technomage116's video: The Witch s Ointment - Thomas Hatsis

This is an amateur reading of the end of Thomas Hatsis's amazing ethnobotanical assay about the origin of the myth that witch's rubbed nightshade or other hallucinogenic substances on brooms and stuck them up their vaginas. Nightshade gives a sense of movement(Schultes & Hoffman, Plants of the Gods), and it was believed that they fly about on something akin to a shamanic journey. This book was insane. It was quite a read. Took me a long time, but I finally got through it. It was very scholarly too, referencing stuff like city documents about witch's from the 1400's in Europe. Thomas Hatsis is an historian of witchcraft, magic, Western religions, contemporary psychedelia, entheogens, and medieval pharmacopeia. He recently published The Witches Ointment: The Secret History of Psychedelic Magic the first study to address how medieval witches and Renaissance magicians utilized psychedelic and entheogenic drugs in their magical systems. A derbygypsy, juggler, musician, and potion-mixer, Hatsis also skates throughout the global derby underworld, dodging police, visiting rare archives, slinging elixirs, and coaching roller derby. He lives … somewhere … with a kitty cat.