The Witches' Ointment

by Thomas Hatsis

  Many centuries after the ancient Greeks and Romans, French explorer Pierre Belon demonstrated firsthand knowledge of opium’s powers over the user, saying of the Turks, “There is no Turk that would not buy opium with his last penny. . . . They eat opium because they think that they will thus become more daring and have less fears of the dangers of war.” During warring times, Belon recounted, opium could hardly be found in the marketplace, the bulk of any vender’s supply having been bought up by soldiers.120 In fact, Belon even took opium himself, though his experience only resulted in a “burning sensation in the mouth of the stomach, a slight disturbance in the brain, and a somewhat restless sleep.”121 A contemporary of Belon, French explorer Nicholas de Nicolay, pointed out that opium use among Islamic Turks occurred because their religion forbade wine: “[T]hey have another way to make themselves drunk without wine, which is with their opium.” Nicolay, too, draws attention to opium’s use in wartime to make warriors more “stout and hardy.” However, he also comments on the drug’s recreational uses: “It maketh them so out of sorts, that they lose both their wit and understanding, for they go reeling about in the streets, holding each other, as the other drunkards do . . . making fierce and terrible cries and howling like unto dogs.”122 Another writer, Gulielmus Biddulphus, a preacher stationed in Aleppo, Syria, writing to a friend around 1600 recounted the Syrians’ opium use for its hallucinogenic properties: “They drink bersh or opium, which maketh them forget themselves, and talk idle about castles in the air, as though they saw visions, and heard revelations.”123

  Cristóbal Acosta, who warned his readers to beware the drugging practices of datura-wielding Indian prostitutes, also described one of the other uses of opium: to enhance sexual pleasure. Too much of a good thing, though, could lead to impotence, as some European medical students who experimented with the drug unfortunately discovered. Moreover, for those men with innately strong imaginations, opium resulted in premature ejaculation, so lustful did they become by the combination of visual imagery and physical sensation brought forth by the drug. Acosta favored opium use for the more insipid person: by taking opium “[t]hey are able to [have sex] slowly,” allowing women (who took longer to orgasm) and men to “climax together.”124

  We can be reasonably sure that opium use trickled down to folk medicine in Europe, as it turns up in one medical treatise after another. One of the earliest medieval propagators of opium’s virtues was Avicenna (980–1037), a Persian polymath who has been described as the father of medicine during the early modern period. Avicenna openly admitted to partaking in the drug’s more intoxicating possibilities. A humorous man, he warned other physicians to “[c]ollect your fee before you dose the patient with opium poppy.”125 It was in fact rumored that the great Muslim doctor died at age fifty-six as a result of his opium habit.126 Nonetheless, he was brilliant, producing two monumental works, one in science and the other in medicine. While Avicenna died centuries before the beginning of the larger witch-hunts of the early modern era, his encyclopedic work The Canon of Medicine, written in the eleventh century, was called “the most famous medical book ever written” by Ambroise Paré, a French barber-surgeon who served four different kings (Henry II, Francis II, Charles IX, and Henry III) during the mid-sixteenth century—an interesting comment considering Avicenna’s battery of opium preparations: as ointments, plasters, cakes, potions, suppositories, and pessaries. Recalling the Ebers Papyrus, Avicenna recommended a mixture of opium and dandelion to quiet “cranky children.” He praised opium for its variety of uses: “It is one of Allah’s gifts, for which He should be thanked every day.” Though divinely inspired as opium was, Avicenna still thought it could earn a bad name due to “mishandl[ing] by bumptious men.”127

  This strong psychoactive appears in countless formulas and in myriad medical books, both learned and informal. One of the formal texts written for informal practitioners, Hispanus’s Thesaurus pauperum, enumerated countless uses for opium including eight opium preparations to cure frenzy alone.128 Two other mixes, a suppository and a laxative unguent, are offered to cure wakefulness.129 The juice of the poppy is mostly used in conjunction with other powerful solanaceous plants like mandrake, henbane, and deadly nightshade. The M. 136 leechbook tells us how to prepare opium oil (opinere).130 Opium also appears in Ardoyni’s Opus de venenas; here he cautions the reader about the dualistic properties of opium: “It is both poison and a poisonous medicine, and it is between these [two polarities] that doctors must understand [the difference].” Some of the “consequences for taking opium every day, especially with good wine,” resemble a modern addict: “stupor . . . vertigo . . . teary and blackened eyes (which sink into the face) . . . itchiness . . . profound sleep . . . and synesthesia.”131 Johann Weyer, “with deep sorrow,” reported on a friend of his who, for reasons unspecified, was called to torture by magisterial decree. This friend decided to imbibe three drachms of opium to numb the torture. Regrettably, without proper knowledge of dosage, the unfortunate man “experienced severe constrictions in his heart and breast, and . . . passed away in a deep coma.”132 Under different circumstances, had the opium been given to the man by a village sorceress, she might have been burned for “witchcraft.”

  HEMLOCK

  (Cicuta maculata)

  Socrates sculpted even his last words with characteristic wit: “Crito, we ought to offer a cock to Asclepius. See to it, and don’t forget,” he said as he slowly succumbed to the poison given him.

  For many Grecians, Asclepius, the god of healing, accepted opportunistic offerings of a rooster and prayers either before going to bed or as a gracious payment after being cured. For Socrates, then, as his wry final words indicate, death was the ultimate cure for all life’s ills.133

  We do not actually know what Socrates’ poisoned cup contained. Around the beginning of the third century CE, biographer Diogenes Laërtius posited that it was hemlock.134 Pliny the Elder also qualified that “the Athenian state employed it for inflicting capital punishment.”135

  Hemlock certainly had some curious uses in antiquity. According to Pliny, a way for people to “drink more [wine],” was to eat hemlock first! Since alcohol nulls the effects of this deadly plant, “fear of death [from hemlock poisoning] . . . compel[s] them to drink.”136 Hemlock also had medicinal applications, such as in poultices used to cure stomach pains, and eye salves; the leaves also relieved “all types of swelling, pain or discharges.”137

  The physician-monks at Monte Cassino Abbey in Italy diligently copied medical manuscripts as ordered by the Synods (or Congress) of Aachen (817 CE). One of these manuscripts includes the earliest reference to an anesthetic sponge in the western world. It was a soporific sponge used to put patients under before surgeons cut them open. Though its main ingredients changed from time to time, nearly every surviving recipe contains at least some of the following: hemlock, opium, mandrake, and henbane. These plants were diced up and mixed in water, into which a sponge was dipped that was then dried in the sun. A surgeon placed this sponge under the patient’s nose; the deep inhalation of the juice sent them off into a near-catatonic state. The Bishop of Cervia, Theodoricus Lucca (d. 1298), wrote of the spongia somniferia in a work titled Chirurgiae (The Surgery), which might have been borrowed from an earlier source—namely, Theodoricus’s father, Hugo de Lucca. Theodoricus called his father’s sponge an Oleum de Lateribus (oil of bricks) and described it as “a most powerful caustic, and a soporific which, by means of smelling alone, could put a patient to sleep on occasion of painful operations which they were to suffer.”138 The infusion contained, among other nonpsychoactives, hemlock, opium, mandrake, and henbane. The sponge was, by the time of Lucca fils, shoved up the nostrils as opposed to just placed beneath them.139

  The anonymous author of the Breviarium (though it is posited to have been famed physician Arnoldus de Villa Nova) credited its sponge recipe to one “Magister Michael Scot.” Hemlock isn’t used in the recipe; however, its soporific equivalents—mandrake, henbane, and opium�
��are. Their deep somnolent effects were used to “produce sleep so profound that the patient may be cut and feel nothing as though he were dead.”140

  The soporific sponge was still renowned by the time of Montpellier surgeon Guy de Chauliac (1300–1368) in Chirurgia magna (The Great [work on] Surgery, ca. 1363). The ingredients hadn’t changed much from those presented in the Monte Cassino Abbey collection other than the addition of that other powerful hallucinogenic-soporific, nightshade; the other ingredients were hemlock, opium, mandrake, and henbane.141 But even as late as 1563, Jean Canape, Lyonnais physician to Francis I, claimed the “second sleep” of Master Hugo (Soporis Secundum Dominum Hugonem) still had value: “There be those, as Theodoric, who give them odoriferous medicines, which make them fall asleep, to the end that they may not feel the cutting.” The active ingredients of the Soporis Secundem should not surprise us: “opium, juice of deadly nightshade, henbane, hemlock.”142 Soon after, the soporific sponge fell into disfavor as better anesthetics emerged.

  Outside the medical universities hemlock was also used as an anesthetic by leeches who favored similar drugs as those used by surgeons like de Chauliac. Hemlock remedies turn up in the Lacnunga as a “sleeping drink.”143 Two other recipes containing hemlock, an ointment and an elixir, are credited with diminishing head lice.144 An anodyne (i.e., an analgesic) for a sore knee from Bald’s Leechbook recommends pounding hemlock and henbane together, bathing in it, and then rubbing the concoction on the knee.145 The M. 136 leechbook outlines an uncharacteristically superstitious-sounding soporific sponge whose chief psychoactive ingredient is hemlock. The passage reminds one of the aforementioned surgical treatise’s recipe.

  To put a man to sleep, that he may be treated or cut (operated upon). Take the gall of swine three spoonfuls, and take the juice of hemlock root three spoonfuls, of vinegar three spoonfuls and mingle all together; then put them in a vessel of glass to hold to the sick man that thou wilt treat or cut; and take thereof a spoonful, and put [it] to a gallon of wine or ale . . . and give him to drink, and he shall soon sleep. [Then] treat or cut him as though wilt.146

  We can be certain that the common people were privy to these kinds of drug sponges. Because of the widely circulated Thesaurus pauperum there was little difference between the sponges coming from medical universities and those used by folk practicioners.147

  Though Ardoyni leaves out his usual adjectives for detachment from reality (alienation, vertigo, etc.) in describing hemlock’s effects, focusing more straightforwardly on its physical effects—for example, noting how it immobilizes the body—he does relate that it causes synesthesia.148

  Historically in the West, hemlock appears to have been used in two ways: in antiquity high doses served as a form of merciful execution; with the rise of medical universities in the eleventh through thirteenth centuries, low doses of hemlock were primarily used to slow the functions of the body so as to become cadaverous for subsequent surgery.

  ERGOT

  (Claviceps purpurea)

  Had the summer of 1374 not been unusually wet and muggy perhaps the peasants living in the scattered villages along the Rhine Valley in southern France would have been spared. Spared, that is, but only until the next inevitable catastrophe swept across medieval Western Europe. This time ergotism—the effect of long-term ergot poisoning—was the culprit.

  Ergot, a fungus that grows on diseased rye grain and thrives in humid temperatures—and is incidentally the base element of the psychedelic LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide)—has been with humanity since the first cultivation of grain millennia ago.149 Typified by black spurs that grow out of the stalks of the maturing grain,*45 those poisoned by ergot exhibit a terrifying collapse of the senses. That autumn an outbreak of ergot-induced hysteria ravaged the Rhine Valley. By the time the first ill-fated folk felt the symptoms—achy limbs and lameness—it was already too late for most of the rest of the community.

  Those infected by ergot suffered muscular convulsions, horrifically kicking and crying out in their beds, while others fled from their homes, defecating and vomiting in the streets. Unholy screams strangled the night as demonic hallucinations filled the village air. The devil had come to the Rhine. One after another those truly fortunate villagers who could still run rushed to the river and drowned themselves to escape further torment. The less fortunate cripples (or otherwise lame) would soon feel all the fires of hell bubbling beneath their skin—an infamous inflammation of the muscles, giving rise to the moniker ignis sacer (holy fire). Eventually paralysis stole over the whole body; death, a welcomed emancipation, followed shortly thereafter. St. Anthony, patron saint of ergotism, was pleaded to by scores of the infected to douse their holy fire; he rarely answered.

  Following European history like a creeping death, unintentional ergot poisoning such as the epidemic experienced by residents living in the Rhine Valley occurred sporadically as the Middle Ages flickered into the Enlightenment.150 The twelfth-century English saint Hugh of Lincoln describes in gruesome detail the condition of ergotism survivors. These people had journeyed to Mont St. Antoine, Dauphiné, and been cured—almost: “[A]lthough terribly crippled, their health was nonetheless restored. Some lacked a forearm, others a leg, or even a leg and thigh up to the groin, but all their stumps were soundly healed.”151 Ergotism struck in one of two forms: gangrenous and convulsive. Briefly, gangrenous ergot is characterized by, among other things, muscle inflammation, brutal diarrhea, jaundice, and swelling. Convulsive ergotism causes vomiting, spasms, hallucinations, mania, and burning sensations in the muscles. Both types result in death. Along the impoverished Rhine Valley, a vast spread of land that borders Germany and France, ergot epidemics ravaged the scattered villages for centuries. The German Rhine was more prone to gangrenous ergotism; the French, the convulsive type.

  Not every encounter with ergot led to death, though: sometimes just the psychoactive effects, with light physiological effects, would be experienced. Such occurrences are seen in one microcosmic instance reported by Johann Weyer in the mid-1500s. Weyer reported on two men who “became slightly mad” after eating their employer’s rye bread. They had been repairing a woman’s roof; to feed them for their services, the woman made a rye bread that also included darnel, a Eurasian grass of the genus Lolium, typically called ryegrass. After eating, the workmen frantically ran around in a panic, eventually falling into a “profound sleep.”152

  Detailed descriptions of the psychological effects of these outbreaks remained sparse until 1723, when medical student Joannes Gotofredus Andres produced a doctoral dissertation outlining the history and causes of an ergotism eruption that hit Silesia in 1717. The final draft spoke of the afflictions suffered by the affected. While many experienced spasms and convulsions, others “like ecstatics fell into a deep sleep: when the seizure was over, they awoke and told of various visions.” Those stricken credited the episode to the supernatural.153

  And yet ergot remained in medicinal vogue. Since the days of Hippocrates, doctors and midwives have used the fungus to induce contractions as an aid in childbirth. It was also recommended as a way to suppress postpartum hemorrhaging.154 German botanist Adam Lonicer (1528–1586), the first westerner to mention ergot in his popular 1557 medical treatise Kräuter-Buch (Herbal), didn’t describe ergot as a witches’ poison used by malevolent old crones to cause madness and death, but rather quite antithetically, as an ecbolic, a facilitator of child delivery, which was sporadically used by midwives in different places and at different times.155

  The M. 136 leechbook counts ergot’s virtues in numerous powders, elixirs, ointments, food additives, and plasters: for strangury (slow and painful discharge of urine), dysuria (painful urination), iliac passion (intestinal obstruction), scabs, worms in teeth, and stomachache. If a patient has “worms in thine ears,” a plaster of ergot mixed with wormwood juice was inserted therein.156 Ergot would even be used as an ointment for acne; or a person could mix ergot with mint into a juice, and insert this into the nostril to combat run
ny nose and “cast out the filth of the brain whence it cometh.”157

  TOAD POISON

  (venena Bufo)

  If a person were to pick a toad at random outside some backwoods village or even just beyond the gates of a large city, chances are she or he would grab one that is poisonous. Its possible role in some forms of the heretics’ potion notwithstanding, toad poison might have accounted for some of the ontological and physiological effects of classic love philters (unfortunately described only as venenem mala, “bad poison”). Indeed, after a brief debate in the twentieth century about the effects of bufotenine, modern clinical studies have demonstrated that taking toad venom (especially as a fumigated powder) can result in “psychedelic effects, such as mild visual hallucinations . . . distortions of time and space, and intense emotional experiences.”158 While some medieval potions might have contained trace amounts of toad venom—it appears specifically as a homicidal agent in the writings of Juvenal in the late first to early second century CE,159 nothing is said of its psychoactive powers in early medical works.

  This changed with the rise of the European university, or at least it appears that way due to the growth of literature produced after the nearly total information blackout that came with the fall of Rome. By the twelfth century Hildegard of Bingen certainly knew about the association between magic and toads at the time she composed Physica, commenting that “humans create idolatry and many empty things with the tree frog, through diabolical arts.” She further commented that it is best to use them in the spring, since at that time “airy spirits attack humans more than at any other time.”160 Indeed, toad venom’s psyche-magical effects also appear in the work of one thirteenth-century astrologer, alchemist, mathematician, and magician, according to the Italian poet Dante.161 Michael Scot (1190–1230) wrote in Liber luminis luminum (Light of Lights) about the preparation of a “marvelous powder,” which involved stuffing several “poison-containing toads” into a “vessel that they cannot escape from,” and making them “drink the juices of white hellebore and [?] for nine days.” The practitioner was then to “burn the [toads] sufficiently . . . and grind gently with [pennyroyal?] . . . [soaked in] urine and let dry.” The concoction was used to “transmute a person.”162