Witches Brews

The magical and medicinal plant lore of the rural "wise woman" (or man) in Anglo-Saxon, Medieval and Early Modern Europe may not occupy a period we can properly call prehistory, but we can say that it was outside history, in that it was a living knowledge largely overlooked or dismissed by the ruling classes and the sophisticates, or discouraged and repressed by the Church. The Church-orchestrated witch-persecutions of the late Middle Ages transformed what was in fact a quietly surviving country tradition into what was hysterically and neurotically seen as a satanic activity.

One of the key elements of "witch lore" was that witches were able to fly on broomsticks, rods or other implements to their sabbats and other night-time gatherings in the wilderness beyond the pale of the town or village. "Flying ointments" were often used, either smeared on the person's body or flying implements. Long before the Church contextualised this "flying out" to the wilderness as a diabolic practice, however, it was happening simply as part of the practice of women and men wise in the rural magic arts and healing based on arcane plant knowledge. The people who became identified as "witches" by the Church were in actuality simply the continuation of an ancient tradition of "night travellers." In northern Europe they were called qveldriga, "night rider," or myrkrida, "rider in the dark." In Scandinavia, there was the tradition of seidhr, in which a prophetess or seidhonka would travel around farmsteads and hamlets with a group of girls to give divinatory trance-sessions. She wore a ritual costume and carried a staff. The goddess Freya, who taught Odin the secrets of magical flight, was the patronal mistress of seidhr. "Night travellers and the later witches are carelessly lumped together," Hans Peter Duerr warns.

by Paul Devereux

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