The belief that witches could actually fly was typically denounced in medieval thought, instead they thought this was a hallucination brought about by the devil.
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The 1487 Malleus Maleficarum, or Hammer of the Witches, which viewed metamorphosis as a demonic illusion: ‘Therefore it is evident the demons cannot actually effect any permanent transformation in human bodies; that is to say, no real metamorphosis’pic.twitter.com/0baxl6m8Nn
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So why the broom? As Brian Levack argued, the broomstick was associated with women and its use ‘might therefore reflect nothing more than the preponderance of female witches’.
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And where did the concept of flying women originate? The idea of the witch as a night flyer occurred as the result of amalgamation of several strands of folklore as well as a ecclesiastical conception that emerged in the late 12th and...
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early 13th centuries when monks created a hegemonic image of the heretic as a ‘secret, nocturnal, sexually promiscuous devil-worshipper’.
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This would fuse with two distinct concepts in existence in Europe for a long time. The first of which is the strigae, which dates to the classical period. The legend here is that women transformed into flying screech owls at night and devoured infants.
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The second strand is the women who would leave their homes at night to follow Dianna on the Wild Hunt aka “Ladies of the Night’. Beliefs in both these concepts were so powerful among the commoners that some women swore that they actually engaged in these practices.
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Until the 14th century, most of the scholarly elite did not believe these claims, instead arguing that these were delusions of the Devil, as I talked about earlier. However, this would come to change as all of these ideas fused, and these supposed illusions became reality
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And it well predates the demonization of the alewife in art and literature. 13th century poem from Tirol stating, ‘Indeed, he adds, it would be a wondrous thing to see a woman riding a calf, or a broomstick, or a poker, over mountains and villages’.
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Tomorrow we chat about cats!pic.twitter.com/MdUKkyJgoo
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Christina thank you for this thread. I’m currently trying to tell some people that just because some folks wrote about flying ointment doesn’t mean women actually used flying ointment on their bits via broomsticks and I’m going bonkers here hahahaha.
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Replying to @AdmiralHip
Oh for sure, a lot of these writers, as medieval writers often did, just made stuff up. To add more drama
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Replying to @Braciatrix
Trying to convince people that just because someone wrote it down doesn’t make it true is harder than it seems lol.
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