TrippingwiTches

Since scientific writing on European witchcraft began in the late 19th century there has been a suspicion that witches did drugs. As far back as 1889, EB Tylor suggested that witches ‘flew’ to the sabbat and enjoyed orgies there after having taken hallucinogens: the witch would apply an ointment, fall asleep and travel mentally rather than physically. As the years have gone by, this explanation has become increasingly popular – to the point now where we have the silly meme (silly because it is not evidencebased) that witches used their broomsticks as drug-coated dildos.

Yet though the existence of a flying ointment is accepted by scholars – a flying ointment is frequently mentioned in witch sources – there is still an argument over whether this was just a nonsensical concoction (blood of bat etc) or a potent pharmacopeia.

There are four sources that suggest that there really was a witch intoxicant: all four describe a woman being ‘anointed’ with a flying cream. The first of these comes from early 15th-century Spain, where Alfonso Tostato described a woman putting on ointment and falling into a trance. In 1437 or 1438 Johannes Nider wrote, in Germany, about a Dominican being invited to watch a woman put on flying ointment: inviting a Dominican to see a witch fly seems something like opening a Bar Mitzvah to the Gestapo, but anyway... Then, a century later, in 1558, Giambattista della Porta wrote of his similar experiences in Italy. Of these three accounts, only Della Porta was an actual eyewitness, but the similarities are fascinating. In all three, the woman entered a trance and in two cases the woman proved completely insensible to pain; in the third, the sleeper only woke up when she fell from a tub in which she had placed herself, banging her head. In all three cases the women described, upon waking, their flight to a sabbat (though of course the women are unlikely to have thought of their trip in these terms): in two cases the women were sure they had been there physically. The most interesting experiment of all, though, was that of Andrés Laguna who in 1545, while resident in Metz, got his hands on some flying ointment. He took a woman who suffered from chronic insomnia. He covered her from head to toe in the ointment – sorry to be all ‘Blue Peter’ but please don’t try this at home – and she fell into an open-eyed trance for 36 hours. When she was finally beaten awake she was furious because she had been snatched away from wonderful visions and a phantom lover.

On the basis of evidence like this, the best question is surely not ‘Did witches use drugs?’ but ‘What drugs did witches use to fly?’ Simon Young writes on folklore and history and runs www.fairyist.com

he covered the woman from head to toe in the ointment and she fell into an open-eyed trance for

36 hours