One with the night
One with the day
One with the earth
That's the witches way
Ghosts may get to turn invisible and vampires have fangs to suck your blood, but witches truly have the best tools. What could be cooler than a flying broomstick. Some of you may have noticed that images of witches on broomsticks generally come in two varieties. The witch speeding past that full moon is either depicted as an old hag, or a long haired hottie with enormous breasts. If your buying a witch decoration for a kids party, hag it is, if it's for an adult party, cue the image of the blonde busty bade straddling the big stick.
I comes as no surprise how sexual the iconic image of a witch on broom, a woman riding a long wooden pole... actually is. But surprisingly, this sexualized version of the sorceress actually has feminist beginnings... Images of witches on broomsticks have been around for centuries, and were drawn in a sexual fashion back as far as the Renaissance. In fact, back then, the witch was often sans hat and cape and drawn completely naked.
Witches didn't begin flight on brooms however. With women's roles changing in society, as we know from The Crucible, when women didn't conform, or exhibited any form of desire, they were considered evil and if they managed to stay alive, were cast out of their homes and communities. Women's role in society played a large part in how witches were seen, and documented in literature and art.
'In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, images of witches riding up and out of chimneys start to dominate. During this period, women also were more closely associated with domestic space than they were 200 years earlier, Zika said. At that time, too, brooms are depicted more and more often in relation to domestic work in art. It seems to me that this idea of them flying out the chimney is actually kind of a protest against this confinement in domestic space," Zika said. "Witchcraft is symbolically in some ways freeing individuals from that kind of conception of their realm.'
Last three images from Alan Spiers
This being FH, and the witches being male, the sky flying may have a different source meaning. This doesn't mean though, that the broom riding spell casters are any less sexual riding their brooms throughout the night. In many ways, the intensity of night riding is even more intense. In different ways, men have been as shoved into their historic roles as women and it is only the last few decades that it's been safe for men to pick up their sticks, and go for a ride.
