In 1428, in the Italian hill town of Todi, a healer named Matteuccia di Francesco was put on trial. She was accused of smearing her body with an ointment made from the blood of newborn children, transforming herself into a fly, and being carried by a demon to a gathering beneath a walnut tree.
Francesco’s trial is one of the earliest complete witchcraft trials in Europe, and one of the first recorded cases of a “witch” anointing herself with a seemingly magical potion. Several reports and recipes followed Francesco’s case, describing a balm that would cause women to fly, shapeshift, and transport to other worlds.
Origins of the Flying Ointment
Well before the witch trials, tales have described balms, salves, and lotions that would induce flight. In Book 14 of Homer’s Iliad, composed around the 8th century BC, the Greek goddess Hera prepares to seduce Zeus by anointing her skin with an oil so potent its scent would reach “both earth and heaven.” Moments later, she leaves Olympus and travels the length of Thrace to Lemnos without her feet ever touching the ground.
The Golden Ass (originally titled Metamorphoses), a 2nd-century CE Latin novel, describes a mistress, Pamphile, who smears herself with a magical ointment and transforms into an owl to fly to her lover.
The text reads, “Slowly, the woman works a handful of the greasy ointment between her fingers and spreads it over her naked body, muttering to herself all the while. Then feathers start to grow over her clammy skin: her arms turn into two wings, and within minutes she has become an owl and is gliding over the rooftops.”
From the 15th century onward, the flying ointment manifested into something more material, with documented recipes for real-world concoctions. These balms and lotions became widely associated with mass accusations of women as witches.
Two main schools of thought prevailed. Some believed the ointment helped women access their magical, and often diabolical, powers. These women would fly to a midnight gathering of those who practiced witchcraft, known as the sabbat, where satanic rituals and wild revelry would occur. The predominant school of thought is that the journey of flight and the sabbat existed. However, it took place in the imaginal realm or the dreamscape, and it was the ointment that would induce a portal to this experience.
Flying in the Dream World
Theologian Johannes Nider was one of the first people to discuss the flying ointment as a place of dreams. He was also one of the first to demonise the notion of a witch, claiming them to be uneducated women who gained magical powers through making pacts with the devil.
In the 1430s text Formicarius, Nider describes watching a woman apply an ointment over her body and falling into disturbed dreams. He said these dreams were “so convincing that she is soon waving her hands about, as if flying.” On waking, the woman allegedly insisted she had flown to a sabbat.
A century later, in Magia Naturalis,Italian polymath Giambattista della Porta described two different magical ointments. He claims to have witnessed a “witch” apply one of these ointments and fall into a deep sleep. She purportedly slept so deeply that she remained unmoved while a group of men shook and beat her. On awakening, the women recounted a vivid journey including flying and participating in sexual banquets.
The Witching Herbs
While exact preparations varied, multiple flying ointment recipes have included the use of herbs from the Solanaceae family, otherwise known as the deadly nightshades. The so-called “witching herbs” of this family include the highly toxic yet highly medicinal plants Datura, Belladonna, Henbane, and Mandrake. The hallucinogenic and oneirogenic (dream-enhancing) properties of these plants align closely with the experiences described by Nider and others.
The witching herbs, particularly Datura and Belladonna, can induce true hallucinations. This is when people experience scenes and characters that don’t exist, at least within consensus reality. People may have drawn-out conversations with real-world characters who aren’t actually there; they may encounter otherworldly creatures and beings – such as fairies, werewolves, and giants – and believe they’ve travelled to far-away lands when, in fact, they haven’t moved. The experience has been akin to a “waking dream.”
Shared Hallucinations
Though it’s plausible that the sabbat was a hallucination induced by psychedelic herbs, it’s curious that multiple women reported the same motifs: flying, feasting, celebrating, engaging in orgies, and performing witchcraft.
One answer to this puzzle lies in suggestibility. If tales of the sabbat were already alive in the culture, that imagery may have surfaced more readily in a person's subconscious once under the influence of whatever psychoactive substances the balm may have contained. Confessions, too, were often coerced rather than truthful. Witch-hunters pressed women to describe stories that fit their existing narrative of heretical, secret gatherings. And since the alkaloids in these plants disrupted normal cognitive processes, women may have been more susceptible to absorbing that cultural myth as their own experience.
A perhaps more intriguing explanation is to question the whole nature of reality. Were these hallucinations mere figments?
Professor David Luke shares a story in which he unwittingly took Datura and saw a “wizened old lady” that “looked about 300 years old” on the back of a bus while taking students out to the Amazon for field research. Three of his students saw the same being, described with the same exact features. Across Datura trips, multiple unrelated users have shared similar hallucinations, including dropping cigarettes that don’t exist, groups of people entering one’s space, and encountering both dead relatives and werewolves.
Dream Portals
Like drug experiences, shared dreams are also a common phenomenon. This is particularly relevant in the case of the flying ointment, whereby the sabbat seemingly took place during a witch's sleep.
In the mid 20th century, researcher Professor Erich-Will Peuckert tested a flying ointment on himself and a colleague. His concoction was based on medieval recipes and included belladonna, datura, henbane, wild celery, and parsley.
Peuckert described falling into a trance-like sleep for twenty hours, during which the two men had near-identical dreams of flying through the air to a mountaintop and participating in erotic orgies with monsters and demons.
Shared dreams have been documented since the ancients. In Greek healing temples, patients underwent a rite called incubatio, sleeping in a special dormitory within the temple, hoping the god Asclepius would appear in a dream, often accompanied by his sacred snakes. Interestingly, evidence suggests that the Greeks incorporated psychoactive plants into these rituals, including one of the flying ointment ingredients: Henbane.
Mainstream psychology tends to explain shared visions through shared culture. If an entire region has been steeped in a cosmology of witchcraft and devil worship, it’s unsurprising these themes occur in the dreamscape.
Escaping Patriarchal Oppression
Other schools of psychology offer different lenses when it comes to shared hallucinations and dreams. Freudian psychology holds that dreams are disguised expressions of repressed desires – impulses too unacceptable to the conscious mind to surface directly. In this lens, the diabolical and sexual visions evoked by the flying ointment visions may reflect the repressed desire of those living in a strict Church-controlled society.
Jungian psychology takes a different view, holding that dreams offer access to a collective unconscious – an inherited layer of mind shared by all people, beneath individual memory and experience. On this reading, the sabbat wasn't a private fantasy but a shared archetype. It was a symbolic expression of the desire for freedom, echoing patterns of pre-Christian shamanic and pagan tradition.
Another perspective could hold that these flying dreams were deliberately planned by the voyager. The witch's herbs have a long association with lucid dreaming – the type of dream where the dreamer knows they are dreaming and so can control the outcome of events.
Village life under the strict Christian doctrine of the time left little room for female autonomy, sexual expression, or communal joy. Women may have actively invented the sabbat as a means of escaping their reality, creating realms where they could freely feast, dance, and express their sexuality.
The Flying Ointment vs the Witches' Ointment
Not all records of the sabbat were desirable, however. Many of the key texts fueling the witch trials described these black masses as including things like infant sacrifice and cannibalism. They were depraved and evil, rather than spaces of joyful release. The flying ointment itself was also highly demonised, depicted as a sinister weapon given by the Devil himself.
“The person who has been led astray worships the presiding Devil. The Devil gives the newest heretic an ointment and a stick so as to return to the Sabbat. … The ointment is made by secret method of diabolical malice, from the flesh of roasted children …” reads the 15th-century anonymous text Errores Gazariorum ("Errors of the Heretics").
Historian Thomas Hatsis makes a clear distinction between the flying ointment and the so-called witches' ointment. He explains that the flying ointment was a real, physical thing, whereas the witches' ointment was an idea invented by the Church.
Hatsis points out that since the Greek empire, groups that went against orthodox powers were accused of committing horrific rituals. Accusations were first directed at political insurgents and early Christians, then at Christian heretics, and finally, by the early 1400s, at witches.
He argues that “the beliefs regarding witches’ ointments evolved out of theological fears over heresy.” That being, knowledge surrounding the flying ointment was deeply misconstrued by patriarchal powers who felt threatened by it.
So, Who Exactly Were the Witches?
Many of those accused of witchcraft were midwives and healers who relied on inherited, folk knowledge rather than that sanctioned by mainstream institutions. These traditional practices would involve the use of herbs and sometimes different pagan rituals and incantations. Those practising this form of healing threatened the power of physicians, who were primarily male and university-trained. They threatened the power of the church, which sought to maintain dominance over traditional pagan practices.
In the 1486 Malleus Maleficarum, written by the German inquisitor Heinrich Kramer, he claims, "no one does more harm to the Catholic Faith than midwives." He played a key role in the witch hunt and the targeting of midwives in particular, spreading the logic that the same powers these women use for healing can be used for harm.
Reclaiming the Witch Today
Between 1450 and 1750 BC, roughly 40,000 to 50,000 witch executions took place in Europe, with up to 85% of those executed being women. The evidence is overwhelming that these killings were unlawful, and churches have since apologised, including the Church of Scotland and the Catholic diocese of Eichstätt in Bavaria.
Not only do people now recognise the innocence of those executed, but also the value of these pagan practices and folk medicines. Many groups are looking to reconnect with pagan wisdom, reclaiming the notion of witches as wise women who knew how to heal people with plants.
Wicca is a growing religious group devoted to reviving old pagan traditions, founded by Gerald Gardner, who wrote the pivotal book Witchcraft Today in 1954. Gardner claimed to be initiated in the New Forest coven, an alleged “witch cult” whose practices survived the trials and remained unbroken.
His book outlined that witchcraft wasn’t harmful magic, but rather a sincere religious devotion to pagan gods. The witches were those who worshipped these gods, practiced age-old rites, preserved herbal knowledge, and maintained magical practices. He originally used the term “the Wica” to describe practitioners initiated into the cult. However, the word was later co-opted by his followers to describe the new religion based on his teachings.
Since its inception, Wicca has been one of the fastest-growing alternative religions in the Global North, with nearly 13,000self-identified Wiccans in the UK in 2021.
Contemporary Uses of the Flying Ointment
Among the modern-day witches, some have begun creating their own flying ointments. Many have replaced the more dangerous "witching herbs" with milder alternatives like mugwort and wormwood. Others have stuck closer to traditional recipes.
Online retailers like Etsy have a variety of flying ointment products, including balms, salves, and essential oils. They are marketed as a means of inducing relaxation, trance states, lucid dreaming, and astral projection (when the “astral body” separates from the physical body and travels).
A concoction sold by the Seed Sistas, a herbalist duo, is packaged as a hallucinogenic lube to be used for enhancing sexual pleasure. They posit that witches may have rubbed the ointment on devices used for self-pleasure, such as wooden sticks, and hence the notion of witches flying on a broomstick. Other people have proposed that witches applied the ointment onto their vagina with wooden objects, not for pleasure, but simply to increase absorption.
People have shared their experiences of using modern-day flying ointments on forums like Reddit and Erowid. While potent for some, others report being underwhelmed, and there’s very little in modern accounts that reflects the kind of experiences described by women prosecuted during the witch trials.
“Well, to be honest, it was kind of underwhelming. I expected some sort of profound out of body experience or crazy hallucinations, but it was more like a feeling of tingling and weightlessness, with minor hallucinations,” one Reddit user writes.
The user describes trying several different recipes but never experiencing sensations of flight. They suggest that there is a missing unknown ingredient that gives this effect.
However, someone else on the same thread suggests that the sensation of flight didn’t occur because it requires personal practice, and isn’t a result of anything else external.
“Develop the skills first, then add the flying ointment. The ointment helps get you "there," but you need to know how to get "there" first (don't necessarily need to have had success, but be knowledgeable in the approaches and have practiced them),” they write. “Metaphorically, flying ointment is like a car, but you still need to know the directions. Get in a car without directions, you're not going to end up where you wanted to go.”
Forgotten Magic
It’s not clear what skills are being referred to. It could be lucid dreaming or astral projection, given that these are non-drug-induced ways of being able to enter other realms of existence. However, there may be ancient practices and skills to which we remain unaware.
Long before the early modern witch hunts, the widespread conversion campaigns to Christianity had begun suppressing paganism: replacing seasonal festivals with saints’ days, physically destroying sacred sites and criminalising cults. This was exacerbated by the witch trials, whereby folk traditions were reinterpreted as witchcraft, and practitioners were prosecuted.
The flying ointment provides a glimpse into a lost art: one by which our ancestors may have been utilising plants and ritual to cross boundaries of reality. So many people in the Western world are now turning to ayahuasca – a mixture of plants is used within the ritual structure to allow one to venture into planes of existence, which, thematically, really isn’t too different from what we can infer about the flying ointment.
Yet while the centuries-old ayahuasca traditions have carried through lineages of healers, our traditions here in the global North were mostly destroyed. Perhaps the growing global propensity for these Indigenous medicines isn’t just experience-seeking. But rather, we’re tapping into and remembering ways in which we used to heal and live.