Witches and Flight

Although beliefs about witches occur in many variations around the world, one important similarity in all cultures is the belief in the witch’s powers of flight.

Both African and European witches were said to have great powers of flight (as well as the power to shift shapes and the propensity for feeding off the blood of their victims, causing them to waste away). Most remarkable among the similarities between African and European beliefs about witches are that the witches fly to their meetings by moonlight and that they assemble for orgiastic nocturnal rites where they perform circle dances and use magical ointments. Also ubiquitous are the beliefs that witches kidnap infants (and sometimes eat their flesh), and that they are aided in their magical workings by familiars.

Still, the power of flight is the most dramatic of the witch’s powers and the one that has most captured the imagination of artists and poets. Flight is a metaphor both for freedom and for sexuality—and the figure of the flying witch, of course, expresses both these longings.

Witches are women who have never been afraid to fly. Was that why they had to be burned?

In the European tradition, it was never really clear to the witch-hunters whether the witches actually flew or only imagined that they did. We know that the witches’ famous flying ointments were compounded of such things as aconite, deadly nightshade, hemlock, cinquefoil, sweet flag, poplar leaves, parsley, soot, bats’ blood, and (we are told) the fat of unbaptized infants. The first three ingredients are known to be highly hallucinogenic in small doses, lethal in large ones.

The witches would first anoint themselves with flying ointment and then ride to their Sabbats. Swedish witches of the seventeenth century flew to Blocula upon a beast the Devil sent them, but before their ride, he gave them “a horn with salve in it, wherewith we do anoint ourselves.” Somerset witches of the seventeenth century reported that their spirit gave them a greenish oil “which smells raw,” which they smeared upon their foreheads and wrists before proceeding to the Sabbat.

What was more important: the ointment, or the broom and the act of riding (which seems, even in “primitive” dances of the present day, to have certain magical attributes)?

Apparently, various symbols and images have joined to produce the magical ride of the witch: first, that there is a substance one can smear on one’s body to make it transcend its physical limitations; second, that one can create a magical vehicle out of a mundane object if only one knows the proper magical words to utter (it may be a broom, a branch, a beast, or even a flying carpet); third, that one can be perceived in one’s bed even while trysting with witches, devils, fairies, and having all sorts of orgiastic experiences; and fourth, that women preside over these mysteries while men meekly stay at home in their own safe beds, imagining the scraggly brooms placed upon their pillows to be their own true and faithful wives. Aha—woman deceives man even in her sleep!