He was arrested in 1453 and tried for witchcraft after publicly criticizing the church’s warnings about witches. Edelin was a priest from Saint-Germain-en-Laye, near Paris. From the beginning, brooms and besoms were associated primarily with women, and this ubiquitous household object became a powerful symbol of female domesticity.ĭespite this, the first witch to confess to riding a broom or besom was a man: Guillaume Edelin. It gradually replaced the Old English word besom, though both terms appear to have been used until at least the 18th century. The word broom comes from the actual plant, or shrub, that was used to make many early sweeping devices. Bryan Lowder writes, this household task even shows up in the New Testament, which dates to the first and second centuries A.D. It’s not clear exactly when the broom itself was first invented, but the act of sweeping goes back to ancient times, when people likely used bunches of thin sticks, reeds and other natural fibers to sweep aside dust or ash from a fire or hearth. But the actual history behind how witches came to be associated with such an everyday household object is anything but dull. * This section updated to remove references to ergot forming on already-baked bread ergotism results from the grain itself being tainted.The evil green-skinned witch flying on her magic broomstick may be a Halloween icon-and a well-worn stereotype. Her work is the subject of continued debate, but has been substantiated by later scholars: The Massachusetts of 1692 likely did see an outbreak of the fungus that had contributed, in other contexts, to "witch's brew." In 1976, Linnda Caporael presented work suggesting that the Massachusetts of the late 17th century had been the unknowing victim of an outbreak of rye ergot. But "witches" in the cultural imagination, of course, don't necessarily need re-purposed cleaning supplies to be accused of sorcery. So there you have it, rye to flying brooms. I soared where my hallucinations-the clouds, the lowering sky, herds of beasts, falling leaves … billowing streamers of steam and rivers of molten metal-were swirling along. At the same time I experienced an intoxicating sensation of flying …. Each part of my body seemed to be going off on its own, and I was seized with the fear that I was falling apart. My teeth were clenched, and a dizzied rage took possession of me … but I also know that I was permeated by a peculiar sense of well-being connected with the crazy sensation that my feet were growing lighter, expanding and breaking loose from my own body. So people used their developing pharmacological knowledge to produce drug-laden balms-or, yep, " witch's brews." And t o distribute those salves with maximum effectiveness, these crafty hallucinators borrowed a technology from the home: a broom. And the most receptive areas of the body for that absorption were the sweat glands of the armpits. What people realized, though, was that absorbing them through the skin could lead to hallucinations that arrived without the unsavory side effects. When consumed, those old-school hallucinogens could cause assorted unpleasantnesses-including nausea, vomiting, and skin irritation. So why do the brooms fit into this? Because to achieve their hallucinations, these early drug users needed a distribution method that was a little more complicated than simple ingestion. Writing in the 16th century, the Spanish court physician Andrés de Laguna claimed to have taken "a pot full of a certain green ointment … composed of herbs such as hemlock, nightshade, henbane, and mandrake" from the home of a couple accused of witchcraft. Forbes's David Kroll notes that there are also hallucinogenic chemicals in Atropa belladonna (deadly nightshade), Hyoscyamus niger (henbane), Mandragora officinarum (mandrake), and Datura stramonium (jimsonweed). And they experimented with other plants, as well. So people, as people are wont to do, adapted this knowledge, figuring out ways to tame ergot, essentially, for hallucinatory purposes. A 17th-century wood engraving of a "witch" being prepared for "flight" (Wellcome Institute, London, via John Mann)
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