Flying ointment

Flying ointment, also known as witches' flying ointment, green ointment, magic salve and lycanthropic ointment, is a hallucinogenic ointment said to have been used by witches in the practice of European witchcraft from at least as early as the Early Modern period,when detailed recipes for such preparations were first recorded.

Francis Bacon (attributed as "Lord Verulam") listed the ingredients of the witches ointment as "the fat of children digged out of their graves, of Juices of smallage, wolfe-bane and cinque foil, mingled with the meal of fine wheat."

The ointment consisted of a fatty base used as a solvent to incorporate the active constituents of various (mostly poisonous) plants, usually including species belonging to the tribe Hyoscyameae (sometimes also tribes Datureae and Mandragoreae) of the plant family Solanaceaeand containing the alkaloids atropine, hyoscyamine and scopolamine. The herbs' alkaloids ( tropane alkaloids in the case of the Solanaceous species) were extracted when heated in the base. Such compounds are more likely to cause poisoning when ingested than when applied to the skin and absorbed more slowly into the body via the transdermal route and Atropine is known to have caused psychotropic effects through absorption through unbroken skin. Typical Solanaceous ingredients in alleged recipes included Deadly Nightshade (Atropa belladonna),Henbane (Hyoscyamus niger) Henbane Bell (Scopolia carniolica) Thornapple (Datura stramonium) and Mandrake (Mandragora spp.), while other frequent, alkaloidal, plant ingredients included Hemlock (Conium maculatum , family Apiaceae) and Wolfsbane (Aconitum napellus, family Ranunculaceae)- usually in a base of animal fat or human fat - the latter allegedly derived from the bodies of unbaptized babies.

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