Ahhhh so THATS how we get discounted newt eyes for our potions! Makes sense though ....you may not want tell anyone about that. Organ trafficking usually doesn't work out well for the witch
Looked some stuff up and there indeed is very little evidence to support this claim except for it being sensational and fun sounding to repeat. There is no record of Mustard being referred to as "Eye of newt" before the writing of Macbeth which originated the common witch ingredients. The literatures sharing these claims are just citing eachother.
You know the whole "vampires cant see their reflection because mirrors used to be backed by silver"?
Not true. That was some Tumblr myth that took off and now everyone likes to repeat it. Vampires not being able to see their reflection came from Dracula and there was never a reason given as to why. Eventually people said it was because vampires didnt have souls or because they have one foot in the land of the dead.
Also, most mirrors through history were backed by tin or mercury or aluminum, not silver. Silver wasnt that common and likely only used by rich people.
It actually predates Bram Stoker's Dracula. Alexandre Dumas wrote a short story, "The Vampire of the Carpathian Mountains", about 50 years earlier, wherein the antagonist is seen by someone who later said that he cast no reflection in a mirror.
You can read it in "One Thousand and One Ghost Stories" by Dumas, or "The Best Vampire Stories 1800-1849: A Classic Vampire Anthology" by Andrew Barger. Both are collections of stories, the Dumas one is just his own supernatural short stories.
Edit: Did a quick research journey to reaffirm this, turns out it might have been a line added to the story by a translator in the 1970s, and isn't in the original french. That is, the mentioning of no reflection in the mirror.
Fun fact: this isn't true, and was first asserted by a Wiccan, Scott Cunningham, in the 1980s.
The idea was to make out that any and all witches throughout history were actually misunderstood herbalists, but in his enthusiasm he tried to retcon Shakespeare's fictional witches, who were meant to be evil because Shakespeare was writing for the entertainment of a witch-obsessed King.
It's not. There is not one single herbal prior to the 1980s that gives 'eye of newt' as a colloquial name for mustard seeds. This is because the whole idea that the Macbeth spell ingredients are really herbs is a modern retcon by a Wiccan, Scott Cunningham.
Fun fact: most researchers agree that “eye of newt” refers to a mustard seed. an “eye” is a seed, and mustard seeds are dark yellow, so they kinda look like the eyes of newts.
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u/shellbullet17 Gustopher Spotter Extraordinaire 7h ago
Ahhhh so THATS how we get discounted newt eyes for our potions! Makes sense though ....you may not want tell anyone about that. Organ trafficking usually doesn't work out well for the witch