As the drugs took effect, delusions of flight may have ensued while astride the broomstick's handle. If contemporary accounts are to be believed, "witches" applied this hallucinogenic ointment with the handle of a broom, smearing the ointment onto the length of the broom and then rubbing the handle against their genitals and even inserting it into the vagina. But high doses can lead to antimuscarinic syndrome: a state of altered consciousness often characterised by delirium and intense hallucinations. Low doses of these chemicals will induce a dry mouth and dilated pupils – and relieve the nausea of travel sickness. Scopolamine and its close cousin atropine are " muscarinic antagonists" – they bind to receptors in the nervous system that would, ordinarily, bind to the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. You will have created the green ointment of de Laguna's alleged witch. Tropane alkaloids are unremarkable additions to a modern medicine cabinet, but if you took the raw plant material and pounded it in molten fat, you'd extract an uncontrolled mixture of the alkaloids in their pure, base form. One of these, scopolamine (also known as hyoscine), is the active ingredient of travel-sickness medications such as Boot's Travel Calms and the skin patch Scopoderm. Like its close relatives henbane ( Hyoscymaus niger) and mandrake ( Mandragora officinarum), its leaves and berries are packed with chemicals called tropane alkaloids. Nightshade ( Atropa belladonna) is immediately recognisable for its deep purple fruit and was said to be tended by the Devil himself. Nightshade, henbane and mandrake are some of the most toxic plants in the family Solanaceae. More recently, this experience was allegedly felt by Gustav Schenk in 1966 when intoxicated with a similar drug.The Spanish court physician Andrés de Laguna, writing in the 16th century, claimed to have taken from the home of a couple accused of witchcraft "a pot full of a certain green ointment … composed of herbs such as hemlock, nightshade, henbane, and mandrake." The drugs are likely to have caused dreams of flying and weightlessness whilst still on the broom. Read the word hallucinogenic again, and that’s your first clue. Now this explains the notion of riding the broom, but not flying. Other, stranger methods, left them in less pain. People partook in this method of drug taking as they quickly learn that ingesting the drugs through food and drink left them in intestinal distress. Trying many different methods to get the drugs into their bodies, there were attempts to ingest the ointments into the system through more intimate locations. People would use plants to create ointments and ‘potions’ containing hallucinogens, something else that became heavily associated with witchcraft. In the Middle Ages, hallucinogenics were first discovered in plants, such as Henbane, and they were experimented with. Hold on to your witches’ hats, you’re in for a ride. However, they’re not the main reason that crops up when researching the connection. The reasons above seem like perfectly reasonable explanations for how witches became associated with brooms.
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