The Reason Witches Ride Broomsticks

The Reason Witches Ride Broomsticks

As Halloween approaches, it offers a chance to delve into the occult, phantasmagoric, otherworldly, and haunted aspects of our world. In a series of posts, we’re exploring art history that offers a portal to a darker side of culture.

Witches sailed through the night air to their sabbats on brooms long before the Wicked Witch of the West or Harry Potter took flight on the spindly cleaning tool. The visual of the witch on a broomstick can be traced to the 15th century, when the illustrations of two practitioners of the dark arts appeared in the 1451 edition of French poet Martin Le Franc’s Le Champion des Dames (The Defender of Ladies), a manuscript now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. One of the flying witches is depicted astride a stick and the other rides a broom. According to Witchcraft in Europe, 400-1700: A Documentary History, edited by University of Pennsylvania history professors Alan Charles Kors and Edward Peters, Le Champion des Dames has “the first such illustration in the pictorial history of witchcraft.” Le Franc’s long poem about virtuous women is interrupted by a discussion of witchcraft, and the covered heads of the two women mark them as Waldensians, a Christian movement that emerged in the 12th-century. With its tenet that any member could be a priest, even a woman, and perform sacraments and preach, the bloody ire of the Catholic Church soon followed. Accusing such “heretics” of meddle with the supernatural isn’t surprising, but why the broomstick?

Dylan Thuras at Atlas Obscura wrote that the “broom was a symbol of female domesticity, yet the broom was also phallic, so riding on one was a symbol of female sexuality, thus femininity and domesticity gone wild.” Importantly, the two women (above) in Le Champion des Dames do not appear deformed or grotesque, they are ordinary; their corruption cannot be visually perceived. And pagan rituals prior to the 15th century had involved phallic forms, so the shape of the broomstick between a woman’s legs had both a sexual and spiritually deviant meaning to the Church.

Richard Cavendish’s 1970 An Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Supernatural cites a man, Guillaume Edelin, who confessed to flying on a broom in 1453 as the first known reference to the act. Just a few years later, in 1456, emerged the mention of “flying ointment.” Either provided by the devil or crafted by a witch, the potion allowed a person to take flight, likely for a trip to the Witches’ Sabbath.

You can probably guess where this is going. Megan Garber of the Atlantic cites the 15th-century writing of Jordanes de Bergamo, who stated: “The vulgar believe, and the witches confess, that on certain days or nights they anoint a staff and ride on it to the appointed place or anoint themselves under the arms and in other hairy places.”

Hallucinogens of the time, such as ergot fungus, could be applied to mucous membranes, such as those “other hairy places,” as Bergamo coyly put it. Matt Soniak at Mental Floss quotes Antoine Rose, who in 1477, when accused of witchcraft in France, confessed that the Devil gave her flying potions. She would “smear the ointment on the stick, put it between her legs and say ‘Go, in the name of the Devil, go!’”

Since many witch “confessions” were obtained under torture, and the Catholic Church and others could be wildly reactionary to any deviance, all this is hearsay. (And think of the splinters!) But the image of the witch on the broomstick combined anxieties on women’s sexuality, drug use, and religious freedom into one enduring myth.

Source: Allison Meier, Hyperallergic, October 23, 2016.

See also:
"Why Do Witches Ride Broomsticks?": whatliesbeyond.boards.net/thread/3850/why-witches-ride-brooms

"Why Witches Ride Broomsticks": whatliesbeyond.boards.net/thread/453/why-witches-ride-broomsticks\