The Perception and Portrayl of Witches and Witchcraft during the 16th to 18th Centuries in England

Sometimes witches flew to sabbats, allegedly by use of brooms, staffs, forks, shovels or demons in the shapes of goats, cows, horses or wolves. The use of ointments for this purpose was fairly widespread, and this alone was the one way witches ‘flew’. The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, written by Abraham the Jew in 1458 contains a description of the use of such an ointment or unguent. In Abraham’s extensive travels in search of magic he met a witch in Linz, Austria. Both he and the witch rubbed the unguent on their hands and feet, and soon after it seemed to him that he was flying and that he arrived in a place he had wished to be, a location he had not shared with the witch. He awoke from this trance or out- of-body state to a painful head ache and a feeling of melancholy. In comparison to his ‘flight’ the witch told him of her experience, but the two were quite different. He was astonished by the vision as he felt he had been “really and corporeally” there, and proceeded with a further experiment, he asked the witch to use the ointment to fly to a place where his friend was and seek news. This she did, and instead of flying away dropped to the floor to Abraham’s surprise. As she lay there for three hours he became worried that she had died, but she regained consciousness and told him what she had seen, which did not correspond with what he knew of his friend, so he dismissed it as a fantastic dream induced by the unguent and questioned the witch, who confessed to Abraham that the Devil had given her the ointment. Being a very pious man, Abraham had nothing more to do with her.

The recipes for the ointment vary, but are generally the same, based on a fat, supposed to be that of an unbaptized child, and containing various herbs, most of them poisonous to greater or lesser extents and narcotic or hallucinogenic. Francis Bacon wrote: “The ointment that Witches use, is reported to be made of the fat of children digged out of their graves; of the juices of Smallage, Wolfe-Bane, and Cinque-Foil, mingled with the meal of fine wheat; but I suppose the soporiferous medicines are likest to do it, which are Hen-bane, Hemlock, Mandrake, Moonshade, or rather Night-shade, Tobacco, Opium, Saffron, Poplar-leaves, etc.”. Research into the witches’ slave done by Dr. Erich-Will Peuckert, of the University of Gottingen, Germany produced interesting results. Using as a basis a recipe from the Magia Naturalis by Giovanni Battista Porta, one of the earliest writers to make a reasoned study of witches’ unguents, he made an ointment containing thornapple, henbane, and deadly nightshade, wild celery, parsley and hog’s lard as a basis. To test this unguent he enlisted the help of a solicitor friend of his who nothing about the subject of unguents. Both applied the ointment to their bodies using Porta’s directions and fell into a deep sleep lasting for twenty hours which ended with symptoms resembling a bad hangover, similar to that described in Abraham the Jew’s account. Both wrote down what they had seen before they compared notes, and found that both had had very similar dreams that resembled the descriptions of the more fantastic sabbats, involving flying to a mountain top, wild orgiastic rites and the appearances of monsters and demons. The strange and erotic nature of the visions naturally made Dr Peuckert reluctant to publish the details. The fact that both men experienced visions that had so many closely resembling details led him to suggest that the salve had perhaps stirred up a racial memory from the unconscious mind.

That the unguent produced the sensation of flying and attending a sabbat is difficult to dispute given the evidence, and given that users of drugs such as LSD speak about their drug induced experiences as ‘taking a trip’ or ‘getting a high’ which are reminiscent of the ideas of flying, it is probable that the ointments were the equivalent to these modern hallucinogens. That way a witch could attend a sabbat without actually being there, and probably shaped some of the more bizarre details involving orgies and demons, as well as influencing the artwork depicting sabbats.