Saturn, the Flying Ointment, and the Witches

Culpeper and the older herbalists place the nightshades under Saturn, the cold, heavy, malefic planet, which suits a plant of shadow and poison. Belladonna belongs, with henbane and datura, to the group of tropane-bearing nightshades associated with European witchcraft and the so-called flying ointments, salves compounded, in the trial literature and later reconstruction, from these plants, whose alkaloids produce delirium, dissociation and vivid sensations of flight. The connection between the witches' flight and the pharmacology of the nightshades is genuinely argued by historians, though how far the ointments were ever really used, as against being a fantasy of their prosecutors, remains uncertain. What is not uncertain is the plant's lethality.

Belladonna's toxicity produced a genuine modern regulatory episode: homeopathic teething products containing trace amounts of belladonna were pulled from the American market after the US Food and Drug Administration warned in 2016 and 2017 that some batches had been found with inconsistent, unsafely high amounts of the plant's alkaloids, a case in which the manufacturing process rather than any traditional use was at fault, and one that illustrates why the plant's warning label has never lost its relevance.