Thoughtless for the Day

[Notice: Not that the following piece needed it, but I've sprinkled this post with random paragraphs from Lisa "Blair" Whelchel's Extra-Spooooooky October E-Letter]

Who hasn't looked at a picture of a witch riding a broomstick and thought "Paging Dr. Freud. Dr. Sigmund Freud to the white courtesy phone"? So what is the deal with witches and broomsticks anyway? For the answer to that question, we must turn, once more, to the late Marvin Harris author of Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches. (Please note that here, Dr. Harris is relying heavily on the work of Professor Michael Harner). And that answer is going to be more than a little dirty.

I'm writing this E-letter from a hotel room in Moline, Illinois. It feels so much more like October here than it does in Texas! Especially staying in this hotel called, "The Lodge," where I'm sure I smelled a pipe when I walked into the lobby. I was immediately drawn to a roaring fireplace in the center of the room with a painting hung above it, which I commented to Steve looked like it belonged in the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland. I'm going to soak up this autumnal atmosphere tonight. (Because tomorrow I will be in Phoenix, Arizona!)

Let's start by wrapping our heads around the fact that there may have been a great many living in the Middle Ages who thought they could fly, and the reason they thought that they could fly was pretty much the same reason that Dianne Linkletter thought she could fly. (yeah, I know; so there's no need to flood the comments section)

Only the culprit in the case of the witches wasn't LSD, but a substance known as atropine: a powerful hallucinogen found in plants like mandrake, belladonna, and henbane. It seems that the witches would combine the atropine with several other ingredients to create pungent, greenish, gooey oil which they would then apply causing them to lapse into a trance-lake state and trip like Dennis Hopper chewing on Klaus Kinski's pituitary gland.

Here's an account of an experiment conducted by Andres Laguna, the Timothy Leary of sixteenth century France, who managed to score some "witch's oil" and tested its properties on the wife of the local hangman:

"...she suddenly leapt slept such a sound sleep, with her eyes open like a rabbit (she also fittingly looked like a boiled hare*), that I could not imagine how to wake her."

Laguna did manage to wake the woman, albeit thirty-six hours later. And as you'll see, she was not a morning person, complaining:

"Why do you wake me at such an inopportune time? I was surrounded by all the pleasures and delights of the world."

At this point the woman turned to her husband and said:

"...all stinking of hanged men. Knavish one, know that I have made you a cuckold, and with a lover younger and better than you."

God is so sweet to me, most often through His children. A gracious lady just delivered a burlap-lined basket to my door with a loaf of homemade Pumpkin Pie bread wrapped in harvest-colored gingham tied together with strands of hemp rope. I brewed a pot of coffee in the bathroom and now I'm sitting here in my sock feet doing what I love more than anything, sipping something hot, nibbling something sweet and enjoying rich conversation with a friend...you.

No wonder the oil was so popular. Although it should be noted that the majority of users just zoned out and imagined that they were flying.

But the best part isn't that Medieval Europe was like Haight Asbury in the 60's(right down to the general disregard for person hygiene), no the best best part is how the witches got the atropine into their systems: and that's where the broomsticks come in. You see the best way to absorb the atropine mixture would be to apply it to ones mucus membranes. For women that’s the vagina, or as it is scientifically known "the hoo-ha" and the handiest "applicator" available would be a (altogether on three. One, two, three) broomstick.

Woman takes drugs. Woman imagines she's been flying. Woman wakes up next to broomstick. Woman puts two and two together and gets five. Case closed.

Next time Marvin Harris will help us understand just why the Inquisition went after witches in the first place.

Call me crazy, but I decided this afternoon to talk tonight from Job 3:25, "For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me and that which I was afraid of is come unto me." I'm speaking at a Christian school fundraiser and I want to share my personal experience regarding money. I can live fairly generously and open-handedly with money because I've lost it all before and when Steve and I hit rock-bottom financially, we discovered that God was there. He filled up the hole with treasure more valuable than money. [Way to go, Steve! Fill up that hole!]

* I swear to fuck that Laguna actually wrote that.