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  • Afterword
  • Brian Levack

witchcraft, flight, magic, historiography, soul, demonology, visual art, witch trials, travel literature, medicine

These articles represent the latest effort to interpret the late medieval and early modern belief that witches could fly. That belief has a long history in the West. It found expression in folklore, literature, and art long before the period of the witch trials, and the image of a witch flying on a broomstick remains a part of popular culture today. During the period of the witch trials, however, the nature and causes of witch flight became a subject of learned debate.

There were three different ways in which early modern witches were believed capable of flight. The first is that they imagined or dreamed that they flew. Some skeptical demonologists took this position, including those who claimed that the experience of flight was caused by the application of ointments, concocted from botanical substances, to their bodies. The second theory was that the spirits but not the bodies of witches flew, in the manner of the benandanti in the Friuli, who claimed that during the Ember days their spirits left their bodies to battle the witches at night while their bodies remained in their beds in a state of catalepsy.1 It is one thing to believe that noncorporeal spirits such as angels and demons fly, but quite another to argue that the souls or spirits of humans do so before death frees their souls from their bodies.2 The third theory of flight, which was adopted by a cluster of French, German, and Italian demonologists and worked its way into a relatively small number of witch trials, was that the “natural,” material bodies of [End Page 109] witches, consisting of flesh and bone, actually flew through the air, either to attend the witches’ sabbath or to cause changes in the weather. Such physical flight, in the view of demonologists, depended upon the assistance of demons who either carried their human cargo on the backs of animals whose shape they had assumed, provided them with a wooden stick to facilitate their magical flight, or carried them through the atmosphere, sometimes in a gust of wind, without the assistance of any animal or material object. The belief that witches or any other human beings could fly by their own unassisted power did not enter this early modern discourse.

Whether witches “really” flew is a question mal posée. Definitions of reality vary from one context to another. One person’s imagination or dreams may seem as “real” as another’s claim that a natural, material body moved through the atmosphere. Most people in early modern Europe thought a person’s noncorporeal soul was just as “real” as the body it was thought to inhabit. Some contemporaries made a distinction between real spirit flight and illusory spirit flight, the former reflecting a belief in the reality of the spirit. Such a distinction could and occasionally did determine guilt or innocence in a witchcraft trial. But even illusory spirit flight might be considered “real.” Instead of addressing the question whether witches “really” fly, the contributors to this issue explore different approaches to understanding early modern beliefs. These approaches can be labeled the demonological, the popular, the pharmacological, the literary, and the artistic.

Michael Ostling deals mainly with the pharmacological approach. He surveys the social scientific literature of the last two centuries, which asserts not that witches flew in their material bodies, but that by absorbing botanical substances, especially belladonna, henbane, and mandrake, mainly through the skin, they experienced the sensation of flying. Ostling thoroughly dis-mantles the claims made regarding the effects of these psychotropic drugs and in the process discredits this entire genre of retrospective, pharmacological speculation regarding early modern witchcraft. He shows that none of the ingredients referred to in either skeptical or more credulous accounts of witches’ flight had the capacity to produce such experiences, any more than the baby fat that was listed as one of the ingredients in some early modern flight recipes. There is also no evidence that such ointments contained lysergic acid, the main ingredient in LSD, which can have a hallucinogenic effect. It may be that those who, like...

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