Editing Flying ointment (section)

==Body in coma and riding on beasts==
{{Unreferenced section|date=July 2017}}
[[File:Hexen bereiten eine magische Salbe zu.jpeg|thumb|upright=1.3|Witches prepare a magic salve. Note naked witch top left riding through the air mounted upon a goat. ([[woodcut]], 1571)]]
{{blockquote|anointing themselves with certain unguents...they are carried by night through the air to distant lands to do certain black magic...but nothing of this is true, though they think it to be...''while they are thus dead and cold, they have no more feeling than a corpse and may be scourged and burnt''; but after the time agreed upon...their senses are liberated, they arise well and merry, relate what they have done, and bring news from other lands.[Italics not original]<ref>Ciruelo, Pedro : ''Tratado en el cual se repruevan todas las supersticiones y hechizerías'', pub. Barcelona 1628, P.II, c. 1, N. 6, pps. 45–46, quoted in H.C. Lea : ''Materials Toward a History of Witchcraft'', pub. Thomas Yoseloff New York and London 1957,  page 413.</ref>}}
[[Dominican Order|Dominican]] churchman [[Bartolommeo Spina]] of [[Pisa]] gives two accounts of the power of the flying ointment in his ''Tractatus de strigibus sive maleficis'' ('Treatise on witches or evildoers') of 1525.
The first concerns an incident in the life of his acquaintance Augustus de Turre of [[Bergamo]], a physician. While studying medicine in [[Pavia]] as a young man, Augustus returned late one night to his lodgings (without a key) to find no one awake to let him in. Climbing up to a balcony, he was able to enter through a window, and at once sought out the maidservant, who should have been awake to admit him. On checking her room, however, he found her lying unconscious – beyond rousing – on the floor. The following morning he tried to question her on the matter, but she would only reply that she had been 'on a journey'.

Bartolommeo's second account is more suggestive and points toward another element in the witches' 'flights'. It concerns a certain [[notary]] of [[Lugano]] who, unable to find his wife one morning, searched for her all over their estate and finally discovered her lying deeply unconscious, naked and dirty with her vagina exposed, in a corner of the pigsty. The notary 'immediately understood that she was a witch' (!) and at first wanted to kill her on the spot, but, thinking better of such rashness, waited until she recovered from her stupor, in order to question her. Terrified by his wrath, the poor woman fell to her knees and confessed that during the night she had 'been on a journey'.<ref>Ginzburg, Carlo. ''Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath''. New York: Pantheon Books, 1991.</ref>

Light is cast on the tale of the notary's wife by two accounts widely separated in time but revealing a persistent theme in European Witchcraft. The first is that of [[Regino of Prüm]] whose ''De synodalibus causis et disciplinis ecclesiasticis libri duo'' (circa 906 C.E.) speaks of women who 'seduced...by demons...insist that they ride at night ''on certain beasts'' [italics not original] together with [[Diana (mythology)|Diana]], goddess of the pagans, and a great multitude of women; that they cover great distances in the silence of the deepest night...'<ref>Quoted in : Ginzburg, Carlo, ''Ecstasies. Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath'', New York, 1991, {{ISBN|0-226-29693-8}}. First published in Italian as ''Storia notturna: Una decifrazione del Sabba'', 1989.</ref> (See also [[Canon Episcopi]]).<ref>Ginzburg, Carlo. ''Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath''. New York: Pantheon Books, 1991.</ref>

The second account dates from some 800 years later, coming from [[Norway]] in the early 18th century and is the testimony, at the age of thirteen, of one Siri Jørgensdatter. Siri claimed that when she was seven her grandmother had taken her to the witches' sabbath on the mountain meadow [[Blockula]] ('blue-hill'): her grandmother led her to a pigsty, where she smeared a [[Domestic pig|sow]] with some ointment which she took from a [[Horn (anatomy)|horn]], whereupon grandmother and granddaughter mounted the animal and, after a short ride through the air, arrived at a building on the Sabbath mountain.<ref>Quoted in Pickering, David : ''A Dictionary of Witchcraft'' pub. David Pickering 2014.</ref>