The Witches’ Ointment: The Secret History of Psychedelic Magic by Thomas Hatsis, is the first full-length volume that explores the use of psychedelics and entheogens, and their role in both the wider western Renaissance culture and the more obscure, backwoods uses found in village magic.
Readers will find a detailed history of how certain folk ideas were caricatured and condemned by some members of the clergy. One such folkway was the use of psychedelics as entheogenic ointments to fall into a lucid dream-state to do a host of things like attend dances on mountain tops and meet and worship variously named goddesses of fertility and good fortune.
It was this kind of magical ointment that some theologians and judges demonized as the witches’ ointment.
The Witches’ Ointment shows how a composite of ideas ranging from fears over heretics and the demon invocation of ritual magicians, and certain folk drugs used in a particular kind of psyche-magical, and at times entheogenic, ways.