Flying Ointments. and Formulas in European Witchcraft - ALINA ARESE

Flying Ointments and Formulas in European Witchcraft

What lies behind the myth of witches' nocturnal flight?

Far from fantasy, this book draws on real historical documents-Inquisitorial trials, medical treatises, and demonological texts-that, over centuries, recorded with striking consistency the use of ointments associated with the so-called "flight" to the Sabbat.

Based on sources spanning the 15th to the 17th centuries, these formulas are reconstructed as they appear in the archives: mixtures of fats, narcotic plants, and ritual practices preceding states of trance, deep sleep, and intensely vivid experiences. Rather than a simple legend, what emerges is a complex phenomenon at the crossroads of pharmacology, belief, and the cultural framework of its time.

The book moves through testimonies, compares regions, and examines ingredients with a critical perspective-without romanticizing or oversimplifying. Here, witchcraft is presented as a coherent system within its historical context, where body, mind, and symbolism operated as an inseparable whole.

A rigorous and well-documented work that invites a closer look at what for centuries was dismissed as mere superstition.