When reading about witches in medieval Europe, I often come across the supposed origin of witches flying on broomsticks- namely, that witches would perform rituals by smearing broomsticks and similar staffs with an ointment made from psychotropic plants and berries like deadly nightshade and belladonna, which they would either "ride" like a hobby horse while nude, or even use as a dildo to cause hallucinations like seeing demons or sensations of flight.
However, something feels off about this story- I can't explain exactly how or why, but it reminds me of a lot of apocryphal historical tidbits that are often touted as fact but have no concrete evidence to back it up. Can anyone here set the record straight?
Hi there! u/6FtAboveGround provided a detailed answer to this very question 7 months ago. I hope their answer helps you out.
I'd like to add a bit of a sidetrack to the discussion, to show OP what historically rigorous examination of psychadelic use looks like. I read a good amount of "Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom" by Andy Letcher. It's a pretty exhaustive attempt to explain the history of mushroom use rigorously. He comes to the conclusion there's virtually no hard evidence of recreational mushroom use until the 1950s. Physical evidence is virtually impossible to find, since mushrooms and the like decompose relatively fast, psychadelic use requires no paraphernalia, and that there is little in any written sources which unambiguously refers to recreational mushroom use. Further, any texts which do attempt primitive mycology and describe effects similar to psychadelic mushrooms refer to them as poisonous, a trend which carries through various 17th-19th century doctor's reports.
Many people who have read about mushroom use have heard the story of Mongolian men drinking urine to maintain a mushroom high. Andy Letcher sources this back to a real person who traveled that far east and recounted his stories. They were so sensational they were republished in novels and spread far and wide - the myth of a strange, foreign culture titillated English audiences. The point being, if something so relatively tame to the OP's story become fodder for books in the 19th century, it seems probable OP's account would as well.
Terrence McKenna and the like seem to not be offering much of actual historical substance when they impose modern psychadelic use onto historical actors. These highly speculative historical interpretations are always dangerous, and psychadelic advocates are often much more confident in their views than the evidence warrants. As a rule of thumb I think OP is very right to be skeptical of the claims. Of course, proving the absence of a source is going to be incredibly difficult, so I can't say for sure there's no source for it. But it doesn't seem congruous with the results of other rigorous looks at the history of psychadelic use.