Many of the botanical ingredients included in witches' potions, says pharmacologist David Kroll, including nightshade, henbane, mandrake and jimsonweed, contain hallucinogenic chemicals called tropane alkaloids. There was no black magic at work in witches’ brews, just chemistry, and "the events of the Sabbat … were an imaginative fiction exacerbated by malnutrition and by the use of hallucinogenic concoctions.” In the centuries since, scientists have confirmed the two doctors’ suspicions.
#Halloween witch riding broom full
After applying their ointments, Della Porta wrote, these women “seem to be carried in the air, to feasting, singing, dancing, kissing, culling, and other acts of venery, with such youths as they love and desire most: for the force of their imagination is so vehement, that almost all that part of the brain, wherein the memory consists, is full of such concepts.” He reached a similar conclusion as Laguna: These potions were the source of the bizarre things that witches claimed to experience and partake in. She also fell into a “most sound and heavy sleep,” and when she awoke “began to speak many vain and doting words, affirming that she had passed over both seas and mountains.”
“From all this we may infer that all that those wretched witches do and say is caused by potions and ointments which so corrupt their memory and imagination that they create their own woes, for they firmly believe when awake all that they had dreamed when asleep,” he said.Īnother 16th century physician, Giovanni Della Porta, described a similar case where he witnessed a suspected witch apply one of her ointments. Laguna wrote that even long after her dream, the executioner’s wife “stuck to many of her crazy notions.” When the woman was conscious again, she asked Laguna, “Why did you awaken me, badness to you, at such an inauspicious moment? Why I was surrounded by all the delights in the world.” She then turned to her husband and claimed that she had cuckolded him and taken a “younger and lustier lover.” after the lapse of thirty-six hours, I restored her to her senses and sanity.” “No sooner did I anoint her than she opened her eyes wide like a rabbit, and soon they looked like those of a cooked hare when she fell into such a profound sleep that I thought I should never be able to awake her,” Laguna wrote. His first test subject was the executioner’s wife, whom he anointed “head to foot” with the green stuff. The local constable was a friend of Laguna’s, so the doctor was able to obtain some of the ointment to experiment with. composed of soporific herbs such as hemlock, nightshade, henbane, and mandrake.” In the early 1500s, physician Andres Laguna described one such substance that was taken from the home of an accused witch as “a pot full of certain green ointment. “Anyone observing the leaping broomstick dance of witches at the full moon,” says anthropologist Robin Skelton, “could be expected to think of flying.”Īnother explanation is that the broomsticks and the potions that witches brewed in their cauldrons are linked, and the former was a tool for delivering the latter.ĭuring the witch panics of the Middle Ages, authorities confiscated various brews, ointments, and salves from people accused of witchcraft and sorcery. One proposed explanation has its roots in a pagan ritual where people danced astride poles, pitchforks, and brooms in their fields, jumping as high as they could to entice their crops to grow to that height. How did that odd choice of transportation get tied to witches and locked into our collective imagination? The popular image of a witch, which you can see everywhere right now in the form of Halloween costumes and decorations, is a woman with a pointy hat and warty nose stirring a cauldron or flying on a broom.
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