Drugs and Poisoners
Jenny
jennyg@compuserve.com
Tue Apr 27 10:07:55 1999
I'm on the AAR's Nature Religions Scholars' mailing list, and recently the talk turned to psychotropic plants and the question of whether or not early witches used hallucinegins.  The following is one of the posts I did, responding to Chas Clifton.  Slightly out of context, but I think it contains some info people'd find interesting.*p*Jenny*p****************************p*>>3. Someone had to pass along safe ways of using them, otherwise you would have a lot of dead witches (and maybe that happened, who knows).<<*p*Well, we have some dead historians to attest to the potency of these things. <g>  A 19th century writer, Dr. Karl Kiesewetter, killed himself trying to concoct a genuine flying ointment based on the Laguna/Weyer recipes.*p*My own opinions are similar to yours.  I don't think that there's solid, unproblematic proof that some witches used hallucinegins.  The recipes are too entangled in polemics, the results of "experiments" too varied. *p*However...*p*1) Flying ointments show up around the world, and I find it hard to believe that Europeans would scrupulously avoid all psychotropic plants.*p*2) Descriptions that sound like trances go back to our earliest sources (Nider, who Harner cites, was re-printed in the 17th century, but he wrote in the early 15th -- and, as witch-hunters go, he was one of our best "ethnographers").*p*3) In some of the early descriptions these "trances" are associated with the most archaic elements of the sabbat -- like the nocturnal ride with a goddess.*p*4) Some of earliest terms for witches revolve around their skill with special types of herbs, ones that are potent and dangerous.  Usually these terms get translated as "witch" or "poisoner", but that's somewhat misleading.  In modern English, "poisoner" means "one who administers poisons to others".  And that's not the meaning of these early terms.*p*In Latin, one of the earliest terms for witchcraft is "veneficia", from "venenum facere" ("to make venenum/poison").  But the Latin venenum isn't "poison", though it's normally translated that way.  According to Lewis and Short's _A Latin Dictionary_, the original meaning of venenum is "any thing, especially any liquid substance, that powerfully affects or changes the condition of the body;  a potion, juice, drug."  Later it came to mean a potion that destroys life (a venom or poison), later still "any evil". But the original meaning is simply, something that is magickal and powerful.  *p*(Random side note -- Carl Darling Buck, in _A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages_, notes that venom probably derives from *wenes-no-:  "Venus", or "love".  I don't know how much one could make of that, however it is interesting that Frau Venus was one of the goddesses that medieval witches were said to follow, one of the deities whom the Church collated with Diana.)*p*In Greek, a witch was a "pharmakis", from the word (for drug, potent herb)which gives us pharmacy and pharmacist.  As our usage suggests, these are not poisons, per se.*p*Several of the early Germanic terms for "witch" revolve around variants of the word lyf (in Old Norse), lybb (in Old English), and lubja (in Gothic).  At its most basic level, the word refers to an herb with healing or magickal powers.  (That's the meaning it retains in Old Norse.)  In Old English it's frequently translated "poison", but that's not strictly accurate.  Lybb is also the OE word for a helpful drug, and OE had another word (ator -- like ON eitr) which specifically meant poison.  Moreover OE has a specific word for a harmful lybb -- unlybba ("bad lybb").*p*In Gothic, "witch" is "lubjaleisei" or "lubjaleisai", from lubja + lais (know) or laisjan (teach):  one who teaches/knows potent herbs.  Old English had half a dozen related terms:  lybbestre ("lybb-woman", witch), lybcra/eft ("skill with lybb", often translated poisoning or witchcraft), lyblac ("lybb-gift/sport", use of drugs for magic, witchcraft), lybla/eca (which I believe translates as "lybb-doctor", a male witch or wizard), unlybba ("bad lybb", witchcraft or poisoning), and unlybwyhrta ("one who works bad lybbs", wizard).  I don't know if there are any Old Norse words that build off this root -- perhaps Jenny Blain does?*p*All this may have no significance to the question of whether or not witches used psychotropic plants.  Perhaps the associations between witchcraft and herbalism simply reflect the ambiguous feelings people had towards powerful (hence dangerous) plants.  On the other hand, Latin had another word for an herbalist (herbarius) which suggests that a venefica/veneficus was not the same thing.  And since belladonna and company are indeed poisonous, perhaps "poisoner" isn't so terribly inaccurate after all.*br*