masses under their control, the church began outlawing all of it, and calling it witchcraft.
