The Witches' Ointment

by Thomas Hatsis

  Let’s temporarily suspend the law of anachronism and work backward in these two commentaries, from Matthew toward Genesis. In Matthew, while addressing whether or not people could be carried by the devil to various places, Tostado took a swing at the long-held view of the Canon Episcopi, which stated that the women who rode with Diana did so only in their imaginations: “It is clear that this is the meaning of the text when it is said that the person who believes such things loses his or her faith and . . . belongs, not to Him, but . . . to the Devil. They believe Diana is a goddess, and yet Diana is the Devil.”65 Tostado further argues that people could not be carried away against their will. For those who chose to be taken away by the devil, it “should not be denied that female and also male sorcerers with certain kinds of wicked rituals and ointments are carried away by demons.” They meet with others and together “revere the demons” by “indulging in lust and all indecencies.”66 The “wicked rituals and ointments” opened an avenue for Tostado to demonstrate that witches really did fly, not bodily, but spiritually, a crimen animae, “crime of the soul” so to speak.

  In the Genesis commentary, however, Tostado says nothing of flying with demons or worshipping Diana or Herodias as Satan’s surrogates. He does mention some peculiar properties of these ointments, though, which sound remarkably similar to those in the hallucinatory drug recipes discussed in chapter 4 of this book. He writes that

  some of these mixtures are the kind that dull the sensation of pain, such as those used when a person is [operated on]. We know, too, that this kind of anointing causes such mental disassociation that man becomes separate from himself, and for a short period of time feels no sensation . . . [T]here are certain women we call witches that admit to using certain ointments and ritual words to transport whenever they wished to diverse places to meet with other men and women, where there are all sorts of pleasures and foods which they enjoyed and indulged.67

  Short of actually using the term Venusberg, Tostado’s description of these mind-travelers’ final destination sounds remarkably similar to that psyche-magical locale, their mode of transportation to that paradise: hallucinatory drug ointments.

  Taken together the two passages show an evolution of thought regarding magical ointments. With the later commentary, Matthew, Tostado fixed them into the Procrustean bed of ecclesiastical demon lore complete with Diana and Satan and magical rites. In Genesis, the devil and the goddess are absent and the context demonstrates that Tostado regarded this proto-Sabbat as a drug-induced phantasm conjured in the minds of “witches” (i.e., village sorceresses/sorcerers) who found themselves between reality and some other detached world.

  Besides its composition, which occurred before the formulation of the theological definition of the witch stereotype (and subsequently was noticeably reworked in Matthew), Tostado’s Genesis has additional value as a credible source: namely, its role in the commentary. Tostado was a biblical literalist out to prove that stories from both the Old Testament and the New Testament were true. In Genesis he was hardly trying to demonstrate that psyche-magical ointments existed, but rather that God could take Adam’s rib to craft Eve without causing him any pain. Attempting to rationalize (and historicize) how a loving God could perform sacred surgery on Adam, Tostado theorized that He must have used the same kinds of medical drugs on the first man in Eden as physicians use to put a patient in a state of soporatum on the operating table. Or, as seems apparent, the kinds of drugs a witch (malefica) might use to magically enter a spiritual realm.

  Perhaps unwittingly Tostado demonstrated that at least a small portion of informal healer-magicians knew of and utilized the soporific and hallucinogenic properties of solanaceous plants on themselves for mind journeying. We do not know the true nature of the experience gained by the women taking these medical ointments, but Tostado seems to think it was a recreational one. Of course, that just might have been his interpretation of the beings encountered while detached from reality. Though impossible to determine completely, we might wonder what these women, whom Tostado labled as witches, believed about the entities they encountered. Such a meeting between the wondering psyche of a dreaming woman and incorporeal creatures (humanoid or otherwise) in an immaterial world smacks of shamanism, provided the woman gained insights from these meetings that she could bring back to waking life.

  Looking deeper we can also see at least four different ways these psyche-magical ointments were used. The Linzian witch used her ointment for some kind of magical remote-viewing purpose; the unholda of Nider’s Predigten and Formicarius may have used hers for some kind of reason related to folk beliefs of the Heuburg; Matteuccia and Finicella both used transformation ointments (although Matteuccia’s ointment usage might have also included some additional sorcery that entailed spiritual flight); and Tostado makes reference to a kind of magical, psyche-recreational usage (at least as he saw it). The devil played no role in any of these accounts except where he was clearly intercalated, as we see with Matteuccia’s record and the corresponding shift in emphasis—from recreational medical drug to agent of demonic activity found between the lines of Tostado’s commentaries.

  It is important to understand how and why these different ideas—night flight, heretical congregation, magical drugs—came together to generate the concept of the witches’ ointment. It is necessary to recognize how the ointment portrayal from Tostada’s Genesis commentary fed into that found in his later Matthew treatise. For it is within that leap, in which the psyche-magical drug practices of the laity were plucked from their local contexts and associated with Satanic forces, that our witches’ ointment is born. The answer may rest in the “hereticization,” if you will, of the village sorceress as epitomized by the cases of Bilia la Castagna and her magical potion, and half a century later, Matteuccia di Francesco and her psyche-magical ointment.

  7

  INCEPTION OF THE SATANIC WITCH

  Be sure to ask about the fairy-women, called “ bonas res,” who [common people] claim go out at night.

  BERNARD GUI (ON INQUISITORIAL PROCEDURE)

  As for their trips to the Sabbats, here is my belief: with the soporific drugs with which they anoint themselves while awake, they imagine that they are soon transported, straddling a broomstick, through the chimney into a room where one can revel, dance, make love, or kiss the ass of a goat.

  CYRANO DE BERGERAC

  AN INQUISITORIAL CONUNDRUM

  The inquisitor of Bern, Peter of Greyerz, glared at the “grand witch” Staedelin, already torn apart by torture, with all the characteristic revulsion one would expect to pass between two such polarized perspectives.1 Greyerz wanted to know what kind of sorcery this late fourteenth-century witch before him performed. From placing lizards under doorways to cause infertility in both women and cattle, to raising storms, to stealing crops from neighboring fields, to flying (broom- and ointmentless) “from place to place through the air,” Staedelin’s testimony offers a keyhole into the rich assortment of folk sorcery of the times before diabolism played any part.2

  Staedelin had learned magic not from the devil but from Hoppo, a man from Bern. Scavius, another witch living in the Simme Valley around 1375, had taught his arts to Hoppo, who in turn made Staedelin his protégé. While Hoppo might have helped Staedelin steal crops magically, raise hailstorms, push children into bodies of water, cause sterility, and transvect, he didn’t believe the devil was necessary to achieve these feats—which is probably why Greyerz tortured him until he confessed to keeping a demon.3 Like his teacher, Staedelin would not have recognized the devil’s hand in any of his or Hoppo’s deeds; but a turn of the thumb screw might urge him in that direction.

  He broke. Physically and spiritually defeated, Staedelin looked up at Greyerz and fabricated the vaguest description of demonic activity that he could muster—anything to loosen those thumb screws. “[W]e implore the prince of all demons with certain words that he should send some [demons] of his, who would strike the place designated by us.”4

&
nbsp; Greyerz now had all the proof he needed to convict.

  TO CALL ON DEMONS

  Chapter 5 showed the role that psychoactive drugs played in some necromancers’ rituals. And while these drugs, or a mind prepped to experience spirits and demons, or both in conjunction, seems like a rational explanation for the psyche-magical effects that ensued, it is not to suggest that Staedelin practiced some kind of psychoactive necromancy. It is merely to draw attention to the fact that as early as the thirteenth century, French bishop Guillaume d’Auvergne warned that magic arose from a conjuror making a pact with one or many of a seemingly limitless number of readied demons, regardless of the method of invocation.5 This demonic retinue was comprised of beings with different magical abilities. They could desensitize a person by taking “awaie the sight, hearing, and understanding of anie man,” or, should the conjuror wish to “taketh awaie monie out of everie king’s house,” he should call on “Shax.” “Focalor” should be summoned if the magician wanted to “killeth men, and drowneth them in the waters.” And should the conjurer decide she wanted knowledge of all the arts, she should call on “Glasya Labolas,” who would appear in the form of a dog.6

  Some demons had powers that sound remarkably similar to the kinds of village sorcery practiced by people like Matteuccia and Staedelin. “Marbas” (or Barbas) could both cause and cure diseases. “Barbatos” could detect hidden treasures; he also practiced a form of sortilegia (fortunetelling), knowing “all things past and to come.” “Buer” sounds similar to Madam Oriente in certain respects: a moral teacher and healer who knew the virtues of herbs. “Bathin” (or “Mathin”) understood the “vertues of hearbs and pretious stones” and how to transfer men “from countrie to countrie.”

  In all these invocations the demons are commanded to serve the magician rather than the other way around. In fact, as late as 1563, even after theologians had decided what a witch was, the humanist physician Johann Weyer—among the first to publish against the persecution of witches—could still comment that “unlike many magicians, [witches] carry about no demon to serve them.”7 As stated in chapter 1, Matteuccia likely did rely on an assortment of local spirits and specters in her magic, which was interpolated in her account as consorting with demons. In fact, two years before Matteuccia was executed Bernardino of Siena would report that Finicella, the cat woman of Rome, would offer the limb of an animal to the devil every time she cured a sickly child.8

  There is no evidence that Staedelin required any apparitional aid in his magic. And he certainly didn’t rely on demons. But like Matteuccia before him, he was forced to confess otherwise.

  The likening of witchcraft with heresy found approval among the highest echelons of Christendom. Pope John XXII (1244–1334) is a case in point. In 1326, as outlined in his bull Super illius specula (roughly translated as “Upon Observation”), he “grievingly . . . observ[ed]” that many Christians were such “in name only,” preferring to spend their time not in a state of beatitude but rather “making a pact with the devil, sacrific[ing] to demons [and crafting or having made] with discernment images, rings, mirrors, phials, or other things for the magical arts.”9 The first part of this injunction deals with heretics as understood by the religious elites (i.e., they invoke demons); said sanction’s second section strictly subverts supernatural services. Like the different opinions found a century later at the Council of Basel, this particular midfourteenth-century concept of wedding heresy with sorcery was by no means uniform. University of Bologna law professor Oldradus da Ponte (d. ca. 1340) had a more tempered view than that of John XXII and chose rather to distinguish between the two crimes, even when it came to that supreme overlap that would later unite them, namely, the invocation of demons. He even urged some judges intent on charging one Johannes Patrimacho with heresy to charge him only with the secular crime of magic for summoning a demon, as Patrimacho hadn’t invoked a demon to revere it but rather to control it in order to gain the love of a woman.10

  Catalonian grand inquisitor Nicholas Eymeric (1320–1399), however, later explained how the one implied the other—that magical meant heretical. There were two kinds of magicians, he wrote in 1376 in Directorium inquisitorum, (The Inquisitor’s Directory). Some of these magicians practiced different forms of magic, like palmistry, but they stayed within the bounds of magic. Others, he contended, used magic in their heresies. They “show the honor . . . to the demons, who rebaptize their children and do other similar things . . . in order to foresee the future or penetrate to the innermost secrets of the heart. . . . [S]uch magicians . . . are punished according to the laws pertaining to heretics.”11

  Grand Inquistor Eymeric’s view won out, and the trend of “hereticizing” sorcerers continued into the early fifteenth century, with the University of Paris’s theological faculty denouncing all magic in 1398. The faculty’s condemnation does not mention magical ointments—or any other aspect of folk sorcery, as its primary focus is the realm of high magic—but the subject does bleed into folk practices with its vague damnation of “every superstitious ritual, the effects of which cannot reasonably be traced back to God or nature.”12 The condemnation of folk magic had begun with a prior condemnation of learned magic.13 French theologian Jean Gerson further cemented this association (for those who accepted it, anyway) a few years later in 1402 with his Tractatus de erroribus circa artem magicam (Treatise on the Errors of the Magical Arts).14

  Bernese inquisitor Greyerz certainly agreed with these theologians. As catastrophes of the late fourteenth century intensified in the form of plagues, famines, revolts, and wars, the devil seemingly loomed ever larger over the activities of mortals—perhaps more so than previously thought. And a lowly magician’s ability to control such potent powers looked ever more dubious. Even such distinguished men as King James VI weighed in on this argument: “Witches are servants only, and slaves to the devil; but the Necromancers are his masters and commanders.”15 Surely unlettered magicians like Hoppo or Staedelin, or folk sorceresses like Matteuccia and Finicella—all equally damned in their folly—couldn’t control the devil.

  SCOBACES (THE BROOM RIDERS)

  The hopeful villagers gathered in the cornfield. Some held pitchforks; others opted for brooms, rakes, shovels, and other domestic items. Their priest might have already tried a remedy not too unlike the following from the twelfth century: before dawn four clusters of dirt should be pulled from the corners of a field. Blessing the clumps with Yahweh’s injunction to Eve and Adam (“be fruitful and multiply”), the priest reinforced his prayer by dousing the dirt with holy water, honey, oil, and milk. More prayers would be said, and four Masses would be sung over the loose earth.16

  Still, the crops withered before the villagers, signifying a saturnine certainty should the stalks stay slouched: starvation. Stirred by frustration and distress the villagers took to magic, but not the magic of the church. No, that magic had failed them, had failed the crops, and was eschewed for something more effective: the fertility traditions of yore, specifically a practice that had been exorcised from the Christian litany: the villagers straddled their brooms, pitchforks, and such. Riding their implements like hobbyhorses, they began to leap into the air, urging their cornstalks to grow as high as their springing and jumping.17

  The above cultis agrorum*57 details one modern researcher’s theory for how folk traditions were brought into a heretofore unknown relationship with prevailing theological beliefs about witchcraft, to produce a phenomenon that was to last until the end of the witch craze and beyond and became one of the witch’s more longlasting attributes: her scoba (from the Italian scopa, “broom”) and her participation in the scobaces—the legendary broom riders.

  This kind of magical fertility patronage is one example among many, as discussed in chapter 2. While there is much by way of European broom lore,18 only the corn ritual involves riding one. Whether there is a kernel of truth to the cornstalk broom rite remains to be historically harvested. Nevertheless, it has played a major role in the cre
ation of the modern myths about witches’ ointments, and it is this aspect of the witch stereotype that is the most widely misunderstood by both romantic historians and the population at large. Their new, twentieth-century lore, completely absent in all forms from the historical record, holds that a supposed witch would rub an ointment comprised of hallucinogenic drugs on a broomstick and then insert the knob into her vagina or rectum as a roundabout way of introducing the drug into the bloodstream.*58 19

  Charming as this idea sounds, the true story of the broom riders involves more complex forms of folk superstition, none of which include smearing a drug paste on a broomstick and masturbating with it.†59 The origin of the broom-rider is unknown. An early mention comes in 1261 from heresy historian Stephen of Bourbon, who informs his readers that benevolent women rode brooms while evil women rode wolves. Ointments weren’t mentioned—nor do these pastes appear in any other broom lore that fifteenth-century theologians drew from to satisfy their demonological discourse.20

  An interesting though rather elusive image of a broom-rider is found in Bavaria within the sacred confines of Schleswig Cathedral. Here a Germanic goddess is seen flying astride a broomstick. She has been identified as the goddess Frigg, although it is possible she might represent Freya. While both goddesses assume different roles in German mythology, there is evidence to suggest that both deities grew out of one archetypical Great Mother.21 While Freya became more of a seductress, Frigg became a “fascinating, multiaspected [sic] figure”: a goddess of domesticity linked with household duties, an agent of fertility and giver of gifts. She was a seer of future events who ironically never divulged them.22 Frigg’s name implies an association with Friday, prompting tenth-century English abbot Ælfric of Eynsham to call her “the shameless goddess called Venus, or Frigg in Danish.”23 Both goddesses held two things in common: love affairs and the possession of a magical falcon cape that allowed the wearer to transform into a bird.24 Frigg’s depiction in flight in the Schleswig Cathedral is not at all outlandish; indeed, she appears to be wearing the falcon cape. But why she is depicted riding a broom while wearing the cape is not known.