Goddess-Based Entheogenism and the Satanic Conspiracy

Goddess-Based Entheogenism and the Satanic Conspiracy

One of the least understood aspects of plant medicine history discussed in the modern psychedelic Renaissance rests in the experiences found among medieval healers, whose practices the Church bastardized as “witchcraft” during the early modern period. And while men were actually executed more than women by Church authorities up until the 14th century,1 it was a specifically goddess-based religion that authorities would condemn at the start of the 15th century that served as justification for the mass conflagrations (of mostly women) during those most unholy years. While the lives and beliefs of far too many of those unfortunate souls consigned to the flames will forever remain lost to us, we happen to know quite a bit—quite a bit from a fragmented historical record perspective—about a few of them. So let’s focus our gaze upon that most tumultuous 15th century—a time of constant wars, plagues, famines, and the rise of the “stereotypical witch” (discussed in a moment)—and meet one of the most famous healers in all of Italy, Matteuccia di Francesco (d. 1428).2

A Little Background


In both the medieval and the early modern period traveling preachers acted as the “newscasters” of the day. They journeyed from hamlet to town to village to city telling each congregation of the various sins found throughout the land. At a time when distant travel was limited to most everyone (besides soldiers, merchants, and, of course, the preachers themselves), these reports provided the only news into what occurred outside a person’s immediate surroundings. These traveling preachers would copy these stories into collections called exempla and pass them around to each other to use if they ever needed extra material with which to scare the shit out of their audiences. Everything from lying to stealing to drunkenness appears in these stories. Even Joan of Arc’s “sins” appear in a popular work of exemplum of the time.3 Around the early 1400s some of these preachers began writing about a certain kind of woman as exempla. These women held knowledge of the plants found in their immediate environment, their medicinal qualities, as well as magical traditions about them. Some of them even called upon helper spirits to aid in their medical practices. Latin authors sometimes called these women vetulas expertissimas (“highly expert old women”), but local dialects had different names for them. As one example, in some parts of Germany she was called unholden, which singles her out as a worshiper of the Germanic Goddess Holda. The Dominican friar and papal inquisitor, Bernard Gui, referred to them as “fairy/witch women.”4 These fairy woman engaged in a most peculiar practice, according to Gui. They would “collect herbs while genuflecting and facing the East, and sing incantations to their goddess.5 In one of those preachers’ handbooks, Predigten or Sermons (c. 1425), the author, Johannes Nider (1380 – 1438) wanted to inform his congregation about the First Commandment and the pitfalls of idolatry. Some of those gathered to listen to him speak had fallen ill between his visits. Instead of seeking out trained male physicians, those afflicted visited local woman physicians—vetulas expertissimas—those women like the unholden. Nider castigates anyone who would see one of these local herbalists instead of a university-trained doctor. After all, sometimes these unholden used their medications on themselves! He mentions an unholden he had heard about who would climb into a large kneading bowl, rub a soporific ointment over her body while singing incantations. The ointment would knock her out cold, sending her into a deep, but lucid, dream state, so as to join the pagan celebrations at Heuberg (or “Hay Mountain”).6 And Heuberg was not the only destination. Among many others, there was also Brocken (also called Blocksberg, or “Broken Mountain,”) Monte Sybil (“Sybil Mountain”), and La Note de Benivento (the “‘Night-Doings’ of Benevento”), where worshipers gathered not on a mountaintop, but instead around a walnut tree. Once arrived at any of these magical locations, the congregants would celebrate the gods of yore with banquets, dancing, and—as Herman von Sachesheim termed it—“ancient rhyme.”7 “Flying in spirit” (transvection) to any one of these places was, more or less, what we today might call an “entheogenic experience.” And in some places, like Sybil Mountain and the walnut tree of Benevento, these fabled lands were overseen by a Goddess.

Overseen by a Goddess … in a highly patriarchal society.  

The Witch Stereotype

Around the early 1400s, some theologians (but certainly not all) had decided that the practices of vetulas expertissimas or fairy women reeked of a new concept: “Satanic witchcraft” (Vaudrie), a fantastic, demonological veneer that they riveted onto the practices of wise-woman. These theologians re-imagined the Goddess as the Devil, their helper spirits as demons, and the plant medicines in their ointments as the boiled flesh of dead children. Furthermore, they used their abominable ointments not to fly to Heuberg or Sibyl Mountain or the walnut tree of Benevento, but instead to sinful congregations called “Sabbats,” sybaritic affairs overseen by Satan.8 At the Sabbat they would engage in demon fornication, devil worship, learn occult arts, and receive instructions on how to murder children (preferably unbaptized children) and cook their skin into grotesque poisons so they could spread plagues and diseases against pious Christians. At least these were the gruesome details peppered into the exempla of some itinerant preachers.

In 1426, one of those roaming preachers, Bernardino of Siena (1380 – 1444), made his way to Todi, Italy. He had been making the rounds all over Italy—stopping here, preaching there—delivering popular sermons to large crowds. We might even call him a “celebrity preacher,” on par with modern snake oil salesmen like Joel Osteen. While in Todi, he tried to use his fame to influence law. In some ways he was successful, drafting a legal code against magic titled De pena de incantatorum et facturariorum (The Penalties of Incantations and Sorcery). In other ways, his ideas fell flat. For example, Bernardino had beef with a certain obscure belief in spirit flight, called the Tregenda.9 We can get an idea of what was meant by Tregenda from an Italian poet and Dominican Jacopo Passavanti (d. 1357), who inspired Bernardino’s fervor:

Thus, it is found that demons who take on the appearance of men and women … go by night in company through certain regions … to spread heresy. … There are some people, especially women, who say that they go out at night in company with such a Tregenda, and name many men and women in their company; and they say that the mistresses of the horde who lead the others are Herodias, who killed John the Baptist, and the ancient Greek goddess Diana.10

But Bernardino couldn’t sell such a story to the local authorities, who did not seem to care about these practices (if they even believed in them at all). And the common people knew nothing of this Tragenda. They only knew of those weirdoes like Matteuccia di Francesco flew to the Night-Doings around the walnut tree of Benevento.

Matteuccia: the “Simple Sorcerer” of Todi

Matteuccia was a vetulas expertissimas, who specialized in love magic. She would perform abortions, break up marriages, concoct pocula amatoria (“recreational drug potions”), and supply battered women with magical herbs and spells to take revenge on abusive husbands. That was her public magical appearance anyway, for which she had achieved some degree of fame. Indeed, Matteuccia had flaunted her magic openly for clients in and around the Todi areas until Bernardino came to preach. Her arrest and inquest revealed that she was also a practitioner of a highly localized folk belief: she used a magical ointment to transform into a mouse and transvect to the Night-Doings of Benevento. Her trial record actually perseveres the earliest magical words we have in conjunction with a “psychedelic” salve: “Ointment, ointment, take me to the walnut tree of Benevento, over water, over wind, over all bad weather.”11 There she would join the company of a goddess.12 Bernardino may not have changed the law, but he certainly changed public opinion regarding Matteuccia’s magic, transvection to Benevento, and goddess worship. For this, the authorities of Todi, executed her in 1428.

Well, not exactly.

The authorities make no mention of any goddess, replacing Her name with “The Enemy of the Human Race,” i.e., Satan.13 Accordingly, Satan would instruct “deluded” women like Matteuccia to suck the blood out of nursing infants to use for maleficia (or “evil magic”). Instead of worshipping Her with sacred rites, the congregants who met in spirit around the walnut tree were worshipping the Devil. Here is the witch stereotype in action. Here is why we will never know the goddess’s name.

The bastards erased her from history.

Dear Matteuccia represents one of the first and clearest examples we have in the historical records that show how some early modern Church authorities demonized lay-healers by riveting a stereotype—the witch stereotype—over their practices.13 Today, when pop-witches and wiccans talk about “covens” and “witch assemblies,” they do not realize that they are carrying out, not the real traditions of these wise-women, but instead buying into the witch stereotype, created by some theologians to demonize the actual, “mind manifesting” plant practices of these women, and eventually send some of them to the stakes. There were no Sabbats; no Satan worship to speak of—just experiences that I call “somnitheogenic”14 that wound up on the business-end of a newly-sharpened demonological theory, which slowly transformed the various goddesses worshipped by common people into one all-encompassing Devil.

For a detailed account of how the witch stereotype attempted to erase the Goddess from history, please check out Tom Hatsis’ book The Witches’ Ointment: The Secret History of Psychedelic Magic (Park Street Press, 2015), available here.

Notes:

  1. Before the early modern period witch trials were often carried out by local villagers (sometimes to the admonition of Church authorities). The majority of people executed at this time (8th – 14th centuries) were men who practiced sorcery or ritual magic. For the Church’s condemnation of executing innocent women (especially that by Pope Gregory VII) see Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons: The Demonization of Christians in Medieval Christendom (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 213-14. For the Church’s outlaw of demon worship (at the time, a specifically male endeavor), see Jeffery Burton Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages (NY: Cornell University Press, 1972), 66.
  2. For a full exposé on Matteuccia see Thomas Hatsis, The Witches’ Ointment: The Secret History of Psychedelic Magic (VT: Park Street Press, 2015), 7 ff.
  3. Johannes Nider, Formicarius: Dialogus ad vitam christianam exemplo conditionum Formice (Cologne: Ulrich Zell, 1475), Bk. 5, Chp. 8.
  4. Bernard Gui, “Practica Inquistionis Haereticae Pravitatis des Inquisitors,” in Hansen, Quellen und Untersuchungen …, 48: “bona res.” This is an interesting term, as it translates to “good things” in vulgar Italian. It’s based on the earlier Latin bonus (“good”) and rēs (“things”). However, we know that medieval and Renaissance people associated this term with witches and/or fairies, as evidenced in Giambattista della Porta’s translation of Gui’s use of “bona res”; first, as the Latin “lamiarum,” which historically has meant “witches” (see, Io. Baptistae Portae Neapolitani, Magiae Naturalis Libri Vigint. Hanoviae: Typis Wechelianis, impehsis Danielias ac Dauidis Aubriorum & Clementis Schleichii, 1619), 5; and then from lamiarum it gets translated into Shakespearean English as “fairies” (see Richard Gaywood, ed., Natural Magick by John Baptista della Porta, A Neopoltane, in Twenty Books. London: Printed for Thomas Young and Samuel Speed, 1658), unpaged Preface.
  5. Gui, op. cit, 48; “… de collection herbarum flexis genibus versa facie ad orientum cum oration dominica.”
  6. Johannes Nider, “Predigten,” in Hansen (1901), 437; “du saß in ain mult … salb machent und enweg farent … si wölt über den Höwberg faren.”
  7. Quoted in Philip Stephen Barto, Tannhäuser and the Mountain of Venus: A Study in the Legend of the Germanic Paradise  (NY: Oxforf University Press, 1916), 19-20.  
  8. Sometimes call “synagogues,” an obvious allusion to the anti-Semitic sentiments of some of these demonologists.
  9. Probably from Vulgar Latin transienda (“transient/ephemeral”); borrowed from classic Latin transeō (“that which shall pass”).
  10. Jacopo Passavanti, Lo Specchio della vera penitenza (F.L. Polidori, 1856): “Cosi si truova [“truova” is a medieval Italian spelling for the modern verb “trovare,” meaning “to find” – in English we speak of a “treasure trove” or “found treasure”] ch’ e’ dimonii prendendo similitudine d’ uomini e di femmine … vanno si notte in ischiera per certe contrade … per seminare questo errore [errore, or “heresy” is a Latin loan word;read eresia for modern Italian] … alcune persone, e spezialmente femminie, che dicono di se medesime ch’elle vanno di notte in brigata con questa Tregenda, e compitano per nome molte di loro compagnia; e dicono che le donne della torma che guidano l’altre sono Erodia che fece uccidere san Giovanni Batosta, e la Diana antica dea de’ Greci.” [Technically, Passavanti is saying, “Herodias, who killed John the Baptist, and the ancient Greek goddess Diana.” I have updated the linguistic syntax to common American-English in the main text above – Hatsis.]
  11. Quoted in Domenico Mammoli, Processo alla strega Matteuccia di Francesco, 20 marzo 1428 (Res Tudertinae 14. Rome:  N.p., 1972), 210: “Unguento, unguento mandame a la note [vulgar Italian; reading “notte”] de Benivento [vulgar Italian; reading “Benevento”], supra acqua uento et supra ad omne maltempo.”
  12. We are not totally sure which goddess Bernardino is referring to, but Diana, Herodias, and an obscure “Iobaina” appear in a 1427 sermon he delivered in Siena; see Franco Mormando, The Preacher’s Demons: Bernardino of Siena and the Social Underworld of Early Renaissance Italy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 268.
  13. Katherine L. Jansen et. al., Medieval Italy: Texts in Translation, 210-11.
  14. For the best treatment of the “classical formulation of the witch” stereotype, see Russell, (1972), 227 ff.
  15. I.e, to “generate divinity on dreams.” See Tom Hatsis, Psychedelic Mystery Traditions: Spirit Plants, Magical Practice, Ecstatic States (VT: Park Street Press, 2018), 9.

Leave a Reply