That a witch is an empiricist is probably not a statement that you hear much these days, and yet what else are they doing with that cauldron and all those wonderful ingredients?

This is but one of the claims made by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English in their impassioned 1972 pamphlet Witches, Midwives, Nurses: A History of Women Healers. The midwives and wise-women of early modernity—necessarily invested in reproductive health, and having preserved a healing tradition and local botanical knowledges passed from mother to daughter from time immemorial—were rather more empirical than the church appointed male doctors who sought to violently replace them. Here is Ehrenreich and English:

The witch was an empiricist: she relied on her senses rather than on faith or doctrine, she believed in trial and error, cause and effect. Her attitude was not religiously passive, but actively inquiring. She trusted her ability to find ways to deal with disease, pregnancy, and childbirth—whether through medications or charms.

Ergot, for example, the parasitic fungus that grows periodically on rye and barley, was collected and used by midwives, for who knows how long, to induce labor (or abortion) and to prevent hemorrhaging in childbirth (Albert Hoffman had been attempting to synthesize this compound when he accidentally created LSD). How could these women have known of the obstetric effects of ergot if they did not have WebMD?

I would wager that this is less empiricism than radical empiricism. These are not objective lab techs but rather persons intimately entangled with the natural world in ways that would baffle our modern scientific understanding with its hard and fast binaries inside/outside, mind/matter, woman/environment.

The most mythic example of this entanglement is the flying ointment: a topical salve that, when applied to the skin will give the witch magical powers of flight. It is precisely the flying ointment that allows the witch to fly around on her famous broom. The flying ointment itself is very old and dates to roman times. The legends of women traveling great distances at night is well documented and found throughout Europe from the 9th century onwards. Reports of the flying ointment reach a crescendo in the 17th century at the height of the witch trials. It is at this point that the legend goes viral and becomes the halloween cartoon it is today.

The story is simple: The witch applies the ointment to her body, speaks a magic word and mounting her stick or broom, flies through the night to meet the devil at the sabbath. We can tell this is a “man’s” story because only a man would imagine that women meet together only if a man is there to lead them—even if it is the devil. It’s an inversion of what normal people do every Sunday morning, for that other man-lead sabbath. The Christians at this time were prone to demonize the other in this inverted way, accusing them of devil worship, because they suspected, in their heart of hearts, that they themselves worshipped the greatest devil of them all. See for example the paranoid philosophy of one René Descartes, contemporary of the witch hunts, and for whom father God and the devil are necessarily confused.

And yet at this time too there are far less salacious reports that imply the flying ointment is really just a soporific that induces long crazy dreams. This is the dawn of the age of reason after all, and there are some men, few and far between, who, not necessarily believing in flying witches, try to be reasonable. Dutch physician Johann Weier (one of Freud’s heros), who went a long way towards discrediting the demonologists, asserted that these women were not witches but rather depressed drug users. In this telling the woman applies the ointment, falls into a deep sleep from which she cannot be awakened and, once she does awake, recounts fantastic travels.

There are more than a few academic historians who would deny even this hallucinogenic motive, for they refuse to admit that, prior to our degenerate age, anyone ever did any drugs. In the meantime, the recipe for the flying ointment is known and long established—Francis Bacon includes one in his Sylva Sylvarum (1623)—and many of the ingredients, aside from bat’s blood and the “fat of babies digged out of graves,” are indeed psychotropic. Deadly nightshade (Atropa belladonna) is one such ingredient that includes two principle alkaloids, atropine and scopolamine and that, while being highly poisonous, when administered in the right dose will allegedly take you there; users often have a feeling of waking up in a different location, as if they had mysteriously traveled. Henbane and aconite are likewise psychotropic and may even mitigate the more toxic effects of the other plants.

It is precisely here in this psychotropism, the point of departure from the known world, a flight to where, unless you know the spell, no one can follow, that the plant and the woman become something else entirely...

Various women going ecstatic on magic botanicals aside, it is obvious that the legend of the witch’s flying ointment is a slander and an attack on any ointment whatsoever. That is, in early-modernity, if a woman was found with any herbal concoction—never mind if it is painkiller, or tiger balm, or personal lube—then she may be accused of witchcraft. Whether or not the flying ointment is real, it became a means by which to systematically suppress and destroy the medicinal expertise that certain women had organized and maintained from generation to generation. So in the course of the centuries-long Christian terror campaign against women, the midwife would soon become a witch. As it notes in the Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of the Witches, 1487) the user-manual for the witch trials, “No one does more harm to the catholic church than midwives.”

The fact that the flying ointment contains baby fat is the grotesque and telling detail at the beating heart of this story. It is a story that is still playing out today outside any Planned Parenthood; the fight for reproductive health must still face gross and salacious accusations from puritanical Christians.

But the persistent idea that certain women have the ability to fly, then or now, contains rather more than can be included in any historical analysis; like the psychotropism afforded by the plant, it is an image far in excess of its basic elements; namely, a sexuality that remains totally indifferent to reproduction.