THE FLYING WITCH
Merry Meet :))) Many of you are probably very familiar with the witch's broom. Some of you may also be aware that these brooms were used in a myriad of ways to include cleansing negative energies from the home. How about the many pictures we see of witch's flying on brooms though? Do you know where this comes from?
Dating as far back as the early 14th and 15th centuries, witches would use what were referred to as "flying ointments." One theory is that these ointments were used to assist with what we refer to today as Astral Travel. Astral travel is basically when we work to seperate our astral body from our physical body and travel to the astral plane. Think of it sort of like dreaming but while awake. Today we can use herbs and crystals to assist us with this process, but do to some herbs having been proved to be dangerous, we cannot achieve this state of being through herbs alone. Today our goal with astral travel is to maintain in control of our experiences. Some may still use the stronger herbs to assist with their astral journeys today. But astral travel is for another article ;)
As I mentioned before some of the herbs used to produce these effects in those days were highly toxic. The witches had to take great care when making these salves, to make sure the amount used was enought to produce visions, and not enough to be lethal. These salves produced not only the visions of astral travel, but they often made them feel as if they were flying. Hence why a witch could "fly" to a ritual on a sabbat. It is more likely they were using the ointments during the ritual by annointing their body with them. This then increased their visions on that evening, and thus could give them the sense of flying. They were not actually flying around on broomsticks. There are other theories as to their use of the salve on the broomstick, but I will leave those for you to find. ;)
