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Concept
Flying ointment
Summary
Flying ointment is a hallucinogenic ointment said to have been used by witches in the practice of European witchcraft from at least as far back as the Early Modern period, when detailed recipes for such preparations were first recorded and when their usage spread to colonial North America.
The ointment is known by a wide variety of names, including witches' flying ointment, green ointment, magic salve, or lycanthropic ointment. In German it was Hexensalbe (witch salve) or Flugsalbe (flying salve). Latin names included unguentum sabbati sabbath unguent), unguentum pharelis, unguentum populi (poplar unguent) or unguenta somnifera (sleeping unguent).
Francis Bacon (attributed as "Lord Verulam") listed the ingredients of the witches ointment as "the fat of children digged out of their graves, of juices of smallage, wolfe-bane, and cinque foil, mingled with the meal of fine wheat."
Unrelated to Francis' account, poisonous ingredients listed in works on ethnobotany include: belladonna, henbane bell, jimson weed, black henbane, mandrake, hemlock, and/or wolfsbane, most of which contain atropine, hyoscyamine, and/or Scopolamine. Scopolamine can cause psychotropic effects when absorbed transdermally. These tropane alkaloids are classified as deliriants in regards to their psychoactive effects.
With the exception of Potentilla reptans, the plants most frequently recorded as ingredients in Early Modern recipes for flying ointments are extremely toxic and have caused numerous fatalities when eaten, whether by confusion with edible species or in cases of criminal poisoning or suicide.
The historian, occultist and theosophist Carl Kiesewetter of Meiningen, author of Geschichte des Neueren Occultismus in 1892 and Die Geheimwissenschaften, eine Kulturgeschichte der Esoterik in 1895, was one such casualty.
He little knows the Devil who does believe that witches and wizards can be borne through the air at wondrous speed to far distant places and there hold revels, dances and suchlike with folk of the same type
the mediaeval witch-ointments.
Official source
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