The Witches' Ointment

by Thomas Hatsis

  THE HEAD OF JEANETTE CLERC

  Two weeks after she was arrested for sorcery, Jeanette Clerc, a peasant woman living in Jussy, Geneva, briefly felt the cold edge of the blade tap the back of her neck before her head followed the last of her tears into a coarse wicker basket. Jeanette’s magical acts included accusations of simple maleficia: she bit a horse so as to drive it crazy, she argued with an animal herder to the effect that neither of his two oxen would plough the fields anymore, she fed a girl an apple that made her sick, killed an inlaw by blowing a special powder in his face, and finally—the reason she was arrested—a cow died after she fed it an unnamed herb that she had picked on the eve of St. John the Baptist Day, perhaps a clue as to why she was executed in such a manner.

  Tortured relentlessly, Jeanette confessed to the true source of her powers. She had given herself to a devil named Simon in exchange for a hefty bounty. She then flew “on a large stick” (which required no ointment to fly) to a “synagogue” where she had “unnatural intercourse” with Satan and participated in all the revelries of the occasion. Afterward, Simon gave her a small white stick, different from the large one she took to the meeting, and a box of ointment. She need only to smear it across the stick when she wanted to return to the synagogue, while reciting “White stick, black stick, carry me where you should; go, in the Devil’s name, go!” Jeanette’s is one of roughly thirty confessions recorded between 1539 and 1574 that all tell a similar tale complementing the theological stereotype of the witch.73

  Since Jeanette’s trial occurred at least a century after the formulation of the witch stereotype, there is no way of knowing if she utilized psyche-magical ointments the way other local sorceresses like Matteuccia did. But it matters not. We can still see the historicity of the witches’ ointment by briefly comparing Matteuccia’s experience and that of Jeanette.

  Roughly a century before Jeanette lost her head, Matteuccia supposedly sang an incantation that adjured the ointment, which was rubbed on her flesh, to carry her to Benevento. A hundred years later Jeanette sang magical words to animate the stick, not the ointment, which would then transport her. As the previous pages outlined, by the time of Jeanette’s trial the role of the psychoactive medical drug used for flying (or other magical purposes) had been smothered by a theological concept that put Satan in the pilot’s seat. The macrocosmic jump from the workings of Matteuccia’s ointment (pharmacological) to that of Jeanette (purely literary) is as obvious as the microcosmic shift in Tostado’s two commentaries.

  And while the efforts of traveling preachers like Bernardino of Siena helped spread this paradigm beyond the esoteric village sorceress’s use in the fifteenth century, it would be the physicians of the sixteenth century who would disseminate information about the elusive concept of the psyche-magical experience, available by means of these ointments, more broadly into popular culture. In the process these humanist physicians would coin a term that surprisingly still didn’t exist until nearly a century after the Arras witch scare: lamiarum unguentum, the “witches’ ointment.”

  8

  LAMIARUM UNGUENTUM

  [They] most foully soil the divine teachings of medicine through their Satanic tricks.

  JOHANN WEYER

  A certain Frenchman . . . terms me a Magician, a Conjuror, and thinks this book of mine . . . should be burned, because I have written of the “Fairies Ointment,” which I set forth only in detestation of the frauds of devils and witches.

  GIAMBATTISTA DELLA PORTA

  WAYWARD GENIUSES AND INTELLECTUAL VAGABONDS

  Monsieur both gave (and couldn’t give) a shit as his feces splattered onto the cobblestone streets of Antwerp. Once relieved he continued his stroll down the road of the bustling Belgian burg, indifferent to the murmurs and gossip coming from those around him. Whatever they were whispering they certainly wouldn’t say to his face, for Monsieur controlled the city through the fear he evoked in its denizens.

  Antwerp had become the cosmopolitan epicenter of Europe by the 1530s, the result of a lucrative sugar trade that boomed when Caribbean-grown goods made their way to Europe from New World plantations in unprecedented quantities. Economic growth didn’t just lure merchants to Antwerp; the city also attracted artists and artisans of myriad trades, steeping that city in sixteenth-century Renaissance culture. Many famous painters like Quentin Matsys (1466–1530), Joachim Patinir (1480–1524), and Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525–1569), among others, and important philosophers like Damião de Góis (1502–1574) claimed residence there. The most famous Renaissance magician and alchemist of the day, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (ca. 1486–1535) lived there as well for a short while. Such magnificent structures as the Cathedral of Our Lady and St. James Church, and the first stone fortress of the city, known as Het Steen, which graced the riverbanks of the naturally beatific Scheldt, filled out the cityscape, no doubt inspiring some of the great artworks for which many future generations would remember the Renaissance.

  But the streets had just become a little less Old World charming, as the stench from Monsieur’s droppings—not to mention the sight of it—caused not a few Antwerp residents to retch. Others just gawked, momentarily frozen with fear. Satan—the devil himself—was in their midst! Mothers scurried their children away; others stood fast, ready to run should Monsieur decide to spread a pestilence that day, or perhaps poison the crops and livestock of those living outside the city. Maybe he would only strike down firstborns; maybe whole families would be razed, some members dying instantly, others lingering, slowly rotting away. Monsieur’s powers were well attested by the people of Antwerp, and they quickly and quietly went about their business lest the slightest misstep cause him to unleash his terrible wrath that morning. Monsieur’s companion, a young man aged around eighteen years, Johann Weyer, could only keep to himself as the citizens reacted in detestation. Weyer pulled the leash, hurrying along his teacher’s small black French poodle, Monsieur.

  Johann Weyer would grow up to author, in 1563, De Praestigiis daemonum, et incantationibus ac veneficiis (On the Tricks of Demons, Spell-casting, and Poisoners), a volume Sigmund Freud would one day call one of the ten most important books ever written. Weyer’s opus is a frontal assault on the very idea of witchcraft, appearing about a century after the horrors that had once engulfed Arras. De Praestigiis, along with other volumes in the genre, significantly popularized the witches’ ointment by serving as an exposé of it. If the use of Solanaceae family plants to drug oneself belonged to some kind of esoteric knowledge held by some village sorcerers in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (and potentially earlier), this information would blossom into a wider spectrum of popular magic in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. To be certain, witches were still executed between the late-fifteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries, but not yet on the massive scale that was largely relegated to those unfortunate years between 1550 and 1700.1

  As a teenager Weyer went to live and study in Antwerp under Henry Cornelius Agrippa, a man of “strange and wonderful fields of learning.”2 They were the perfect odd couple: the impulsive intellectual and the solemn student. They shared little in common other than the bond of having both been born in the lower Rhine and their aggressive quest for knowledge.3 Agrippa had defended a witch in court and was, in turn, accused of witchcraft himself.4 He also damned someone posthumously: years after he died a young man was convicted of witchcraft for trying to obtain his “most important and influential”5 opus, De occulta philosophia libri tres (Three Books of Occult Philosophy).6 Agrippa’s black poodle, Monsieur, was rumored to be the devil, which was why the magus referred to the canine in such a polite manner. Agrippa (and his little dog too) had scoured the earth searching for knowledge of the magical arts—a wayward genius that never found peace in life. This dichotomy could be seen in the man himself: he was both “a good soldier and a good student” who hated conflict but invented a kind of gun that shot heated bullets. His friends included people from various social strata, rich an
d poor alike.7 By 1508 he had joined a secret society that studied the “hidden” nature from a Neoplatonist perspective, a philosophy that viewed the entire universe as an interconnected hierarchy, each stratum dominating its immediate inferior, with God commanding over it all.8

  The fifteenth century proved as tumultuous as the fourteenth. But for the practitioner of magic the years hit harder on a spiritual level. The world was changing, and a splice between a magical world and a scientific one could be felt in the air and in print. Agrippa himself would contribute to this shift, exemplified in the publication of his two masterworks, the Three Books of Occult Philosophy and Of the Uncertainties and Vanities of the Arts and Sciences. As the title suggests, Uncertainties trashed everything he had written in his former masterwork, reflecting the “profound despair” of a man caught between two worlds.9

  Many intellectuals traveled as widely as Agrippa had, for they knew that true learning came from all over the world, not just from one’s homeland. The sixteenth century saw students wandering from country to country, university to university, looking for the opportunity to study with specific professors of myriad disciplines. The college experience in those days involved living a hand-to-mouth existence to survive; along the road students often “earned a few coins by pulling teeth, or selling medical remedies, telling fortunes, [and] singing at inns.” The roving experience made them somewhat disorderly in character. Crafty, intelligent, desperate, not accustomed to authority, they were natural troublemakers who drank, fought, fornicated in public, and were even known to throw animal dung at professors they didn’t like10—“wayward geniuses and intellectual vagabonds,” as one renowned historian has called these unruly generations.11 The Renaissance was hardly that glorious period we imagine today to the people who shaped our perception of it.12 To those who lived through it the Renaissance was an era of great uncertainty, anxiety, and conflict, both physical and spiritual; the known world was shrinking as the cosmos was expanding beyond a human-centered Creation paradigm.

  At a time when far too many doctors were named Johann, Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim was a welcome mouthful. Most of von Hohenheim’s peers had a more succinct adjective for this weird and incorrigible little man: insane. History remembers him as Paracelsus.*63

  Rumored to be a hermaphrodite, Paracelsus once burned the standard physician’s medical text, The Canon of Medicine, on the front steps of the University of Basel.†64 13 Leaving home at a young age to learn the medical arts, he quickly fell into the spirit of the times, referring to himself as a “resident nowhere” and remarking about “all kinds of behaviors and customs that another would eat his shoes to see.”14 He traveled many of the same routes as Agrippa, and though there is no record of these intellectual vagabonds ever having met, the two interacted with some of the same people.15 They certainly shared the same philosophies about magic, which they believed was “rooted in Christian tradition.”16

  Paracelsus was surely familiar with Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy17 and employed a wide range of elixirs in his own medical practice. As one would expect, these included solanaceous drugs and opiates.18 His cure for “falling sickness” (epilepsy) included “sedatives” like opium, mandrake, and henbane.19 “I have personally prepared somniferum and stupefactivum with such excellent results. . . . We should all try to rely on and trust these somnifera, because we know of many diseases that cannot be cured without anodynes. God has given us a cure for them, through the nature of anodyne.”20 The mad alchemist-doctor also created a special drink, laudanum, a tincture of opium that would become a popular recreational drug and medication in the Victorian Era. This is not meant to suggest that Paracelsus embraced any sort of solanum-inspired magical visions the way Agrippa did; rather, it is to propose that we can credit him (and others like him) to the wider distribution of these psychoactive plants into areas where they might not have been known before. In fact, Paracelsus is known to have opened his university lectures to low status barber-surgeons and even folk healers! The mad doctor didn’t don the distinguished garb of a specialist, but rather the “smock of the artisan, stained and smeared with the residues of the chemical laboratory.”21 We can imagine this pugnacious little man, fresh out of his alchemy lab, yelling through his lectures after having accidentally inhaled some kind of experimental new chemical. Further microcosmic shifts in medical books of the time demonstrate this conceptual popularization of the witches’ ointment—even as the nomadic souls who authored those texts traveled and distributed the magical elixirs and ointments to a wider audience.

  DR. LAGUNA’S NIGHTSHADE OINTMENT

  In 1547, a century after Spanish theologian Alonso Tostado established a link between medical drugs and “flying ointments” (and thus decisively answered whether these psyche-magical practices existed before the crystallization of the witch stereotype proper), Andrés Laguna (1499–1559) wrote of a well-known solanum “manic nightshade,” “manicum solanum” [sic] whose roots when mixed with wine caused “frivolous, unpleasant delusions.”22 The passage is interesting only in so far as the time between its 1547 publication date*65 and a later edition released in 1570. In the earlier version Laguna was merely composing errata of those mistakes he found in Pietro Andrea Mattioli’s 1540 publication of Dioscorides’s work. Based on the success of his errata, Laguna wrote a second version of Dioscorides, this time with commentary. Two variations on solanaceous drugs in the latter text are of notable mention: Laguna adds a new “nightshade species that the Italians call ‘Stramonium,’” [sic] while describing the powerful hallucinogen datura (“solanum manicum”), which is absent from the original errata. Another curious edition addition: after quoting Dioscorides’ warning that one drachm of the roots of any Solanaceae family plant mixed in wine was a “carrier of madness,” he describes these mind delusions as “pleasant”—a departure from the earlier text. He further states that “although they are very pleasant . . . they should be viewed upon like dreams. I believe that [datura] is the active part of those ointments often associated with witches.”23 Laguna’s reversal of the description (from unpleasant to pleasant mind delusions) is telling, as is his inclusion of datura in witches’ ointments. An experiment with solanaceous ointments between the years of the two editions might have prompted the change in his description of the plant’s effects.

  One of the most reliable records detailing psyche-magical ointments survives in a medical commentary written by Laguna that details an event that occurred in 1545 that prompted him to concoct and test a sleeping ointment of his own. While living as the municipal physician in Metz, Laguna happened upon two hermits who lived just outside that city.*66 A jar found in their home contained an ointment that Laguna believed was composed of “the very coldest and soporific herbs,” among them hemlock, henbane, and nightshade.†67 24 Laguna proceeded to mix his own ointment based on what he believed that of the hermits contained and tried it on a patient of his. He leaves us not a demonologist’s machinated account of demonic night flight but rather a physician’s description of a controlled experiment using an ointment that certainly contained Solanaceae family plants.

  Laguna didn’t use his mixture as a flying ointment (or any other folk-magical kind), but as a sleeping ointment for a patient of his suffering from insomnia caused by suspicions of a cheating husband. This was not his first attempt to cure her: “An infinite number of other remedies had been tried in vain.” In the presence of several others, Laguna anointed the woman with his nightshade ointment and watched her eyes widen “like a rabbit’s.” She subsequently fell into soporatum for thirty-six hours, having to eventually be beaten awake. Her first words upon reviving were an angry, “Why in an evil hour did you awaken me? I was in the midst of all the pleasures and delights of the world.” She then informed her husband that during her absence she had cheated on him with a younger and handsomer man.25

  Another mid-sixteenth-century exposition on the hallucinatory potential of Solanaceae plants comes fro
m Girolamo Cardano (1501–1576), an Italian Renaissance mathematician, physician, astrologer, philosopher, and gambler. In De subtilitate rerum (The subtleties of things, 1550) Cardano describes the uncertain nature of the hallucinogenic ointment experience in Book 18 of this work (titled “De mirabilibus,” “On marvels”). It is here that the words witches and ointment appear side by side for the first time. It is also here that the vacillating effects these drugs can have on the psyche are first outlined.

  Cardano first gives a recipe for the witches’ ointment: “fat of young children (so they say), the juices of parsley, aconite, cinque-foil, nightshade, and soot.” He then outlines a variety of visions, such as “theaters, pleasure-gardens, banquets, beautiful ornaments and clothing, handsome young men, kings, [and] magistrates, demons, ravens, prisons, desert wastes, and torments.”26 The term witches’ ointment was also used eight years later by Giambattista della Porta in Natural Magick (1558), wherein he outlines two ointment recipes. The first reminds one of Cardano’s aforementioned concoction, except it contains “wild celery” (probably hemlock) instead of nightshade. This latter psychoactive appears in della Porta’s second ointment recipe, as does “water parsnip, common acorum, cinque-foil, [and] bat’s blood.”27 He also relates a story about a woman who used an ointment, fell into a deep sleep, and believed her experience to be real. The account, however, seems contrived, striking this writer as a form of exemplum from a natural philosopher’s standpoint, a way to disprove the notion of witches’ flight by showing that the phenomenon was caused by drugs, not the devil.

  Weyer, of course, took his cue from Cardano and della Porta, reprinting these writers’ accounts and recipes of the witches’ ointment in his De Praestigiis. He also contributes a third recipe that neither della Porta nor Cardano referenced: it includes henbane, hemlock, darnel, deadly nightshade, and opium. Interestingly, he hints that there are even stronger drugs than the ones he cites, admitting that those “experienced with the natural sciences” know of countless other concoctions of this kind, some of which are so powerful that he excludes them from his treatise for pragmatic reasons—“lest I seem to have furnished someone the opportunity to abuse them.”28