The Witches' Ointment

by Thomas Hatsis

  But how can a religion, itself featuring transformation lore, wholly dismiss the idea of metamorphosis? Did not Nebuchadnezzar devolve into a wild beast for seven years for disobeying the One True God?*18 And what about transubstantiation? How can bread and wine really become the body and blood of Jesus if such transmutations of matter are impossible?

  While many ecclesiastics pondered this question, the Bishop of Hippo, Saint Augustine himself, had the answer. On the subject of such transformations (and familiar with Apuleius’s Metamorphosis) Augustine stood firm: the “divine order,” a hierarchy of all beings, from insects to angels, placed humans above all other creatures save the one omnipotent God, who alone could change matter. To Augustine, because God created all people in His image, no person could ever really descend to a lower form of life. The innate homo interior—that side of humans made in God’s image—could not be compromised. If a person thought she or he transformed into some other creature it was an illusion of the devil. Thus Augustine developed the notion of the “phantasm,” the image that appears in the mind, which symbolizes that which the senses believe a material object to be.

  I cannot therefore believe that even the body, much less the mind, can really be changed into bestial forms and lineaments by any reason, art, or power of the demons; but the phantasm of a man . . . may, when the man’s senses are laid asleep or overpowered, be presented to the senses of others in corporal form . . . so that men’s bodies themselves may lie somewhere, alive . . . yet with the senses locked up much more heavily and firmly than by sleep, while the phantasm, as it were embodied in the shape of an animal, may appear to the senses of others, and may even seem to the man himself to be changed, just as he may seem to himself in sleep to be changed.52

  Augustine is clearly skeptical: unless God so chooses to engineer a transformation—say, bread and wine into body and blood—the act is impossible. A just God simply wouldn’t allow women to transform themselves into strix; therefore, strix don’t exist. This Augustinian phantasm view is clearly defined in later Christian law codes like those of Rothari, Charlemagne, and Burchard of Worms. Lawmakers, theologians, and other medieval writers of the strix phenomenon adopted the Augustinian theory and held this view from the fifth through the fourteenth centuries. Thirteenth-century physicians counted these “lamias,” i.e., mascas to commoners (strias in French), as “nocturnal hallucinations” caused by a thickening of the humors.*19 This in turn resulted in the troubled sleep of insomniacs.53 The masses, however, remained unconvinced. In “Corrector,” Burchard of Worms denounces the belief in “night-flying women who were supposedly killing Christians, cooking and eating their flesh, but then restoring them to life again”—a clear mingling of two separate lores: strix and the bone miracle.54 However, not all commentators held to the rational view. As late as the thirteenth century writer and preacher Stephen of Bourbon (d. c. 1260 CE), a historian of medieval heresies, encountered a woman living along the Rhône-Alps expanse who was convinced that a strix (stryge) had killed two of her babies.55 Stephen concluded that the strix “was a demon who, taking on the semblance of an old woman, wandered about at night astride a wolf, killing suckling babies.”56 In 1296, two women in Tyrol were convicted and executed for this imaginary crime.57

  Throughout the Middle Ages and into the high Middle Ages night-roving women appear in countless stories and incarnations. Some traveled with goddesses to bless or ransack homes; some engaged in aerial battle; others like sylvan were feral women, and still others were strix. Separable as these curious creatures might have been to a commoner, leitmotifs overlapped enough in Burchard’s writing so as to create a base idea for later demonologists to expound upon. Several centuries later, at the dawn of the witch-craze periods, these kinds of groups would coalesce into one kind of midnight assembly—all prompted by a stereotype that started to take form around the early 1400s.

  Most important for our investigation is that aside from one ancient literary source, not one chronicler of folk phenomena, theologian, king, or detainee—not Charlemagne, Alfonso X, Regino, Burchard, Bourbon, Ruggero, Ratherius, Germanus, Sibillia, or Pierina—ever mentions an ointment necessary for nightly excursions with fertility goddesses. And strix, which were not even believed to exist according to later Christianized law, needed no ointment to transform.

  The story of the witch Pamphilë as recounted by Apuleius, the lone example from the classical world, might have been an acceptable literary origin for the witches’ ointment; however, its exclusion from the tales of strix for nearly fourteen centuries, between Apuleius’s comedy and Matteuccia’s indictment, indicates that Christian lawmakers hadn’t smuggled it into the legend. Hell, these ecclesiastics didn’t even think strix existed! And as will be shown in later chapters, not a single early chronicler of these ointments ever makes a connection to Apuleius’s novel (including the scribe who penned Matteuccia’s record). For now, lacking a direct precedent we still cannot be sure where Matteuccia’s ointment originated. However, we can say that the lacuna of historical mentions of ointments in the varieties of folklore at the very least begins the authentication of Matteuccia’s psyche-magical salve. Otherwise what is it doing in her trial record?

  But there are still other avenues to explore. For example, the concept of nocturnal assemblies as outlined in Matteuccia di Francesco’s record most certainly had a foundation in heretical folk religious congregations, spurred on, most likely, by those all-too-human preachers of the early modern period—healer-priests damned by the church as heretics who, like the Dianic horde, succubi, wild women, and strix, also prowled the silence of deepest night.

  3

  THE HERETICS’ POTION

  Where or when did anyone ever hear that man, that august and sacred animal, ate excretions? . . . and yet this is but the preliminary proceeding with these execrable wretches.

  MICHAEL PSELLUS

  They also say the Roman Church is the Church of the wicked, and of the beast and the whore.

  RAINIER SACCONI

  HUMAN ERROR

  Mother Church had strayed from the path, influenced by terrible calamities that had befallen her empire. Those centuries bridging the collapse of Western Rome with the rise of the witch stereotype proved most tempestuous; internal struggles between warring kings and landowners over territory, external threats from savages, widespread famine, papal schisms, disease and plague—all belied the prophecy of a New Jerusalem.

  The state of the flock had redoubled this decay; the faithful had wandered from the shepherd, unable to reconcile their daily bread and toils with the church’s feasts and spoils. While it is true that many doctors of theology lived piously, they too found themselves abhorred by the negligence and irascibility of the lower clerical orders.1 Many nuns and monks hardly lived the devotional, humble lives expected of them. Often the bratty daughters and sons of wealthy merchants, many of them found it difficult to relinquish the splendor they had enjoyed while growing up. Gluttonous godmen wore fine clothing and sauntered the streets armed with small daggers to protect their riches; prurient nuns could be found intoxicated and merry at local inns.2

  None of this behavior escaped the attention of Pope Innocent III. His Third Lateran Council of 1179 was comprised of a two-part objective: recapture the Holy Land and reform the church. On this latter point, Canons 16 and 17 were resolute:

  Canon 16:

  Clerics . . . shall not hold secular office. . . . They shall not attend performances of mimes, jesters, or plays and shall avoid taverns. . . . Nor shall they play with dice; they should not even be present at such games. They should wear the clerical tonsure and be zealous in the performance of their divine offices and in other responsibilities.

  Canon 17:

  [Some] spend half the night eating and talking. . . . And get to sleep so late that . . . they mumble their way hurriedly through morning prayers. There are some clerics who . . . disdain even attending Mass. And, if they happen to be present at Mass, they flee the silence of the choir
to go outside to talk with laymen, preferring their frivolous things to the divine.3

  Despite these papal prohibitions the chapels remained empty. At best all priests could hope for was Sunday morning lip service from a sparse and unenthusiastic congregation. The church, with her swift and passionate administration of flagellations, was quite literally flogging herself to death.

  But many Christians never totally abandoned the faith and were only missing from the pews; instead, they were reworking Christianity with their own folk variations,*20 which the learned ecclesiastics called “errors” of the faith.4 These errors were spread by those whom the church labeled heretics—believers in Christ who had been disowned by the church. Ironically, these heretics kept faith in Jesus alive among the common folk as trust in orthodoxy slowly bled out of them.

  Heretics are as old as Jesus’s rumored Resurrection, with various believers inspiring different interpretations of that supreme event. Over the first three centuries of the common era Christian sects and cults sprung up in and around the Roman Empire, steadily rising to prominence in some areas.†21 Perhaps the most obvious aberration of the young Christian religion that distinguished it from its pagan and Hebrew forerunners was its insistence that what a person believed trumped how one behaved. Such a radical view of piety would require cohesion among the various groups that adopted this strange new creed. Thus all the early Christian groups—proto-orthodox, gnostic, and heretical, as well as other spiritual mutations common in the first few centuries CE—fought for their particular set of beliefs as the correct version. What we call Christianity today just so happened to be the one incarnation among a multitude that won those early battles.

  The great proselytizer of Christianity Paul of Tarsus (the Apostle Paul) recognized the factionalism among the faithful early on. An ex-Jew who at one time had “violently persecute[ed] the Church of God and was trying to destroy it,” the reformed Paul, in Galatians 1:6–12, revealed revulsion for heretical beliefs: “I am astonished that you . . . are turning to a different gospel—not that there is another gospel, but there are some who are confusing you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ.” In a religion in which belief mattered, correct belief mattered most.

  Nonetheless, heretical sects flourished. They included both ministers as well as laypeople, both women and men, and encompassed a spectrum of beliefs. Some of the highly localized forms of heresy are forever gone, the records lost to the unyielding abyss of history. Others, however, survive. Still, the most these heresies can tell us about the people who believed them is that the variations were endless. What is clear is that the church’s evolution and growth after the fall of Rome included the formulation of the stereotype of the heretic, which became the rallying cry for the battle against all those who would defy the Church Fathers.*22 That stereotype included certain key themes: nocturnal orgies, cannibalistic infanticide, and conspiratorial insurgency.

  Poignancy is the punch of irony; the stereotype existed in an embryonic form during the days of pagan Rome and was cast on those citizens who practiced the then-illicit religion, Christianity, the newest internal threat to the Roman Empire.5

  THE LAMP THAT SHINES IN DARKNESS

  A scream resounded from within the pile of dough, confounding the new convert. She quickly pulled the dagger out of the floury mound, which to her surprise oozed blood. She wanted to stop but the dozen onlookers urged her to stab the dough again and again, which she did until the screams ceased and blood began to soak the small wooden table. The sectarians had fooled the new recruit, omitting beforehand that a human baby had been sheathed in the dough. They all then thirstily drank the blood of the baby and divided its limbs among themselves in a ghoulish banquet. The murder of the child and subsequent feasting on its innocent flesh had bound them all to one another.

  The new recruit was now a Christian.

  Illuminated by a single lamp shining ominously in an otherwise dark cellar, this Christian sect then gathered to worship their idol—the severed head of a donkey. Members of this sect were also known to revere “the virilia of their pontiff and priest and adored them [like fathers].” Their feast days were quite the spectacle: they would gather at night with their families for a large meal called an agape. Afterward, once “the fervor of incestuous lust [had] grown hot with drunkenness,” a dog leashed to a shining lamp was thrown scraps of meat just out of its reach. The dog pounced on the morsels; the lamp that once shone fell over, was “extinguished in the shameful darkness,” at which point all members of the sect descended into a wild, incestuous orgy.6

  These were among the many slanders the Roman elite hurled at early Christians. Although such depictions were little more than the persecutory fabrications of an oppressive majority, they were widely accepted as truth by the pagan masses. What is important is what these themes—specifically, the pact over ritualized murder and cannibalism—represented to the ancients: conspiratorial insurgency against the state by secret societies, in this case, Christians.

  Indeed, even pagans were not immune from this inflammatory charge. Second-century CE Macedonean writer Polyaenus wrote of a certain “obscure tyrant” from the third century BCE, Apollodorus of Cassandreia, who tried to seize power from the Romans, but not before making his coconspirators swear an oath. Apollodorus killed a child, cooked the viscera into a meal, and shared it with the insurgents: “When they had eaten, and also drunk the victim’s blood, which was dissolved in dark wine, he showed them the corpse and so, through this shared pollution, ensured their loyalty,” Polyaenus recounted.7

  The Roman festival of Bacchus, the Bacchanalia, suffered similar slanders in 186 BCE. At one time consisting of a relatively small group of women who gathered during the day to worship, the Bacchanalia grew over time until it evolved into large nocturnal debauches. First-century Roman historian Livy (Titus Livius Patavinus) recorded that to their initiation rites

  were added the delights of wine and feasts. . . . When wine had inflamed their minds, and night and the mingling of males with females, youth with age, had destroyed every sentiment of modesty, all varieties of corruption first began to be practiced. . . . If any of them were disinclined to endure abuse or reluctant to commit crime, they were sacrificed as victims.

  Livy is clear that aside from murderous orgies the Bacchanalia had as its prime objective the “control of the state.”8

  Christians had already been blamed for the Great Fire of Rome in 64 CE, making their recalcitrant ritual realistic to their pagan neighbors. Nero targeted them because they were already spurned by the conservative Roman population; we must recall that Jesus, their felonious founder, had been executed for capital crimes only three decades prior. Since prosperity of the Roman State depended on sacrifices to the gods, Christians upset this balance by refusing to participate in public pagan practices and thus they neglected their civic duties. A nonconformist Christian congregation could therefore serve as a way for Romans to explain any kind of misfortune. First-century Roman senator and historian Tacitus made no exaggeration when he admitted that the Roman Christians were “convicted not so much of arson as of hatred of the human race.”9 The Christian women and men arrested for starting the fire had the hides of animals sewn on their skin; they were then fed to wild dogs. In other cases unfortunate Christians fell victim to mob justice.10

  Even with the triumph of Christianity in the late fourth century CE, disparate Christian groups still engaged in conflict over the matter of who truly kept the revealed Word. Various gnostic and heretical sects flourished, most with little more in common than their zealous persistence that they alone held the truth.11 Toward the end of the sixth century Isidore of Seville, a scholar of the ancient world, recounted the beliefs of several heretical sects existing in various parts of the empire in his Etymologiae. Some were well-known sects like the Arians, who “did not recognize the Son as coeternal with the Father.” Others, like the Nestorians, named for the bishop of Constantinople, Nestorius, “place[d] free will ahead of divine gr
ace.”12 The Adoptionists seem to have been comprised solely of learned clerics—a departure from the majority of sects, which usually leaned toward inclusiveness. As its name implies, Adoptionism maintained that Jesus was the adopted son of God, born purely mortal and chosen to fulfill some divine task. Other heresies sprung up “without founders and without names.” Their beliefs ranged from not accepting that the soul is an image of God, to believing that souls could be transformed into “demons and animals of every kind.”13 Some ideas were considered heretical merely because they held “different opinions on the condition of the universe” than those of the orthodox church; there was even rumored to have existed a cult that dared to believe that “water has existed as long as God has.”14 Labeling all these groups under the umbrella of “heretical” or “gnostic” gets us nowhere, as the groups represent a broad spectrum of beliefs.15 Furthermore, these groups were not immune from infighting, and variations arose from time to time.16 One sect in particular deserves special attention for this very reason.