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.
Read more about this topic: Flying Ointment
Famous quotes containing the words appearances and/or fiction:
“Truth has scarce done so much good in the world as the false appearances of it have done hurt.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)
“We can never safely exceed the actual facts in our narratives. Of pure invention, such as some suppose, there is no instance. To write a true work of fiction even is only to take leisure and liberty to describe some things more exactly as they are.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)