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The First Known Depiction of a Witch on a Broomstick
In the 15th century, the image of the witch flying on a broomstick
first appeared, its meaning laden with sexual and spiritual depravity.
Allison Meier
The visual of the witch on a broomstick is so ubiquitous as to be benign. Before the Wicked Witch of the West or Harry Potter took flight on the spindly cleaning tool, the image first appeared in the 15th century. Two women in marginal illustrations of 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 (BNF), are soaring, one on a stick, the other on 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 marks them as Waldensians. This Christian movement 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. That these heretics would also meddle with the supernatural was not a leap, but why the broomstick?
Yet it was racier than that. 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 given by the devil or crafted by a witch, the potion allowed a human to take flight, likely for a trip to the Witches’ Sabbath.
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, couldn’t just be eaten. They could be applied to mucous membranes, such as on genitalia, or 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 of 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.
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