WHY ARTISTS HAVE BEEN ENCHANTED BY WITCHCRAFT FOR CENTURIES

Alina Cohen

Illumination depicting the two witches on a broomstick and a stick, in Martin Le Franc's Le Champion des dames ("Ladies' Champion"), 1451. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

The history of witchcraft in Western art is a tale with a dramatic plot twist. Throughout the 1400s, witches began appearing in European illustrations and woodcuts as demonic creatures with deviant sexual habits: Broomsticks were stand-ins for phalluses, and nude women rode backwards on goats. Throughout the next 400 years, around 80,000 Europeans—80 percent of them women—were killed for alleged witchcraft. Their “crimes” ranged from causing male impotence to damaging property and worshipping Satan. In the 1800s, occult spirituality was suddenly back in vogue. Women began reclaiming sorcery for themselves, in both their lives and their art.

Fast forward to 2019: Witches are alive and well, from Bucharest to Los Angeles. They’re casting spells, making enchanting artwork, and cursing world leaders. It’s certainly an improvement from the days of witch burnings, but gender inequality is still evident in contemporary spiritual and aesthetic practices. Ideally, women would have enough power and influence to make magical activity redundant. By tracing the history of witchcraft in art, we reveal just how far we’ve come—and how far we still have to go.

 The first known Western artwork depicting witches on broomsticks appears in an illustrated manuscript of a poem, “Le Champion des Dames” (1451), by French writer Martin Le Franc. To the left of Le Franc’s calligraphic text fly two women in long dresses—one pumpkin-hued, the other the color of a carnation. Light cloths cover their hair, and they look up towards the sky. They’re labeled as “Waldensians,” hailing from an ascetic Christian sect. French lore derided the group as heretical, imagining that its women flew through the sky on twig brooms.

“Some of the most powerful images of the diabolical nature of witchcraft produced in the fifteenth century depicted witches as part of a group, and were shaped by contemporary notions of heresy and apostasy,” wrote Charles Zika in The Appearance of Witchcraft (2007). Heretics, of course, were more frightening in large numbers, as they created a more significant threat to the status quo. If one witch was scary, a flying coven was downright terrifying..............

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