Witchcraft Medicine: Healing Arts, Shamanic Practices, and Forbidden Plants (57 page)

This olive tree (
Olea europea
L.) is approximately six hundred years old and is still called
Olivo della Strega
, “olive of the witch” in Magliano (Tuscany, Massa Marittima). The hooked-nosed profile of a witch can be seen in the bark. (Photographs by Claudia Müller-Ebeling.)

The yellow pheasant’s eye (
Adonis vernalis
L.), also known as false hellebore, sweet vernal, and spring Adonis, one of the sacred plants of antiquity, was eventually demonized and called a devil’s eye or devil’s Flower.
Adonis
provides an important homeopathic medicine. (Photograph by Christian Rätsch.)

Wolf’s milk, or cypress spurge (
Euphorbia cyparissias
L.), was one of the feared plants of the witches. Today it is known only as a poisonous plant. (Photograph by Christian Rätsch.)

The common thorn apple (
Datura stramonium
L.) has been known in Europe since the 16th century. Because of its psychoactive activity and toxicity at higher dosages it was considered a witches’ herb and was included as an ingredient in the legendary Flying ointments. Although thorn apple is one of the most powerful hallucinogens known, it is not subject to narcotics laws. Nevertheless, thorn apple has been stigmatized as a devil’s herb, and in more recent times as a poisonous plant. Botanical gardens and plant books still warn about this dangerous plant. (Photograph by Christian Rätsch, in the Botanical Gardens, Hamburg.)

The “golden apples of Aphrodite” are the ripe fruits of the mandrake (
Mandragora officinarum
L.). (Photograph by Christian Rätsch.)

In Chile
Lobelia tupa
L. is still called
tabaco del diablo,
or devil’s tobacco. The plant has mild psychoactive effects when smoked, which led to it being banned by authorities and generally demonized. (Photograph by Christian Rätsch.)

Two smokable plants that have been vigorously demonized: tobacco
(Nicotiana tabacum)
and henbane
(Hyoscyamus niger).
Yet tobacco was one of the most important shamanic plants of the New World, and henbane was the most important sacred plant of the Germanic peoples. (Photograph by Christian Rätsch.)

The three Moirai, or goddesses of fate, from late antiquity, depicted on a Floor in the house of Dionysus on Cyprus. (Photograph by Christian Rätsch.)

These three women on a classical mosaic in Pompeii also appear as the goddesses of fate. They are called the “three tragic masks” in literature. The objects on the table can be recognized (from left to right) as a grass or henbane panicle, a censer, and a Flat box with a lid. The three women, with tragic expressions, are drinking; the substance, presumably, is intoxicating. (Photograph by Alinari, National Museum, Naples.)

During antiquity the ithyphallic satyr was one of the intoxicated followers of Dionysus, the god of ecstasy. Because of the satyrs’ buck attributes, their bundled energy, and their intoxicated excesses, they became the icongraphic model for the Christian image of the devil. (Photograph by Claudia Müller-Ebeling.)

Two postcards illustrate scenes from the film
Alraune and the Golem.
On the left a woman, using a conjuring gesture, approaches a patient whose nerves are at the breaking point. On the right are a Rumpelstilskin-like mandrake manikin and the spirit that commands it.