Poetry Black Poetry White

[lysichitum]

I see nobody has posted anything on this thread in quite a while, but just wanted to throw in the idea of "flying ointments". Apparently there was a tradition practiced among European witches of taking strong hallucinogenic plants...mostly nightshades such as henbane, mandrake, and belladonna, and making salve of them....thus diluting the herbs in a larger amount of other stuff. These salves or ointments would be applied topically...to the skin....thus giving another level of fine-tuning and moderating the dosage. The legends of witches flying on broomsticks originate from this practice...sometimes the ointment would be applied to the broomstick, and the "flying" refers to the visionary experiences. Modern witches (Sarah Anne Lawless comes first to mind, but there are others) are reviving this practice and learning to formulate these ointments and develop protocols for their safe use. Given the systematic eradication of witchcraft and the suppression and co-optation of its associated arts of herbalism and medicine, this seems like just one example of what might have been a rich tradition of pre-Christian entheogen use in Europe.