The Alchemy Key.pdf - Veritas File System

alcoholic beverages. This miel fou was probably the mandrake of the
witches and used along with opium and plants containing skin-penetrating
atropine such as hemlock, nightshade, hellebore, henbane and
belladonna. 273 Henbane is also called Jupiter Beans or apollinaris for its
god-like trance-inducing properties. 274 Pliny recorded that the people of
Gaul used the sacred plant veravain to prepare an ointment that was used
in fortune telling and uttering prophesies.. 275
As with their Mediterranean counterparts, European witches
applied a green Oyl to induce states of ecstasy. They applied the Oyl to
their foreheads, forearms and underarms. They also used a broomstick
handle to apply the Oyl to their vulva and this is probably the source of
the flying broomstick myth.
In the sixteenth century, the physician Andrés Laguna
investigated the discovery of a jar of witch’s Oyl. 276 The jar still had
some of the green unguent used by the witches. He experimented with
the Oyl by smearing it all over a woman. She promptly fell into a deep
coma that lasted for thirty-six hours. Afterwards she described her erotic
coma with considerable delight.
A Homeric Hymn to Hermes describes how the melissae beepriestesses
of Mount Parnassus consumed the honeycomb of the gods,
meli chloron, to attain a state of ecstasy: 277
Divinely maddened, they are inspired to speak the truth
But if they are deprived of the divine honeycomb
they cannot prophesy.
Toxic honey causes vertigo, delirium, nausea, vomiting, blue
skin, muscle paralysis and unconsciousness. Severe ventricular
tachycardia leads to death. This is an over-contraction of the lower
ventricles of the heart. The contractions fall out of phase with the heart’s
own pacemaker in its sinus node. In the second century CE, Plutarch
noted that the melissae priestesses often collapsed and died after frantic
disorientation and shrieking. In 19 BCE, Virgil described the effects on
the Cumaean Sibyl priestess as she foretold of grim war in Lavinium to
the legendary Trojan leader Aeneas at Euboea: 278
The threshold was barely gained when the maiden cried ‘It is the
hour to enquire your fates! The god – behold the god.’ And as she stood
by the doors and spoke, suddenly her countenance and hue changed, and
her tresses fell disordered: her bosom panted, her wild heart swelled with
fury, and she grew taller to the view, and her voice rang not of mortality,
now that the god breathed on her in nigher presence … in her cavern the
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