April 30, 2025 • 54 mins
In this scholarly episode of Witch Hunt Podcast, hosts Josh Hutchinson and Sarah Jack welcome historian Dr. Michael Ostling to examine one of witchcraft history's most persistent legends: the hallucinogenic flying ointment.
Dr. Ostling carefully separates historical evidence from modern misconceptions, revealing how contemporary interpretations often reflect our own misogynistic projections rather than the experiences of those accused of witchcraft. Through thoughtful analysis, this episode respects the memory of innocent victims while providing listeners with a deeper understanding of how witchcraft myths evolve and persist across centuries.
This conversation challenges popular assumptions and offers valuable historical context on this fascinating yet frequently misunderstood aspect of witch hunt history.
Content Warning: This episode contains discussion of explicit sexual content related to historical witchcraft allegations.Michael Ostling's Research
Buy: Emotions in the History of Witchcraft, co-edited by Michael Ostling
Buy: Between the Devil and the Host Imagining Witchcraft in Early Modern Poland, by Michael Ostling
Check out our new podcast: The Thing About Salem on youtube!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
The idea of there being flying female dangerous vampiric beings
can be traced very far back. Welcome to Witch Hunt, the
podcast that talks about the history and lore surrounding
witchcraft accusations. I'm Sarah Jack.
And I'm Josh Hutchinson. Today we're tackling a really
(00:20):
fascinating and persistent pieceof witch lore, the Flying
Ointment. Were there really hallucinogenic
potions that made people believethey could fly?
We're thrilled to have Doctor Michael Osling with us today to
discuss this Welcome to Witch Hunt podcast.
Doctor Osling, please tell us about your expertise and what
(00:41):
are we going to talk about today?
I think we're mostly going to talk about the myth of the
witch's flight ointment, the hallucinogenic flight ointment,
but I'm happy to talk about any anything else that also comes
up. I am a historian of witchcraft,
A humanities scholar specializing in all aspects of
(01:03):
witchcraft and magic, primarily in Europe and the Americas, but
also more globally. In our discussion about the
witches playing ointment today, are we talking about the
physical world or are we talkingabout a different reality where
which is flu? So it's my working assumption
(01:26):
that which is never flu, that the idea that which is flu is a
mixture of folklore and demonology.
So it's some comes out of culture, not out of reality.
And I think that assumption thatwhich is never physically flu is
shared by all modern scholars. But there are some scholars,
(01:50):
some I would say real scholars, some more pseudo scholars or
pseudoscientists who would like to make the claim that witches
understood themselves to fly in the same sense that somebody
taking LSD or psilocybin mushrooms or peyote might
experience themselves as flying.And what era did witches start
(02:14):
doing that? It depends on what you mean.
The idea of there being flying female dangerous vampiric beings
can be traced very far back. We have the Lamiae or Lilith,
the Jewish M&S. Some of those can go back well
(02:35):
into 1000 years or so, BCE probably even earlier because
kind of the notion that there are dangerous beings out there
in this world that fly by night.But maybe take the form of
screech owls or bats or night raisins or those sorts of things
and can sneak up on you at nightand suck your blood.
(02:57):
That that seems to be AI. Wouldn't call it a universal.
I'm very careful about not assigning universality to things
unless I'm quite sure, but it's certainly very very widespread.
The attachment of that image of the flying night demon to actual
human women. You can see traces of that
(03:18):
already in some Roman literature, but really more as a
literary construct, not something but seems to have been
taken seriously in real life, orat least not that seriously.
You have the claims made in the Canon episcopy, which is a
Christian document, that there are women who think that they go
(03:39):
out on night journeys. The Canon episcopy doesn't
exactly say that they fly, but sort of a suggestion of some
kind of magical journey. But the Canon episcopy is very
clear, and this is a superstition.
So this is a Christian Catholic document that says it is not the
case, right? It is not true that women fly.
Anyone who thinks that women flyis incorrect in their faith.
(04:05):
And then you really start getting the notion that that
witches fly with the formation of the mythology of the witch's
Sabbath because you have this question, how do they all get to
this big gathering, often described as a really large
gathering, right? If your witch's Sabbath is a few
(04:26):
women gathered in, you know, in a basement somewhere, well, they
could have just walked there. But as you start getting these
stories elicited usually under torture of these fast, fast
gatherings of which is from all over the country or from, you
know, all over the world, they have to get there somewhere.
And the way the path is usually depicted as in terms of flying.
(04:53):
And what were early theories when the flight was specifically
attached to witches? What were early theories about
how they flew? So you have a really strong
split between a demonological theory and a theory or a set of
(05:13):
theories associated with people who understood themselves to be
natural philosophers or natural magicians.
So it's anachronistic to describe such people as
scientists, but certainly peoplewho who were trying to
understand the world through means of nature rather than
super nature. And then the demonological
(05:36):
theory is earlier, and it comes out of a long discourse within
Christianity about the powers ofSatan.
Satan is a spirit, the world is material.
How do spirits interact with theworld?
This was a question that scholastic philosophers turned
(05:58):
over and over in all sorts of different directions and they
came up with really ingenious, really interesting ideas about.
While spirit is, is sort of likeair.
So it's not completely immaterial.
It's just this very refined material.
And so a spirit like Satan couldcondense himself into air.
(06:19):
This the same way that the, the,the winds, right?
The wind seems very spiritual, very immaterial, but when it
blows, you feel it right? Or he could animate a human
corpse in various ways. So you have this a long
standing, really just theological, philosophical set
(06:39):
of questions about the powers ofSatan.
And then when you start getting this mythology about the witches
travelling to the Sabbath, well,Satan took them there, right?
Satan carried them. So that's the demonological
theory. He picks them up.
They sometimes claim or say thatthey rode on a broomstick or
they rode on a shovel or they rode on a chair or on a horse or
(07:02):
on a feather or on a all sorts of things or that they turned
into birds. But all of this is the witches
have no power under this illogical model.
Any power they seem to have is coming from the devil.
And so if they seem to fly or ifthey do physically fly, it's the
devil carrying them. So when we talk about
(07:25):
hallucinogenic witches ointment,is that posing theory, Is that
something that came later? Is there's not a diabolical
piece of that that's giving power back to the witches?
So in its original intent, the theory advanced by some 16th and
17th century medical doctors, natural magicians and natural
(07:50):
philosophers is to debunk the idea of witches flight.
It is not to give power back to the witches.
It is to say there are no witches.
And so in many ways, this intense is something that that
we might align with, right? These are people who are saying
(08:10):
you are torturing people. You are executing people for an
impossible crime, right? They can't fly.
People can't fly. There are these people claim,
and these are going to be peoplelike Juvande Della Porta,
Francis Bacon or Johanna Veer, who of course was a a famous
skeptic of the witch trials. There are old women who think
(08:35):
that they fly, and there's various reasons they might think
of this. All of these theories,
interestingly, are grounded in misogyny.
So on the one hand, they're trying to save the lives of
women before the courts, and that's admirable.
They do so by saying these womenare crazy, right?
They are delusional, They are hallucinating, Veer says.
(09:02):
Old women, especially old peasant women, they're always
eating turnips and cabbage and beans.
They're just farting a lot. They're like, he literally says
that they're having like, bad digestion while they sleep and
having nightmares and thinking that they're flying.
And because they're old women and old women are stupid, says
(09:23):
Veer. They turn this into this fantasy
of going to the Sabbath again. His intentions are really good.
His intentions are to save the lives of innocent women.
But his method is interestingly misogynistic.
So it could be cabbage and beansor, says Veer and others, it
(09:45):
could be a product of a hallucinogen.
They could be using an ointment that is hallucinogen.
And the reason that Viir and Cardano and and Della Porta and
others have this theory available to them, that which is
might be using a hallucinogenic ointment, is that they are
(10:05):
themselves natural philosophers,medical doctors, men, Latin
speakers, very educated and theyknow that there exists and had
existed for years anesthetic ointments that had potential
hallucinogenic side effects. So they are not making this
(10:29):
have, but they are projecting onto the accused witches their
own knowledge of ancient and medieval Greek and Latin
medicine having to do with opiumand the nightshades and other
lucinogenic or otherwise psychotropic botanical
substances. How did this ointment work?
(10:54):
Did they just rub a little on themselves or they grease their
broom or how did they use this? So again, it depends on which
theory you're looking at. In the demonological theory, the
devil is making them fly right? And the devil is tricking them
(11:15):
into thinking that they have a magical power.
Good, because this is the basis of the witchcraft reach in early
modern Europe in general, at least in its orthodox Christian
form, which is have no power. All of the devil have fallen.
The power is the devil's, and the devil allows women and some
men to think that if they say certain words or make certain
(11:40):
ritual gestures or use certain substances, things will happen.
And those things do happen, but only because the devil is doing.
And so the demonologists go out of their way to say, look, in so
far as the witches have an ointment, it doesn't work.
If they fly, it's because the devil makes them fly.
(12:02):
And so they can put it on themselves however they want.
It doesn't matter. Some of them put it on their
hands, some of them put it on their feet, some put it on the
broom, some put it all over their naked bodies.
Has some touch the tops of theirheads.
It's actually emphasized in these demonological accounts
that it's put on in all kinds ofdifferent ways.
And it really doesn't matter howthey do it because it doesn't
(12:24):
work anyways. When you look at people like
Francis Bacon or Johan Veer or Della Porta, because they're
making a claim that in so far asaccused witches think they fly,
they are hallucinating the flight and they're using a
(12:45):
hallucinogenic ointment for it to work, they really have to rub
it in, right? They have to be putting a lot of
it on themselves, rubbing it in vigorously, getting it and all
their nooks and crannies. Because again, there existed at
this time and analgesic ointmentused in some surgeries, but it
(13:10):
wasn't all that defective and hekind of needed a lot.
So there's no evidence, I've never seen any evidence that any
accused which ever had access toor even knowledge of these
learned medicine alignments which would have been used by
sort of high class medical doctors trained in Galenic
(13:32):
medicine, Precarnian medicine. But men trained in this
tradition would claim that it might be possible that the
accused witches for using the assignments and again, really
sort of rubbing them in all overtheir bodies.
I was thinking about the narrative of a lot of accused
(13:56):
witches having been healers. So it's interesting.
I wonder how that fits into the that origins story or narrative
when you have men that have the access and the knowledge to
medicines that women wouldn't have had.
(14:17):
So it's actually really a minority of accused witches who
were practicing healers. That is also a little bit of a
myth and and I can come back on another time and go and that is
less of a myth than the myth of the hallucinogenic ointment.
Certainly some a significant minority of accused witches
(14:40):
practiced as healers, including using various herbal mixtures,
Absolutely. But really the minority.
But the plants claimed to be used in the hallucinogenic
ointment we're not the sorts of plants that you found in the
farmacopia of a village healer. Some of them did not exist in
(15:06):
Europe. So it was sometimes claimed that
the witches might use Datura, which is very powerful for this
engine from the New World, obviously not available in the
old. Insofar as it might have been
available, it would have been very expensive.
Mandrake is from the Mediterranean.
Any account of Mandrake in Northern Europe.
(15:28):
Again, it's not impossible that someone might have imported
some, and in fact, we do know that fake Mandrake was very
popular in Northern Europe. So various other routes like
calamus or iris root would be doctored to look like Mandrake.
If you know what Mandrake root look like, it looks vaguely kind
of sort of like a human being, like ginseng, as it often has
(15:52):
sort of two roots, so it's like 2 legs.
And the other routes would be doctored to look like Mandrake
consoled as magical charms. Those are not going to work
right? This is high risk root or
calamus root. They don't have any
hallucinogenic properties. So again, it's not impossible.
I don't want to let the possibility that some accused
(16:12):
which somewhere might have used,for example, belladonna, deadly
nightshade. Pretty common really a weed in
Europe. There are some very, very
equivocal accounts of nightshadebeing used in a very few trials,
never as an ointment for flying.When it's reported in a trial,
it's used in other ways for other things, but we just don't
(16:36):
find in the trials any accused which, whether she was in fact
an herbal healer or not, making anything that looks like a
hallucinogenic ointment. Thank you.
So there's basically what I'm understanding is there's no
(16:58):
documentation that which anybodyaccused of witchcraft actually
used the ointment. Yeah, there, there really is not
so. So there are people who try to
make the claim, but there are documents and they're just
unsuccessful. So, for example, Edward Beaver,
who's a contemporary historian who has made some arguments
(17:21):
about the hallucinogenic appointments.
He says he knows of one trial in1651 in which an accused which
chewed what she called bitter almonds and this helped her fly
and she also rubbed some on her skin.
And he says OK, bitter almonds maybe those were nightshade
(17:41):
berries. So a few things to observe.
One, this is 1 trial. Even if it is completely true,
and I don't think it is, but this accused witch used
nightshade to have the experience of flying, basing an
entire sort of theory of the origin of witches fight and the
(18:04):
origin of the witch trials. Even on this hallucinogenic
premise, it's pretty weak if youhave just one trial.
But she didn't make an ointment.She rubbed some berries, some
bitter almonds on herself and nightshade berries, they don't
look like bitter almonds at all,right?
But bitter almonds looks like analmond.
(18:26):
It is the pit of a kind of apricot.
Nightshade berries are little berries.
They're depending on the speciesor subspecies, they're white or
black, kind of reddish. It is hard to see how someone
could misidentify A nightshade Berry, which is hallucinogenic
(18:47):
with a bitter almond. So you do have modern historians
really grasping, I would say at straws, finding here and there
very cherry picked examples to hold up this belief that there
is a, a physical basis for the myth of witches flight.
(19:08):
Thank you. I really, really enjoyed hearing
you talk about the harvest of the earth today, getting to hear
about all these ingredients. We haven't had anybody share so
much expertise on that and it's really been enjoyable.
But I know these ointments have theories that include some
(19:29):
detestable ingredients. Can you tell us about?
Yeah, absolutely. So going back to the
demonological theory again, which is in so far as they fly
to by Satan's power, the ointment has no power.
So what is the point of the ointment in the demonological
(19:51):
view? It is indication of just how
horrible witches are, right? If witches are the opposite of
good Christians, the Ayman is going to incorporate things that
good Christians should not be involved with.
So if a good Christian makes useof the Eucharist in the proper
(20:15):
way, the Ayman might make use ofthe Eucharist in an improper
way. If a good Christian eats the.
Right. Christian foods, meat from house
pigs, chickens. This is going to be the wrong
kind of meat, right? I have news for a bat, that sort
of thing. And if good Christian women
(20:38):
nurture and feed their children,if that's the emblem of what a
good Christian woman is, then the witch, of course, kills
children and cuts them in. This inversion of proper womanly
behavior, sometimes to eat them,sometimes there are suggestions
of cannibalism, but more usuallyto render their fat and use it
(21:02):
as part of her ointment. And so just for the experience
of this entertainment of flying and flying where to a place
where she gets to have lots of weird sex.
Witches are such bad women, suchevil women, that they kill
children to make their ointments.
(21:24):
So in the demonological theory, the omen again has no actual
effect, but is an emblem, a symbol of everything that is
terrible about the witch. There's a disturbing tendency in
a lot of the the pose of the scientific, scientific sounding
(21:48):
accounts of the witch's ointmentfrom the last 50 years that is
very sexualized. What I find fascinating and
disturbing about this is you getthese accounts written nearly
always by men, and these are usually men who are or seem
(22:08):
right, I think are very respectable.
They are not historians. They're pharmacologists,
toxicologists, botanists, experts in various kinds of
chemistry. And they say, hey, I figured it
out. This is why witches think they
flew. Listen, they made an ointment
out of hallucinogens. They rubbed it on the
(22:29):
broomstick, and they used that broomstick as an applicator.
They never say has a dildo as a sex toy, but it's pretty clear
what they're saying as an applicator in order to introduce
the ointment to their mucosa, bywhich they mean essentially
(22:52):
their vulva or vagina or anus. And then they went on this trip
that idea that the broom was used are a phallic objects
coverage in grease covering an ointment that was then
(23:13):
introduced through penetration. That traces back to Michael
Harner, a scholar in many ways, a good scholar of shamanism in
the early 1970s. It doesn't have earlier roots.
It doesn't really show up in thewitch trials, which is
surprising because the witch trials loves to dwell on the
(23:35):
sexual proclivities of the accused witches.
But it shows up. It shows up in the last 50 years
and and it it is just very disturbing to me that one takes
as one excuse for dwelling on the hyper sexualization of the
accused, which is this claimed scientific key to the witch
(24:00):
trials. Why were 50,000 women burned in
early modern Europe? Well, because some women were
using hallucinogenic dildos. It's, again, just tremendously,
tremendously disrespectful. Yeah.
That that brings so many questions to mine.
But I am curious, when you're looking at convictions that were
(24:25):
sexual crimes, do we find women committing crimes with dildos?
No, in in the demonology and in some of the trials, you get a
lot of accounts of which is having sex the wrong kind of
(24:45):
people. So sometimes this is incest,
having sex with the wrong kind of people because they're having
same sex relations, have sex with the wrong kind of being
because they're having sex with cats or goats or Saber.
You have very precious accounts of Satan's penis being extra big
(25:11):
or forked or scaly. You also have very commonly kind
of pushing against the idea of this, like extra pleasurable
penis. You have claims that that the
devil's penis is icy cold. So you really do have a
fascination in the early modern period on the part of the
(25:32):
demonologists, on the part of these men.
How are the witches doing, right?
They want to talk about that a lot.
But. This this again, entirely
fantasy. Very occasionally it does seem
to be the case that a woman originally came to be accused
(25:59):
because she was of quote UN quote Phil fame as the sexually
promiscuous person, right? So she was an adulteress, she
was a prostitute, she was a precurious.
That shows up for sure. But most of the women accused of
(26:20):
witchcraft were not Saints, and not whatever the opposite of a
St. is. They were ordinary human beings,
right? Some of them probably cheated on
their husbands. Many of them probably didn't.
Their sexual lives remain mostlyclose to us.
Yeah. And it's disturbing because it,
like the broom, of course, is this domestic symbol that's part
(26:44):
of the witch story. But then to then sexualize the
same prop, that's something. Yeah.
And the sexualization of the broom was probably there from
early on. The very first picture we have
(27:05):
of a woman flying on a broom, which is from the 15th century,
a woman, a person astride A broom.
It is suggestive, right? We have Albrecht Durer's famous
engraving of a witch riding backwards on a goat and she's
(27:28):
holding, it's not a broom, it's probably a Distaff, but it's a
phallic looking domestic object and she's holding it in a way
that kind of looks like I look like a penis.
So this is very, very standard in the depictions, the artistic
depictions of which is that theyare repurposing domestic items
(27:49):
in a sexual way. This sort of shame to be always
a broom in in later stories, right?
It's only in the 19th and 20th century that it comes to be just
standardly A broom. Before that it is a butter
churn, which also has kind of a sound like a part to it, the
part that pounds the butter distaffs, which are, you know,
(28:12):
used to spin yarn, which are like a stick, brooms, Rakes,
shovels. So in the depictions of witches,
you nearly always have these sort of phallic objects in the
trials themselves. They flew in all kinds of ways,
sometimes on a broom, sometimes on a rake or the distaff or a
(28:38):
butter charm, but also in a tub,in a sieve, on the back of a
wool, on the back of a swallow. Right.
Some of these, if you kind of squint, you can make them
sexual. Most of them you can't.
So what we have in the demonology, in the art depicting
(29:03):
witches, and then really continuing into the 20th and
21st centuries, this retrojection of male fantasies
onto the bodies of women in roads that are, yeah,
disturbing. So did these women who were
(29:24):
traveling to the Sabbat, did they know that they were they
astrally projecting or were theyattempting to get there
physically somehow? Testimonies of women traveling
to the fabrics are, almost without exception, elicited
(29:45):
under torture from women who probably at least in the early
century or so of the witch trials, had not heard of the
witch's Sabbath until they were accused of it and asked about
it. Right now, this idea from
demonology, it does soak down into local folklores through,
(30:08):
among other things, the mechanism of the witch trials.
So after a century or so, sure, people know about the witch's
Sabbath, but at least early on people are saying they're being
tortured and they're asked wheredid you go?
How did you get there? What did you do?
Isn't it true that you had sex with the devil?
Isn't it true that you committedincest and hate lizards and all
(30:30):
these things? They say, yes, they did all
those things. So they did not think they were
astrally projecting. They did not think they were
physically flying. They didn't think anything.
They're confessing to something imposed on them.
That being said, it is true thatin a few corners of Europe there
are folk traditions of various kinds of night journey.
(30:58):
So we have the Ben and Dante andfreely it was sort of
northeastern Italy. We have what's sometimes called
the dream cult, the ladies from outside in southern Italy.
We have the the cult of the Seeley Whites and in in Scotland
and our evidence for these in some cases pretty good, in other
(31:21):
cases less good. But certainly there are
traditions in parts of southeastern Europe, far
southern Europe, maybe Scotland,maybe the Baltics, of people
having it, some kind of shamanistic type flight.
As is typical of folk traditions.
(31:44):
These are not strongly theorized.
So is this astral projection? Is this a second soul?
Is this the shadow? Is it the physical body?
It doesn't really matter. Different stories are different.
(32:04):
You don't get these kinds of nitpicky questions until either
early modern inquisitors or modern historians,
anthropologists, scientists start trying to make these
distinctions. Has anybody found any physical
(32:28):
evidence like traces of the ointment or anything like that?
So when I was researching this afew years ago, I found an
article that did claim that it had found some traces of the
ointment and it was very excitingly.
We finally found some witches ointment and it turned out to be
(32:51):
sort of a nothing broker really.They had found a cells of some
kinds in the peasant dwelling and of course people use salves,
right. People used ointments as we
still do. People moisturize in peasant
economies highly dependent on dairy.
(33:15):
Least some of our most popular moisturizing greens today are
called like milk maids, friend or things like that.
Other ointments for the chapped hutters of cows or or for the
chapped hands of milk maids werewere really common.
For example, in in one Polish trial, they did find an
ointment. They were very excited and it
(33:37):
turned out to be it was a stone crop mixed with butter.
And interestingly, in 19th and 20th century, Bolin stone crop
mixed with butter is still a very standard ointment for your
hands, for your face. Stone crop is not lit by
(33:57):
hallucinogen. It's like chamomile or like
lilac or other things you might put into your lip balm or your
or your moisturizers. So those sorts of ointments.
Sure. Yeah.
We we find those. We have never found anything
like a hallucinogenic, which is what I meant.
And they were looked for right in the Bass Witch trial, one of
(34:20):
the biggest sets of witch trialsin the early 17th century.
The inquisitors did go out into the villages and into the huts
and look for ointments. And they found them.
And then when they were looked at more carefully by the second
set of inquisitors who came to kind of clean up this witch hunt
because it had been this sort ofhuge fiasco and and Inquisitor
(34:44):
names, Alonso de Salazar Shrias came out and said, look, this
whole thing was a witch craze, right?
Made-up. They already had these ointments
in evidence and they looked at them again and they were made
out of things like pork fat mixed with soot or various sort
(35:08):
of standard innocuous local herbs mixed with butter.
Again, they were just the sorts of ointments people would have
for various reasons, practical or medicinal in their homes.
It's it. All of this is just mind
boggling and interesting. You can really see how
(35:28):
authoritative, perceived authoritative writings and
consensus just really impacted culture.
That makes me think of the impact of the Malice
Maleficarum. And then over here you have this
these ointment theories. In your article, you touch on
the cultural significance of thinking with ointments and
(35:52):
about this reality and imagination debate.
What do we need to recognize looking back?
Or so I wrote an article called Baby Fat in Belladonna, and I
really wrote that after a few years of teaching a
undergraduate course on the witch trials.
(36:15):
And anyone who teaches an undergraduate purse on the witch
trials will always get a studentor two or three who say, well, I
heard and they will have heard various things, right?
They'll have heard of poisoning.So the theory that the accused
witches are poisoned by this fungus that sometimes crows on
wry, that's a big claim in the Salem trials, long, long
(36:36):
debunked. Or that the accused witches all
suffered from hysteria. Or there's just, there's all
sorts of myths. And so I wanted to debunk the
particular myth that came up every year in my class, which
was, well, isn't it true that they made use of a
hallucinogenic ointment? And the answer is no.
(37:00):
But more than just wanting to debunk this myth, I became
really interested in the resilience of the myth because
it resurfaces literally every few years.
And quite respectable places andwebsite devoted to Popular
(37:22):
Science, usually around Halloween and websites devoted
to popular history also around Halloween.
In journals of toxicology or pharmacology and certain types
of sort of reductionist or materialist history.
(37:45):
It just comes up over and over again, Hey, we figured it out.
Now we know why people mistakenly thought that which is
flu. It's figured out, we've nailed
it down. There were these ointments, they
rubbed them on themselves. They thought they flew.
It wasn't true. Now we know, and I find this
(38:06):
very frustrating, not only because it isn't true, but
because it's really disrespectful to the accused.
Witches, right? I understand my responsibility
as a scholar studying these people, making my living out of
their stories, to try to tell those stories as accurately as I
(38:32):
can, to try to understand both the accused and the accuser as
as accurately as I can and as much as I can.
To not project my own fantasies,contemporary concerns, onto
their stories, onto their minds,onto their burned bodies.
(38:55):
I think that's just a baseline ethical requirements of anyone
studying these materials. Because, after all, that's how
the woods trials themselves happened, right?
Demonologists on the one hand, and the village accusers on the
others project onto the real bodies and lives of real women
(39:17):
their own dehumanizing myths andnarratives and stories about
monsters, vampires, heretics. So I can't be repeating that
pattern myself. And so when we make these claims
that the accused witches really were understanding themselves to
(39:38):
fly and really were experiencingA subjective but real
hallucinated orgy, that might play well to some of us today,
right? We have a fantasy cult of free
love retrojected into the MiddleAges.
(40:01):
We have a nice story about the long pedigree of emissions,
again retrojected into the Middle Ages.
But it's not true in so far as Iwant to understand what these
women were experiencing, why they were abused, how they
(40:21):
understood their own lives. With the very marginal but of
course important exception of some accused witches who were
members of these sort of semi shamanistic practices in some
areas of Europe. None of them understood
themselves to be witches, right?None of them understood
themselves to worship Satan or ahorned God.
(40:45):
None of them understood themselves to be travelling to
orgies. Just none of these things.
It's a fantasy and it's not their fantasy.
It's men's fantasy. It's the demonologist fantasy,
so I just can't be any part of that.
And it is ironic. It's funny and strange that the
particular myth of the ointment originates itself as a debunking
(41:10):
move. Natural scientists, natural
philosophers, medical men are saying, hey, these women,
they're not witches, they're just hallucinating.
That's in the 16th and 17th centuries, and then in the 19th
and 20th and 21st century, othermen and women take that
(41:31):
debunking story and use it to claim that the witches were
real, but they really existed asan underground ecstatic
shamanistic hallucinogen using cult.
I just think it's disrespectful.I think that such an important
(41:54):
point to remember that we're talking about witch hunts
against innocent people and to not visualize them as having
done what they were accused of. Yeah.
So. Important and the distinction
that they themselves were not identifying in a religious
(42:18):
manner, even as accessing something diabolical or to match
modern practices that people enjoy or identify as it's it's a
whole different template that was put on these lives.
Earlier in the discussion, you pointed out the misogyny in the
(42:43):
ointment theory, and I really appreciated that.
I think it, you know, we use that word around the witch hunts
in these stories, but sometimes we don't point out how it was
there. And I think that was a really
good point today. Thanks.
Yeah. I mean, misogyny pervades every,
every aspects of the early modern witch hunts.
(43:04):
Absolutely. The Maleus Maleficarum, which
you mentioned by Heinrich Krameror Heinrich Instatoris, one of
the foundational demonological documents of the witch hunts,
just noxious and it's misogyny, saying all sorts of things about
how witches are the descendants of Eve.
(43:26):
These are brought sent into the world and they do everything
backwards. And why are there more women who
are witches than men? Because women in general are
lusty, full of we easily seducedby the devil, contrary to logic.
I mean, they really sound like you're drunken uncle at
(43:47):
Thanksgiving, right? They're just terrible.
Those are the demonologists. So then you turn to the people
who are defending or at least casting doubt on demonology.
Johann Veer would be the best example of this.
And one would assume, OK, he's going to be not misogynistic.
(44:08):
Unfortunately, no, Right. His defense of the accused
witches is, come on, women are crazy.
You can't believe what they say or what they think or what they
feel. They're hallucinating.
They're eating cabbage and beansor, or they're just being old
women, right? And old women make up all kinds
of stuff. So there's no place safe from
(44:28):
misogyny in the story, except maybe in our retelling of these
stories. We can train.
Avoid retelling these misogynistic tropes as if they
were fact because they fit, or can be made to fit aspects of
our thinking today. You talked earlier about how
(44:53):
people who use these substances today do experience a sensation
of light. Has anybody recreated one of the
ointments? So I should make 2 points.
One is that there are of course shamanistic practices that make
(45:13):
use of nightshade hallucinogens,especially in the Americas,
right? Datura is or was used and a
variety of shamanistic practicesby a variety of indigenous
peoples and the Southeast and Southwest.
Peyote is of course, not a nightshade, but has similar
(45:34):
effects, and it's important. In some Native American
religions you have things like ayahuasca.
So it's completely reasonable tohave the idea that really modern
witches might have been doing something similar.
It really is a reasonable idea. It's wrong, but it's reasonable.
And I don't want to cast any shade at all on the entheogenic
(45:58):
use of phytochemical hallucinogens and all sorts of
indigenous traditions, which is clearly something again,
primarily in sort of ranging from Southwest down through
Central and South America is a big part of lots of indigenous
traditions. It just happens not to be true
(46:20):
of early modern Europe. So there is one person, Ville
Eric Poykert, German folklorist,to in the early mid 20th century
reconstructed the ointment. Very important to remember he
did not reconstruct an ointment ever recorded in any witch
(46:44):
trials. So he is not reconstructing the
witch's ointment, he's reconstructing the natural
philosophers and imagination of the witch's ointment based on
those natural philosophers knowledge of Greek and Roman and
medieval medicine. So these natural philosophers
(47:07):
know that opium is a narcotic. They know that henbane and
belladonna and mandray contain alkaloids that are
hallucinogenic and had been usedin a small way in analgesic
ointments since the 12th century.
(47:29):
They know this because these menthemselves are trained as
doctors, right? So these 16th and 17th century
men say, hey, I think the witches probably use something
like what we sometimes use and they describe the ointment and
they give the ingredients and being belladonna, mandray,
(47:53):
opium. And then plaikert in the 20th
century says, hey, I can make that.
And he does. And he applied it to his armpits
and his genitalia. And he reports having a 30 hour
trip that was very similar to some of the sorts of things
(48:19):
described in demonology and sometimes described in witch
trials. So flying a party with all sorts
of strange looking, being, interacting with and talking to
all sorts of beings, right? In my opinion, and I say this in
my article, that was the first time anyone ever actually
(48:39):
experienced hallucinogenic witchfight was in the early 20th
century. Well, are there, is there any
documents or letters of a woman writing about her experiences?
No, sorry, sorry for that short answer, but there's not, No,
(49:03):
there's not. Now, what I tried to do, and I
think most responsible scholars of the witch trials try to do,
is read the trials very, very carefully.
Because what I think we don't want to do is say, because these
(49:25):
trial, because the testimony, the confessions of the witches
were extracted under torture, nothing about them can be
believed. We can't say anything about the
lives of these women. We just have to be silent.
We just have to say no, no, no, I don't know anything about
them. I think that is a understandable
(49:49):
position and it is more responsible then some other
positions which like, oh, I'm going to make them, but it also
re silences the victims of the witch trials, right?
We say, sorry, the documentationis too fragmentary, the evidence
(50:09):
is too tainted. We just don't know what they
felt or thought at all. And we're just going to be
silent about it. We can read things carefully.
We can triangulate between testimony given before torture
and testimony given during torture.
(50:31):
We can triangulate between what we know contextually about the
religion of the time or the folklore of the time and
confessions. We can use all sorts of tools to
try and figure out what the accused witches might have
actually done or thought or felt.
(50:54):
And when we do that, we do find when the accused witches are
compelled to talk about their ointments, sometimes they fall
straight into what is probably being pushed on them.
So yes, it's made out of babies,right?
It's made out of bats, blood, that sort of thing.
(51:15):
And sometimes they start talkingabout the herbs which they do
use in their lives, usually not because they are professional
healers, but just because they are people living in the 16th
and 17th century. And if you live in those
centuries, you, especially if you're a what, you know, some
(51:37):
herbs. I live in modern times.
I use modern medicines. But I am aware of chamomile,
golden seal, right? Like, oh, as any normal person.
So again, under torture, what isyour aim made out of?
And some they say, well, it's made out of butter and, you
(51:59):
know, this herb or that herb. And the herbs that they end up
confessing to most often are nothallucinogenic herbs.
And they're not even quite oftenreally medicinal herbs that have
like, a strong medicinal property.
They are more often the herbs that are used ritually to ward
off evil. So think about the irony of
(52:21):
that, right? It is part of virtual practice
across Europe in the early modern period.
A little bit less so in Protestant areas than in
Catholic areas. You hang various vegetative
substances in places like doorways, windows, above bed.
(52:42):
These are often things used for Easter palms.
So on Palm Sunday, Sunday beforeEaster, nowadays, most often
because we have access to palm trees, an actual palm frond is
sort of folded into the shape ofa little cross, right?
And people take these home and again they hang them in their
(53:03):
windows and their doors above their beds, just a little
protective amulet. In northern Europe in the early
modern period, nobody had accessto palm trees, so they call it
Palm Sunday. They understand that it is
because palm trees are describedin the Bible, but they don't
have palm trees. So they bring to the church
various flowers, herbs, other things usually that just, like,
(53:25):
smell nice. And those are their palms.
And they have them blessed, and then they bring them home and
they hang them in places. And the ashes used on Ash
Wednesday are traditionally madefrom burning last year's palms.
So that's just sort of standard Catholic tradition.
You have an accused witch. She's being forced under torture
(53:49):
to describe her ointment. And she starts describing the
herbs that she really does use to protect herself from
misfortune, to protect herself from the devil, to protect
herself from witches. But now, because she's being
tortured, she's describing theseas the ingredients to her
(54:13):
ointment. Yeah, so the irony there is just
incredible. Thank you so much again for for
being here today. This has been really enjoyable.
Thank you. It's my pleasure.
Thank you for joining us for this episode of Witch Hunt.
Have you subscribed to our YouTube channels yet?
Do it today. Have a great today and a
(54:36):
beautiful tomorrow.
The idea of there being flying female dangerous vampiric beings
can be traced very far back. Welcome to Witch Hunt, the
podcast that talks about the history and lore surrounding
witchcraft accusations. I'm Sarah Jack.
And I'm Josh Hutchinson. Today we're tackling a really
(00:20):
fascinating and persistent pieceof witch lore, the Flying
Ointment. Were there really hallucinogenic
potions that made people believethey could fly?
We're thrilled to have Doctor Michael Osling with us today to
discuss this Welcome to Witch Hunt podcast.
Doctor Osling, please tell us about your expertise and what
(00:41):
are we going to talk about today?
I think we're mostly going to talk about the myth of the
witch's flight ointment, the hallucinogenic flight ointment,
but I'm happy to talk about any anything else that also comes
up. I am a historian of witchcraft,
A humanities scholar specializing in all aspects of
(01:03):
witchcraft and magic, primarily in Europe and the Americas, but
also more globally. In our discussion about the
witches playing ointment today, are we talking about the
physical world or are we talkingabout a different reality where
which is flu? So it's my working assumption
(01:26):
that which is never flu, that the idea that which is flu is a
mixture of folklore and demonology.
So it's some comes out of culture, not out of reality.
And I think that assumption thatwhich is never physically flu is
shared by all modern scholars. But there are some scholars,
(01:50):
some I would say real scholars, some more pseudo scholars or
pseudoscientists who would like to make the claim that witches
understood themselves to fly in the same sense that somebody
taking LSD or psilocybin mushrooms or peyote might
experience themselves as flying.And what era did witches start
(02:14):
doing that? It depends on what you mean.
The idea of there being flying female dangerous vampiric beings
can be traced very far back. We have the Lamiae or Lilith,
the Jewish M&S. Some of those can go back well
(02:35):
into 1000 years or so, BCE probably even earlier because
kind of the notion that there are dangerous beings out there
in this world that fly by night.But maybe take the form of
screech owls or bats or night raisins or those sorts of things
and can sneak up on you at nightand suck your blood.
(02:57):
That that seems to be AI. Wouldn't call it a universal.
I'm very careful about not assigning universality to things
unless I'm quite sure, but it's certainly very very widespread.
The attachment of that image of the flying night demon to actual
human women. You can see traces of that
(03:18):
already in some Roman literature, but really more as a
literary construct, not something but seems to have been
taken seriously in real life, orat least not that seriously.
You have the claims made in the Canon episcopy, which is a
Christian document, that there are women who think that they go
(03:39):
out on night journeys. The Canon episcopy doesn't
exactly say that they fly, but sort of a suggestion of some
kind of magical journey. But the Canon episcopy is very
clear, and this is a superstition.
So this is a Christian Catholic document that says it is not the
case, right? It is not true that women fly.
Anyone who thinks that women flyis incorrect in their faith.
(04:05):
And then you really start getting the notion that that
witches fly with the formation of the mythology of the witch's
Sabbath because you have this question, how do they all get to
this big gathering, often described as a really large
gathering, right? If your witch's Sabbath is a few
(04:26):
women gathered in, you know, in a basement somewhere, well, they
could have just walked there. But as you start getting these
stories elicited usually under torture of these fast, fast
gatherings of which is from all over the country or from, you
know, all over the world, they have to get there somewhere.
And the way the path is usually depicted as in terms of flying.
(04:53):
And what were early theories when the flight was specifically
attached to witches? What were early theories about
how they flew? So you have a really strong
split between a demonological theory and a theory or a set of
(05:13):
theories associated with people who understood themselves to be
natural philosophers or natural magicians.
So it's anachronistic to describe such people as
scientists, but certainly peoplewho who were trying to
understand the world through means of nature rather than
super nature. And then the demonological
(05:36):
theory is earlier, and it comes out of a long discourse within
Christianity about the powers ofSatan.
Satan is a spirit, the world is material.
How do spirits interact with theworld?
This was a question that scholastic philosophers turned
(05:58):
over and over in all sorts of different directions and they
came up with really ingenious, really interesting ideas about.
While spirit is, is sort of likeair.
So it's not completely immaterial.
It's just this very refined material.
And so a spirit like Satan couldcondense himself into air.
(06:19):
This the same way that the, the,the winds, right?
The wind seems very spiritual, very immaterial, but when it
blows, you feel it right? Or he could animate a human
corpse in various ways. So you have this a long
standing, really just theological, philosophical set
(06:39):
of questions about the powers ofSatan.
And then when you start getting this mythology about the witches
travelling to the Sabbath, well,Satan took them there, right?
Satan carried them. So that's the demonological
theory. He picks them up.
They sometimes claim or say thatthey rode on a broomstick or
they rode on a shovel or they rode on a chair or on a horse or
(07:02):
on a feather or on a all sorts of things or that they turned
into birds. But all of this is the witches
have no power under this illogical model.
Any power they seem to have is coming from the devil.
And so if they seem to fly or ifthey do physically fly, it's the
devil carrying them. So when we talk about
(07:25):
hallucinogenic witches ointment,is that posing theory, Is that
something that came later? Is there's not a diabolical
piece of that that's giving power back to the witches?
So in its original intent, the theory advanced by some 16th and
17th century medical doctors, natural magicians and natural
(07:50):
philosophers is to debunk the idea of witches flight.
It is not to give power back to the witches.
It is to say there are no witches.
And so in many ways, this intense is something that that
we might align with, right? These are people who are saying
(08:10):
you are torturing people. You are executing people for an
impossible crime, right? They can't fly.
People can't fly. There are these people claim,
and these are going to be peoplelike Juvande Della Porta,
Francis Bacon or Johanna Veer, who of course was a a famous
skeptic of the witch trials. There are old women who think
(08:35):
that they fly, and there's various reasons they might think
of this. All of these theories,
interestingly, are grounded in misogyny.
So on the one hand, they're trying to save the lives of
women before the courts, and that's admirable.
They do so by saying these womenare crazy, right?
They are delusional, They are hallucinating, Veer says.
(09:02):
Old women, especially old peasant women, they're always
eating turnips and cabbage and beans.
They're just farting a lot. They're like, he literally says
that they're having like, bad digestion while they sleep and
having nightmares and thinking that they're flying.
And because they're old women and old women are stupid, says
(09:23):
Veer. They turn this into this fantasy
of going to the Sabbath again. His intentions are really good.
His intentions are to save the lives of innocent women.
But his method is interestingly misogynistic.
So it could be cabbage and beansor, says Veer and others, it
(09:45):
could be a product of a hallucinogen.
They could be using an ointment that is hallucinogen.
And the reason that Viir and Cardano and and Della Porta and
others have this theory available to them, that which is
might be using a hallucinogenic ointment, is that they are
(10:05):
themselves natural philosophers,medical doctors, men, Latin
speakers, very educated and theyknow that there exists and had
existed for years anesthetic ointments that had potential
hallucinogenic side effects. So they are not making this
(10:29):
have, but they are projecting onto the accused witches their
own knowledge of ancient and medieval Greek and Latin
medicine having to do with opiumand the nightshades and other
lucinogenic or otherwise psychotropic botanical
substances. How did this ointment work?
(10:54):
Did they just rub a little on themselves or they grease their
broom or how did they use this? So again, it depends on which
theory you're looking at. In the demonological theory, the
devil is making them fly right? And the devil is tricking them
(11:15):
into thinking that they have a magical power.
Good, because this is the basis of the witchcraft reach in early
modern Europe in general, at least in its orthodox Christian
form, which is have no power. All of the devil have fallen.
The power is the devil's, and the devil allows women and some
men to think that if they say certain words or make certain
(11:40):
ritual gestures or use certain substances, things will happen.
And those things do happen, but only because the devil is doing.
And so the demonologists go out of their way to say, look, in so
far as the witches have an ointment, it doesn't work.
If they fly, it's because the devil makes them fly.
(12:02):
And so they can put it on themselves however they want.
It doesn't matter. Some of them put it on their
hands, some of them put it on their feet, some put it on the
broom, some put it all over their naked bodies.
Has some touch the tops of theirheads.
It's actually emphasized in these demonological accounts
that it's put on in all kinds ofdifferent ways.
And it really doesn't matter howthey do it because it doesn't
(12:24):
work anyways. When you look at people like
Francis Bacon or Johan Veer or Della Porta, because they're
making a claim that in so far asaccused witches think they fly,
they are hallucinating the flight and they're using a
(12:45):
hallucinogenic ointment for it to work, they really have to rub
it in, right? They have to be putting a lot of
it on themselves, rubbing it in vigorously, getting it and all
their nooks and crannies. Because again, there existed at
this time and analgesic ointmentused in some surgeries, but it
(13:10):
wasn't all that defective and hekind of needed a lot.
So there's no evidence, I've never seen any evidence that any
accused which ever had access toor even knowledge of these
learned medicine alignments which would have been used by
sort of high class medical doctors trained in Galenic
(13:32):
medicine, Precarnian medicine. But men trained in this
tradition would claim that it might be possible that the
accused witches for using the assignments and again, really
sort of rubbing them in all overtheir bodies.
I was thinking about the narrative of a lot of accused
(13:56):
witches having been healers. So it's interesting.
I wonder how that fits into the that origins story or narrative
when you have men that have the access and the knowledge to
medicines that women wouldn't have had.
(14:17):
So it's actually really a minority of accused witches who
were practicing healers. That is also a little bit of a
myth and and I can come back on another time and go and that is
less of a myth than the myth of the hallucinogenic ointment.
Certainly some a significant minority of accused witches
(14:40):
practiced as healers, including using various herbal mixtures,
Absolutely. But really the minority.
But the plants claimed to be used in the hallucinogenic
ointment we're not the sorts of plants that you found in the
farmacopia of a village healer. Some of them did not exist in
(15:06):
Europe. So it was sometimes claimed that
the witches might use Datura, which is very powerful for this
engine from the New World, obviously not available in the
old. Insofar as it might have been
available, it would have been very expensive.
Mandrake is from the Mediterranean.
Any account of Mandrake in Northern Europe.
(15:28):
Again, it's not impossible that someone might have imported
some, and in fact, we do know that fake Mandrake was very
popular in Northern Europe. So various other routes like
calamus or iris root would be doctored to look like Mandrake.
If you know what Mandrake root look like, it looks vaguely kind
of sort of like a human being, like ginseng, as it often has
(15:52):
sort of two roots, so it's like 2 legs.
And the other routes would be doctored to look like Mandrake
consoled as magical charms. Those are not going to work
right? This is high risk root or
calamus root. They don't have any
hallucinogenic properties. So again, it's not impossible.
I don't want to let the possibility that some accused
(16:12):
which somewhere might have used,for example, belladonna, deadly
nightshade. Pretty common really a weed in
Europe. There are some very, very
equivocal accounts of nightshadebeing used in a very few trials,
never as an ointment for flying.When it's reported in a trial,
it's used in other ways for other things, but we just don't
(16:36):
find in the trials any accused which, whether she was in fact
an herbal healer or not, making anything that looks like a
hallucinogenic ointment. Thank you.
So there's basically what I'm understanding is there's no
(16:58):
documentation that which anybodyaccused of witchcraft actually
used the ointment. Yeah, there, there really is not
so. So there are people who try to
make the claim, but there are documents and they're just
unsuccessful. So, for example, Edward Beaver,
who's a contemporary historian who has made some arguments
(17:21):
about the hallucinogenic appointments.
He says he knows of one trial in1651 in which an accused which
chewed what she called bitter almonds and this helped her fly
and she also rubbed some on her skin.
And he says OK, bitter almonds maybe those were nightshade
(17:41):
berries. So a few things to observe.
One, this is 1 trial. Even if it is completely true,
and I don't think it is, but this accused witch used
nightshade to have the experience of flying, basing an
entire sort of theory of the origin of witches fight and the
(18:04):
origin of the witch trials. Even on this hallucinogenic
premise, it's pretty weak if youhave just one trial.
But she didn't make an ointment.She rubbed some berries, some
bitter almonds on herself and nightshade berries, they don't
look like bitter almonds at all,right?
But bitter almonds looks like analmond.
(18:26):
It is the pit of a kind of apricot.
Nightshade berries are little berries.
They're depending on the speciesor subspecies, they're white or
black, kind of reddish. It is hard to see how someone
could misidentify A nightshade Berry, which is hallucinogenic
(18:47):
with a bitter almond. So you do have modern historians
really grasping, I would say at straws, finding here and there
very cherry picked examples to hold up this belief that there
is a, a physical basis for the myth of witches flight.
(19:08):
Thank you. I really, really enjoyed hearing
you talk about the harvest of the earth today, getting to hear
about all these ingredients. We haven't had anybody share so
much expertise on that and it's really been enjoyable.
But I know these ointments have theories that include some
(19:29):
detestable ingredients. Can you tell us about?
Yeah, absolutely. So going back to the
demonological theory again, which is in so far as they fly
to by Satan's power, the ointment has no power.
So what is the point of the ointment in the demonological
(19:51):
view? It is indication of just how
horrible witches are, right? If witches are the opposite of
good Christians, the Ayman is going to incorporate things that
good Christians should not be involved with.
So if a good Christian makes useof the Eucharist in the proper
(20:15):
way, the Ayman might make use ofthe Eucharist in an improper
way. If a good Christian eats the.
Right. Christian foods, meat from house
pigs, chickens. This is going to be the wrong
kind of meat, right? I have news for a bat, that sort
of thing. And if good Christian women
(20:38):
nurture and feed their children,if that's the emblem of what a
good Christian woman is, then the witch, of course, kills
children and cuts them in. This inversion of proper womanly
behavior, sometimes to eat them,sometimes there are suggestions
of cannibalism, but more usuallyto render their fat and use it
(21:02):
as part of her ointment. And so just for the experience
of this entertainment of flying and flying where to a place
where she gets to have lots of weird sex.
Witches are such bad women, suchevil women, that they kill
children to make their ointments.
(21:24):
So in the demonological theory, the omen again has no actual
effect, but is an emblem, a symbol of everything that is
terrible about the witch. There's a disturbing tendency in
a lot of the the pose of the scientific, scientific sounding
(21:48):
accounts of the witch's ointmentfrom the last 50 years that is
very sexualized. What I find fascinating and
disturbing about this is you getthese accounts written nearly
always by men, and these are usually men who are or seem
(22:08):
right, I think are very respectable.
They are not historians. They're pharmacologists,
toxicologists, botanists, experts in various kinds of
chemistry. And they say, hey, I figured it
out. This is why witches think they
flew. Listen, they made an ointment
out of hallucinogens. They rubbed it on the
(22:29):
broomstick, and they used that broomstick as an applicator.
They never say has a dildo as a sex toy, but it's pretty clear
what they're saying as an applicator in order to introduce
the ointment to their mucosa, bywhich they mean essentially
(22:52):
their vulva or vagina or anus. And then they went on this trip
that idea that the broom was used are a phallic objects
coverage in grease covering an ointment that was then
(23:13):
introduced through penetration. That traces back to Michael
Harner, a scholar in many ways, a good scholar of shamanism in
the early 1970s. It doesn't have earlier roots.
It doesn't really show up in thewitch trials, which is
surprising because the witch trials loves to dwell on the
(23:35):
sexual proclivities of the accused witches.
But it shows up. It shows up in the last 50 years
and and it it is just very disturbing to me that one takes
as one excuse for dwelling on the hyper sexualization of the
accused, which is this claimed scientific key to the witch
(24:00):
trials. Why were 50,000 women burned in
early modern Europe? Well, because some women were
using hallucinogenic dildos. It's, again, just tremendously,
tremendously disrespectful. Yeah.
That that brings so many questions to mine.
But I am curious, when you're looking at convictions that were
(24:25):
sexual crimes, do we find women committing crimes with dildos?
No, in in the demonology and in some of the trials, you get a
lot of accounts of which is having sex the wrong kind of
(24:45):
people. So sometimes this is incest,
having sex with the wrong kind of people because they're having
same sex relations, have sex with the wrong kind of being
because they're having sex with cats or goats or Saber.
You have very precious accounts of Satan's penis being extra big
(25:11):
or forked or scaly. You also have very commonly kind
of pushing against the idea of this, like extra pleasurable
penis. You have claims that that the
devil's penis is icy cold. So you really do have a
fascination in the early modern period on the part of the
(25:32):
demonologists, on the part of these men.
How are the witches doing, right?
They want to talk about that a lot.
But. This this again, entirely
fantasy. Very occasionally it does seem
to be the case that a woman originally came to be accused
(25:59):
because she was of quote UN quote Phil fame as the sexually
promiscuous person, right? So she was an adulteress, she
was a prostitute, she was a precurious.
That shows up for sure. But most of the women accused of
(26:20):
witchcraft were not Saints, and not whatever the opposite of a
St. is. They were ordinary human beings,
right? Some of them probably cheated on
their husbands. Many of them probably didn't.
Their sexual lives remain mostlyclose to us.
Yeah. And it's disturbing because it,
like the broom, of course, is this domestic symbol that's part
(26:44):
of the witch story. But then to then sexualize the
same prop, that's something. Yeah.
And the sexualization of the broom was probably there from
early on. The very first picture we have
(27:05):
of a woman flying on a broom, which is from the 15th century,
a woman, a person astride A broom.
It is suggestive, right? We have Albrecht Durer's famous
engraving of a witch riding backwards on a goat and she's
(27:28):
holding, it's not a broom, it's probably a Distaff, but it's a
phallic looking domestic object and she's holding it in a way
that kind of looks like I look like a penis.
So this is very, very standard in the depictions, the artistic
depictions of which is that theyare repurposing domestic items
(27:49):
in a sexual way. This sort of shame to be always
a broom in in later stories, right?
It's only in the 19th and 20th century that it comes to be just
standardly A broom. Before that it is a butter
churn, which also has kind of a sound like a part to it, the
part that pounds the butter distaffs, which are, you know,
(28:12):
used to spin yarn, which are like a stick, brooms, Rakes,
shovels. So in the depictions of witches,
you nearly always have these sort of phallic objects in the
trials themselves. They flew in all kinds of ways,
sometimes on a broom, sometimes on a rake or the distaff or a
(28:38):
butter charm, but also in a tub,in a sieve, on the back of a
wool, on the back of a swallow. Right.
Some of these, if you kind of squint, you can make them
sexual. Most of them you can't.
So what we have in the demonology, in the art depicting
(29:03):
witches, and then really continuing into the 20th and
21st centuries, this retrojection of male fantasies
onto the bodies of women in roads that are, yeah,
disturbing. So did these women who were
(29:24):
traveling to the Sabbat, did they know that they were they
astrally projecting or were theyattempting to get there
physically somehow? Testimonies of women traveling
to the fabrics are, almost without exception, elicited
(29:45):
under torture from women who probably at least in the early
century or so of the witch trials, had not heard of the
witch's Sabbath until they were accused of it and asked about
it. Right now, this idea from
demonology, it does soak down into local folklores through,
(30:08):
among other things, the mechanism of the witch trials.
So after a century or so, sure, people know about the witch's
Sabbath, but at least early on people are saying they're being
tortured and they're asked wheredid you go?
How did you get there? What did you do?
Isn't it true that you had sex with the devil?
Isn't it true that you committedincest and hate lizards and all
(30:30):
these things? They say, yes, they did all
those things. So they did not think they were
astrally projecting. They did not think they were
physically flying. They didn't think anything.
They're confessing to something imposed on them.
That being said, it is true thatin a few corners of Europe there
are folk traditions of various kinds of night journey.
(30:58):
So we have the Ben and Dante andfreely it was sort of
northeastern Italy. We have what's sometimes called
the dream cult, the ladies from outside in southern Italy.
We have the the cult of the Seeley Whites and in in Scotland
and our evidence for these in some cases pretty good, in other
(31:21):
cases less good. But certainly there are
traditions in parts of southeastern Europe, far
southern Europe, maybe Scotland,maybe the Baltics, of people
having it, some kind of shamanistic type flight.
As is typical of folk traditions.
(31:44):
These are not strongly theorized.
So is this astral projection? Is this a second soul?
Is this the shadow? Is it the physical body?
It doesn't really matter. Different stories are different.
(32:04):
You don't get these kinds of nitpicky questions until either
early modern inquisitors or modern historians,
anthropologists, scientists start trying to make these
distinctions. Has anybody found any physical
(32:28):
evidence like traces of the ointment or anything like that?
So when I was researching this afew years ago, I found an
article that did claim that it had found some traces of the
ointment and it was very excitingly.
We finally found some witches ointment and it turned out to be
(32:51):
sort of a nothing broker really.They had found a cells of some
kinds in the peasant dwelling and of course people use salves,
right. People used ointments as we
still do. People moisturize in peasant
economies highly dependent on dairy.
(33:15):
Least some of our most popular moisturizing greens today are
called like milk maids, friend or things like that.
Other ointments for the chapped hutters of cows or or for the
chapped hands of milk maids werewere really common.
For example, in in one Polish trial, they did find an
ointment. They were very excited and it
(33:37):
turned out to be it was a stone crop mixed with butter.
And interestingly, in 19th and 20th century, Bolin stone crop
mixed with butter is still a very standard ointment for your
hands, for your face. Stone crop is not lit by
(33:57):
hallucinogen. It's like chamomile or like
lilac or other things you might put into your lip balm or your
or your moisturizers. So those sorts of ointments.
Sure. Yeah.
We we find those. We have never found anything
like a hallucinogenic, which is what I meant.
And they were looked for right in the Bass Witch trial, one of
(34:20):
the biggest sets of witch trialsin the early 17th century.
The inquisitors did go out into the villages and into the huts
and look for ointments. And they found them.
And then when they were looked at more carefully by the second
set of inquisitors who came to kind of clean up this witch hunt
because it had been this sort ofhuge fiasco and and Inquisitor
(34:44):
names, Alonso de Salazar Shrias came out and said, look, this
whole thing was a witch craze, right?
Made-up. They already had these ointments
in evidence and they looked at them again and they were made
out of things like pork fat mixed with soot or various sort
(35:08):
of standard innocuous local herbs mixed with butter.
Again, they were just the sorts of ointments people would have
for various reasons, practical or medicinal in their homes.
It's it. All of this is just mind
boggling and interesting. You can really see how
(35:28):
authoritative, perceived authoritative writings and
consensus just really impacted culture.
That makes me think of the impact of the Malice
Maleficarum. And then over here you have this
these ointment theories. In your article, you touch on
the cultural significance of thinking with ointments and
(35:52):
about this reality and imagination debate.
What do we need to recognize looking back?
Or so I wrote an article called Baby Fat in Belladonna, and I
really wrote that after a few years of teaching a
undergraduate course on the witch trials.
(36:15):
And anyone who teaches an undergraduate purse on the witch
trials will always get a studentor two or three who say, well, I
heard and they will have heard various things, right?
They'll have heard of poisoning.So the theory that the accused
witches are poisoned by this fungus that sometimes crows on
wry, that's a big claim in the Salem trials, long, long
(36:36):
debunked. Or that the accused witches all
suffered from hysteria. Or there's just, there's all
sorts of myths. And so I wanted to debunk the
particular myth that came up every year in my class, which
was, well, isn't it true that they made use of a
hallucinogenic ointment? And the answer is no.
(37:00):
But more than just wanting to debunk this myth, I became
really interested in the resilience of the myth because
it resurfaces literally every few years.
And quite respectable places andwebsite devoted to Popular
(37:22):
Science, usually around Halloween and websites devoted
to popular history also around Halloween.
In journals of toxicology or pharmacology and certain types
of sort of reductionist or materialist history.
(37:45):
It just comes up over and over again, Hey, we figured it out.
Now we know why people mistakenly thought that which is
flu. It's figured out, we've nailed
it down. There were these ointments, they
rubbed them on themselves. They thought they flew.
It wasn't true. Now we know, and I find this
(38:06):
very frustrating, not only because it isn't true, but
because it's really disrespectful to the accused.
Witches, right? I understand my responsibility
as a scholar studying these people, making my living out of
their stories, to try to tell those stories as accurately as I
(38:32):
can, to try to understand both the accused and the accuser as
as accurately as I can and as much as I can.
To not project my own fantasies,contemporary concerns, onto
their stories, onto their minds,onto their burned bodies.
(38:55):
I think that's just a baseline ethical requirements of anyone
studying these materials. Because, after all, that's how
the woods trials themselves happened, right?
Demonologists on the one hand, and the village accusers on the
others project onto the real bodies and lives of real women
(39:17):
their own dehumanizing myths andnarratives and stories about
monsters, vampires, heretics. So I can't be repeating that
pattern myself. And so when we make these claims
that the accused witches really were understanding themselves to
(39:38):
fly and really were experiencingA subjective but real
hallucinated orgy, that might play well to some of us today,
right? We have a fantasy cult of free
love retrojected into the MiddleAges.
(40:01):
We have a nice story about the long pedigree of emissions,
again retrojected into the Middle Ages.
But it's not true in so far as Iwant to understand what these
women were experiencing, why they were abused, how they
(40:21):
understood their own lives. With the very marginal but of
course important exception of some accused witches who were
members of these sort of semi shamanistic practices in some
areas of Europe. None of them understood
themselves to be witches, right?None of them understood
themselves to worship Satan or ahorned God.
(40:45):
None of them understood themselves to be travelling to
orgies. Just none of these things.
It's a fantasy and it's not their fantasy.
It's men's fantasy. It's the demonologist fantasy,
so I just can't be any part of that.
And it is ironic. It's funny and strange that the
particular myth of the ointment originates itself as a debunking
(41:10):
move. Natural scientists, natural
philosophers, medical men are saying, hey, these women,
they're not witches, they're just hallucinating.
That's in the 16th and 17th centuries, and then in the 19th
and 20th and 21st century, othermen and women take that
(41:31):
debunking story and use it to claim that the witches were
real, but they really existed asan underground ecstatic
shamanistic hallucinogen using cult.
I just think it's disrespectful.I think that such an important
(41:54):
point to remember that we're talking about witch hunts
against innocent people and to not visualize them as having
done what they were accused of. Yeah.
So. Important and the distinction
that they themselves were not identifying in a religious
(42:18):
manner, even as accessing something diabolical or to match
modern practices that people enjoy or identify as it's it's a
whole different template that was put on these lives.
Earlier in the discussion, you pointed out the misogyny in the
(42:43):
ointment theory, and I really appreciated that.
I think it, you know, we use that word around the witch hunts
in these stories, but sometimes we don't point out how it was
there. And I think that was a really
good point today. Thanks.
Yeah. I mean, misogyny pervades every,
every aspects of the early modern witch hunts.
(43:04):
Absolutely. The Maleus Maleficarum, which
you mentioned by Heinrich Krameror Heinrich Instatoris, one of
the foundational demonological documents of the witch hunts,
just noxious and it's misogyny, saying all sorts of things about
how witches are the descendants of Eve.
(43:26):
These are brought sent into the world and they do everything
backwards. And why are there more women who
are witches than men? Because women in general are
lusty, full of we easily seducedby the devil, contrary to logic.
I mean, they really sound like you're drunken uncle at
(43:47):
Thanksgiving, right? They're just terrible.
Those are the demonologists. So then you turn to the people
who are defending or at least casting doubt on demonology.
Johann Veer would be the best example of this.
And one would assume, OK, he's going to be not misogynistic.
(44:08):
Unfortunately, no, Right. His defense of the accused
witches is, come on, women are crazy.
You can't believe what they say or what they think or what they
feel. They're hallucinating.
They're eating cabbage and beansor, or they're just being old
women, right? And old women make up all kinds
of stuff. So there's no place safe from
(44:28):
misogyny in the story, except maybe in our retelling of these
stories. We can train.
Avoid retelling these misogynistic tropes as if they
were fact because they fit, or can be made to fit aspects of
our thinking today. You talked earlier about how
(44:53):
people who use these substances today do experience a sensation
of light. Has anybody recreated one of the
ointments? So I should make 2 points.
One is that there are of course shamanistic practices that make
(45:13):
use of nightshade hallucinogens,especially in the Americas,
right? Datura is or was used and a
variety of shamanistic practicesby a variety of indigenous
peoples and the Southeast and Southwest.
Peyote is of course, not a nightshade, but has similar
(45:34):
effects, and it's important. In some Native American
religions you have things like ayahuasca.
So it's completely reasonable tohave the idea that really modern
witches might have been doing something similar.
It really is a reasonable idea. It's wrong, but it's reasonable.
And I don't want to cast any shade at all on the entheogenic
(45:58):
use of phytochemical hallucinogens and all sorts of
indigenous traditions, which is clearly something again,
primarily in sort of ranging from Southwest down through
Central and South America is a big part of lots of indigenous
traditions. It just happens not to be true
(46:20):
of early modern Europe. So there is one person, Ville
Eric Poykert, German folklorist,to in the early mid 20th century
reconstructed the ointment. Very important to remember he
did not reconstruct an ointment ever recorded in any witch
(46:44):
trials. So he is not reconstructing the
witch's ointment, he's reconstructing the natural
philosophers and imagination of the witch's ointment based on
those natural philosophers knowledge of Greek and Roman and
medieval medicine. So these natural philosophers
(47:07):
know that opium is a narcotic. They know that henbane and
belladonna and mandray contain alkaloids that are
hallucinogenic and had been usedin a small way in analgesic
ointments since the 12th century.
(47:29):
They know this because these menthemselves are trained as
doctors, right? So these 16th and 17th century
men say, hey, I think the witches probably use something
like what we sometimes use and they describe the ointment and
they give the ingredients and being belladonna, mandray,
(47:53):
opium. And then plaikert in the 20th
century says, hey, I can make that.
And he does. And he applied it to his armpits
and his genitalia. And he reports having a 30 hour
trip that was very similar to some of the sorts of things
(48:19):
described in demonology and sometimes described in witch
trials. So flying a party with all sorts
of strange looking, being, interacting with and talking to
all sorts of beings, right? In my opinion, and I say this in
my article, that was the first time anyone ever actually
(48:39):
experienced hallucinogenic witchfight was in the early 20th
century. Well, are there, is there any
documents or letters of a woman writing about her experiences?
No, sorry, sorry for that short answer, but there's not, No,
(49:03):
there's not. Now, what I tried to do, and I
think most responsible scholars of the witch trials try to do,
is read the trials very, very carefully.
Because what I think we don't want to do is say, because these
(49:25):
trial, because the testimony, the confessions of the witches
were extracted under torture, nothing about them can be
believed. We can't say anything about the
lives of these women. We just have to be silent.
We just have to say no, no, no, I don't know anything about
them. I think that is a understandable
(49:49):
position and it is more responsible then some other
positions which like, oh, I'm going to make them, but it also
re silences the victims of the witch trials, right?
We say, sorry, the documentationis too fragmentary, the evidence
(50:09):
is too tainted. We just don't know what they
felt or thought at all. And we're just going to be
silent about it. We can read things carefully.
We can triangulate between testimony given before torture
and testimony given during torture.
(50:31):
We can triangulate between what we know contextually about the
religion of the time or the folklore of the time and
confessions. We can use all sorts of tools to
try and figure out what the accused witches might have
actually done or thought or felt.
(50:54):
And when we do that, we do find when the accused witches are
compelled to talk about their ointments, sometimes they fall
straight into what is probably being pushed on them.
So yes, it's made out of babies,right?
It's made out of bats, blood, that sort of thing.
(51:15):
And sometimes they start talkingabout the herbs which they do
use in their lives, usually not because they are professional
healers, but just because they are people living in the 16th
and 17th century. And if you live in those
centuries, you, especially if you're a what, you know, some
(51:37):
herbs. I live in modern times.
I use modern medicines. But I am aware of chamomile,
golden seal, right? Like, oh, as any normal person.
So again, under torture, what isyour aim made out of?
And some they say, well, it's made out of butter and, you
(51:59):
know, this herb or that herb. And the herbs that they end up
confessing to most often are nothallucinogenic herbs.
And they're not even quite oftenreally medicinal herbs that have
like, a strong medicinal property.
They are more often the herbs that are used ritually to ward
off evil. So think about the irony of
(52:21):
that, right? It is part of virtual practice
across Europe in the early modern period.
A little bit less so in Protestant areas than in
Catholic areas. You hang various vegetative
substances in places like doorways, windows, above bed.
(52:42):
These are often things used for Easter palms.
So on Palm Sunday, Sunday beforeEaster, nowadays, most often
because we have access to palm trees, an actual palm frond is
sort of folded into the shape ofa little cross, right?
And people take these home and again they hang them in their
(53:03):
windows and their doors above their beds, just a little
protective amulet. In northern Europe in the early
modern period, nobody had accessto palm trees, so they call it
Palm Sunday. They understand that it is
because palm trees are describedin the Bible, but they don't
have palm trees. So they bring to the church
various flowers, herbs, other things usually that just, like,
(53:25):
smell nice. And those are their palms.
And they have them blessed, and then they bring them home and
they hang them in places. And the ashes used on Ash
Wednesday are traditionally madefrom burning last year's palms.
So that's just sort of standard Catholic tradition.
You have an accused witch. She's being forced under torture
(53:49):
to describe her ointment. And she starts describing the
herbs that she really does use to protect herself from
misfortune, to protect herself from the devil, to protect
herself from witches. But now, because she's being
tortured, she's describing theseas the ingredients to her
(54:13):
ointment. Yeah, so the irony there is just
incredible. Thank you so much again for for
being here today. This has been really enjoyable.
Thank you. It's my pleasure.
Thank you for joining us for this episode of Witch Hunt.
Have you subscribed to our YouTube channels yet?
Do it today. Have a great today and a
(54:36):
beautiful tomorrow.
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