Healing the Weapon and the Wound

If you were cut by a sword in 17th century New England, either a family member or a village healer would take care of the wound. They'd clean it with water, bandage it, and possibly smear it with a salve containing herbs and animal fat.

If you were lucky, a highly skilled doctor (like John Winthrop Jr.) would also apply a salve to the weapon that injured you. Putting the salve on the sword would magically heal the wound it made on you.

This seems a little implausible to a modern New Englander, but the so-called weapon salve was grounded in a widely held view of the universe. This worldview claimed that if everything in the universe is connected, then the sword that cut you had a particularly strong connection to you. The weapon salve takes advantage of this connection to heal you at a distance.

This blog has a recipe for a weapon salve from the 16th century text Archidoxis Magia. Ingredients include human fat, moss that has grown upon a human skull, rose oil, linseed oil, and human blood. The ointment should sit for a while after it has been mixed. When someone is wounded, the doctor should dip a stick in their blood and then insert the stick into the ointment. The ointment is now ready for use.

Doctors in Europe and New England debated the efficacy of the weapon salve. Some claimed it didn't work, but those who claimed it did had a variety of reasons as to why. Some claimed it worked through magnetism, while others claimed it was the harmony between the macrocosm and the microcosm. Some thought it was just the work of Satan.

I learned about the weapon salve a while ago and thought it was just another piece of folk magic that had long since disappeared. But I was wrong! The practice, or one very similar to it, survived until at least the 1980s in parts of Vermont.

Jane C. Beck, director of the Vermont Folklife Center, has interviewed many Vermonters about their traditional medicine practices. She collected the following piece of lore from a woman in Hyde Park, Vermont:

Similarly, it was believed that a nail that had been withdrawn from the foot, must be treated as well as the puncture wound itself. While salt pork was applied to the wound, the nail was carefully greased, wrapped up, and put into the warming closet where it would stay an even temperature. Today these supplementary measures are considered in holistic terms - treating the psychological mind as well as the body.

Although no skull-growing moss is involved, the theory is the same. Treating the item that injured you will cure your wound. I have no clue how the weapon salve evolved into this folk magic about the nail, but I think the continuity over 300 years of history is amazing.

I got the information about the weapon salve from Walter W. Woodward's Prospero's America: John Winthrop, Jr., Alchemy, and the Creation of New England Culture, 1606 - 1676 (pages 195 - 196). Jane Beck's article "Traditional Folk Medicine in Vermont" appears in Medicine and Healing. Volume 15 of the Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife.

The Alchemist of Connecticut, or the Christian Hermes

I'm reading a fascinating book about a Puritan alchemist who founded several Connecticut towns, started industries, and stopped witch trials. The book is Prospero's America. John Winthrop, Jr., Alchemy, and the Creation of New England Culture, 1606 - 1676, by Walter W. Woodward, a history professor at UConn. The Puritan in question, as you can tell by the title, was John Winthrop Jr.


Although I read a lot about magic and folklore, my knowledge of alchemy is not particularly deep. I knew that Puritans at Harvard and Yale dabbled in it, but I didn't realize how closely intertwined the alchemical and Puritan worldviews could be.

John Winthrop Jr.

I tend to think of alchemy as a murky pseudo-science with a lot of cryptic symbolism and magical jargon. After reading Woodward I realize I was only partly right!

Alchemy has its roots in the writings of Renaissance authors like Marsilio Ficino and Cornelius Agrippa. Drawing upon the works of the ancient mythical mage Hermes Trismegistus ("thrice great Hermes"), Ficino and Agrippa thought that mankind could use astral magic and the power of the stars to manipulate nature for mankind's benefit. A later writer with the fantastic name of Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus Von Hohenheim (aka Paracelsus) refined their Hermeticism into what we now know as alchemy. Observation and experimentation, said Paracelsus, were important to "discovering the divine keys of the workings of nature." Alchemy was similar in some ways to modern science but also incorporated mysticism, Cabalist magic, astrology and Christian prayer.

Hermes Trismegistus, a syncretization of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Anubis.

According to alchemical thought everything in nature was slowly working its way towards perfection. Humans, plants, animals and minerals were all gradually improving over time. Only when a total state of perfection was reached would the world be ready for the second coming of Christ.

The alchemist's job was to help the world reach perfection. For example, gold was considered the most perfect metal, so alchemists spent a lot of time conducting experiments to find the philosopher's stone, which could transmute any metal into gold. They also worked at discovering the alkahest, a substance that would cure all human illness. Hermes Trismegistus, and Adam before him, had possessed perfect knowledge so the alchemists also placed a high premium on increasing human learning.

Many practical benefits emerged from alchemy, particularly in lucrative fields like metallurgy, mining, agriculture, navigation and medicine. Alchemical thought also blended well with Christian (including Puritan) theology so it was attractive to John Winthrop Jr., the son of the first governor of Massachusetts. Born in England in 1606, John Winthrop Jr. traveled through Europe and Turkey meeting with alchemists and acquiring alchemical texts before emigrating to New England in 1631. As his personal symbol Winthrop used the monas hierogyphica, a sigil representing cosmic unity developed by John Dee, Queen Elizabeth's famous astrologer. (Dee is often thought to be the inspiration for Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest and the titular character in Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus.)

John Dee's Monas Hieroglyphica, which John Winthrop Jr. adopted as his personal symbol.

Winthrop brought alchemy's practical benefits and emphasis on progress to his new home. In Salem, Winthrop developed a saltmaking venture. In Quincy, he created a successful ironworks. With backing of wealthy English alchemists he founded the town of Saybrook, Connecticut and later established New London, which he hoped would be a Utopian alchemical haven.

Utopia never arrived, but Winthrop still served for many years as Connecticut's governor. As governor he discouraged witchcraft trials. Although he believed in magic, as an alchemical practitioner he knew how difficult it actually was to get any magical results. If he couldn't get results how could the average witch? Winthrop also encouraged a certain level of religious tolerance, based on the belief that a perfect understanding of Christianity had yet to emerge.

Finally, Winthrop practiced medicine. He tended to patients in his home, and also distributed cures through a network of mid-wives and healers. Although they included items like seahorse penises, millipedes, and mouse feces (and were ineffective by modern standards) his cures were eagerly sought by people across New England. The Boston minister Cotton Mather dubbed Winthrop the "Christian Hermes" for his charity and healing skills.

John Winthrop Jr. died in 1676. A poem written for his funeral extolled his virtues as an alchemist:

"...His fruits of toil Hermetically done
Stream to the poor as light doth from the Sun.
The lavish Garb of silks, Rich Plush and Rings,
Physicians Livery, at his feet he flings."

If you like New England history I would recommend Woodward's book. If you want a more concise but still really informative discussion of Winthrop and other early American alchemists, I'd recommend this article in Newtopia Magazine. It has some fantastic illustrations!