Toads and Poison

Since antiquity, toads in Europe have been connected to poison and evil. From classical to medieval and early modern natural histories and bestiaries, the toad’s venomous property was mentioned with regularity.⁴ Naturalists, herbalists, folk healers, and physicians throughout Europe expressed interest and curiosity in the potential virtues and vices of the toad. Natural histories penned by classical authorities such as Aristotle and Pliny proclaimed its medicinal potential, while warning of its toxicity. As early as the second century BCE, the Greek physician Nicander noted the pharmaceutical potential of toads; however, he first cautioned readers to avoid ingesting “a draught of the sun-loving toad,” which would cause bodily discomfort and troubled breathing.⁵ And in his Natural History (77 CE), Pliny the Elder referred to rubetæ in his section on “Frogs,” reporting they had two protrusions like horns, but more significantly, they were “plenæ venefociorum”: full of poison.⁶ Reflecting its amphibious nature, the toad posed both real dangers and beneficial remedies.

For centuries, the toad’s skin secretions appeared in Galenic cardiac and diuretic preparations and in traditional treatments for allergies, inflammation, infections, irritations, and hemorrhages.⁷ While dozens of toad uses were proposed in medieval and early modern pharmacopeias, they came with a warning. In her medical treatise Physica (1155), for instance, Hildegard of Bingen proposed the toad could be used for its curative powers even as she cautioned that “the toad … has some diabolic art in it … and is sometimes dangerous.”⁸ Drawing from understandings of sympathetic magic, she then clarified how this could be so: “Something bad often dispels another bad thing.” Similarly, seventeenth-century intellectuals and folk healers drew from the special prophylactic and healing ingredients of toads in their preparation of amulets to be worn during times of plague.⁹ The amulets worked by virtue of the sympathy of the poisonous toad with the pestilential venoms, an understanding informed by the homeopathic principle of “poison drives out poison … evil attracts evil.”¹⁰ Thus medicines were often thought to have opposite qualities contained within them. Despite their medicinal utility, however, ultimately it was the toad’s poison that drew the most attention, making it the perfect witches’ accomplice.

Modern toxicology sheds light on why medical forebears—and Navarra’s villagers—regarded the common toad with suspicion. All members of the Bufo genus produce a sticky secretion exuded from their skin and parotoid glands, a pair of well-defined skin glands behind the eyes that excrete bufotoxin.¹¹ This milky, moderately potent poison contains several identifiable components: bufagin, which affects the heart; bufotenine, a hallucinogen; and serotonin, a vasoconstrictor. Bufotoxins can dramatically damage various body parts and functions and can be fatal in large doses. Bufagins act on the heart by slowing it, and laboratory experiments have shown that increased dosages stop the cardiac activity of cats.¹² Similarly, studies have isolated bufotoxins from toad venoms and tested for their inhibitory effects on guinea pig hearts, concluding that they have the biochemical capacity to stop cardiac activity entirely.

Of course, Navarra’s villagers would not have known of chemical formulas or modern laboratory experiments. But the toxic effects of toad venoms on small animals and pets through skin and eye irritations, vomiting, and even cardiac failure would have been observable, and further informed early moderners’ association of the toad with poison and death. If toad venoms yielded palpable results in the material world through irritations and even death to animals, why could their boiled grease not also play a role in the mysterious world of witchcraft? This knowledge of the toad’s power to poison in the natural world—combined with its cultural role as a demonic helper and its generally grotesque physique—made it a natural assistant and companion to the equally reviled witch.

Toads, Sin, and Death

Toads held weight in early modern European culture as both carriers of toxicity and agents of death. The literature of the classical world paired the female witch figure with the toxic toad when Horace partnered his fictional witch Canidia with the “loathsome toad” as she worked her magic into a poisonous concoction.¹³ And the Roman poet Juvenal’s Satires (early second century) told of the evil woman who murdered her husband with “toad blood” mixed with wine, teaching other wives to “bury the blackened corpses of their husbands” with the help of toads.¹⁴ The connection between toad blood and death as reflected by these classical works would endure as a common trope in literature, trial records, and early modern depositions of accused witches who similarly placed great importance on the power of the anuran and its bodily fluids.

Within a Christian cosmology, toads and their toxic bodies—bursting with allegorical potential—embodied sin, suffering, and death. Even in the Old Testament, frogs and toads (encompassed by the single Hebrew term tsephardea) were symbolic markers of evil. Tsephardea carried out God’s second plague on Egypt, as the antagonistic army of anurans infested the lands and dwellings of the people, serving as agents of punishment and death.¹⁵Tsephardea again appeared in the New Testament, where they assumed the forms of corrupt spirits and demons. In his book of Revelations, the apostle John declared: “And I saw three unclean spirits like frogs come out of the mouth of the dragon, and out of the mouth of the false prophet. For they are the spirits of devils.”¹⁶ The toad inspired biblical authors to cast them as harbingers of plague and the embodiment of demons. Medieval Christian lore, iconography, sermons, and moralizing artwork relied on the toad to evoke feelings of revulsion and horror and inspire penitence in its Christian audience.¹⁷

Christian artists drew heavily from toad symbolism and its power to convey shared meanings to European audiences. For example, toads bite the breasts and genitals of the female statue of Luxuria at the entrance of the twelfth-century St. Pierre Abbey in Moissac.¹⁸ Likewise the cauldron at Bourges Cathedral displays a toad biting the left nipple of a sinful woman in punishment of her lust. Another toad latches onto a heretical cleric’s tongue, injecting him with venom as punishment for his poisonous doctrines.¹⁹ These grotesque toads linked lust and the dangers of feminine sexuality, warning their observers against sin and the seductiveness of the female body. Renaissance artists, such as Pieter Brueghel the Elder in The Seven Deadly Sins, employed a poisonous toad squatting prominently in front of the female representation of Avaritia, avarice, to remind his audience that the ultimate reward for this sin is death. Toad-like creatures also served as chief tormentors of sinners throughout Hieronymus Bosch’s renditions of purgatory and hell.²⁰ In The Last Judgment (ca. 1482), toads torment a sinner who is immersed in a cask with these creatures, while in another panel, a bishop is compelled to eat a toad as a punishment for the sin of Gula, gluttony; meanwhile nearby a gigantic toad appears to prepare to copulate with a person guilty of Luxuria, lust.²¹ Toads’ toxic bodies created an evil legacy that made them the ideal moralizing representations for artists. The toad’s cultural currency, combined with its toxic biological properties, helped shape the witchcraft beliefs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The Toad as the Witch’s Accessory

Branded as the witches’ accomplice and the purveyor of poison for their maleficent charms, toads served as a biological explanation of how witches, in Navarra and beyond, could turn diabolical intent into materially harmful deeds.²² While toads’ specific roles as agents of witchcraft were flexible and varied among witness testimonies, they emerged consistently in over half of Navarra’s secular witch trial records. In the earliest extant trial from 1525, witches were accused of using flayed toads and toad blood for maleficia and transvection. Situated within lengthy testimony recounting the witches’ gathering, Martín de Zaldaiz from the village of Burguete shared a tangible recipe for the poisonous concoction used to “waste the grains and kill people.” In Martín’s deposition from June 1525, he explained: “To go to the witches’ gathering, they anointed themselves with an unguent using … dead and burned flayed toads.”²³ Thus, according to this witness, toad grease facilitated the witches’ flight.

When María de Ituren confessed to witchcraft, she, too, drew on possible uses of the amphibian’s toxic body. She admitted to using toads both to commit maleficia and to attend the witches’ gathering with “an unguent made with flayed toads.”²⁴ In the fields she met with other witches to roast toads, mixing them with water “to make powders mixed with an herb called usaynbelarr. And they wasted the mountains with the powders of those roasted toads.” Other villagers echoed this specific recipe in their reports, situating this nefarious concoction of roasted toads in the material world.²⁵ Toads at this early date were understood to provide versatile ingredients used to attend the witches’ gatherings, and as the producer of their poisons.²⁶

The material toxicity of the toad remained a central focus in villagers’ testimony throughout the first half of the sixteenth century. María Sagardoy’s witchcraft accusation in 1534 was predicated on her ability to manipulate toads for evil. Her established reputation in the village of Aezcoa as a “mala cristiana and poisoner” was coupled with rumors of her hunting toads to use for poisons.²⁷ The council charged María with being a “malefica” and with acts of poisoning spanning a decade, her maleficia assisted by the powers of the toad, which she compounded and “mixed with burned, flayed toads and big, black spiders, and the livers of children, and other deadly things. And she ground everything and made a poisonous powder.”²⁸ María denied all charges against her, prompting the royal tribunals to order interrogation under torture in search of the “truth,” an order she avoided by cleverly asserting she was four months’ pregnant. At this time, in the autumn of 1534, the tribunals did not zealously pursue a conviction, nor did María’s denunciation generate a search for other witches, or a hunt for every other “mala cristiana” in Aezcoa. The devil, night flight, and the witches’ gatherings did not emerge. Solitary trials such as María’s heavily relied on the accused’s fama in the village and her ability to use toads for poisons but did not conform to learned diabolical ideas.

Such ideas did exist, however, and appeared in other cases handled by the royal tribunals. In 1540, the alcalde from the Valley of Salazar, Lope Esparza, was accused of witchcraft and maleficia enacted by the power of the evil toad. The fiscal charged Lope, alongside other accused witches, with assembling “many times both night and day, in their gatherings and festivities and dances of witches” to craft their poisons. They then killed using powders they made from “filth and powders and burned toads and other poisons.” Witnesses also testified they killed people by “touching them all over their bodies with a toad tied by its leg … and with toad blood.”²⁹ These accusations incorporated more learned, diabolical elements and included the witches’ gatherings and the renunciation of God. In these trials, even though toads were situated among diabolism and heresy, they retained their roles as toxic bodies used by witches to poison their neighbors and crops. The fiscal officially charged the accused: “With the flayed toads they make poisonous powder, and unguents, and they anointed themselves with that and with the blood of the toads, and they anointed the people they inducted.”³⁰ This reflected a fusion of the knowledge of bufotoxins and the heretical symbolism of its amphibious producer.

The significance of toads in Navarra transcended judicial boundaries. Like its secular counterpart, the episcopal curia diocesana de Pamplona reflected the toad’s cultural currency in its trials.³¹ In the 1569 case of the witch-priest Don Pedro Lecumberri, villagers denounced the popular thirty-five-year-old cleric in Burgui to the alcalde for witchcraft and, worse yet, leading a small sect of female witches, including children.³² Toads served as prominent diabolical markers throughout this trial. The first accusations came from eight-year-old Andella Garat who declared that she was asked to join the accused’s witch sect and was offered good food, but instead “they gave her a roasted toad with bread to eat.”³³ According to her little friend, Gracieta, her grandmother had taught her to say in a loud voice “Come here, literna, come here, literna,” and out of a small pond emerged a “large toad like a puppy” with some small horns. Gracieta approached this “ox of God” and placed it in her skirt. But when another child, María Baldan, caught sight of the large black toad and uttered “Jesus!” the toad disappeared. The witches then chastised Baldan, warning her to not speak Jesus’s name. Andella reported also seeing the accused witches by the river with “three toads with little bells on them, and they were shaking them with their hands.”³⁴ As the women and girls sat there, shaking their belled toads, Andella’s friend, seven-year-old Catalina Bront, and María “tried to catch live toads from the water, and they killed them with a knife to the throat.”³⁵ They then feasted on toad flesh, which was black in color and odious in flavor. Doubting these reports, the commissary and scribe, Pedro Aguinaga, asked María Garat to demonstrate her skill in his presence along with two other officials. And so, ten-year-old María asked for a knife, and “without fear or impatience” cautiously cut the toad from its head to its bottom with deftness. She then proceeded to “skin it with great patience all over its body,” expertly peeling back its skin from the neck up to its head, and around the extremities, removing its poisonous skin from its head, its torso, and its arms and legs.³⁶ All three men attested to their observation of her practiced toad-skinning skills.

Throughout this extensively documented trial, the prominence given to the many toads appearing in individual depositions—as well as the curia’s charge that groups of witches incorporated toads into inverted Mass rituals—demonstrates that toads were freighted with meaning both for the involved villagers and for the episcopal tribunal. Within this religious court, toads’ spiritual significance was accentuated, and they were situated among other diabolical notions such as the anal kiss of the devil and the renunciation of God. The toads were not explicitly used to harm others in acts of maleficia—the likes of which would fall to the secular court’s purview—but rather were invoked as a symbolic indicator of Christian transgression.

Toads were unsurprisingly a dominant feature during the chain of witch trials in 1575–76. Among the dozens of accused witches and multiple trials, scores of toads appeared in the villagers’ depositions beginning with María Johan in Anocíbar in 1575, and nearly all the chain trials in its wake. In his initial testimony against his aunt, ten-year-old Miguel de Olagüe reported that María Johan and her accomplices gave him and his brother “two toads in their hands and forced them to handle them.” When asked what the toads were for, Miguel said he was not certain but thought “they were to make an unguent with those toads” because when they returned, they then “went to the witches’ gathering.”³⁷

Toads emerged as protagonists in many of these trials, serving as both fantastical characters and poison providers. For example, in her accusation against Teresa de Ollo in 1576, thirteen-year-old Catalina de Ybero centered her proof on “hearing a sound like the singing of toads” and witnessing Teresa feed several toads bits of masticated bread. She also reportedly heard Teresa’s daughter say “that those toads were her saints, and not the ones that were in the church.”³⁸ This villager couched witch activity in terms of the inverse of Christianity. Here, these toads represented more than folkloric beliefs: they were grotesque manifestations of a diabolic cult.

The roles of toads varied. The villagers of Burguete, for example, claimed Graciana Loizu had mala fama as a witch because of her alleged intimacy with toads. Even those testifying on her behalf were familiar with the rumors of her suspect interactions with these amphibians. Burguete’s shoemaker, thirty-one-year-old Juanes de Zuncarren, admitted he did not know with certainty if Graciana was a witch but confirmed that she was in the “public saying and opinion” of being a witch, adding “there was the rumor in the village of Burguete that one time Martinot de Vitoria … saw Graciana Loizu giving food to some toads in the field.” Witness after witness echoed Martinot’s story of having witnessed “Graciana Loizu giving food to two or three toads in the pastures” as he tended to his mares.³⁹ Though the depositions were not identical, this was a well-circulated tale that had traveled the pathways of village truth-making. So intimate was her relationship with toads, she was said to wear “the skin of a flayed toad in the hood of her coat,” and to be surrounded by toads as she washed her clothes in the creek. It is noteworthy that none of the witnesses elaborated on why she would be feeding toads or wearing toad leather, nor did any explicitly state that toad interactions signified witch-hood. There was no need to, since by this point the connection between toad and witch was well established in Navarra.

Based upon reports given by twenty witnesses, the tribunals formally charged Graciana with “using many spells and witchcraft, and harm and maleficia, and many have seen her raising toads in the countryside and solitary places.”⁴⁰ The picture of an old lady breeding toads offered a powerful inversion in this farming community. Martín de Aragon, her procurador, offered Graciana a robust defense. He claimed that her main accuser Martinot de Vitoria was the “capital enemy” of Graciana’s daughter, an argument supported by the lengthy history of legal battles between the litigants. His most striking line of defense, however, addressed her pastoral care of the clutch of toads. He argued against Martinot’s testimony that he had witnessed Graciana “feeding three toads in the field,” maintaining that this accusation was not credible. But it was not the plausibility of an adult feeding toads in a field he called into question; rather, it was the weather at the time of the alleged crime that he disputed:

The year Martinot claims [he saw her] was the year of the big snows, the likes of which lasted until throughout March and all through Lent, when the witness says the mares were in the pasture. But they could not have been … nor could anyone walk in the countryside because the land was so covered with snow.⁴¹

This defense is telling, for it did not discount the possibility of the act of toad-feeding, but rather the timing of the act. This was not the first time a witch was accused of nurturing toads, as Graciana Martínez, a widow from the village of Urdiain, had also been charged by the royal court with “having and raising toads in her house to make poison to kill people and children and the fields” some months prior.⁴² Supported by their religious and cultural contexts, toads carried weight in the legal realm as well. Throughout the 1575–76 chain trials, villager testimony tended to center toads’ toxic bodies, reflecting a long-standing ingredient in the cauldron of witch beliefs (see figure 4.1).

Toads emerged within the royal tribunal’s torture chamber. When María Sanz’s daughter accused her of witchcraft and poisoning, many of the alleged acts of maleficia and attendance at the witches’ gatherings centered on the power of toads. Supported by thirteen witnesses’ accusations of mala fama and witchcraft, the fiscal charged María with keeping toads in a pot under her bed to use for poisons and with murder and sentenced her to judicial torture.⁴³ In Pamplona’s torture chamber in June 1576, the magistrates pressed ropes into her body in a bid to press her soul into confession. After she proclaimed her innocence, the men ordered the ropes to be tightened on María’s muscles and pushed her to answer “what venom” she used to poison a neighbor’s child and “what toad she put in the pot” at her neighbor’s house.⁴⁴ As María cried out in pain and asked them why they “mistreated her in this way” the magistrates again tightened the ropes and inquired about the toads with which she was said to anoint her daughter and herself. She explained the cream she applied to her daughter’s head was to help with the child’s mental illness. But again, the judges pressed her on the toads she was said to collect in pots. In María’s trial, as well with all the other cases during the chain trials of 1575–76, toads served as purveyors of witches’ poisons, and their presence was of great interest for the royal tribunals.

But toads metamorphosed into the witch’s mark in the peculiar 1595 trial of the villagers from Inza in the Valley of Araiz. The alcalde Fermín Andueza had charged a young “witchfinder” to discover the witches in his territory, a task she did by looking for toad-shaped pupils in the villagers’ eyes. As we saw earlier, the forced confessions of this group of villagers diverged significantly from the more common witchcraft concerns in Navarra and focused instead on the witches’ gathering, diabolical sex, and acts of iconoclasm. As the level of diabolism escalated beyond that of any other witch trials in the secular tribunals’ records, so too did the role of the toad as it metamorphosed from an accessory of witchcraft to its visible proof.

The magistrates interrogated Andueza’s key witness, the twelve-year-old witchfinder Juana de Baraybar, who detected witches by looking for the devil’s mark. She testified that “they are witches because they have a marking in the shape of a toad’s foot in their left eye, some of them, and others in their right eyes.” She admitted she had not seen these witches at any witches’ gatherings but drew her conclusions exclusively from the mark in their eyes. Juana added that only those witches who have this marking, or like herself have been to the witches’ gatherings, can see it. She had inherited this talent from her mother who had taken her to a gathering in the Valley of Larraun where “the witches had the mark and that is how they recognized one another.”⁴⁵ She lamented that “the signs would remain for life and at no time could they be removed,” even by participation in Catholic practices such as confession. Her report suggested that she was not actively seeking to denounce fellow villagers, but was persuaded by Andueza to look for witches, a task she performed by searching for a devil’s mark of sorts; and in Navarra, fittingly, it was the toad. Within the narratives of this trial the toad took on a new form as learned, elite visions of the “devil’s mark” came to the fore.

To be sure, villagers in Navarra believed that toads were used in witchcraft. For some, they transcended being ingredients for maleficia and assumed symbolic markers of witch-hood. Appearing in half of the secular trial records between 1525 and 1647, toads clearly held a central role in Navarra’s witchcraft beliefs. But its invocation was not limited to villagers, or secular and episcopal judges, for Spanish inquisitors, too, fell under the toad’s spell.

Toads in a Panic

Toads figured prominently in the witch panic handled by the Inquisition. Elaborate descriptions of toads emerged in witness testimonies, inquisitorial reports, and even a French demonology, showing clearly the enduring influence of toads as they became embellished and anthropomorphized.⁴⁶ Even during the toad’s metamorphosis, it maintained its role as the physical procurer of the witch’s key ingredient within the panic’s records. Eighty-year-old María de Zozaya revealed her process to make poisons: first she would cut and fillet the toads, then grate them, and finally pound them in a mortar mixed with boiled “toad liquids.”⁴⁷ She had received these toads from the devil to facilitate her travel to the akelarres. Unlike their naked counterparts, these toads were dressed and kept securely hidden in a wooden box that had a wooden lid. She further concealed her precious toads between a chest and the wall.⁴⁸ To attend the akelarres on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, she pulled out her dressed toad and whipped it. And after the toad had expelled its fluid and been replaced in its box, the devil would then have vaginal and anal intercourse with her. Once María arrived at the akelarres there would be a “toad flock” of stabled, dressed toads “equipped with a collar hung with bells,” a descriptive confession shared by several other witches from the region of Las Cinco Villas.⁴⁹ These rich details differed greatly from the toads of the sixteenth century, but still resounded within the world of witches. This world was malleable and amphibious, inviting any manner of permutations.

Unsurprisingly, dressed toads hopped into other testimonies. When nine-year-old María de Yturria from Echalar confessed to witchcraft in December 1609, she claimed Catalina de Topalda had taken her to the akelarres where she was given a small stick and the task of guarding “the clothed toads.”⁵⁰ Multiple reports of toad guardianship would emerge throughout the testimonies during the witch panic as a task relegated to the children supposedly inducted into the witch cult. While testimonies varied slightly (for example, some parishioners claimed to keep their toads hidden in a hole, under a tree, while others said they tethered their toads’ legs with a cord to prevent escape), it became clear that toads were to have a central, coveted, and sometimes-clothed position within the witch panic’s narratives. This was mirrored in the mental world of Beltrana de la Fargua, a forty-year-old beggar from the village of Vera. Beltrana confessed to the inquisitors that she cared for a childlike dressed toad whom she breastfed. Sometimes, as she nursed her own children (whom she supposedly also converted into witches), her dressed toad would “stretch and crane upwards from the floor until it could nurse” too.⁵¹ And, at times, it simply metamorphosed into a child and suckled her breasts. Toads, as reflected in this inquisitorial deposition, had evolved beyond naked, poison-producing amphibians and into clothed animals, ones that would metamorphose further into anthropomorphic creatures with demonic capabilities.

The Toad as the Witch’s Familiar

The Spanish inquisitors reported on toads as crucial actors in Navarra’s witchcraft practices. In their twelve-page account sent to the Suprema, the inquisitors in Logroño related the acts of the accused witches to be sentenced at the auto de fé.⁵² This formal decree (Relación de las causas, hereafter Relación), was intended for a wide audience, including the Suprema, the king of Spain (at least, the inquisitors hoped it would attract his attention), and the thousands of spectators who would witness the sentencing of these witches at the widely advertised auto de fé held that year.⁵³ Curiously, this official and authoritative text focused much of its attention on the rituals conspicuously featuring the herd of dressed toads. The prominence of the decree underscored the fact that lore surrounding toads had become part of legal evidence at the highest levels. The inquisitors reported on the vital function of the toads as protectors, companions, and mentors to new witches at their initiation ceremonies where the devil gifted them a prized toad, explaining:

The dressed toad serves as a guardian angel to the new witch from then on, accompanying him and instructing him in the evil deeds that are to be done… .

And [the witches] nourish, give gifts, and feed the toad giving it food every day, and they talk with it, and communicate their business, and [the toads] advise [the witch] when it is time to go to the akelarre.⁵⁴

The dressed toads instructed them “in the wrongs to be committed” and when it was time to attend the akelarres. In exchange for their assistance, the witches fed their dressed toads human flesh, which they devoured eagerly amid “snarling and growling.”⁵⁵ Together the witches and their dressed toads participated in vulgar orgies, destroyed crops and livestock, and even killed their neighbors. No longer mere accessories for maleficia, the dressed toads had become its organizers.⁵⁶

Within the witch panic, the toad metamorphosed into the witch’s servant, or familiar. The dressed toads of the Relación served as “guardian angels” providing companionship for the new witch and tutoring her in the art of maleficia. These were demons who assumed the grotesque form of half toad and half man and were costumed in velvet (terciopelo) and other luxurious cloth (paño), as a show of their importance in the church of the devil. In an inversion of the Catholic clergy, they displayed their special station through their sartorial distinctions. These toads, dressed in tailored and form-fitting fine linens by the inquisitors’ imaginations, at times even sported “a ribbon of bells.”⁵⁷

Familiars were lowly demons given by the devil as presents to his followers, and their role was to serve the witch. Although they are hardly unfamiliar to scholars of the early modern period, familiars have generally been assumed to be a feature of English witch beliefs. The importance and developed notion of witches’ familiars have been considered “exclusive to English witchcraft,” and thus far British familiars have dominated the historiography of this aspect of witch lore.⁵⁸ One expert has noted that familiars “seem to constitute the one great peculiarity in English witchcraft beliefs, secondary literature at least suggesting that equivalent beings figured very rarely in the ideas about witchcraft held in other parts of Europe.”⁵⁹ English familiars took multiple forms, often as nonhuman animals, and sometimes as toads.⁶⁰ But as reflected in these trial records, familiars also served the witch-mistresses of Navarra.

As the inquisitors fashioned Navarra’s toads into familiars, they drew from local lore and traditional conceptions of toads as creatures who provided the pivotal ingredient for attendance at the witches’ gatherings. The Logroño tribunal reported: “They make use of these dressed toads to extract a dark and green foul-smelling liquid with which they anoint themselves to go to the akelarres.” Pressing down on dressed toads with their hands or feet, the witches extracted the potent magical fluid, the necessary ingredients for night flight and poisonous concoctions. The witches “make them vomit from above and from the bottom the liquid they collect in an earthen pot … and the witches take the remainder of the liquid extracted from the toads and pour it into a huge cauldron … to make powders and poisons from this brew” (see fig. 4.2).⁶¹ Thus in the minds of the inquisitors, local lore and learned demonological literature fused, yielding the distinguished toads.

A final role bestowed upon the toad was its appearance in the witches’ mark. The inquisitors reported: “And then the devil finally marks [the new witch] sticking a nail of his left hand into whatever part of his body he chooses and draws blood, and the pain lasts for many days, and the mark forever. And he also makes other marks in the eyes, inside, on the pupils.”⁶² The witches’ marks, taking the shape of a toad’s “paw,” served as a tangible bond between the devil and the witches, physical reminders of the diabolical pact they had made. This witch’s mark reminds us of the toad noted by the young witchfinder in 1525. Thus, the Inquisition’s tribunal drew substantially from the local traditions and learned lore as they conceptualized toads as infernal familiars.⁶³

The Toad as a Demonological Actor

This learned tradition of witchcraft was reflected in the writings of early modern European theologians, clergymen, natural philosophers, jurists, and other literati who codified witch beliefs within their demonological literature. Early demonological writings, such as the Errores gazariorium (ca. 1437) and the Malleus maleficarum (1486) positioned the toad as a significant ingredient for witches’ maleficia, reporting toad venom in the activities of diabolical heretics.⁶⁴ Though there is no indication whether the secular magistrates in Pamplona encountered either of these texts, the dressed toads of Navarra appeared in a widely circulated demonology during the witch panic.⁶⁵

Toads assumed an important role in the demonological treatise composed by the French magistrate Pierre de Lancre, a judge from Bordeaux dispatched to the Basque witch trials.⁶⁶ In his Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et demons (1612), de Lancre reported on the horrors of demons and witches plaguing the early modern world, especially the diabolical witch sect coursing throughout the French Basque lands in 1608–9.⁶⁷ During his investigations of witchcraft in the region, de Lancre encountered toads within the cauldron of witch beliefs. For example, in 1608 twenty-eight-year-old Marie de la Ralde reported to him that she had gone to the “sabbath,” and there she observed women witches taking toads in their teeth, then skinning them and crushing them.⁶⁸ Similarly, Marie d’Aspilcouette mentioned that witches at these “sabbaths” decapitated and roasted toads to craft the ointments and toad powders. Like her Spanish counterparts, Marie reported that “the great female witches are assisted by some demon in the form of a toad,” adding that the toad perched prominently on their left shoulders and had two small horns on its head.⁶⁹

The dressed toads of the witch panic emerged in testimony from the French side of the Basque lands. According to de Lancre’s reports, sixteen-year-old Jeanette d’Abadie from Cibourne reported dressed toads in September 1609, claiming that the treasured toads were taken to a cemetery where a great party was held “to have toads baptized.”⁷⁰ Dressed for this momentous occasion, the toads wore “red velvet and sometimes black velvet, with a little bell around their necks and another one around their feet.” As with Christian baptism, godparents were present “with a godfather who would hold the head of this toad and a godmother who would hold it by its feet, as one holds a child in church.” Jeannette’s inverted world of witchcraft included a dancing lady with four toads, with only one dressed in velvet with bells on its feet, and the others carried in her fists “like a bird.” But while Jeannette dressed her toad, it never became a familiar. And as her testimony predated the Inquisition’s auto de fé and its accompanying report, de Lancre did not pursue that line of inquiry.⁷¹ While his interrogations did not reflect the learned visions proposed by the Spanish Inquisition’s Relación, his demonology did.

Within de Lancre’s demonology, toads served as visual markers of witchcraft and played a crucial role in proving witch-hood. De Lancre, like other demonologists, often learned from the courts about the possible activities of witchcraft while simultaneously developing a rational doctrine of evil and reaffirming that diabolical powers were real. He brings into striking relief the influence of some demonologies on judicial procedure:

I believe that the mark that Satan puts on his disciples is of great importance to the adjudication of the crime of witchcraft. Further evidence is found among all our contemporaries who are judges, as we believe that the marks are such persuasive clues and indicate such strong presumptions of guilt against the witches that, taken together with evidence, it is lawful to proceed with their conviction. This is why it is wise to remember what we learned about them from our trials.⁷²

This shows clearly not only the connection between demonologies and the importance of the witches’ mark, but also their influence on judicial procedure. Drawing from reports from a young witchfinder, de Lancre reported that “all the witches from Biarritz had in their left eye a mark like that of a toad’s foot, which the women of this parish who confessed also said.”⁷³ This foot marked them as the devil’s property and imbued them with mysterious gifts of seeing and recognizing “things that concern only witches, things that cannot be seen by those who do not take an oath with a toad.”⁷⁴ Beyond markers of a heretical pact, these toad feet indicated that the witches had powers that could, possibly, harm their neighbors and the republic.

Demonological treatises often included the authors’ eyewitness account of trials. For example, de Lancre described how in September 1610 a seventeen-year-old girl was presented to him, and he saw in her left eye “something resembling a little cloud that looked like a toad’s foot.” The girl confessed that “Satan had marked her with his horn in her left eye” at the witches’ Mass.⁷⁵ The mark not only implicated the accused in a diabolic pact but also carried evidentiary weight in establishing guilt. To be sure, only the most succinct symbol could encapsulate such a complex concept, and the toad, with its exceptionally wide web of associations, was particularly well qualified to serve in this capacity.

Toad bodies, too, played central roles in the witches’ ceremonies. Here de Lancre’s narrative borrowed unequivocally from the Inquisition’s version of the witch initiation ceremony in his reports of the akelarre, which described children under the age of nine who “guard the toads with little sticks, and these toads are those that the Devil gives to each female witch, as an angel looking out for her, dressed in green or gray.”⁷⁶ So highly regarded were these toads thought to be that if a child should accidentally step on one, they would be “immediately whipped.” After renouncing God and swearing allegiance to the devil, the new witch “receives a dressed toad in its hood or coat; then [the devil] orders him to adore it … and marks them with a mark that looks like a little toad.”⁷⁷ The anuran’s role far transcended being a source of toxic poisons, now serving both as a familiar and as a permanent marker. But it maintained its chemical contribution in “recipes for placing hexes on people.” When the witches’ toads were whipped and swollen, they secreted a “green liquid used to harm and fly.” And at the end of the witches’ initiation ceremonies, de Lancre explained, “they fly through the night like birds, together with their dressed-up toads,” ready to commit maleficia.⁷⁸ When combined with the records from the secular court, this treatise offers a remarkable window into the fusion of common understandings (poison for maleficia) and learned tropes (sartorial distinctions).

De Lancre’s Tableau offers a special glimpse into the world of the witches through an image that accompanied his written treatise. Its frontispiece, crafted by the Polish artist and printmaker Jan Ziarnko in 1612, includes in its depiction of the witches’ gathering a group of children armed with switches guarding a little herd of toads. This fascinating image, complete with a lettered appendix glossing the details of the figure, visually describes that which was textually recorded (fig. 4.3). It is particularly noteworthy that the toads to which these children tend, presumably for their use in maleficia, are unattired. The dressed toads may thus have remained mostly in the inquisitorial imaginary of Spain. In sum, de Lancre’s rich demonology reveals how learned writings incorporated established, common witch beliefs in their grand syntheses. The learned body of witchcraft literature they created was as varied and nuanced as were witch beliefs, and an innovative synthesis of the two.

Following the witch panic, toads appeared one final time before the royal tribunals as reflected in the 1647 sorcery trial of María Yrisarri. Forty-year-old Joan de Ybirizu testified that some twenty-eight or twenty-nine years before, María had taken him one night to a valley in the countryside where he was left “guarding some toads while the accused went around dancing to the beat of a drummer” while she kissed a large man.⁷⁹ This witness had guarded his secret for almost three decades out of fear María would kill him should he tell anyone about the toads at the akelarre.⁸⁰ Joan’s testimony attests to the longevity of the toad’s currency and offers clues to how tropes of witchcraft were drawn from a deep reservoir of folkloric beliefs and, sometimes, childhood fantasies. It also shows how the Inquisition’s learned vision of children guarding toads at the akelarres had entrenched itself in this villager’s understanding of toad lore.

The enduring role of toads in Navarra, as seen in this late trial of 1647, demonstrates that villagers and jurists alike drew from the cauldron of belief to form their notions. Religious and cultural understandings of the toad reveal its cultural currency as artists and authors used the toad to moralize sin and represent death. The biological knowledge of the toad, too, serves to illuminate the internal logic and coherence of systems of witchcraft beliefs, as toads possessed biological powers to poison. But the metamorphoses toads underwent in the witch panic draw our attention to the changing nature of witchcraft beliefs and the negotiations between elite inquisitors and Basque-speaking villagers. Examined over the course of Navarra’s sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, toads within various cultural productions and witch-trial records reveal for us how witchcraft beliefs, prosecutions, and even demonologies were an adapted, negotiated, and shared cultural production.

1. AGN, TR_11195 (1576), fols. 1r–17r.

2. AGN, TR_11195 (1576), fol. 28r.

3. AGN, TR_11195 (1576), fol. 18r.

4. Mary E. Robbins, “The Truculent Toad in the Middle Ages,” in Animals in the Middle Ages, ed. Nona C. Flores (New York: Routledge, 2016), 25.

5. Nicander, The Poems and Poetical Fragments, trans. and ed. A. S. F. Gow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), 133.

6. Pliny the Elder, The Natural History of Pliny, vol. 6, trans. and ed. John Bostock, M.D., and H. T. Riley (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1953), 21.

7. Calendario Rodriguez et al., “Toxins and Pharmacologically Active Compounds from Species of the Family Bufodinae,” Journal of Ethnopharmacology 198 (2017): 235–54.

8. Hildegard of Bingen, Physica, trans. Priscilla Throop (Vermont: Healing Arts Press, 1998), 231.

9. For more on toad preparations in amulets, see Martha R. Baldwin, “Toads and Plague: Amulet Therapy in Seventeenth-Century Medicine,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 67, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 227–47.

10. Walter Pagel, Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance (New York: Karger, 1982), 147.

11. K. K. Chen and Alena Kovarikova, “Pharmacology and Toxicology of Toad Venom,” Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences 56 no. 12 (December 1967): 1535–42.

12. Chen and Kovarikova, “Pharmacology and Toxicology,” 1537.

13. Horace, The Works of Horace, “The Book of the Epodes of Horace, Ode V: “The Witches Mangling of a Boy.” https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_works_of_Horace/Book_of_Epodes.

14. Juvenal, “Satire 1,” trans. G. G. Ramsay, transcribed by Robert Pearse, The Tertullian Project, 2008, http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/juvenal_satires_01.htm.

15. It has been suggested that the plague was likely of toads rather than frogs, as common Egyptian toads were poisonous while frogs were not, and toads metamorphose more quickly and prolifically than do frogs. Richard Wasserug, “Why Tadpoles Love Fast Food,” Natural History 93 (April 1984): 67.

16. Revelation 16:13–14, The Holy Bible, https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0839/__P12Z.HTM.

17. The toad was not universally met with fear and loathing. Ancient Egyptians, for instance, associated toads with fertility and birth, the goddess of which was Heqet, a frog-goddess. See Elizabeth Ann St. George, Heket: Frog and Toad Magic (London: Spook Enterprises, 2006). Similarly, multiple Native American cultures also held the toad in a positive light, associating it with fertility and life. See Adrian Morgan, Toads and Toadstools: The Natural History, Folklore, and Cultural Oddities of a Strange Association (Berkeley: Celestial Arts, 1995), 123–26.

18. Thomas Dale, “The Nude at Moissac: Vision, Phantasia, and the Experience of Romanesque Sculpture,” in Current Directions in Eleventh-and Twelfth-Century Sculpture Studies, ed. Robert Maxwell and Kirk Ambrose (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 60–61.

19. Adrian Tudor, Tales of Vice and Virtue: The First Old French “Vie des Peres” (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), 368.

20. In The Garden of Earthly Delights, the lecherous amphibian crouches on the breast of a woman, while in the Haywain Triptych, a toad prefers to squat on a woman’s genitals. Another example is The Temptation of St. Anthony where a winged toad transports the saint through the air while he is being tormented by demons. Meanwhile a demonic toad lounges in the right corner, holding a chalice being filled by a sorceress, while a toad crawls out from under a table on which poisonous food and drink are seductively displayed. See Renilde Vervoort, “The Pestilent Toad: The Significant of the Toad in the Works of Bosch,” in Hieronymus Bosch: New Insights into His Life and Work, ed. Jos Koldeweij and Bernard Vermet (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, NAi Publishers, 2001), 147.

21. Vervoort, “The Pestilent Toad,” 147.

22. In some legal proceedings such as witch trials in Normandy, toads could even serve as tangible proof of a witch’s guilt. E. William Monter, “Toads and Eucharists: The Male Witches of Normandy, 1564–1660,” French Historical Studies 20, no. 4 (Autumn 1997): 563–95.

23. Florencio Idoate Iragui, La Brujería en Navarra y sus Documentos (Pamplona: Institución Príncipe de Viana, 1978), 253.

24. Idoate, La Brujería, 264.

25. It is noteworthy that many Spanish medicinal recipes proposed using toads administered in a burned form for treatments of arthritis, cancer, and nose hemorrhages. See Rodriguez et al., “Toxins and Pharmacologically Active Compounds,” table 1.

26. Ander Berrojalbiz’s research shows that as early as 1370 witches in Lower Navarre were said to use cooked toads and the broth they rendered in their maleficia. See Ander Berrojalbiz, “The Sorcery Trial against Pes de Guoythie and Cobd,” in Berrojalbiz, Sources from the Dawn of the Great Witch Hunt in Lower Navarra, 1370 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), 18–19.

27. AGN, TR_209502 (1535), fol. 3r.

28. AGN, TR_209502 (1535), fol. 7r.

29. AGN, TR_63994 (1540), fols. 59v–60r.

30. AGN, TR_63994 (1540), fol. 2v.

31. The records also show that two inquisitors from Calahorra reported in 1540 that eleven-year-old Miguela reported it was not until she “touched a toad” that she was able to go to the witches’ gathering. AGN, TR_63994 (1540), fol. 14r.

32. ADP, Aguinaga, Cartón 13, n. 17 (1569).

33. Modern experimentations conducted on humans show that bufotoxins in the bloodstream cause significant pain, disorientation, and vomiting. See Rochelle Rojas, “Plenae veneficiorum: Toads, Poison, and Witchcraft in Pre-Modern Europe” (forthcoming).

34. ADP, Aguinaga, Cartón 13, n. 17. Bell-wearing toads will reappear in the witch panic. See Gustav Henningsen, The Salazar Documents: Inquisitor Alonso de Salazar Frías and Others on the Basque Witch Persecution (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 152.

35. ADP, Aguinaga, Cartón 13, n. 17, fol. 48r.

36. ADP, Aguinaga, Cartón 13, n. 17, fol. 48r.

37. AGN, TR_69853 (1575), fol. 13v.

38. AGN, TR_327744 (1576), fol. 6r.

39. AGN, TR_98192 (1576), fol. 17r.

40. AGN, TR_98192 (1576), fol. 44r.

41. AGN, TR_98192 (1576), fol. 158v.

42. AGN, TR_327215 (1576), fol. 10r.

43. AGN, TR_327422 (1576), fol. 31r.

44. AGN, TR_327422 (1576), fol. 85v.

45. AGN, TR_71319 (1595), fol. 173v.

46. Toads metamorphose during the panic. In Invoking the Akelarre: Voices of the Accused in the Basque Witch-Craze, 1609–1614 (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2019), Emma Wilby dedicated multiple chapters to presenting different “cultural and experiential matrices” (156) accused witches may have mined to arrive at such detailed toad narratives.

47. Gustav Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate: Basque Witchcraft and the Spanish Inquisition, 1609–1614, Basque Series (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1980), 172.

48. She also kept a pot of toad vomit and powder made from ground toad-skin and wrapped in a piece of paper, items that the inquisitors failed to discover as the devil “must have removed them.” Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate, 165.

49. Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate, 164.

50. Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate, 138.

51. Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate, 155.

52. AHN, Inq., Lib. 835, fol. 340v. This decree begins with: “A Relation of the people who are to appear in the auto de fé celebrated by the Inquisition of Logroño, Sunday, the seventh day of November in the year 1610, of the acts and offenses they have committed, and the punishments they are to receive for them.”

53. Lu Ann Homza, Village Infernos and Witches’ Advocates: Witch-Hunting in Navarre, 1608–1614 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022), 98.

54. AHN, Inq., Lib. 835, fol. 346r.

55. AHN, Inq., Lib. 835, fol. 348v.

56. While normal toads were a common animal connected to witchcraft practices, these dressed toads of the Basque congregation are the only familiars I have encountered anywhere in the corpus of witchcraft literature to be adorned in fine apparel. Thus far, I have encountered only two instances of the dressing of animals in nonfictional, early modern scholarship (doubtless there may be others), and neither appears in the context of witchcraft. Robert Darnton gives an account of a costumed cat who was “shaved to look like a priest, dressed in mock vestments,” and then “hanged on the gallows” in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Vintage Books, 1984), 12. Monkeys, too, were on occasion dressed in imitation of humans both in courts and in public, a practice dating back to antiquity. See Erasmus’s gloss of the adage “An Ape in Purple” (Adagia I.vii.10).

57. AHN, Inq., Lib. 835, fol. 346r. Recall that in 1569 the toads of the priest-witch of Burgui also donned bells.

58. James Sharpe, “The Witch’s Familiar in Elizabethan England,” in Authority and Consent in Tudor England, ed. G. Bernard and S. Gunn (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 209.

59. James Sharpe, Witchcraft in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 2013), 63–64. Sharpe’s observation that the study of familiars is “currently one of the most urgent items on the agenda for future research into English witchcraft history” can usefully be broadened to continental inquiry.

60. A scholarly examination of witch trials from 1530 to 1705 has revealed the recurrence of various manifestations of the familiar, most of which were “nondescript” representations (such as imps), followed in prominence by mice, cats, dogs, and toads. James A. Serpell, “Guardian Spirits or Demonic Pets: The Concept of the Witch’s Familiar in Early Modern England, 1530–1712,” in The Animal/Human Boundary, ed. A. N. H. Creager and W. C. Jordan (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2002), 169, 171–73.

61. AHN, Inq., Lib. 835, fol. 346r.

62. AHN, Inq., Lib. 835, fol. 346r.

63. In a meeting in March 1611, Bishop Venegas convened a meeting in Pamplona to which he summoned various investigators, and the Franciscans arrived with their report. In it they claimed to have proof of witchcraft in the form of four jars of unguents and a dressed toad. Supposedly these were delivered to the tribunal at Logroño, though no further information appeared. Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate, 219.

64. Alan Kors and Edward Peters, Witchcraft in Europe, 400–1700: A Documentary History, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 161; Heinrich Kramer, Malleus Maleficarum, trans. Christopher Mackay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 116–17.

65. The secular witch trials do mention two demonological writings: Reprobación de las supersticiones y hechicerías (1537) by Pedro Ciruelo, a theologian from Aragon, and Disquisitiones magicae (1608), by the Jesuit theologian Martin Delrío; neither mentions toads.

66. Pierre de Lancre, Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et demons, trans. Gerhild Schultz (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006).

67. Jan Machielsen, The Science of Demons: Early Modern Authors Facing Witchcraft and the Devil (New York: Routledge, 2020), 284.

68. De Lancre, Tableau de l’inconstance, 148.

69. De Lancre, Tableau de l’inconstance, 150. These toad horns remind us of Pliny’s natural history and the toads in Burgui from 1569.

70. De Lancre, Tableau de l’inconstance, 153.

71. See Wilby’s analyses of Jeannette’s testimony and de Lancre’s interrogations in Invoking the Akelarre, 163–77.

72. De Lancre, Tableau de l’inconstance, 197–98.

73. De Lancre, Tableau de l’inconstance, 200.

74. De Lancre, Tableau de l’inconstance, 201.

75. De Lancre, Tableau de l’inconstance, 204.

76. De Lancre, Tableau de l’inconstance, 399.

77. De Lancre, Tableau de l’inconstance, 400.

78. De Lancre, Tableau de l’inconstance, 400.

79. AGN, TR_16058 (1647), fol. 12v.

80. The interesting genesis of the term akelarre, which did not come into common parlance until the witch panic, remains a fascinating and popular line of inquiry. See Mikel Azurmendi, Las brujas de Zugarramurdi: La historia del aquelarre y la Inquisición (Córdoba: Almuzara, 2013), 139.