Halloween is fast approaching, as are the trick-or-treaters who knock on our door, hoping for candy. These visitors include ghouls, goblins, and hungry witches, and I always love the see the kids run up to the door in their costumes. Recently, my great niece asked me why witches fly on brooms. Since I didn’t know the answer, I did my usual thing that included a deep dive into the folklore behind the witch’s broom. And this is what I found: Not much.

There’s not a lot written about why witches fly on brooms. Black cats are considered familiars. Cauldrons were popularized by Shakespeare’s witches in Macbeth. Here is part of their song:

Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and caldron bubble. Fillet of a fenny snake, In the caldron boil and bake;

But brooms had to come from somewhere. And it turns out, the only real evidence I found for witch’s brooms comes from testimony in 1324 regarding an accused witch named Lady Alice Kyteler. Lady Alice was an Irish widow tried for sorcery and heresy. When investigators searched her house, they found a “pipe of ointment, wherewith she greased a staff, upon which she ambled and galloped through thicke and thin.”

So there’s a lot of subtext in this quoted line. To start with, the ointment found in Lady Alice’s home was a middle ages concoction from Atropa belladonna (deadly nightshade), Hyoscyamus niger (henbane), Mandragora officinarum (mandrake), and Datur stramonium (jimsonweed). This concoction would have been not just poisonous, but it would’ve also caused hallucinations from the chemicals we now know are tropane alkaloids.

According to historians, because this ointment would’ve been so toxic, the middle ages investigators would never have suggested the accused witches ingested it. So they came up with another possible way of using the ointment–by rubbing it on the skin, especially near private parts. To make things even grosser, they accused witches (men and women) of rubbing the ointment on a stick or the end of a broomstick so they could insert it into body in their most intimate areas.

In the book Murder, Magic, and Medicine, the author John Mann cites Jordan de Bergamo, a 15-century theologian who wrote that “the vulgar believe, and 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.”

By the 17th century, there were stories of witches flying up and out of their chimneys on broomsticks. Some historians believe that because of a common practice of women who’d leave their broom outside their doors to let their neighbors know they’d gone to the market and weren’t home, that the broomstick became associated with women’s inability to leave the house without being noticed. Honestly, the ties between witches and broomsticks seems tenuous at best, especially since there are very few written admissions of broomstick flying by people actually accused of witchcraft.

Witches illustrated in Martin Le Franc’s ‘Le Champion des Dames’ (1451) (via Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF)/Wikimedia) {{PD-US}} – US work that is in the public domain in the US for an unspecified reason, but presumably because it was published in the US before 1929.

There is one intriguing account of a man accused of witchcraft who admitted he’d flown on a broomstick, but it dates to 1453. Guillaume Edelin, a priest from Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France, was arrested and tried for witchcraft. Probably because he was quite public about his criticism of the church and their pursuit of witches. Anyway, during his interrogation which included torture, he confessed to riding a broom. He repented, but spent the rest of his life in prison. But Edelin’s story of riding a broomstick could’ve been inspired a French poet named Martin Le Franc. In 1451, two years before Edelin’s accusation, two illustrations were added to Le Franc’s manuscript titled “Le Champion des Dames (The Defender of Ladies). One drawing features a woman on a broom, and the other shows another woman riding a plain white stick. It’s possible that Edelin was inspired by these drawings, especially since Le Franc’s publication had been hugely successful.

By the 18th century, most of the witch panic had subsided, partly due to the horror of the Salem Witch Trials in 1692. Even during those testimonies, the witches were supposedly flying on poles, not brooms. But the images of a witch riding a broom has become even more popular today, and I suspect it has to do with an old movie called Häxan (1922) that is part horror flick and part witchcraft documentary. This black-and-white movie silent movie included scenes of broom-riding witches. (If you want to watch it, there are multiple versions floating around the internet, but the Criterion version is the best one.) And, supposedly, the style of filming inspired the young filmmakers who made The Blair Witch Project. (That is hearsay I was unable to corroborate, but it’s plausible since Häxan is still studied in film schools.)

So while the connection between witches and broomsticks seems tenuous, I can’t deny that it makes for a great visual. And maybe that was the point all along. Maybe, to rile up people and get them to believe outrageous claims, they needed propaganda that people could visualize on their own. Broomsticks were ubiquitous. Every household, rich and poor, had one. That meant that every household had the potential to be hiding a witch. And as far as propaganda goes, that’s an easy and powerful symbol that everyone could understand… and fear.

I hope you all have a wonderfully spooky week and maybe, just for a few days, put away your brooms!

 

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