FATE December 1960 Vol. 13, No. 12
WITH ACHING leg muscles I pedaled my bicycle slowly up the long gradual incline of the Berg Strasse, the lovely mountain road that stretches from Wiesloch to Darmstadt in southwestern Germany. I was on my way to visit a man who had, only a short time before, experienced a genuine Witches Sabbath. It was hard to reconcile the stream of modern cars, trucks and busses along the busy highway with a medieval adventure of this type. Yet the man I was going to see is as modern as the new cars roIling along the asphalt. Full professor at Gottingen, one of Germany’s great universities, author of books and one of Europe’s foremost authorities on occultism, Dr. Erich-Will Peuckert is no wild-eyed wizard mixing bat’s blood and toads in an iron cauldron.
He is a highly trained, scientifically minded specialist in his field. What he had to say is not the irresponsible rantings of a sensation seeker but the considered findings of a qualified and respected academician. Dr. Peuckert’s house is as unlike a wiz-ard’s lair as could be imagined. It resembles one of the better houses to be found almost anywhere in the United States sub- urbs. Dr. Peuckert himself proved to be reassuringly un-wizard-like, as well as friendly and cooperative. Shaking his hand, I was struck by the realization that had his experience taken place only a few hundred years before, he almost certainly would have been burned at the stake for it. For Dr. Peuckert is one of probably only two living persons ever to have at- tended a real Witches Sabbath.
The story actually begins nearly 40 years ago when Dr. Peuckert first took up the study of occult phenomena. In his study of the ancient books and manuscripts of the Middle Ages he kept run- ning into all kinds of magical recipes and formulas. A scientist of insatiable curios- ity, Dr. Peuckert personally tested about 60 such formulas over the years. As a simple example, he describes the medieval formula for taming a savage dog. The directions call for the trainer to feed the dog a piece of bread he has carried in his armpit for an entire day. The manu- script advises that this procedure will make the dog friendly with the donor. Dr. Peuckert tried the formula and found that it works. He explains that the bread absorbs the personal body scent of the trainer. Dogs depend largely upon scent for identification and attitude and by eating the bread they accept the person’s personal scent and with it the per- son. Today we understand how this works because we understand something about the behavior and motivation of animals. But during the Middle Ages such a procedure was regarded as magic. Now something of the same kind also works between human beings, but since it involves humans, and since somehow the unconscious mind may be implicated it appears to be much closer to magic than the dog training formula. By using human bodily extracts, Dr. Peuckert has been able to induce a “phys- ical and subconscious affinity” between male and female test subjects. Again, the formula, though modified, came from medieval books on witchcraft. Girl students at the University of Gottingen were used as test subjects in the ex- periments. Dr. Peuckert hastens to point out that the tests were “scientific and carried out with all the necessary safeguards.”