A Magickal Herball Compleat.pdf - Magicka School

Sunday, they pick and dig Solsequium, on Monday Lunariam, on Tuesday Verbenam, on
Wednesday Mercurialem, on Thursday Barbam Jovis, on Friday Capillos Veneris. They make
the salve by mixing these with quite a lot of birds’ blood, and also animal lard. I do not write
down details, so as to harm no one. Whenever they want to, they rub it on benches or chairs,
rakes or oven forks and fly away. This is nothing but necromancy, which is strongly forbidden
[18].
Not only was flight supposedly possible, but for a long time in Europe the art of
shape-shifting was attributed to Witches. The earliest surviving account of this is
written of in the second century C.E. work, The Golden Ass by Apuleius:
On a day Fotis came running to me in great fear, and said that her mistress, to work her
sorceries on such as she loved, intended the night following to transform herself into a bird, and to
fly whither she pleased. Wherefore she willed me privily to prepare myself to see the same. And
when midnight came she led me softly into a high chamber, and bid me look through the chink of
a door: where first I saw how she put off all her garments, and took out of a certain coffer sundry
kinds of boxes, of the which she opened one, and tempered the ointment therein with her fingers,
and then rubbed her body therewith from the sole of the foot to the crown of the head, and when
she had spoken privily with her self, having the candle in her hand, she shaked parts of her body,
and behold, I perceived a plume of feathers did burgen out, her nose waxed crooked and hard, her
nails turned into claws, and so she became an owl. Then she cried and screeched like a bird of
that kind, and willing to prove her force, moved her self from the ground by little and little, til at
last she flew quite away [19].
But, apart from a handful of sensationalist works that purport to give true Witch
recipes or more literary musings, there is a lack of first hand accounts from those
who were supposed to have used the ointments. This is the age-old problem of
finding primary evidence for practices associated with Witchcraft and, as usual,
there is a lack of documentation.
However, a great deal of evidence of the use of powerful hallucinogenic plants in
Europe exists, except that they are mentioned without reference to Witches. For
example, henbane had long been used by Germanic peoples to make their ale
more intoxicating [20] until it was eventually banned as an ingredient of beer in
early sixteenth century Bavaria. Deadly nightshade, or belladonna (which means
beautiful woman), was used throughout Renaissance Italy in the form of eye drops
designed to dilate pupils and make women more sexually attractive. And
mandrake (Mandragora officinarum), perhaps the most famous plant associated with
Witches, was frequently used for its medicinal purposes. Because the root could so
often look human in form it was thought to contain a spirit of good fortune and
later, because of the Doctrine of Signatures, was considered to be an especially
potent cure-all.
Not to mention, of course, that all these plants and many of their effects were
widely written of during the Golden Age of Herbals. For example, the Bavarian
Leonhart Fuchs (1501-1566) wrote in De Historia Stirpium Commentarii Insignes
(Notable Commentaries on the History of Plants) [21] that the:
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