For centuries, people have turned to botany for medicine, spiritual enlightenment, and communal bonding. Across the world, people in the Middle and Medieval Ages have used plants, fungi, and even mold for rituals, healing, and exploration:
- The Aztecs would crush morning glory seeds and boil them into a decoction called ololiuqui, which contained alkaloids that are similar to LSD.
- In Siberia, the urine of someone who consumed toasted fly agaric mushroom decoction (or mixed with blueberries and reindeer milk) has psychoactive properties.
- Ergot is a fungus that would grow on rye and other grains like rye and would cause hallucinations and even death if consumed.
Despite being used in rituals or in the presence of a healer or shaman, dealing with psychedelics in the Middle Ages was often a double-edged sword.
According to The Witches’ Ointment: The Secret History of Psychedelic Magic by Thomas Hatsis:
“Witches’ ointments” were magical drug (veneficium) pastes, ointments, and oils that women and men were said to smear over their bodies; those anointed would then fall into a deep sleep (soporatum), experience fantastic visions, and upon waking claim to have traveled great distances and copulated with others. Contemporary reports have led some modern scholars to theorize that the so-called witches’ ointments contained soporific, hallucinogenic, or otherwise psychotropic ingredients mostly culled from the Solanaceae family of plants and that the effects of these drugs were the cause of such bizarre delusions. This theory is not without evidence; most historians of medieval European magic agree that several kinds of medical folk magic existed and were practiced by low-strata women and men. There is little doubt that this folk magic involved the use of plants and herbs in remedies and potions. Mostly when ointments and potions are mentioned in trial records, they are used to heal; cause insanity; incite love, harm, or death in people; and/or cause harm and death to animals.”
In our article “Witch, Please: Broomsticks Are Psychedelic,” we take a dive into what other potions and ointments so-called witches would brew. But, even in cases of healing and helpfulness, we all know how a charge of witchcraft could end up for the accused.
Another downside was the potential harm a plant could cause. People in the Middle Ages didn’t have the same resources that we do today, and before anyone knew something was poison — someone had to find out the hard way.
In Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln’s Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities by Amy Stewart, the author dives deep into flora you should definitely avoid:
“Plants that are monstrously ill-mannered deserve recognition, too: kudzu has devoured cars and buildings in the American South, and a seaweed known as killer algae escaped from Jacques Cousteau’s aquarium in Monaco and continues to smother ocean floors around the world. The horrid corpse flower reeks of dead bodies; the carnivorous Nepenthes truncata can devour a mouse; and the whistling thorn acacia harbors an army of aggressive ants that attack anyone who comes near the tree. Even a few interlopers from outside the plant kingdom — hallucinogenic mushrooms, toxic algae — merit inclusion here for their wicked ways.”
