Until the mid-1960s many historians believed witchcraft was a pre-Christian pagan fertility ritual, witches worshipping the Horned God, whose consort was the Triple Goddess. The most notable advocate of this theory was the Egyptologist Margaret Murray. Then came revisionists led by Norman Cohn. Examination of witch trials suggested there had been no witchcraft: it was a ‘social construct’ of the Christian patriarchy persecuting innocent women, as it had innocent Jews indicted for the same satanic practices.
Professor Hutton is a follower of Cohn. His study, by ideological necessity, makes no reference to the historical and modern evidence that European witches used hallucinogenic drugs which produced psychedelic sensations of flying, time-space displacement, transformation into beasts, and close encounters, often sexual, with man-beast therianthropes such as the god Pan. The redcap Fly Agaric mushroom, which appears in many pictures showing witches, was one such psychedelic, as was psilocybin. The Solanaceae family of datura, nightshade, Belladonna, henbane, wolfsbane and mandrake give the sensation of flying when rubbed into the mucous membranes of vagina or anus as on a broomstick — and are heart-stopping poisons when ingested in even small amounts.
Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626) observed that ‘witches believe that they do that which they do not do, transforming themselves into other bodies, not by incantations or ceremonies, but by ointments and anointing themselves’.
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