Equating actual witches with Satan and devil worship is like people who listen to heavy metal and wear an upside down pentagram think they are Satan worshipers.

Witchcraft and wicca are not the same thing. Wicca is an Oprah-esque New Age version of paganism. Though we no longer practise animal sacrifice or the like, witchcraft is still an earth-worship, polytheistic faith and has so Satan figure. That’s my final word on this.

Mushrooms have had an impact on our evolution.
Many things have.
The drugs, in this case; the mushrooms, can, I agree, only really be considered facilitators.
It’s the mind on the drugs that is interesting. Not the drugs on the mind.

Although they are fairly interesting in their own right; but that’s beside the point.
Which was something about shoes apparently…

one day maybe i’ll get around to writing my “psychedelics and fine art” book…

I happen to be a big fan of the truth, and in my view the more truth we can tell about our history, the better off everyone will be. When myths are disseminated as fact, this not only corrupts our sense of our own history, but it undermines the position of the entheogenic subculture by wedding it to fallacious narratives. That impedes the ability of the larger culture to take these substances seriously, and I think that’s really too bad.

The 2006 Johns Hopkins psilocybin and mystical experience study offered strong evidence that certain plant- or fungus-based entheogens, under certain circumstances and for some people, may produce experiences that are profoundly valued by those people, and that have a measurable, lasting, positive effect. In my view, this kind of information helps people who are interested in these substances, while pseudo-histories of Amanita muscaria use in early Christianity hurt these people. They undermine the credibility of the entire subculture, and unfortunately many of the loudest mouths in the psychedelics world have the greatest disregard for truth. Terence McKenna, may he rest in peace, is a great example. He was a world class storyteller, but all that “Food of the Gods” stuff about mushrooms and the origins of consciousness is just nonsense. I’m not saying that out of prejudice, I’m saying that because I’ve carefully looked at his arguments and his evidence, and they’re extremely weak.

The fact that a theory is interesting, attractive, or even plausible is not in itself evidence for its truth. It is only the starting point — then the work begins of evaluating it.

From a witchcraft investigation in 1324: “In rifleing the closet of the ladie, they found a Pipe of oyntment, wherewith she greased a staffe, upon the which she ambled and galloped through thick and thin.” Also this from around 1470: “But the vulgar believe, and the witches confess, that on certain days or nights they anoint a staff and ride on it to the appointed place or anoint themselves under the arms and in other hairy places.”

Anyhow, for what it’s worth.

Apparently this kind of thing has been for psychedelic purposes done since Greek times. Not to be tried at home due to extreme likelihood of death.

The concept of a “witch” as we know it is an invention of medieval Christians who wanted a good excuse for killing people who had different belief systems. The fact that some have chosen to embrace this epithet in more recent years doesn’t change its original connotations.

“Some historians say the practitioners of witchcraft were using hallucinogenic plants like mandrake and belladonna to perform their “magic,” and even believe they were flying. Such drugs work best when applied to the thin skin of mucus membranes… like the labia. So the story goes the “witches” would apply their “magic potion” to their broom sticks and “fly.”

http://www.cracked.com/article/177_6-popular-monsters-myths-that-prove-humanity-doomed/

But, as above, it can be adequately explained by perfectly ordinary mass hysteria, enforced confessions and perversion of justice.

I’ve personally made a full-on traditional flying ointment following that research for the last several Samhain seasons. I agree that it is potentially very toxic, and not to try casually, but it is also a very wild ride if undertaken with care and diligence.

I wrote my own couple of posts about this on my blog, talking about shamanic flight from both the European witches’ perspective and similar Eastern practices that led, oddly enough, to the legendary flying carpet mythos.

Here’s the Witches’ post:
http://al-kemi.com/alchemy/2009/10/flight-witches-on-brooms/

And the Eastern perspective:
http://al-kemi.com/alchemy/2009/10/flight-magic-carpets-kung-fu-leaps/

-leavesofjoy

Belladonna and aconite
Give to me the gift of flight
Take me up, ever on in the night
In a dream, across the sky
A hundred-million miles high
Take me ever onwards in the night

Dark sisters join my night flight
See how far you can climb
Holt’s with us on this bright night
Ride with him ‘cross the sky

As a screaming horde
We cut the scape
The Devil’s Apple exacerbates
At the sabbat on a demon steed I ride
Across the astral plane we race
The universe my fingers trace
And I am lost forever in my mind

Hemlock, Henbane, Aconite, Belladonna,
Opium, Thornapple, Cinquefoil, Mandragora

o/

The whole purpose of scientific and historical research methods in these fields is that they provide tools by which a hypothesis can be methodically tested such that our personal biases don’t excessively cloud our judgment. One can start with any belief that gets you out of bed in the morning, but at the end of the day reason and evidence are the arbiters.

If you look at guys like R. Gordon Wasson, who was actually one of the most responsible scholars in this field, it’s obvious that he started out with the conviction that psychoactive mushroom use was instrumental in the creation of early religion. He looked for decades for evidence for his theory, and surprise! he found some, buried amidst the murk and mists of fragmentary history. This is not my account of what happened – he is very clear about this throughout his writings.

If you actually read any of these books — have you, Kim? — you can see how this distorts their methods. Both “Road to Eleusis” and “Soma” are deeply colored by all the errors I’m describing, and any freshman archaeology major should know better.

As I said, Wasson is actually pretty good as far as these guys go. When you get to John Allegro or Clark Heinrich, all you get is ridiculous stories mascaraing as history.

Letcher make the same point as Gendun about that cover image. Sure, on the copy they look like mushrooms. On the original they look like they could be arrow-heads or who knows what.

There is a *vast* amount of scholarship on why so many people were accused and sometimes admitted to being witches, and while there is no consensus, most arguments tie their appearance with factors specific to the early modern period (reformation, inquisition, social upheaval…)

Moreover, most of the data we posses about what the “witches” allegedly did is seriously compromised by how the information was gathered (torture, hearsay). It is extremely difficult to determine what people accused of things like witchcraft actually believed themselves.

[disclaimer: I too am a medievalist]

it’s legal, you can buy it in smoke shops. Every drug that I’ve taken to ‘see’ or to ‘go’ to another visual state or mental state have all been a big show with neat special effects but always you are still in this world…

Salvia…say bye bye to reality my friends when you smoke it, depending on the quality of course. It makes every other drug pointless. Reality is ripped open and you pierce the illusion that what people perceive as the every day mundane.

In other words, stop sniffing the paint, snorting crap on your noise, smoking out of glass pipes, chewing on glass vials, what have you. Shrooms are still fun of course but if you want to chase Alice down the rabbit hole, Salvia is the only way to fly.

enjoy.

If you read this article closely you will see that there are many citations, but almost all of them document factors which are themselves circumstantial evidence for the use of flying ointments by medieval witches. We can cite with certainty that a writer in the 1960s believed in this theory, or that so-called witches were believed by a classical author to rub ointments on their bodies, or that this term or that may refer to the administration of an ointment to the body, but on close inspection we’re missing the smoking gun — a contemporaneous account clearly establishing a link between visionary transformation or flight with the administration of a solanaceous ointment.

After years of following these discussions I must admit that I simply don’t understand this field and what it inspires in people. I’ve come to call this crypto-entheo-hermeneutics, or the attempt to find evidence for undocumented use of psychoactive substances for religious purposes in history. The field is overwhelmingly dominated by people who begin convinced they will find what they are looking for, who rife through historical evidence and cherry pick the facts which support their theories and disregard or explain away strong counter-evidence, i.e. no witch confession ever described what they’re asserting here. I do not understand what it is about this topic that seems to excite so much amateurish speculation, pseudo-scholarship, and such extremely low standards of evidence.

I note that the cover of this book is a clear testimony to the phenomenon I’m describing. The image is a reproduction of a prehistoric cave painting in Algeria that may depict a deity with mushrooms projecting from its body. While that image is striking and in wide circulation, it’s not well known that it is not a picture of the cave painting, rather, it is a reproduction drawn by a colleague and intimate of Terrence McKenna which exaggerates the mushroom-like quality of the protuberances on this figure’s perimeter.

There is clearly evidence of use of solanaceous plants for medicinal and even visionary purposes — this is well established. But I question the zeal with which many authors take this phenomenon or that and set out to prove that it must be explainable by a psychoactive substance. They seem to often find a large and credulous audience willing to embrace that hypothesis. Perhaps it is testimony to the material reductionism in our age, to conclude that all spiritual visionary phenomena in history must be explainable by pharmacology. Surely the initiation of Eleusis or the rhapsodic praise of the Vedas must have their origins in some plant drug. A case in point is Benny Shanon’s extremely dubious claim that some form of Acacia-based ayahuasca precipitated the theophany of Moses. For heaven’s sake, we have no evidence for the historicity of Moses, much less that he made a plant preparation containing DMT and MAOIs.

Let’s all hold ourselves to a higher standard, eh?