In The Enemy Within: A Short History of Witch-Hunting, John Demos reveals one book found in the American colonies directing the devout to cut a cross into a broom to ensure wanton women would use it to sweep, not straddle. Soon after, Ulrich Molitor’s 1489 etchings star strange beasts riding backward on a cooking fork, and Albrecht Du?rer’s circa 1500 engraving “Witch Riding Backwards on a Goat” shows a broom between a sorceress’ thighs.īy the time “witches” came to the new world, the idea of deviant femininity unfurled atop a broomstick was ubiquitous.
An unattributed woodcut from circa 1400 depicts a witch, demon, and warlock gliding on their broomsticks toward a peasant woman. Less than a hundred years after Lady Alice’s alleged dildo was taken as evidence of her witchery, the broom-as-sex-toy discourse found its way into visual art. “Witch Riding Backwards On A Goat” by Albercht Dürer (c. Imagine being arrested after the cops found your Hitachi Magic Wand? (This could conceivably still happen in Alabama today, where sex toys remain illegal.) But in extant documents from the 1324 trials of Ireland’s first accused witch, Lady Alice Kyteler, inquisitors describe finding her special stash of “flying ointment.” “In rifleing the closet of the ladie, they found a pipe of oyntment, wherewith she greased a staffe, upon which she ambled and galloped through thick and thin,” they write.
Whether this is an accurate account of an early-modern ritual or merely historical hearsay is unclear. “Départ pour le Sabbat” by Albert Joseph Pénot (1910) Emboden, confirm that this type of hallucinogen would best be absorbed into the body through a mucous membrane like the vagina, further explaining why the traditional image of the witch would depict her astride an ointment-coated broomstick. “This was the ‘broomstick’ by which these women were said to travel.” Other sources, including historian William A. “These ingredients would be combined in a hempseed-oil-based ‘flying ointment’ that the witches would then administer vaginally using a special dildo,” he writes.
#A sexy witch on a broom skin#
In fact, the familiar image of a witch flying on a broomstick has a surprisingly sexual origin.īasque witch illustration, artist unknownĪuthor Michael Pollan gives perhaps the most detailed description of the alleged sexual connection between witches and their brooms in his book, The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World. As he tells it, midwives, herbalists, and ladies in the know (aka witches) would cultivate “psychoactive” agents including datura, opium poppies, belladona, hashish, and even the skin of toads with trace levels of the hallucinogen DMT. Women’s bodies and minds were presumed to be more susceptible to vice, and thus more likely to be overtaken by the charms of Satan. As a result, the labyrinthine history of sex in witchcraft is a heady brew of intrigue, transgression, and repression.ĭuring the early modern witch-hunts in Europe (roughly 1300-1750), female sexuality was viewed as an abomination, but it was also a cultural obsession.
For millennia, sex magic has been a powerful tool in the hands of gifted conjurers, but it has also been a practice slapped with negative distortions by generations of freaked out male historians. Witches use sexual energy to commune, to manifest, to make magic, and-in the case of the Medieval hags described in the 1486 witch-hunting bible the Malleus Maleficarum-even to steal penises. Both serious practitioners and characters in witchy lore are known for their abilities to unleash primal desires. 3.5K From riding greased-up broomsticks to weaving seduction spells, the secret sex lives of witches are the stuff both wet dreams and nightmares are made of
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