Great catch Mel.
I have looked into the ancient use of Henbane. Found some interesting theories to do with Henbane and the Witches broom.
In my opinion Witches and Warlocks and their victims never leave the ground except in their minds. The Craft is just so much misdirection and “smoke and mirrors” in the very suspicious minds among us. Very much like dimwit’s aging playbooks.
If witches and warlocks were going to influence and use young boy and girl “derps” they would be smart to get access to early childhood and medical records to recruit the most susceptible to groom and program.
Then one would need gingerbread cakes/candy fun houses and tea parties to gain access, hook and draw the liddle ones through a looking glass.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/10/why-do-witches-ride-brooms-nsfw/281037/
Excerpts-
It started with bread.
In the Europe of the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, bread was made, in large part, with rye. And rye and rye-like plants can host fungus—ergot*—that can, when consumed in high doses, be lethal. In smaller doses, however, ergot can be a powerful hallucinogen. Records from the 14th to the 17th century mention Europeans’ affliction with “dancing mania,” which found groups of people dancing through streets—often speaking nonsense and foaming at the mouth as they did so—until they collapsed from exhaustion. Those who experienced the “mania” would later describe the wild visions that accompanied it. (In the 20th century, Albert Hofmann would realize the psychedelic effects of LSD while studying ergot.)
So people, as people are wont to do, adapted this knowledge, figuring out ways to tame ergot, essentially, for hallucinatory purposes. And they experimented with other plants, as well. 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). 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.
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. When consumed, those old-school hallucinogens could cause assorted unpleasantnesses—including nausea, vomiting, and skin irritation. What people realized, though, was that absorbing them through the skin could lead to hallucinations that arrived without the unsavory side effects. And the most receptive areas of the body for that absorption were the sweat glands of the armpits ... and the mucus membranes of the genitals.
So people used their developing pharmacological knowledge to produce drug-laden balms—or, yep, “witch’s brews.” And to distribute those salves with maximum effectiveness, these crafty hallucinators borrowed a technology from the home: a broom. Specifically, the handle of the broom. And then ... you get the idea...
End Excerpts-
I take this to mean that the - means of external application as detailed would help to overcome first-pass hepatic metabolism as would occur with oral ingestion.
I won’t excerpt anymore here. It is an interesting if not vulgar theory none the less, so the more curious may read more at the links.
I will never look at Halloween the same way.
The dancing mania mentioned is so strange. I have been digging in the hole of the red shoes (forced to dance until dead) fairytale off and on for a while. Like so much else the red shoes have been outside my notice forever. But not anymore.
https://sciencebasedlife.wordpress.com/2012/03/30/why-do-witches-ride-broomsticks/
https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/why-do-witches-fly-brooms/
The Day of St. Anthony’s Fire
by John G. Fuller
4.18 · Rating details · 104 ratings · 19 reviews
This is the strange, true, almost incredible story of a small French village where in ‘51 hundreds of townspeople went mad on a single night. Many of the most highly regarded citizens leaped from windows or jumped into the Rhone, screaming that their heads were made of copper, their bodies wrapped in snakes, their limbs swollen to gigantic size or shrunken to tiny appendages. Others ran through the streets, claiming to be chased by “bandits with donkey ears”, by tigers, lions & other terrifying apparitions. Animals went berserk. Dogs ripped bark from trees until their teeth fell out. Cats dragged themselves along the floor in grotesque contortions. Ducks strutted like penguins. Villagers & animals died right & left.
Bit by bit, the story behind the tragedy in Pont-St-Esprit—a tiny Provencial village of twisted streets that looks much today as it did in the Middle Ages—unfolded to doctors & toxcologists. That story, one of the most bizarre in modern medical history, is movingly recounted in The Day of St. Anthony’s Fire.
Throughout the Middle Ages & during other times in history, similar hallucinatory outbreaks occurred. They were called St. Anthony’s Fire because it was believed that only prayers to the saint could hold the disease in check.
Even modern medicine could find no way to check the disease. Drugs failed to bring even temporary relief. Hundreds in the village suffered for weeks, with total agonizing insomnia, never knowing when they might once more suddenly go berserk.
The cause of St. Anthony’s Fire was known since early history to be ergot, a mold found on rye grain that at rare times inexplicably became posionous enough to create monstrous hallucinations & death.
In ‘51 little significance was attached to the fact that the base of ergot was lysergic acid, also the base for LSD, a drug just coming to the attention of scientists at the time—a drug so powerful that one eye-dropperful could cause as many as 5000 people to hallucinate for hours.
At this point, the story becomes a vividly absorbing medical detective story demonstrating the possibility that a strange, spontaneous form of LSD might have caused the human tragedy that came to the hapless villagers of Pont-St-Esprit.