The Witches' Ointment Read online

  THE

  WITCHES’

  OINTMENT

  “The Witches’ Ointment is, remarkably, the first full-length treatment of a topic that is central to our understanding of European witchcraft. Did the witches use psychoactive substances or not? This has long been debated but often on the basis of prejudice or inadequate information. We are fortunate that Hatsis has written an authoritative account, drawing deeply on primary sources and pursuing original lines of thought. Entertaining and highly readable, this book seems destined to be the definitive work on the subject. No doubt it will inspire others to see the witch cult in a new light. Highly recommended to all those who are interested in witchcraft, the history of drugs, and the more unusual byways of culture. A fascinating book.”

  RICHARD RUDGLEY, AUTHOR OF PAGAN RESURRECTION AND THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PSYCHOACTIVE SUBSTANCES

  “This wonderful book brews up a heady potion of folk herbs and psychedelics to intoxicate the conspiracy theorists and passionate disbelievers alike. With his objectivity and beautiful writing, Hatsis shines a light on the destructive Christocentric misogyny of the medieval world, whose holistic pagan medicine was certainly no more diabolical than our own modern Pharma Industry.”

  BEN SESSA, MBBS, MRCPSYCH, AUTHOR OF THE PSYCHEDELIC RENAISSANCE

  “Tales of witches and toads, broomsticks and belladonna—documented herein are the exotic herbal potions and demonic flights of fancy that terrified and confounded the religious authorities of the Middle Ages. Exquisitely written and meticulously researched, Hatsis clears the supernatural mists of yore and roots out the various psychoactive agents lying at the heart of European witchcraft. A remarkably informative and wholly compelling read!”

  SIMON G. POWELL, AUTHOR OF MAGIC MUSHROOM EXPLORER AND THE PSILOCYBIN SOLUTION

  “In this remarkable book, Thomas Hatsis reveals the hidden truth behind history’s most legendary ointments—the medieval bewitching potions—that supposedly lubricated broomsticks and fueled extracorporeal mystical journeys and hallucinogenic night flights, setting the stage for strange entity encounters and unholy copulations, animal transformations, and miraculous healings as well as diabolical poisonings, dangerous delusional deceptions, and harmful “black magic.” In this impeccably researched and compulsively readable volume, Hatsis recovers the lost history of these magical medicinal brews and psychoactive formulas that have been hidden for centuries and hinted at in the mythic portrayal of witchcraft and sorcery. Hatsis’s scholarly research shines an illuminating spotlight on what is actually known about these visionary (and sometimes deadly) herbal mixes, and he expertly blends his meticulous studies with keen intuition in this uniquely envisioned volume, overflowing with rare historical treasures and fascinating speculations as well as the secret psychedelic ingredients for re-creating the legendary ointments. This book will appeal to anyone interested in herbal folk remedies, entheogenic medicine, the relationship between alchemy and science, and how heretical notions of healing influenced Western religious systems and modern medicine. A few words of caution: history compels you to use this book wisely or you may get burned at the stake!”

  DAVID JAY BROWN, AUTHOR OF THE NEW SCIENCE OF PSYCHEDELICS AND FRONTIERS OF PSYCHEDELIC CONSCIOUSNESS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  No book is written by one person, and this book is no exception. The following people have been instrumental in helping me complete this work:

  Mom, I am all out of words at this point, and I only hope you find them within these pages, saying “thank you” every time a sentence makes you proud of the writer I have become; El Dad, for teaching me the value of education; Stuart Eisbruck, your legal advice has been both appreciated and edifying; Nini and Thomas Humphrey, for your belief in me and help with last-minute research funding for this work—γιαγιά, for always knowing how to make me smile on the cloudiest of days; Edward Bever, your research advice and tremendous insight into the field of early modern period witchcraft has been invaluable—this book would not be in the shape it’s in without your help; Jack Zevin, for the research experience; Simon G. Powell, for your help in getting it all published; the women and men of the WFTDA (Women’s Flat Track Roller Derby Association) and MRDA (Men’s Roller Derby Association) for keeping me sane (and kinda driving me crazy); and my publisher, Park Street Press, for giving me the chance.

  The following people assisted with translations; they are included in citations where appropriate throughout this book, but I would like to thank them here more formally. Carl A. P. Ruck: while we part company in some areas, I appreciate your contributions to this field. I hope you like this one. Elizabeth Timpone: you have been a friend to me for as long as I can remember; thank you for your help with the French. Marie Phillips: who would have thought a banana would need a place to crash in Oxford to conduct research at the Bodleian? Such is derby. Thank you for your French translations, food, hospitality, kindness, and invaluable crash space. Peter Conolly-Smith: for teaching me how to write history. Thank you also to Gerhild Williams and Hannelore Spence for your advice and German translations. Also, a big thank you to Kayla Wing for her last-minute help with German translations as well. See you on the track, friend.

  You’re not writing this for the guy who’s in the office next to you, you’re writing this for your mother.

  BART EHRMAN

  (COMMENTING ON

  THE NATURE OF ACADEMIC WORKS)

  για τη μαμά

  CONTENTS

  COVER IMAGE

  TITLE PAGE

  EPIGRAPH

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  FOREWORD BY EDWARD BEVER, PH.D.

  PREFACE

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER 1: HELEN’S TEARS A SIMPLE SORCERER

  QUINTILIAN’S QUESTION

  THE TRIAL OF MUMMOLUS

  CHAPTER 2: IN THE SILENCE OF DEEPEST NIGHT NIGHT DOINGS

  THE HEAD OF JOHN THE BAPTIST

  WOMEN THAT WALK AMONG THE DEAD

  THE SOCIETY OF THE GOOD WOMEN OF THE NIGHT

  THE MIRACLE OF THE BONES

  AFTER THE MANNER OF PAGANS

  CHAPTER 3: THE HERETICS’ POTION HUMAN ERROR

  THE LAMP THAT SHINES IN DARKNESS

  THE POOR OF CHRIST

  GNOSTIC SORCERY

  HEAVENLY FOOD

  BILIA’S BREW

  TREGENDA

  CHAPTER 4: ROOTS OF BEWITCHMENT THE VENECOPEIA

  MANDRAKE

  HENBANE

  DEADLY NIGHTSHADE

  DATURA

  OPIUM

  HEMLOCK

  ERGOT

  TOAD POISON

  CHAPTER 5: VENEFICIA SPIRITS’ HERBS

  CHAPTER 6: SOPORIFIC SPELLS HERBAL IDOLATRY

  THE CAT WOMAN OF ROME

  THE WITCH OF LINZ

  WHERE WITCHES DANCE

  HOW VENUS USURPED THE GRAIL REALM

  A NIGHT ON HAY MOUNTAIN

  VETULA FORMICARIUM

  WICKED RITUALS AND OINTMENTS

  CHAPTER 7: INCEPTION OF THE SATANIC WITCH AN INQUISITORIAL CONUNDRUM

  TO CALL ON DEMONS

  SCOBACES (THE BROOM RIDERS)

  A NEW SECT

  ALL HELL BREAKS LOOSE

  THE HEAD OF JEANETTE CLERC

  CHAPTER 8: LAMIARUM UNGUENTUM WAYWARD GENIUSES AND INTELLECTUAL VAGABONDS

  DR. LAGUNA’S NIGHTSHADE OINTMENT

  DANCING BACKWARD

  GIRLS GONE WILD

  FROM WITCHCRAFT TO SCIENCE

  CHAPTER 9: MORNING ON BARE MOUNTAIN THE ARGUMENT FROM SILENCE

  ROMANTIC CONJECTURE

  FOOTNOTES

  ENDNOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT INNER TRADITIONS • BEAR & COMP
ANY

  BOOKS OF RELATED INTEREST

  COPYRIGHT & PERMISSIONS

  INDEX

  FOREWORD

  At the conclusion of the formal session titled “Cognition and Magic,” held at the 2011 Congress of Medieval Studies, informal discussions began, as commonly happens. While I spoke with different people interested in points I had raised in my paper, one of the conference participants came up to me and introduced himself: Thomas Hatsis. He explained excitedly that he was doing research into witches’ ointments that he thought I would be interested in and invited me to hear his paper during the next round of sessions. I took him up on the invitation and was glad I did. His talk impressed me with its combination of openness and rigor, knowledge of the sources and originality of thought, sophisticated understanding of the established authorities in the field and sophisticated critique of the same. We stayed in touch over the next few years as he researched and wrote and gradually transformed that twenty-minute presentation into this book.

  As I watched this transformation I was particularly struck by three things. First of all, Tom was not enrolled in a doctoral program, yet he stuck with this project over the course of years, displaying remarkable perseverance in expanding, deepening, and refining it without the pressures, incentives, or support of a faculty position. His is a labor of love, of passion. Secondly, while Tom writes in an engaging, accessible style, he adheres to rigorous scholarly standards. His discussion is based on an extensive use of primary as well as secondary sources; it pays close attention to detail, context, and interconnections, and it displays a judicious regard for the evidence in drawing conclusions. Third, through his perseverance, rigor, and insight, Tom has produced an important and substantial contribution to the field, one that promises to change the terms of the debate about witches’ ointments and their role in early modern period*1 witch beliefs.

  How so? In a nutshell, this book develops an extended and nuanced discussion of the place of psychoactive potions and ointments in the coalescing beliefs about ancient magic and deviance—folktales concerning mystical travels at night and animal metamorphosis, scholastic polarization of the world between God and the devil, the campaign against heresy, medieval medical pharmacopeia, magical healing, malicious poisonings, and village sorcery—into the prevailing myth of diabolical witchcraft fueled by noxious ointments that transported witches from their daily lives to Satan’s Sabbats. By placing the psychoactive agents associated with witches’ ointments in this context, including popular magic, poisoning, magical healing, and particularly the medieval medical pharmacopeia, Hatsis shows that far from being exotic substances removed from the mainstream of everyday life during the early modern period, psychoactive plants and the potions and ointments derived from them were employed in a wide variety of ways, as medicines, sleeping potions, poisons, magical objects worn as amulets (rather than consumed), and adulterants to enhance the effects of beer and wine. The use of them to induce magical and mystical experiences did not require a radical break with normal routines and practices, but instead could be a seamless extension of them. Hatsis thus makes a strong case that, as he argues in his conclusion, “while there wasn’t really a witches’ ointment, there was a variety of mystifying mixtures . . . that involved psyche-magical visionary experiences” employed by a small but significant minority of people in medieval and early modern society. Neither a baseless invention of the demonologists, as skeptics have argued, nor a common or organized religious practice, as romantics have claimed, the use of hallucinogens was a foundation in the reality of associated witch beliefs. Furthermore, and far more importantly, it was a component of popular magical practices, as Hatsis says, “the true breadth and nature of which remains unknown today.” The issue is no longer did such substances exist and were they used? It is now how were they used, by whom, how extensively, for what purposes, and to what effect?

  EDWARD BEVER, PH.D.

  PROFESSOR OF HISTORY

  STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

  COLLEGE AT OLD WESTBURY

  PREFACE

  This book began in 2007. I was living in Milan, Italy, finishing up my master’s thesis, “starving hysterical naked” (to quote poet Allen Ginsburg) and desperately trying to learn the Italian language so I could talk to the cute Bolognese girl living three doors down. My thesis focused on the 1950s, when LSD was not the horror drug it has become known as today. Rather, it was then considered a wonder drug that promised to usher in new understandings of the human (and animal) mind. In those days one could speak of psychedelics without making the listener cringe. The term psychedelic itself was not a colloquialism but an esoteric word of intellectuals. The study of psychedelics and the mental states they occasion was going to be just another academic pursuit—a class to fulfill an undergraduate math major’s humanities requirement.

  Like any student interested in learning psychedelic history and culture, I had lived much of my life believing that drugs like LSD had just appeared in the 1960s, causing a bunch of people to tune in, turn on, and drop out, before the drugs were quickly made illegal. While writing my undergraduate thesis, a biography of Timothy Leary, I discovered that there was an earlier era of psychedelic drug use in Western culture, before the 1960s. My later master’s thesis focused on that much richer history of LSD, which lasted roughly a decade (known historically as the “fabulous fifties”), when a new and exciting experimental drug, LSD, reached American shores and promised relief for a variety of mental disorders. I wondered: if the Western psychedelic experience goes back even a decade before I once believed it did, could it possibly go back even further?

  While writing my Timothy Leary thesis, a friend let me borrow*2 Richard Rudgley’s The Alchemy of Culture, a survey, as the subtitle indicates, of “intoxicants in culture,” wherein the author mentions a “witches’ ointment” over a few pages. I found the idea intriguing but limited, as these early modern period ointments had little to do with my 1960s focus. What the book did accomplish for me, however, was to open a door—a door that led to a history of the psychedelic experience in the West before the 1960s. Reading Leary’s work for my thesis, I was aware that psychedelic visionary experiences had existed and played a role in cultures around the world, throughout history. But even Leary himself had lamented that the West held no history of psychedelia, which is exactly why he appropriated the Tibetan Book of the Dead, to which he wed his ideas about psychedelics.

  But there had been Richard Rudgley’s The Alchemy of Culture, which seemed firm in its assertion that some kind of “hallucinatory experience induced by intoxicants in the ointments” existed during the early modern period. I decided to check his sources and came across Michael Harner’s groundbreaking article about witches’ ointments in Hallucinogens and Shamanism (1973). The article, though both scholarly and enthralling, wasn’t enough; I wanted to know more. I scoured bookstores and libraries looking for a full-length volume about the legendary witches’ ointment. There was none. I spent the next five years collecting facsimiles of Latin manuscripts, translating them and looking for the historical truth, if any, of the early modern period psychedelic experience (used here anachronistically) in the form of a witches’ ointment.

  What I found, however, was not one use but a variety of practices, some malefic, others possibly entheogenic,*3 and still others purely recreational. I call these phenomena psyche-magical experiences. When Saskatchewan psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond first coined the term psychedelic, he meant it as nothing more than “mind manifesting.” Think, therefore, of psyche-magical as “mind manifesting to gain the ability to manipulate, communicate with, or otherwise experience a supernatural world.”

  I am all too aware that I am stuck with twenty-first–century terminology to describe an experience for which there is little recorded history. Words like vision, ecstasy, etc., are used throughout this work in a limited sense to mean psyche-magical. Furthermore, words like drug, psychoactive, hallucinogen, and the like will also be used interchangeably. They a
re meant to carry neither positive nor negative associations; consider these words neutral, unless otherwise specified.

  I am in no way reducing medieval and early modern period magic to drug use. I merely aim to show first how these drugs fit in with the broader system of magic, and second, how the early modern church demonized the experiences people had while using these drugs. The picture is complicated, the road winding, the record incomplete, but clues do exist, which can at the very least lead us in the right direction.

  These kinds of experiences crop up every now and then in the historical record, from the chills of Siberia to the jungles of Mesoamerica and throughout the rest of the world. Sometimes they are accepted by the society in which they occur, other times condemned. The following pages demonstrate how some Western ecclesiastical writers demonized the psyche-magical experiences produced by drugs as the “witches’ ointment” of the early modern period.

  INTRODUCTION

  A woman, alone at night, pulls an ointment jar from a chest hidden beneath her bed. Opening the container, she scoops a handful of the foul-smelling goop—the witches’ ointment, lamiarum unguenta—into her palm. She turns to an ordinary broom in the shadows of the corner, the kind that her neighbors foolishly believe has no other use than that of sweeping—maybe killing a mouse or two. At present, this woman intends to do neither. Grasping the besom, she smears the long wooden handle with her witches’ ointment, destroying the freshly woven spiderwebs that now trail her fingertips. Straddling the oily broomstick, she is instantly lifted out the window into the ethers to join scores of other women who have similarly anointed implements, soaring alongside demons that fill out the aerial entourage. As they glide over rooftops and clouds, dotting the moon in their wake, all are careful not to mention the name of God or Christ lest they plunge to their deaths. They are traveling to a faraway meadow leagues beyond the watchful eyes of the clergy and their neighbors where they will join others already assembled, reveling and worshipping Satan: the Sabbat. Should any newcomer wish to join Satan’s congregation she must pay homage to him by renouncing her Christian faith and trampling a large cross conveniently placed before her feet. Finally, she must solidify her devotion by planting the obscene kiss, the osculum infame, on the Devil’s derriere. Now a full member of the sect, she will join the others in a fine banquet of murdered child’s flesh. They will feast heartily only to discover that the food lacks all taste and oddly leaves the diners still hungry. Afterward, she will engage in such wicked debauches as dancing backward and fornicating with demons.