It is striking that fifteen centuries after Dioscorides, the repertoire of European plant drugs seems to have remained limited to the dark spectrum of narcotics and deliriants, all toxic and potentially fatal. It may be simply botanical accident that the rich stimulant and mind-expanding flora of the New World was absent from Europe. It is also possible that the earlier transition of the Old World peoples to settled agriculture made them less engaged with the native wild pharmacopeia than was the case for the nomadic hunter-gatherers of the Americas. Alternatively, it may be that Dioscorides’ ‘cold herbs’ were used in Europe for their visionary properties more than documentary sources attest. But evidence for any hidden shamanic tradition is by its nature elusive, and in this case is further confused by the ways in which nightshades were invoked during the early modern witch craze, when ideas of sorcery involving sinister potions and ‘flying ointments’ became a central plank of the mythology of the witches’ Sabbat.
Interrogated about the means by which they travelled to their Sabbat celebrations, those accused of witchcraft typically answered that they flew: on a cloak, or a broomstick, or a fork, or (most frequently) a goat. When they arrived, they ate banquets off gold and silver plates, performed blasphemous rites and backwards dances, and fornicated copiously with the Devil. The mythology of witches, broomsticks, Sabbats and flying ointments has been explained by the ingenious theory that the ‘real’ meaning of the witch riding her broomstick was the practice of rubbing nightshade ointments into her labia, after which she would hallucinate her Sabbat flight. But this supposition dates back only to the 1970s, and many scholars remain unconvinced that the magical ointments had any more literal reality than the claims of flight, or indeed the Devil himself. The ingredients typically listed are repetitive and formulaic, perhaps unsurprisingly, since most accounts were extracted under torture. They also include horrors such as bat’s blood and baby fat, which suggest that nightshades might simply have been part of a litany of repellent and blasphemous substances. Rather than being first-hand reports of actual drug-taking practices, descriptions of flying ointments can be seen simply as magical narrative devices expected in all confessions of witchcraft.
Nevertheless, the stories of witches, ointments and Sabbats did prompt a handful of humanist philosophers, sceptical of the lurid fantasies that the witch craze generated, to attempt early experiments with mind-altering drugs and their mechanisms of action. The best known is Andres de Laguna, physician to Pope Julius III, who in 1545 heard of a married couple who had been tortured for witchcraft and found in possession of a jar of green ointment. Laguna investigated its contents, and recognized it as a foul-smelling concoction of ‘cold’ narcotic herbs, with which he anointed the wife of the hangman of the city of Metz. She fell into a deep sleep for thirty-six hours, and awoke with familiar tales of attending a witches’ Sabbat. He took this to prove that such devilish scenes were the product of vulgar and overheated imaginations, but also that drugs might stimulate them - or, perhaps, produce an amnesia into which they could be interpolated once consciousness was restored.
Like other sceptics of the witch crazes, Laguna did not advertise his conclusions widely; nor did his experiments add to the store of knowledge available since Dioscorides, whose Materia medica he translated into Spanish and cited as the authority for his conclusions. But his willingness to put drugs to the test of experiment signalled the method by which, as pharmacology came to surpass its classical authorities, the understanding of their effects on the mind would be transformed.
Hans Baldung Grien studied under Albrecht Durer and specialized in grotesque and erotic images of witches and supernatural scenes. In this woodcut of 1514, three witches prepare a foul potion while another flies over their heads to the Sabbat, riding on a goat. (Wellcome Library, London)
World History
