The historical Merlin may have been the last of his kind. In the second half of the first millennium CE, Christianity became established in Britain. Peaceful coexistence between the official religion and druidical magic was no longer an option: magical knowledge was stamped out or driven underground. This was the age of witches: isolated women who kept alive the traditional techniques of foretelling the future and using charms and curses. Witches tended not to write down their lore for fear of persecution; both their knowledge and their religious beliefs have survived primarily through oral tradition.
Like the shamans and druids before them, witches amassed a body of herbal and pharmacological knowledge. This chemical expertise took two main forms:
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ritual drugs, which would induce unconsciousness or hallucination |
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medicinal drugs |
Through the ages, magic often involved taking drugs and seeing things. Where the druids had ergot and the shamans had mushrooms, witches had mandrake. The mandrake has long been regarded as having magical properties, perhaps because its forked root gives the plant a human-like shape. According to tradition, the plant would scream when it was pulled out of the ground. Consequently, mandrake was not dug up by hand; instead, a dog would be harnessed to the root and encouraged to drag it out of the ground.
The mysteries of the mandrake are not limited to its shape. It is related to henbane and deadly nightshade. All three contain a number of very powerful alkaloids. When absorbed into the body, these chemical substances can cause double vision, hallucination and even coma. With their knowledge of the effects of mandrake, witches would have been able to dose themselves to produce the required effects without risking their lives.
The witch's cauldron would have been used to boil the herbs in a fatty solution; this produced an ointment that the witch would smear on her body. A trance-like state would follow, with the witch experiencing sensations of flying - this is probably the origin of the familiar imagery of witches flying on broomsticks. Witches, like druids and shamans before them, derived some of their authority from their apparent ability to travel into another world.
What began as a search for hallucinogens eventually turned into medicine. In fact, the dividing line between the two was once unclear. In the days before anaesthesia, they may well have been used to knock out anyone undergoing surgery. Drugs may also have been administered to people experiencing psychological problems, as a form of therapy.
Some other herbal remedies had less dramatic but equally striking effects. St John's wort was valued in traditional herbal medicine; it was linked with sunlight, an association suggested by its bright yellow flowers. The plant is now known to contain a substance which promotes neural activity in the brain. It is now widely used to combat depressive conditions, including SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder), a condition triggered by insufficient absorption of sunlight in winter.
Due to their potentially fatal side-effects, alkaloids have now fallen out of use in medicine. However, interest in mandrake is reviving. The plant is now under investigation by pharmaceutical companies; substances have been identified in the mandrake root which could lead to new treatments for HIV and even cancer. Modern medicine could still have something to learn from the chemical lore of the witches.
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