Abstract
Throughout the early modern period, many Europeans believed in the reality of witchcraft. Those accused of being diabolic witches were thought to have signed a pact with Satan, to worship him, attend Sabbaths, and devise ways to harm humans through maleficia. Witches functioned as an inversion of Christian society, whereby they and their actions were emphasized as being ‘other’, while simultaneously reinforcing the societal norms they revoked. This article investigates representations of devils and witches, and the visual renderings of witchcraft belief, all of which helped construct their otherness. The paper will explore depictions of witches in early modern visual cultures by examining sixteenth- and seventeenth-century fine art, engravings, and woodcuts.
Keywords: Early Modern, witchcraft, supernatural, art, visual cultures, print, gender
Witches and the Devil in Early Modern Visual Cultures: Constructions of the Demonic Other
Throughout the Early Modern period, an estimated 90,000 people were prosecuted for witchcraft in Europe, about 50,000 of whom were executed.[1] In many witchcraft narratives and confessions, the Devil played a major role as he was believed to form a pact with witches, giving them powers in return for their soul. At the witches’ sabbath, the Devil was purported to be the figurehead, where witches allegedly gathered to have sex with and to worship him. The intrinsic connection between belief in the Devil, heresy, magic and witches led to the construction of the diabolic witch.[2] By absorbing and developing witch-theory in Europe, art became a way of engaging with these ideas and circulating them more widely.
This article explores the depictions of witches and devils in Early Modern European visual cultures, which helped to construct an image of witches as the ‘other’, as the enemy within.
It discusses art concerning witches’ sabbaths, milk and weather magic, maleficia, the sexual threat of witches and English woodcuts which conveyed the otherness of the witch’s body and familiar spirits. The commonality of the visuals chosen are their depictions of the demonic as an inversion of society and pervasive threat to Christendom.
Visuals of the dairy-witch and Tempestarii
A fear concerning witchcraft was the impact that magic could have on the economy and targeted individuals. Early modern Europe was mostly comprised of agrarian communities where crops, livestock and dairy were very valuable commodities – disruption to these could spell disaster for the owner. Illustrations of dairy-stealing witches emerged in woodcuts such as those accompanying the 1486 edition of Hans Vintler’s Buch der Tugend (originally written in 1411 and modelled on an early fourteenth-century tract, Tommaso’s Fiori di Virtù) and Johann Geiler’s Die Emeis (1517) (Fig. 1). These images were also depicted on wall paintings, such as those by Albertus Pictor (c.1490) in Söderby-Karl, Uppland, Sweden, or the murals in Vejlby kirke, Århus (1492), and Tuse kirke in Holbæk (c.1460), Denmark.[3] Below, the image of dairy-stealing (Fig. 1) shows the witch using axe magic to pilfer milk from the cow, into her pail – hence the emaciated cow in the background. The witch is syphoning the milk to profit, while the victim and their livestock suffer directly from the effects of the magic, and indirectly from its economic impact. Demonic elements are also visible in the image’s iconography, from the gathering storm of destruction, the smoking cauldron and the group of three female witches gathered to help enact the magic. In a fairly benign looking village scene, the image depicts fears surrounding dairy produce – namely that it can inexplicably spoil or disappear because of demonic witches’ direct meddling.
Figure 1: Witch Stealing Milk from a Neighbour’s Cow. Wellcome Collection, CC BY.
A more sinister ‘cumulative concept of witchcraft’ and demonology began to form in the 1400s, culminating at the end of the century. To many of the elite, demons were no longer considered to be external enemies that could be easily be defeated through trickery, magic or piety, but were extremely powerful supernatural agents that invaded every part of daily life.[4] Some medieval scholars believed that demons and Satan could take human and animal form, make pacts with humans, influence thoughts and emotions, have sexual intercourse with humans and even produce offspring.[5] These beliefs helped inform and create early modern art depicting the demonic and the witch as the enemy.
Part of the vast repertoire of magic attributed to witches was weather magic. In visual cultures Tempestarii were portrayed as the enemy of society by causing terrible weather which could cause damage to or devastate crops, destroy buildings and ships. Ulrich Molitor’s popular text, De Lamiis et Pythonicis Mulieribus (1489), the first illustrated witchcraft treatise, showed witches creating weather magic. In a woodcut two witches stand beside a flaming cauldron into which they cast a serpent and a rooster as sacrifices to enact the weather magic, as depicted by the clouds overhead (Fig. 4). The image was simplistic but influential in forming the iconography of witchcraft, especially for Tempestarii. Pieter Bruegel the Elder imitated these concepts and deployed them in a much more intricate manner. His engraving, St James and the Magician Hermogenes (1565) (Fig. 2) depicts a cognate scene, while including evidence of ritualistic sorcery, and crafting his demons and strange hybrids in the style of Hieronymus Bosch.[6] Bruegel’s engraving, loosely based off ‘The Golden Legend’, is loaded with demonic iconography. In the underground chamber of the image, demons are about to dismember a man, overseen by the Devil, and in the middle of the image we can see a witch reading a grimoire and shaking a sieve to divine or enact weather magic. She is aided by the other boiling cauldrons and flying witches scattered throughout the picture. Following the line of clouds, in the top right a witch riding a goat is amidst of the storm which has caused ships to sink and a church steeple to collapse, and, to the left, we see the outline of livestock being killed by the weather. The visuals clearly show demons and witches using weather magic to target and destroy individuals, even to level church buildings, representing witches as an enemy of Christendom.
Figure 2: After Pieter Bruegel the Elder, St. James and the Magician Hermogenes (1565). Public domain.
Jacques de Gheyn II’s Preparation for the Witches’ Sabbath (c.1610) (Fig. 3) also uses the motif of the witch with a cauldron to produce huge plumes of smoke which texture the engraving’s background. Demons and witches abound in the engraving: at the bottom of the image three witches are gathered around a vase with a grimoire to create a potion, while the witches to the right open a cauldron, unleashing the clouds and smoke which envelope the sky. The square topped volcano that is violently erupting serves to remind viewers of the natural, destructive powers that witches command, such as their purported ability to control weather – as evidenced by the witches preparing to hurl thunderbolts from the storm clouds.[7] In the background we can see a further indication of this, as a man and his livestock are crossing a river on a raft and an outline of a city is depicted – both of these are likely to be the target of the diabolic witchery presented in the foreground. The Witches’ Sabbath is thus showing demonic forces preparing to lay siege to the Christian settlement, again locating witches as an enemy.
Figure 3: Designed by Jacques de Gheyn II, Preparation for the Witches’ Sabbath (c.1610). Public domain.
In a similar vein, Jan van de Velde II’s Heks/Sorceress (1626) positions witchcraft on the outskirts of the mundane, taking place under the cover of night. The engraving shows the witch throwing a powder into the cauldron for a magic ritual (signified by the circle, grimoire and skull), the smoke and fire belching out from the force of the wind produced and melding with the rest of the engraving. In front of the sorceress are an array of strange demons, perhaps signifying sins and vices.[8] Crucially, in the bottom right of the image we can see a house either belonging to the witch or a villager, locating witchcraft in the domestic sphere and emphasising the threat on daily life that demonic witchcraft posed.[9]
Witches, demons, nudity, death, and weather magic are the familiar themes depicted in the art explored. The civilians in the background of the visuals remind viewers of the close proximity and the imminent threat of witchcraft to ordinary Christians.
Witches, power and sexuality
The concept of diabolic witchcraft gave impetus to its artistic depictions in woodcuts, engravings and paintings, visually showing the sexual threat of witchcraft, which evolved with other themes such as Tempestarii. Simplistic woodcuts in Ulrich Molitor’s De Lamiis (1489) (Fig. 4) showed key witchcraft iconography, representing it as a threat, and including themes like weather magic, witches flying on pitchforks, and a woman embracing a bestial devil. The latter positioned devils as hybrid creatures, depicting their bestiality and immorality, and as a threat to monogamy since the woman’s head covering in the image indicates that she has married.[10] Civilisation is again represented in the background, at the very top of the woodcut.
Figure 4: Ulrich Molitor, De lamiis et pythonicis mulieribus(1489). Public domain.
In early modern intellectual thought, women were considered ‘the weaker vessel’ and men were believed to have a divinely sanctioned rule over them. Men were to fulfil this commandment by governing women through marriage and by ruling their households, as advised in conduct books such as William Gouge’s popular Of Domesticall Duties (1622).[11] As illustrated through Molitor, Devils could prey on women luring them to adultery, disorder and witchcraft, therefore threatening to destabilise the very nucleus of social order – the household.
But women were not helpless: witches could tempt men through magic and the sexuality of their bodies, as witches were thought to be lustful and woman to have sexual capital. For example, Hans Baldung Grien’s painting The Weather Witches (1523) (Fig. 5) combines the sexual element of witches with Tempestarii to identify the naked female bodies as a source of disorder. The swelling clouds indicate the witches’ power and destruction and their windswept hair signifies the lust of the women, as does the witch’s crossed-legged stance – a visual sign of immorality. In the lower tier of the image we see a shrouded goat symbolising the Devil and sexuality, and a small demon is trapped in the flask (stopped by the fruit of original sin) held by the woman on the right.[12] As Charles Zika noted, the iconography, the strong assertive poses of these women and the eroticism of their bodies, convey the centrality of sexual desire and seduction to this image of witchcraft.[13]It shows that witchcraft was demonic in origin but also had power from the sexuality of women, which gave the ‘weaker sex’ power over men.
Figure 5: Hans Baldung Grien, The Weather Witches (1523). Public domain.
Albrecht Dürer was another artist who encoded these concepts of demonic witchcraft in art, helping solidify the sexualised witch-figure. His engraving The Four Witches (1497) (Fig. 6) makes witches more inconspicuous, locating them within society and thus more threatening. The image shows four young, naked women standing together in a room, possibly a bathhouse. At first glance it may seem unassuming but Dürer included cues for his audience to render its diabolic meaning unmistakable: a sinister aspect is added by the inclusion of the Devil emerging from the flames of hell in the bottom left of the image, and the skull and bones on the floor. The rather cryptic letters ‘O.G.H’ written in a sphere above the witches’ heads could mean ‘O Gotte hüte’(Oh God protect us [from the witches]). Additionally, the nudity of the women functioned as a contemporary cultural cipher of witchcraft as a sexual transgression. The positioning of their hands indicates sexual intimacy with each other, while the witches’ beauty, body and desirability represent a threat to the viewer, to men, and the moral and social order. In the image, the women are empowered as witches, giving them magical influence over men and nature, but the image reasserts male authority, by constructing an invisible prison positioning the witches between the demon’s gaze from behind and the male viewer’s gaze from the front. Dürer places male viewers on the precipice of discovering the clandestine witches, just as the demon appears and male authority is challenged.[14] Dürer’s chiaroscuro woodcut, Witches’ Sabbath (1510) conveys similar messages, showing the motif of a young woman astride a goat at the top of the woodcut, symbolising lust, and also parodying the male pastime of horse riding. The bottom half of the image portrays hag-like witches literally cooking up devilry, including weather magic and a demonic ritual. The sexual element so common in witchcraft iconography is primarily evidenced here through the witches’ nudity and the phallic imagery on the left of the woodcut – witches have reclaimed gender power by stealing penises and dangling them over a wooden stick – thus showing how witches threatened Christianity, gender and established order.[15]
Figure 6: Albrecht Dürer, Four Witches (1497). Public domain.
In early modernity, it was believed that diabolic witchcraft was a complete inversion of established social norms. Women would eschew God, attend Sabbaths to worship the Devil, take part in infanticide and orgies and plan direct acts of maleficia, weather magic or the bewitching of men. The actions, sexual capital and demonic allegiance of witches illustrated the debilitating effects diabolism could have on Christian society.[16] Some images in this paper showed the witches brewing malefic magic just outside of normal society, on the peripheries, while some show that the witches were the ‘other’, infiltrating society and therefore a serious threat operating from within.
Enemy Within: English Witchcraft Pamphlets
The close proximity, and threat, of witches can be shown through the visual cultures of English witchcraft pamphlets, as they described actors in localised trials. These witches were also thought to have created a pact with the devil, carried out maleficia and had familiars, all while living amongst ordinary people and subverting norms. Visually, in woodcuts this ‘enemy within’ was often portrayed as an old dishevelled woman, an evil hag with wrinkled skin, a long nose, a facial protrusion, and a cat for a pet – much like our witch stereotype. In early modern print cultures, image and text suggested that the deformed exterior of the witch’s body was a mirror for the twisted interior of the mind. In this sense, the body was rendered as a readable text that betrayed the inner thoughts and behaviours of the individual, painting her as the enemy.[17] This practice of evaluating an individual’s inner condition based on their outer appearance, stemmed from a long tradition of physiognomy, ‘the study of the features of the face, or of the form of the body generally, as being supposedly indicative of character; the art of judging character from such study’.[18] This is more tangible if we examine some witches portrayed in English witchcraft pamphlets. In 1645 Elizabeth Clarke was depicted as a one-legged elderly widow and Joan Flower, in 1619, was portrayed as an old spinster, partially disabled and ‘full of wrath’.[19] A Northampton witch was labelled as ‘monstrous and hideous’ in her appearance and, likewise, in 1613, Elizabeth Device was described as an ‘odious witch…her left eye, standing lower than the other…so strangely deformed’, who outrageously cursed ‘according to her accustomed manner’. Thomas Potts commented that for women with these attributes, their fates were often sealed in court for ‘the wrinkles of an old wives face is good evidence to a jurie against a witch’.[20] The descriptions match the visual depictions of the alleged witches, and this may have had basis in reality, affecting the lived experience of the women: Elizabeth Clarke’s appearance and lameness were symptomatic of her dealings with devils and witchcraft, while Joan Flower’s and Elizabeth Device’s aesthetics and demeanour signified the sinfulness of their souls (Fig. 7). Their exterior appearance could be corroborative evidence of their sins and demonic pact with the Devil. Indeed, Egeon Askew questioned in 1605 that if their ‘outward face is so deformed…How much more within the breast lies there a more terrible countenance, a more cruell aspect, a more ugly spirit, and a more deformed face?’.[21] The connection between the aesthetics of a person and their mental or spiritual condition was not idiosyncratic in early modern England, but was an element of popular culture which upheld the stereotypical witch-figure as a conceptually potent enemy.
Figure 7: Anon., Wonderful Discoverie of the Witchcrafts of Margaret and Phillip Flower (London, 1619). Public domain.
Additional visual indications of witches’ otherness in woodcuts were their close relationships with their familiars (Fig. 8). These were personal demons who lived with the witch and enacted her harmful magic and were commonly deformed. References to these creatures were prevalent in English witchcraft literature. Taking Clarke again as an example, she confessed to having a sexual relationship with the Devil and of having familiars, which assumed the role of surrogate children. Indeed, some alleged witches specifically called their familiars their children and they took child-like forms: Elizabeth Hubbard said ‘three things came to her in the likeness of Children, which asked her whispering to deny God, Christ, and all his workes’, and Alice Wright confessed to having two familiars in the shape of boys, one of which ‘spoke to her with a great whorce voyce, as if he had been griev’d’.[22] It was believed that familiars suckled blood from supernumerary teats on the witch’s body (resembling a nipple, mole, pimple, wart or keloid) in order to renew the diabolic pact, the body thus marred by a demonic protuberance. Charlotte-Rose Millar has argued that these women conceptualised familiars as surrogate children because they wanted dependent children yet could not have any.[23] As a result, feeding demonic child-like familiars blood, rather than milk, styled the witch as an anti-mother: the dynamic was an inversion of breast feeding and a parody of English society’s ideal of the ‘good mother’ figure – a pious woman who was a good wife, mother and manager of her nuclear family within a patriarchy-based household.[24] The witch-figure symbolised the harmful, selfish anti-mother in league with the Devil, a neighbour who was sustaining and nurturing demons within the household and local parish – a dangerous enemy within.[25]
Another conceptual layer within the demonic witch-familiar dynamic was the deformity of the animal familiar akin to the ugliness and crookedness of the stereotypical witch, both aesthetics visually signifying evil. It was posited that demonic spirits could not mirror God’s perfect creation hence their deformity, as seen through the hybridity of the animal familiars in the woodcuts of printed pamphlets. Despite this, by interacting with and attacking humans, animal-familiars were able to subvert God’s natural order. Early modernity inherited the medieval concept of the Great Chain of Being, which stated that God’s law, as recorded in Genesis 1.28, gave humans control over the animal kingdom and placed animals on a lower level of creation.[26]By using animal familiars to harm humans, witches helped to directly breach God’s natural order and destabilise society. The dynamic between witches and animal familiars also signified the corruption of the witch’s soul, much like the witch’s body. Familiars fed from witches and were the conduits through which magic was enacted at the witch’s behest: these deformed creatures were therefore an extension of the witch and represented her sinful thoughts and desires, to kill and harm.[27] With the stereotypical English witch-figure, her outward appearance corresponded to the twisted interior of her mind, which was mirrored and reflected by the deformed animal familiars enacting the witch’s own thoughts and desires.
The stereotypical depiction of an aged widow or spinster who sustained familiar spirits was construed as an anti-mother figure, which sustained demons with blood outside of wedlock, instead of breastfeeding and caring for a child within a nuclear family and patriarchy-based household. A lustful woman living independently was seen as inherently disorderly; moreover, the witch was nourishing demons and causing harm to locals though magic, all while operating outside of male supervision. The witch and familiars symbolised an inverted family and natural order, and her appearance confirmed the demonic nature of the witch. The idea of witchcraft made the authorities anxious as witches operated outside of the systems which maintained social order, namely patriarchy, the household, marriage, and the Church.[28] This visual construction of the archetypical witch positioned her in opposition to traditional societal norms and ideas of aesthetics, rendering the witch as a localised icon of evil and as a cipher for numerous cultural concerns in the early modern period.
Figure 8: Matthew Hopkins, The discovery of witches(London, 1647). Public domain.
Conclusion
Throughout the early modern period, European visual cultures echoed contemporary concerns about witches and devils, whether in fine art or print. Witches’ relationship with the demonic, their harmful magic, and sexuality endangered established social norms. Witches’ actions and aesthetics portrayed in the selected European visuals construed them as an inversion of conventional social, moral, gender and natural order, and as a dangerous enemy threatening society. Visual constructions of witch- and devil-figures were fluid and reflected contemporary cultural concerns, and highlighted the witch’s ability to subvert and challenge various aspects of order. Above all, the threat demonic forces posed to Christendom was emphasised, witches being visually portrayed as a dangerous enemy within and as the demonic other.
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