Giambattista della Porta: The Witches' Ointment, Bodin and the Chapter That Vanished

In one of the most quoted passages of Renaissance natural philosophy, a Neapolitan gentleman watches through a crack in a door as an old woman rubs herself with an ointment, falls into a sleep so deep that a beating does not wake her, and then insists she has crossed seas and mountains. Giambattista della Porta printed that scene in 1558. Within three decades it had been used as proof that witches fly, as proof that they do not, and as stage business for a London playwright — and Porta himself had quietly taken the recipe out of his book. Here is what the printed record actually says, edition by edition.

The short answer

Giambattista della Porta (born 1535, probably in or near Vico Equense; died 4 February 1615 in Naples) was a Neapolitan natural philosopher, playwright and one of the best-known writers on "natural magic" in early modern Europe. His Magia naturalis appeared in four books in 1558 and in a heavily expanded twenty-book version in 1589; the English translation of 1658, Natural Magick, is based on the later version. He also wrote on cryptography (1563), physiognomy (1586), optics, distillation and pneumatics, and at least fourteen comedies. He founded an early learned society in Naples, was examined by the Inquisition, and joined the Accademia dei Lincei in 1610.

For readers interested in witchcraft, one chapter matters above all: Book II, chapter 26 of the four-book version, which gives two witches' ointment formulas and reports an experiment with an old woman. That chapter was attacked by Jean Bodin in 1580, used against Bodin by Reginald Scot in 1584 — and is no longer in the 1589 edition.

A self-taught Neapolitan and his "Academy of Secrets"

Porta came from a well-off family of the Kingdom of Naples and was one of several brothers; the eldest surviving, Gian Vincenzo, shared his scholarly interests. The Galileo Project at Rice University gives his birth as 1535 in Vico Equense, twelve miles south of Naples, and notes that the nature of his formal education is unknown; early accounts describe him as largely self-taught. Britannica marks the birth year with a question mark. He travelled in Italy, France and Spain and spent almost his entire working life in Naples.

At some point before 1580 he gathered a circle known as the Academia Secretorum Naturae, the Academy of the Secrets of Nature. It is often called one of the first scientific societies in Europe, and it did not last: the academy was closed, and Porta was examined by the Inquisition. The dates vary by source — the Galileo Project says "about 1578"; the scholarship summarized on Wikipedia gives a closure in 1574 and a trial from October 1577 that ended in 1578 with a canonical purgation, not a conviction. Later, between 1592 and 1598, the Church barred his philosophical works from further publication.

None of this ended his career. In 1610, at about seventy-five, he joined the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome, the society that would soon count Galileo as a member. He died in Naples on 4 February 1615.

What "natural magic" meant in 1558

Porta's magic is not spellcraft. In the twenty-book version he quotes Plotinus, who called the magician nature's servant rather than its maker, and he fills the work with things a reader could try: grafting and breeding, cosmetics, perfumes and distillation, magnets, invisible ink, fireworks, cooking, lenses and mirrors. The book's claim is that marvels have natural causes that can be learned. Britannica puts it in one line: it presents the wonders of nature "as phenomena underlain by a rational order."

He was aware how that sounded to others. In the preface to the 1589 edition, rendered in the 1658 English translation, he complains of critics "who affirm that I am a witch and a Conjurer, whereas I never Writ here nor elsewhere, what is not contain'd within the bounds of Nature." That sentence is the key to everything that follows.

The ointment story below involves plants that are dangerous in any amount. If what draws you to Porta is the history of how people thought about magic — rather than trying anything from his pages — a good general history is the better companion.

The ointment experiment, in his own words

In the four-book Magia naturalis (we read the 1560 printing, which follows the first edition), chapter 26 of Book II complains that people abuse what nature gave for human benefit, "heaping many herbs together" to make the ointments of the lamiae — the witches. These preparations, Porta says, are mixed with a great deal of superstition, "yet it is plain to anyone who looks that they work by natural force." He then reports what he says he was told. The first formula begins with an accusation that was standard in the witch literature of his time: children's fat, boiled down. Then come plants — among them aconite (wolfsbane), a sleep-inducing nightshade (solanum somniferum), poplar leaves and soot — and, in a second formula, bat's blood and oil. We give no quantities or method here, and neither should anyone: aconite and the nightshades are seriously poisonous.

Porta's explanation is psychological, not diabolical. The women rub the skin red so the pores open; the ointment's force goes inward; and then, "on a moonlit night," they seem to be carried through the air to banquets, music, dancing and lovers. Their imagination, he says, is so strong and their diet of beets, roots, chestnuts and beans so poor that the brain fills with these images.

Then comes the experiment. Reginald Scot's English version of 1584 follows the Latin closely: an old woman promised to bring him news from far countries, sent the witnesses out, undressed and rubbed herself with ointment, "which action we beheld through a chinke or little hole of the doore." She fell into so heavy a sleep that when they broke in and beat her she felt nothing. When she woke, she began "affirming that she had passed over both seas and mountaines; delivering to us manie untrue and false reports: we earnestlie denied them, she impudentlie affirmed them." Porta adds that this works mainly with melancholic old women. He never says she flew. He says she believed she had.

One story, three readers: Bodin, Scot, Middleton

The French jurist Jean Bodin read the same page and came away with the opposite result. In De la démonomanie des sorciers (Paris, 1580), Book II, he retells it from "the Natural Magic of a Neapolitan": a witch rubbed herself with grease, fell senseless, and three hours later "returned to her body" bringing news of several countries "qui furent avérées" — which were verified. The Latin says the opposite: her reports were false, and the witnesses told her so. Bodin adds that the author of that book — "qui mérite le feu," who deserves the fire — shows the means of practising it. In Book IV he cites "Baptiste Porta, Neapolitan" alongside Sprenger, co-author of the Malleus maleficarum, as a source for the charge that witches boil children. The detail Porta had recorded as hearsay became evidence.

Four years later the Kentish gentleman Reginald Scot turned the chapter around again. In The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), Book X, chapter 8, he translated the formulas and the experiment precisely "bicause it greatlie overthroweth the opinion of M. Mal., Bodin, and such other, as write so absolutelie in maintenance of witches transportations." For Scot, Porta's old woman was the best available proof that the night flight happened in the head.

The third reader was a dramatist. Brinsley Nicholson's notes to the 1886 edition of Scot, reproduced in the Project Gutenberg text, show that Thomas Middleton's play The Witch (written in the 1610s) lifted Porta's ingredients through Scot almost word for word. His Hecate orders: "Boil it well; preserve the fat: / You know 'tis precious to transfer / Our 'nointed flesh into the air / In moonlight nights" — and then lists "eleoselinum," "aconitum, frondes populeas and soot," "the blood of a flitter-mouse." A skeptic's evidence had become a stage witch's spell.

1589: the passage that disappeared

When Porta published the twenty-book Magia naturalis in 1589 — its title page says the books were "expurgated and expanded by the author himself" — the witches' ointment chapter was gone. We searched the full text of the 1589 Latin edition and of the 1658 English translation, both digitized on the Internet Archive: the formulas, the old woman and the children's fat do not appear. (A word search in scanned early print is not infallible, but the chapter's key terms are absent throughout.) The only place the ointment survives is the preface.

There Porta answers Bodin without naming him. In the 1658 English: "A certain Frenchman in his Book called Dæmonomania, terms me a Magician, a Conjurer, and thinks this Book of mine, long since Printed, worthy to be burnt, because I have written the Fairies Oyntment, which I set forth onely in detestation of the frauds of Divels and Witches." He adds that French visitors told him the man was a heretic who had narrowly escaped the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre — polemic, and marked as such here. Whether the Inquisition's scrutiny of 1577–78 also played a part in the cut is a reasonable guess, but Porta does not say so, and we have found no document that does.

The drugs stayed, the witches went

What Porta removed was the witch. What he kept was the pharmacology. Book VIII of the 1589 edition, "Of strange cures," describes how a sleep-bringing nightshade (Solanum manicum) and belladonna can produce visions "both pleasant and horrible," and warns that a larger dose prolongs the madness and a quadrupled one "brings death." He tells of a friend who could make a man believe he had turned into a fish or a goose, and adds a personal memory: "I remember when I was a young man, I tried these things on my Chamber-Fellows." One, who had eaten a lot of beef, saw nothing but bulls charging at him.

Read side by side, the two editions tell a consistent story. Porta always believed that these plants act on the imagination and that the "flight" is an experience, not a journey. In 1558 he illustrated that with a witch; in 1589 he illustrated it with students and a friend's party trick. The substance stayed. The word that brought a French jurist's call for fire did not.

That is also why modern reenactments are no argument for trying. When the German folklorist Will-Erich Peuckert rubbed himself with a salve made after Porta's account in 1927, he slept for some twenty hours. Our flying ointment article covers those experiments and the toxicology in detail.

Lenses, the dark chamber and the telescope quarrel

Outside witchcraft studies, Porta is remembered for optics. Book XVII of the 1589 edition, "Of Strange Glasses," describes burning mirrors and what a convex "lenticular crystal" can do; it was the popularity of Magia naturalis, not an invention by Porta, that spread knowledge of the camera obscura — the darkened room in which light through a small opening casts an image of the outside world on the wall. Britannica counts him among the pioneers in the use of the lens.

That reputation led to a priority quarrel. After Galileo's telescope made news in 1609, Porta claimed that the principle was already in his book and began a treatise on telescopes that he did not finish before his death. Most historians credit the instrument to Dutch spectacle-makers of 1608 and Galileo with its scientific use; Porta's passages describe what lenses do, not a working telescope.

Where the sources disagree

Reference works do not agree on several basic facts about Porta, and we would rather show that than smooth it over.

Question	What the sources say
Birth	1535 in Vico Equense (Galileo Project); "1535?" without place (Britannica).
First edition of Magia naturalis	1558, four books (Britannica, Wikipedia; the 1560 printing we read matches). The Galileo Project's catalog entry gives "1585" — almost certainly a transposition.
Inquisition	"About 1578" (Galileo Project); academy closed 1574, trial from October 1577, canonical purgation 1578 (Tarrant, as summarized on Wikipedia).
De refractione	1589 (Galileo Project) or 1593 (Britannica).
De distillatione	1608, 1609 or 1610, depending on the source and on whether a separate chapter printing is counted.
How long the old woman slept	Bodin says three hours. The 1560 Latin text we read gives no number of hours; Scot, translating Porta, gives none either.

What the record does show is unusual enough. One page of a Neapolitan's book was read as proof of witches, as proof against them, and as a stage spell — and its author answered the fire-and-brimstone reading by removing the witch and keeping the chemistry.

Frequently asked questions

Who was Giambattista della Porta?

A Neapolitan natural philosopher and playwright (1535–1615), author of Magia naturalis (1558, expanded 1589), a founder of the early Academy of the Secrets of Nature and, from 1610, a member of the Accademia dei Lincei.

What is Magia naturalis about?

It explains "wonders" through natural causes: plants and breeding, cosmetics and perfumes, distillation, magnets, invisible writing, fireworks, lenses and mirrors. The 1558 version has four books, the 1589 version twenty; the 1658 English Natural Magick translates the later one.

What was della Porta's witches' ointment experiment?

In Book II, chapter 26 of the four-book version he reports watching an old woman rub herself with an ointment and fall into a deep sleep. On waking she claimed to have crossed seas and mountains; Porta calls her reports false and explains the "flight" as imagination.

Why did Jean Bodin attack della Porta?

In his Démonomanie (1580) Bodin retold the experiment as if the woman's news had been verified and said the book's author deserved the fire. Reginald Scot used the same passage in 1584 to argue the opposite.

Is the ointment passage in the 1658 English Natural Magick?

No. The English translation follows the 1589 edition, from which the chapter was removed. Only the preface mentions the "Fairies Oyntment," in Porta's reply to Bodin.

Did della Porta invent the camera obscura or the telescope?

No. He popularized the camera obscura and described what lenses can do. He claimed priority for the telescope after 1609, but the instrument is usually credited to Dutch makers in 1608.

Sources

Giambattista della Porta, Magia naturalis sive de miraculis rerum naturalium libri IIII (1560 printing of the first version; Internet Archive) · Magiae naturalis libri XX (Naples, 1589; Internet Archive) · Natural Magick (London, 1658; Internet Archive) · Jean Bodin, De la démonomanie des sorciers (Paris, 1580; Antwerp, 1593), Books II and IV · Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), Book X, ch. 8, ed. Brinsley Nicholson (1886), Project Gutenberg #60766 · Thomas Middleton, The Witch, I.2 · "Giambattista della Porta," Encyclopaedia Britannica · Richard S. Westfall, "Porta, Giambattista della," The Galileo Project, Rice University · Neil Tarrant, "Giambattista Della Porta and the Roman Inquisition," British Journal for the History of Science 46 (2013) · Wikipedia, "Giambattista della Porta" and "Magia Naturalis" (as a register of the literature).

Further reading on this site: Flying ointment: what was really in it · Johannes Praetorius and the Blocksberg · Mandrake: the legend and the real plant · Plants you should never burn as incense