Flying Ointments and the Night Flight

The flying ointment is one of the most persistent images in early-modern European witchcraft: a woman smears a dark salve onto her body — or onto a broomstick — and departs for the sabbath. Learned demonologists wrote about it. Inquisitors asked accused witches about it. Physicians tried to explain it. Playwrights staged it. By the sixteenth century the ointment had become as standard an accessory of the literary witch as the pointed hat would become in later centuries.

What no consensus has ever settled is what the ointment actually was, whether it produced real effects, and how much of the tradition was pharmacology, how much was prosecutorial invention, and how much was something older and harder to name. That argument runs from the Renaissance to the present day and involves some of the most interesting historians of early-modern Europe. This guide maps the sources, the chemistry, and the debate — without pretending any one position has won.

The earliest written records

The first known written recipe for a witch’s ointment appears in Johannes Hartlieb’s Das Buch aller verbotenen Künste (1456). Hartlieb was court physician to Duke Albrecht III of Wittelsbach — a medical professional writing in a specific advisory context, not a demonologist inflaming a mob. His account describes an unguentum pharelis whose base is animal fat (Schmaltz von Tieren) mixed with the blood of birds; each plant component is assigned to a day of the week under planetary rulership. The recipe is embedded in a broader treatise on forbidden arts, but the tone is clinical rather than polemical, which makes it an unusually clean early source.

A century later, the Neapolitan polymath Giambattista della Porta gave the tradition its most influential early-modern form. Magia Naturalis appeared first in four books in 1558, then expanded to twenty books by 1589. The chapter titled Lamiarum Unguenta — “the ointments of witches” — provides two recipe variants. One calls for aconite, poplar leaves, apiaceous herbs (from the carrot family), and soot, all worked into an unguent. Della Porta does not simply transcribe rumors: he claims to have observed the ointment’s effects on living subjects, comparing the deep trance-like state he witnessed with the bacchanalian visions his subjects reported afterward. His account is equal parts natural philosophy and field report.

Della Porta’s summons before Pope Paul V — on charges related to his writings on witches’ ointments and necromantic arts — confirms that the Church took such recipes seriously, even when the author’s framing was more curious than credulous.

Earlier still, though in a confessional rather than a medical register, the Spanish theologian Alfonso Tostado (d. 1455) addressed the flying ointment in his Super Genesis Commentaria (printed Venice, 1507), taking the position that the sabbath was real and the ointment a genuine vehicle for it. The contrast with the Canon Episcopi — the ninth-century ecclesiastical decree that explicitly denied witches could physically fly — was already generating argument within the Church long before the great witch trials began.

The plants named

The solanaceous herbs that appear across the recipe literature are four:

Henbane (Hyoscyamus niger) — a rough, hairy annual with dull yellow flowers and a rank smell. Among the oldest medicinal plants in Europe, documented in classical sources as a sedative and anesthetic. In higher doses, produces delirium, visual disturbance, and dissociation.

Belladonna (Atropa belladonna), or deadly nightshade — named for Atropos, the Fate who cuts the thread of life. The berries are seductively dark and sweet-tasting, the plant lethal in small quantities. Its alkaloid load is among the highest in the European flora.

Mandrake (Mandragora officinarum) — the forked root whose human resemblance generated centuries of sympathetic magic. Chemically it shares the same alkaloid profile as belladonna and henbane. Its sedative depth gave it a reputation for producing trance states indistinguishable from death.

Aconite (Aconitum napellus), or monkshood/wolfsbane — the fourth recurring ingredient, and botanically distinct from the others. It is not a solanaceous plant at all but a member of the buttercup family (Ranunculaceae). Its active compound, aconitine, is a sodium-channel toxin that causes extreme numbness and tingling, progressive paralysis, and cardiac arrhythmia. In subliminal doses it produces the sensation of skin going dead and limbs becoming weightless — potentially contributing to a feeling of disembodiment. At higher doses it kills, reliably and fast.

The fat base used in most recipes is not cosmetic. It is pharmacological: lipid-soluble alkaloids cross the skin barrier far more readily when suspended in fat than in water, and transdermal delivery through the mucous membranes (armpits, inner thighs, genitalia) is the fastest route short of injection.

The chemistry of the experience

The three solanaceous plants above share a common alkaloid group: the tropane alkaloids, principally atropine, scopolamine (hyoscine), and hyoscyamine. All three are anticholinergic — they block acetylcholine receptors, disrupting the parasympathetic nervous system. The physiological consequences include dry mouth, dilated pupils, elevated heart rate, flushed skin, and, at higher doses, vivid delirium, hallucinations with an intensely real quality, and full amnesia of the episode on recovery.

Scopolamine in particular is recognized for inducing dreamlike states with amnesia; it was isolated from henbane in the nineteenth century and remains in clinical use today (transdermal scopolamine patches treat motion sickness). Atropine, isolated from belladonna, was used as a pre-anesthetic sedative and remains the standard antidote for nerve-agent poisoning. The same molecules that made these plants dangerous made them medically useful — once anyone understood what was in them.

Crucially, transdermal absorption is real and documented. Scopolamine absorbs through skin readily enough that a patch worn behind the ear delivers a therapeutic dose over seventy-two hours. A fat-suspended preparation rubbed into the thin skin of the armpit or vulva would deliver alkaloids more slowly and unevenly than oral ingestion, but the effect would be real. The threshold between a visionary dose and a lethal one is narrow for all three plants, and the alkaloid concentration in wild-harvested material varies substantially between specimens, seasons, and plant parts. Historical recipes give no measurements. Accidental overdose was a genuine risk.

What the alkaloids do not produce, reliably or at all, is the sensation of rapid aerial movement followed by coherent social interaction at a distant gathering. They produce confusion, delirium, vivid but disorganized imagery, and amnesia. Whatever “flying” meant to a person who had used the ointment, it was not the executive transport of a body across miles. That observation is the entry point for the historians.

Three explanations and their problems

The early-modern debate about the flying ointment settled into three positions, each with theological and philosophical stakes:

Physical flight — the ointment, combined with diabolic agency, physically transported the witch’s body to the sabbath. This was the position required to sustain the witch-trial narrative at its most extreme. It was also the position disputed from the beginning: the Canon Episcopi (c. 900 CE) explicitly stated that women who believed they flew through the air at night were deceived by the Devil, not actually aloft. The flight was illusion. A significant strand of ecclesiastical opinion maintained this throughout the trials.

Diabolic illusion — the Devil put the witch into a trance and projected the sabbath experience into her mind. Her body lay at home. The ointment might have facilitated the trance, but the real work was supernatural. This was a compromise position that preserved diabolic agency while conceding physical impossibility.

Pharmacological dream — the ointment produced a hallucinatory state in which the witch dreamed the sabbath. No Devil required. This was della Porta’s implicit position: the natural chemistry of the plants explained the experience. It was also the most radical explanation from a demonological standpoint, because it evacuated the entire sabbath of supernatural content.

The problem with all three is evidential. Confessions of witches describing the ointment and the flight were extracted under torture, in legal proceedings that presupposed the reality of the sabbath, conducted by officials whose theological framework determined what questions were asked. Any account filtered through that process is compromised as independent testimony. This is not a modern cynicism; contemporaries raised the same objection.

Ginzburg, the Benandanti, and the night battles

The Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg entered this ground with I benandanti (1966; translated as The Night Battles, 1983), a study of a visionary folk tradition in the Friuli region of northeastern Italy during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The benandanti — literally “those who go well” — were men and women who claimed to leave their bodies in a trance state on the Ember Days, flying out in spirit as animals or in spirit-form to battle witches and defend the fertility of the fields. Their accounts were internally consistent, not elicited by the questions of inquisitors, and they described their spirit journeys with a matter-of-fact conviction that distinguished their testimony from confessions obtained by coercion.

Ginzburg’s argument was that the benandanti preserved traces of an older ecstatic visionary tradition — fertility-cult shamanism, essentially — that preceded the demonological sabbath. When the Inquisition processed the benandanti, it gradually bent their own description of themselves toward the sabbath template: by the later testimonies, the benandanti were confessing to things that looked like standard witch-trial material. The tradition had been overwritten.

In Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath (Italian 1989, English 1991), Ginzburg extended this argument across a much wider canvas, tracing analogous ecstatic and night-journey traditions across Eurasia — shamanic flight, the Wild Hunt, the retinue of Diana or Herodias in medieval folk belief — and arguing for a deep common stratum beneath the prosecutorial stereotype. The sabbath as described by inquisitors was, on this reading, a distortion of something real: actual visionary practice, probably involving trance states, that had existed long before the trials.

Ginzburg is careful about the ointment specifically. He does not argue that accused witches physically flew. His claim is that ecstatic traditions involving perceived flight — spirit journeys, dream battles, out-of-body experiences — were genuinely part of popular religious culture, and that the pharmacological properties of the ointment plants may have been one mechanism by which such states were entered. He is arguing for the reality of visionary experience, not bodily transportation.

Cohn, Hutton, and the sceptical reading

Norman Cohn, in Europe’s Inner Demons (1975), staked out a harder sceptical position. For Cohn, the sabbath stereotype was overwhelmingly a construction: an assemblage of existing anti-sect anxieties (Jews, heretics, early Christians as imagined by their persecutors) that learned inquisitors and demonologists attached to the category of witch. The night flight, the ointment, the orgy, the cannibalism of infants — these were the standard charges leveled at any group a society wanted to demonize. They said more about prosecutors than about defendants. The benandanti were an anomaly, not evidence of a widespread survival.

Ronald Hutton, writing in Triumph of the Moon (1999), occupies a middle position. He acknowledged Ginzburg’s Ecstasies as “something which probably nobody else could have written, and which broke important new ground,” while also noting that it “had the faults common to such bold and broad-brush enterprises, of covering too much too fast.” Hutton’s specific criticism was that Ginzburg extrapolated too far from the Friuli benandanti — a genuinely unusual phenomenon — toward a universal Eurasian shamanic substrate. The benandanti are striking evidence of a local visionary tradition; they are not automatically evidence of an unbroken pan-European stratum.

In later work, including his 2014 Folklore article on the Wild Hunt and the Witches’ Sabbath, Hutton continued to refine the position: pre-Christian folk traditions involving night-flying spirits and goddesses are “clearly of importance to the early modern European witch trials” and the trials “cannot fully be understood without reference to” them — but the connection is partial and layered, not the simple survival Ginzburg’s early framing sometimes implied.

The practical upshot of this three-way argument: the sabbath and its ointment sit at the intersection of real visionary practice, prosecutorial projection, learned demonological theory, and genuine pharmacology. Disaggregating these layers is what the best scholarship attempts, and no single layer explains the tradition on its own.

The ointment in context: what it was not

Two claims recur in popular writing that the sources do not support.

The first is that flying ointments were a survival of pre-Christian pagan religion, a secret practice maintained by an underground of practitioners across the Christian centuries. This is Margaret Murray’s thesis in compressed form, and it has not survived scrutiny. Hutton’s Triumph of the Moon dismantled the Murray hypothesis systematically; neither the ointment tradition nor the sabbath narrative shows continuous pagan lineage. What the tradition shows is a sixteenth-century florescence — in the medical literature, in demonological writing, in trial records — that drew on genuine plant knowledge, classical sources, and a newly intensified anxiety about demonic conspiracy.

The second claim is that the ointment reliably and consistently produced the experience of flying to a sabbath. This overreads both the pharmacology and the testimony. Tropane alkaloids in the doses achievable through transdermal application produce disorientation and vivid, often disturbing imagery — not coordinated social experience at a specific location. The consistency across confessions reflects the consistency of the questions asked under torture, and the shared cultural frame that organized both questioner and defendant.

What the ointment may plausibly have done: produced a trance state, induced vivid imagery, facilitated the kind of dissociative experience that a practitioner in an ecstatic tradition might have interpreted as spirit flight. Della Porta observed this. Ginzburg’s benandanti experienced something like it without any ointment mentioned. The mechanism and the tradition are separable.

Working with this material today

The modern practitioner who engages with the flying-ointment tradition inherits all of this: the genuine pharmacological substrate, the demonological distortion, and the partial scholarship. Several things follow from keeping the history straight.

The plants are lethal at doses close to their effective ones. None of the four main herbs — henbane, belladonna, mandrake, aconite — has a safe margin that makes internal use reasonable for any non-clinical purpose. Transdermal use is real, but the dose delivered is unpredictable. Fatalities from casual use are historically attested and pharmacologically expected. This is not a tradition to reconstruct experimentally.

The symbolism of the tradition is available without the toxicology. The ointment, the threshold, the broomstick, the departure from the body — these are images of ecstatic practice and of moving between worlds. They connect, however indirectly, to genuine pre-modern visionary traditions. A practitioner working with the symbolism of night flight and the spirit journey is working real material, even if the material does not require rubbing belladonna onto the skin.

The historiographical debate is itself useful to practitioners: it models how to hold a tradition with honesty. The sabbath was not one thing. The ointment was not one thing. What came down through the demonologists and the trial records and the sixteenth-century physicians is a palimpsest — useful precisely because it is complicated, not because it is clean.

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Cross-references on this site: belladonna, henbane, mandrake, aconite (correspondence pages forthcoming); the benandanti tradition; Samhain and the spirit-flight motif.