FLYING OINTMENT

NOCTURNAL HAND & FOOT SALVE. Inspired by the mysterious unguents of historical folk practice, this restorative balm is crafted with spider web-inspired proteins, sea buckthorn, quartz crystal, mushroom extracts, resins and herbs that replenish skin and prepare the body, mind, and spirit for the dream state.

• Restorative & Protective
• Includes Tube Key
• Vegan Unhydrolyzed Spider Silk Proteins
• Sea Buckthorn
• Sacred Resins & Medicinal Herbs
• Mushroom Extracts
• Powdered Quartz Crystal
• Scent: Frankincense, Copal, Sage, Dragon’s Blood

PRODUCT DETAILS

The Flying Ointment comes with a book and tube key.

A nocturnal repair balm for hand and foot. A preparation for passage. There is an hour when the body grows heavy and the borders of the waking world begin to thin. The Flying Ointment belongs to this hour. This fragrant salve is applied beneath the cover of darkness to restore skin depleted by the waking world, and to mark the moment before consciousness crosses into sleep. Mysterious preparations like the Flying Ointment have long been associated with medicine, magic, and the folklore of witches, night journeys, and the sensation of traveling beyond the physical body. Our Flying Ointment reimagines this ancient mythology as a nightly ritual of restoration and passage.

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BODY: Reconstitution of the Boundary

The hands and feet are the body’s outer provinces: where we touch the world, traverse it, and carry its evidence home. By night, these extremities may be dry, fissured, and depleted. The restorative Flying Ointment features vegan, unhydrolyzed spider silk proteins that form a tensile, adaptive veil across the skin, supporting elasticity and resilience. The spider understands that a boundary need not be solid to possess strength. Its architecture is delicate, responsive, and nearly invisible.

Sea buckthorn restores suppleness, Comfrey extract supports compromised skin, while pomegranate seed and evening primrose oils replenish and reinforce the moisture barrier. Together, these materials restore the body’s outer boundary as a living threshold between self and world. Before the journey inward, the vessel is repaired.

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MIND: Induction of Descent

In sleep, the senses slowly withdraw and the waking mind begins to dissolve. The Flying Ointment transforms this nightly disappearance into ritual. Massaged slowly into the hands and feet before bed, the repeated gesture becomes a tactile marker of transition: a signal that the activities of the waking body are complete. Then scent opens another door.

Omani frankincense, a resin with an ancient history of ceremonial and ritual use, releases a mineral, balsamic breath that draws attention inward. Sage, equally ancient in its associations with purification and clearing, brings an aromatic brightness to the composition. Together, resin, herb, scent, and touch create an atmosphere for withdrawal.

The hands release what they have held.
The feet relinquish the roads they have traveled.
The mind turns toward the dark. The descent begins.

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SPIRIT: Guarding the Unfixed State

Sleep is the great nightly loosening. The body remains where it was left, yet consciousness wanders elsewhere. Identity becomes porous. Time folds strangely upon itself. Across cultures and millennia, dreams have been understood as omens, revelations, visitations, and journeys into territories inaccessible to waking consciousness. And passage into such territories was not always undertaken unguarded.

The Flying Ointment carries this memory through its materials. Dragon’s blood resin, surrounded by centuries of magical and ceremonial associations, has been used symbolically for protection, purification, and preservation. Mushroom extracts emerge from darkness and participate in the transformation of decay into new life. They belong neither entirely to death nor to what follows it. Powdered quartz crystal, long regarded in mystical traditions as a material of clarity, amplification, and energetic focus, completes the preparation. Here, these substances exist simultaneously as material and symbol, botanical, fungal, mineral, and mythic. Together they form a kind of nocturnal architecture around the ritual of sleep: restoring the physical boundary while acknowledging the mystery that begins when that boundary is no longer the only one that matters.

The ointment is applied.
The body is tended.
The threshold is marked.
The waking self is released.
And somewhere between the final thought and the first dream,
the flight begins.

SHOP THE NOCTURNAL RITUALS COLLECTION

RITUAL USE

Apply nightly before sleep to hands and feet as an act of restoration, protection, and passage into dream.

THE KEY

In early ritual and domestic practice alike, keys were carried not only for the securing of physical space, but for their symbolic function. They were held by those tasked with guardianship of thresholds: doorways, boundaries, and transitional states in which the ordinary limits of the world were understood to loosen. Among these figures is Hecate, a powerful Greek goddess who is frequently depicted bearing keys. She associated with night passage, liminality, magic, and the governance of crossings. Her key is a symbol that acknowledges the existence of unseen thresholds, and a state in which crossing becomes possible, though never without awareness of what is being left, and what is being entered.

The Nocturnal Key is conceived within this lineage. It is not only a functional tool, but a symbolic part of your nocturnal ritual.

Held in the hand, it initiates a sequence: a small, deliberate act that precedes the application of the ointment and the descent into sleep. In this way, it functions less as an accessory than as the first articulation of a practice, one that recognizes the transition from waking into dream as a condition worthy of attention.

It does not claim protection. It does not promise transformation. It marks the moment before.

To use the key is to acknowledge the threshold.
To turn it is to prepare for crossing.

THE FRAGRANCE

Sacred resins smolder in the shadows, frankincense, dragon’s blood, labdanum and copal entwined with wild sage to create an intoxicating veil of smoke, earth and ancient ritual. Mysterious yet exquisitely refined, it evokes a private ceremony at twilight: sensual, otherworldly and unapologetically luxurious.

THE HISTORY 

Flying ointments have long occupied the obscure territory between medicine, magic, folklore, and altered states: mysterious preparations associated with witches, night journeys, and transformation.

There are accounts of gatherings that took place beyond the limits of ordinary perception. Figures are seen in the darkness not walking, but arriving, as though drawn across distance. They come anointed. This detail, though often overshadowed by the spectacle of the sabbat itself, appears with striking consistency across early descriptions. Before departure, before the crossing, there is preparation. A substance is applied to the body. Hands, feet, and other thresholds of the skin are treated with care and intention.

The history of what follows is described variously: flight, transformation, communion. But the ointment remains constant. The so-called flying ointments, or unguenta volandi, emerge not solely from folklore, but from accounts from the 15th and 16th centuries that describe preparations composed of botanical extracts, resins, and fats, applied directly to the skin. 

The flying ointment must be understood not as fantasy, but as a deliberate preparation, one that engages the body, alters the condition of the mind, and was believed to safeguard the individual. Our Flying Ointment reimagines this ancient mythology as a nightly ritual of restoration and passage.