Why Witches Flew on Broomsticks: The Real History
Quick Answer
Why did witches fly on broomsticks? The broomstick wasn't a metaphor. Medieval and early modern records describe witches applying a hallucinogenic ointment made from belladonna, henbane, mandrake, and jimsonweed to their bodies using a wooden staff or broom handle. The active compounds — tropane alkaloids including scopolamine and atropine — cause vivid hallucinations including the sensation of flying when absorbed through the skin. The broom was the applicator. The earliest documented reference comes from a 1324 Irish court record. The first known illustration of a witch on a broomstick is from 1451.
The broom wasn't a symbol. It was an applicator.
In 1324, authorities raided the home of Alice Kyteler, a wealthy Irish widow accused of sorcery. Among her possessions they found and documented: "a pipe of ointment, wherewith she greased a staff, upon which she ambled and galloped through thick and thin." That is the earliest known written record connecting witches to broomsticks. It is a property inventory from a criminal investigation. The broom was evidence.
What was in it
The recipe varied by region and century, but the active ingredients were consistent: belladonna, henbane, mandrake, and jimsonweed. Sometimes wolfsbane. All of them produce tropane alkaloids — scopolamine, atropine, and hyoscyamine — which at the right dose cause vivid hallucinations, the sensation of flying, shape-shifting, out-of-body experiences, and encounters with other people that feel completely real during and after.
Belladonna's name means "beautiful woman" in Italian. Renaissance women used it as eye drops to dilate their pupils, which was considered attractive at court. Same plant. Multiple uses. The eye drop dose could make you go blind. The flying ointment dose could kill you.
That's the key point. You couldn't eat these plants. Oral ingestion at doses high enough to hallucinate causes convulsions, respiratory failure, and death. What the people using these ointments had discovered — and what modern pharmacology confirms — is that transdermal absorption is different. These compounds are fat-soluble. Mixed into a fat or oil base and rubbed onto the skin, they absorb slowly and produce the hallucinogenic effects without the worst toxicity. The application sites that work best are the areas with the highest concentration of blood vessels near the surface: armpits, inner thighs, genitals. You need a smooth implement to apply it. A broomstick handle works. You already have one in the kitchen.
The physician and the sleeping woman
Around 1545, a Spanish court physician named Andrés de Laguna was traveling through the region of Metz when he was called to the home of a couple accused of witchcraft. He found them both catatonic — rigid, unresponsive, deeply unconscious. Their bodies were covered in a greenish ointment.
De Laguna collected a sample. Later, with a female patient who had trouble sleeping, he applied the ointment to her body. She slept for 36 hours. He sat there and waited and documented the time. When she woke, she was disoriented and disappointed. She had been with a young lover, she said. Dancing. Everything vivid and real. She didn't want to come back.
De Laguna was not credulous. He identified the plants in the ointment — hemlock, henbane, mandrake — and published his account in a 1555 commentary on Dioscorides. He described the effect as pharmaceutical, not supernatural. He was trying to understand it.
Why a broom specifically
The broom was already a loaded object before witches entered the picture. In medieval Europe, a broom propped outside the door signaled that the woman of the house was available or the man was away. Brooms were associated with domestic labor, with women, with the boundary between inside and outside. A woman leaving the house at night on a broom was a legible image of disorder before any hallucinogens were involved.
The earliest illustration of witches on broomsticks is from 1451, in a French manuscript called "Le Champion des Dames" — The Defender of Ladies. Two figures flying on sticks. Twenty-seven years before the Malleus Maleficarum, the inquisitors' handbook that systematized the witch panic. The image was already circulating before the persecution got organized.
In 1453, a French priest named Guillaume Edelin confessed to watching his mother grease a broomstick and fly out through the chimney. Edelin was notable because he was a man and a priest — not the typical profile of the accused. He was executed anyway.
Johann Weyer, a 16th century physician, documented the ointments in clinical detail. Weyer was one of the most vocal skeptics of the witch trials — he was trying to get women acquitted by arguing they were pharmacologically altered, not diabolically possessed. His account of the application method, and the sensation of rising into the air and flying that followed, is one of the most specific in the historical record. He was on the side of the accused and still wrote it all down.
What they thought they were flying to
The women who used these ointments described flying to gatherings. The witches' sabbath. Feasts. Dances. Sexual encounters with strangers. Meetings with the devil. The confessions were vivid, specific, and remarkably consistent across countries and centuries.
Scopolamine produces exactly this. Hallucinations under tropane alkaloids are not abstract or impressionistic. They are narrative. Populated. They unfold like real events. They feel real during and feel real after. Women who described flying to sabbaths and meeting other witches weren't inventing confessions under torture. Some of them had genuinely experienced something. The pharmacology explains the consistency better than any other theory.
This is not an explanation for the witch trials. Most of the people executed had nothing to do with any ointment. They were accused because they were old or difficult or owned land someone wanted or a neighbor's child got sick. The flying ointment doesn't explain the persecution. It just explains what was happening in some of the confessions that described flying — women who were genuinely convinced they had gone somewhere, because they had, chemically speaking.
The church looked at a woman coming out of a 36-hour stupor describing dances and lovers and called it the devil's work. The physician looked at the same thing and wrote down the recipe.
If you like the history that didn't make it into the textbook, The Horrors Persist shirt is for you. The full horror collection is here. For who actually died in the witch trials and why, the post on Salem covers it. And for the pattern of who gets accused of witchcraft across history, you didn't have to be a witch to get burned goes into it.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Why did witches fly on broomsticks?
The broomstick was an applicator for hallucinogenic ointments made from plants like belladonna, henbane, and mandrake. These plants contain tropane alkaloids — scopolamine and atropine — which cause intense hallucinations including the sensation of flying when absorbed through the skin. The broom handle was used to apply the ointment to areas with high skin absorption. The earliest documented reference is from 1324, when Irish authorities seized a jar of ointment and a greased staff from the home of Alice Kyteler.
What was in a witch's flying ointment?
Historical recipes and trial records describe ointments containing belladonna (deadly nightshade), henbane, mandrake, jimsonweed, and sometimes wolfsbane. All of these contain tropane alkaloids — specifically scopolamine, atropine, and hyoscyamine — which produce hallucinations, out-of-body sensations, and the vivid experience of flight when absorbed transdermally. The compounds are fat-soluble and were typically mixed into animal fat or oil to allow skin absorption.
Did witches actually believe they could fly?
Many likely did, because they were genuinely experiencing it pharmacologically. Scopolamine and related tropane alkaloids produce coherent, narrative hallucinations that feel completely real during and after the experience. Women who confessed to flying to sabbaths and meeting the devil were not necessarily lying or speaking metaphorically. Some were describing what they had genuinely experienced under the influence of these plants. Spanish physician Andrés de Laguna documented this in the 1550s after testing a witch's ointment on a patient, who slept for 36 hours and woke up describing a vivid dream of dancing with a lover.
When did the image of a witch on a broomstick originate?
The earliest known illustration of a witch flying on a broomstick appears in a 1451 French manuscript called "Le Champion des Dames." The earliest written account is from 1324, when Irish court records describe finding a greased staff in the home of Alice Kyteler. The image predates the major witch persecution by decades — the Malleus Maleficarum, the inquisitors' handbook, wasn't published until 1486.
Is belladonna actually dangerous?
Yes. Atropa belladonna (deadly nightshade) contains atropine and scopolamine, which are toxic at relatively low doses. Ingesting the plant can cause hallucinations, tachycardia, respiratory failure, and death. In Renaissance Italy, women used diluted belladonna as eye drops to dilate their pupils, which was considered attractive — a practice that could cause temporary blindness. The same plant was used in flying ointments. Medical derivatives of atropine are still used today in eye exams and as an antidote to nerve agent poisoning.
Does this explain the witch trials?
No. Most people executed in the witch trials had no connection to hallucinogenic herbs. They were accused because of social conflict, property disputes, perceived nonconformity, or just bad luck. The flying ointment explains why some confessions describe remarkably consistent and vivid experiences of flight and sabbaths — those accounts may reflect real pharmacological experiences. It does not explain or excuse the persecution, which killed tens of thousands of people across Europe and America who were targeted for reasons that had nothing to do with any plant.
