The Witches’ Ointment: Flight, Pharmacology, and the Historians

2 July 2026

Among the stock images of European witchcraft, the flying ointment has the odd distinction of being both a demonological cliché and a genuine pharmacological question. The early modern sources describe witches anointing themselves, or their staffs, before flying to the sabbath; the skeptical physicians of the same era, and this is the crucial point, describe the same ointments and draw the opposite conclusion: that the flight happened in dream. The debate between those two readings has continued, in increasingly sophisticated form, for five hundred years.

The early modern evidence

The physician Andrés Laguna, in his 1550s commentary on Dioscorides, reports examining a pot of green unguent taken from an accused couple, compounding a test: he anointed the wife of a patient, who fell into a thirty-six hour sleep and woke complaining at being taken from a paradise of pleasures. Giambattista della Porta's Magia naturalis (1558) gives recipes and the same interpretation: the ointments, laden with soporific herbs, produce dreams of banquets and flight. The recipes that survive in these hostile-but-curious sources center on the Solanaceae: henbane, belladonna, mandrake, and datura, whose tropane alkaloids (hyoscyamine, scopolamine, atropine) are absorbed through the skin, cross into the nervous system, and reliably produce delirium, sensations of flight and falling, and vivid encounters experienced as fully real. The pharmacology, reviewed in the modern literature from Harner's early essays to Thomas Hatsis's book-length study, is not in serious doubt.

The historians’ caution

What is in doubt, and vigorously, is how much work the ointment should do in explaining witchcraft belief. The maximal thesis, that sabbath accounts simply transcribe solanaceous trips, founders on the sources: most confessions were extracted under torture to a script the interrogators already held, most accused never mentioned ointments, and the sabbath's content is visibly built from sermon and folklore. Historians such as Ginzburg, whose night-battle visionaries flew without any drug, and Ostling have converged on a modest synthesis: real psychoactive practice existed at the margins; dream-culture and visionary tradition did most of the flying; and the demonologists welded both to their own theory of diabolical pact. The ointment is a thread in the tapestry, not its loom.

The practical verdict

This site's position on tropane experimentation is the one every responsible source gives: the therapeutic window is narrow, the dose-response is wildly variable by skin, batch, and body, and the historical record itself is strewn with deaths; della Porta's cheerful recipes killed people. The legitimate modern interests are historical and technical: the ointment episode is the West's best-documented case of applied entheogeny, and its lesson for practice is the one Part III of the hedge-riding series draws: the states the ointments forced are reachable by the slower engines, rhythm, hypnagogia, discipline, which have the twin advantages of repeatability and of leaving the practitioner alive to write the diary.