Flying Ointment - Appearances in Fiction

Appearances in Fiction

• In Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, Margarita, after agreeing to act as hostess at Dr Woland's ball, uses the ointment to become a witch and fly to the estate where the event is being held.

• In Clayton Rawson's Death from a Top Hat, two recipes by Johann Weyer, a 16th-century demonologist, are given in a footnote:

1-Water hemlock, sweet flag, cinquefoil, bat's blood, deadly nightshade and oil.

2-Baby's fat, juice of cowbane, aconite, cinquefoil, deadly nightshade and soot.

• In the movie serial Warlock, the villain kills an unbaptised boy to get this "Flying Ointment".

• In Jodi Picoult's Salem Falls, a group of four girls practicing witchcraft ingest a flying ointment made of belladonna. It has disastrous results for the main character of the story.

• In the book Calling on Dragons (Book three of the Enchanted Forest Chronicles), the witch Morwen uses a flying potion on a straw basket and a broomstick, not on herself. Both objects perform their duties as expected.

• In E. L. Konigsburg's Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth, two characters try to make a flying ointment.