How broomsticks, cauldrons, and pointy hats became essential witch gear
Early modern people in Europe believed in witchcraft and the supernatural, and in times of duress, might blame supposed witches for unfavorable events.
What makes a witch? Being a witch goes beyond riding a broomstick while wearing a black outfit and tall, pointy hat. It transcends hag with warts or siren-like beauty too. Yet the history behind this American pop-culture archetype can reveal much about the enduring influence of early modern witch hunts and our ongoing fascination with the figures we call witches.
Here is how cauldrons, pointy hats, broomsticks, and black cats became all-important tools of the trade.
Cauldrons
Black as deepest midnights. Large enough to fit eye of newt and a multitude of other scary-sounding ingredients. Enormous though it is, and heavy to boot, its contents are so potent they invariably seem to roil and bubble above the rim. This is a witch’s cauldron.
Cauldrons might appear as de rigueur witch gear for concocting spells and potions. But historically the pots were a more mundane part of domestic life. They hung over the fire in every kitchen, used by the woman of the house for making dinner. But surprisingly that might be part and parcel of why they are so scary. “Witchcraft, when it is gendered as firmly as it is, embodies anxieties about motherhood and sexuality and food,” says Northwestern University historian Haley Bowen.
The witch-cauldron connection might have started in the waning days of the 1400s. In 1489 German lawyer Ulrich Molitor published De Lamiis et Phitonicis Mulieribus (Of Witches and Women Fortune Tellers), the first illustrated witchcraft tome. It was a rejection of the witch-phobic Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), published several years prior by German friar Johann Sprenger and Austrian friar and inquisitor Heinrich Kramer. Witchcraft, Kramer proclaimed, was the worst among all heresies: It required devotion of body and soul to evil, renouncement of Christianity, and the sacrifice of unbaptized infants to Satan. Molitor’s book featured a series of woodcuts meant to counter such perceptions and debunk popular notions of how witches looked and behaved. But because of reprints and widespread distribution that allowed people to see the images over and over, the visuals entrenched rather than undermined the ideas.
One of the images was of two witches before a cauldron. “The image of the witch is so stable in our imagination . . . The power of that iconography is really due to that early crystallization right after the printing press was created,” adds Bowen.
By the late 16th century, Catholics and Protestants believed that witches were making pacts with Satan so that they could gain powers. One of these powers was the capacity to brew magical potions in cauldrons. Thus, an image of women gathered around a cauldron became synonymous with witchcraft. So pervasive, persistent, and quick to take hold was this cauldron trope that it infiltrated Shakespeare’s contemporaneous efforts to curry favor with King James I, who had a terrible fear of witches. Arguably there is no more iconic witch-cauldron connection than that made by Shakespeare’s 1606 play Macbeth, Act 4, Scene 1, and three terrifying women on the misty moors that chant:
“Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.”
Pointy hats, warts, and all
Take any commuter train rushing toward Salem, Massachusetts, particularly around October 31, and you’ll be awash in a sea of pointy hats heading to pay homage to what is arguably the witchiest town in the world.
Where did the story of that peaked millinery begin? That turns out to be a rather difficult question to answer.
(How villains like the Wicked Witch set the standard.)
Witches wear black because it is the color of night and the color of fright, Walter Stephens, a professor of Italian studies at Johns Hopkins University, has said. Practically, black was also a common—and budget-friendly—color of clothing to come by. But when it comes to why they are pointy and oversize, things get stickier. History is brimming with a dizzying number of potential sources. Stephens has said that they might be derived from the dunce caps that heretics were forced to wear or possibly 17th-century Puritan headgear, à la pilgrim style. Wide-brimmed black conical hats were also daily wear for members of a new religion called Quakerism in the 1600s (a religion thought to dabble in satanic goings-on and witchcraft, according to Puritan thought). Towering and tapering hennins were commonly worn by medieval noblewomen as fashion, a trend that eventually made its way into the countryside. Some historians think the pointy black hat stemmed from similar headwear worn by the medieval alewives who dominated England’s brewing trade (and occupied a position on the fringes of society) to help them be seen in the marketplace.
Some theories are not so innocuous and link the phenomenon to anti-Semitic prejudice. Some claim the pointy hat could derive from a conical hat called a Judenhut that Jewish people were forced to wear to identify themselves in the 13th century in medieval Europe. In 1431, Hungarian law required first-time sorcery offenders to wear “peaked Jews’ caps” in public. And that crooked, hooked nose might be related to Jewish stereotypes too. Some scholars think it might be a caricature of the aquiline nose used to depict Jews, who, like witches, were persecuted at various times throughout the Middle Ages.
And what of the notion that witches possess warts? A likely descendent of the “witch’s mark,” according to some historians, a nod to the special teat that a witch would use to suckle her familiars (animal companions).
Black cats and spiders and toads, oh my!
Early modern people in the British Isles and Europe believed in witchcraft and the supernatural, and in times of duress, might blame supposed witches for unfavorable events. Failing crops? Ailing livestock? Such misfortunes could be caused by a witch’s harmful magic. Witch hunts and accusations of witchcraft began in the early 15th century and continued for the next 300 years. Witchcraft superstition ramped up by the 17th century and popular and intellectual belief held that the devil and his servants were abroad in the land. From 1400 to 1750 alone, between 50,000 and 100,000 innocent people in mainland Europe and the British Isles were declared witches and put to death, dispatched by burning or hanging.
Once a witch’s pact with the devil was complete, common belief held that he would gift a witch a familiar, or an animal companion, with all manner of magical powers. They were sometimes known as imps. A witch might also receive a companion passed down from a fellow witch. Sometimes witches even shared them. Black cats are the most recognized incarnation of familiars today, but they could also be toads, rats, mice, owls, dogs, birds, goats, or even spiders, flies, or snails.
As the witch was said to do Satan’s bidding, so the familiars did as the witch told them to do. They might serve as messengers, helpmates, or even spies. Many were known to have rather memorable names, as recorded by the Matthew Hopkins, England’s self-appointed “witchfinder general”: things like Pyewacket, Peck in the Crown, Griezel Greedigut, and Vinegar Tom.
Familiars show up a lot in witch trial testimony and were used as one of the most telling pieces of evidence that a suspect was practicing dark arts. To wit, in 1566, Agnes Waterhouse, a widow from the village of Hatfield Peverel, England, confessed that she had a cat named Satan that she had used to kill and injure people. In 1645, Hellen Clark confessed in her trial that the devil came to her house as a white dog that she called Elimanzer. Just feeding their pet cat Rutterkin was enough to count as evidence in the trial of Margaret and Phillipa Flower of Beresford.
It was a mutually beneficial arrangement: Witches got a companion and helpmate in evildoing, and the familiars got a place to live and plenty of food to eat. Some were known to eat human food like bread and milk. But most familiars were wont to suckle on the witch herself. As for suckling sources, fingers, moles, or warts could suffice.
But it was the presence of a third teat, thought to be strictly for the use of familiars, that was often used during trials in England and Scotland in the 16th and 17th centuries to prove a witch was indeed a witch. (Although sometimes just the presence of a small animal was enough to convict.)
Sometimes it was difficult to tell if an animal was a familiar or a shape-shifting witch herself, as could be the case with popular perceptions of those infamous black cats. The origin story goes deep. Hecate, goddess of witchcraft, was said to have a pet cat. Black cats were officially declared an incarnation of Satan in the 13th-century church treatise Vox in Rama. In 1486 Malleus Maleficarum chimed in, citing cats “in the Scriptures, an appropriate symbol of the perfidious . . . for cats are always setting snares for each other.” Further, it made a connection with witches explicit: “Now concerning this it may be asked, whether the devils appeared thus in assumed shapes without the presence of the witches, or whether the witches were actually present, converted by some glamour into the shapes of those beasts.” Yet some historians argue the black cat–witch connection is more practical and mundane in origin: In the dark of night, black cats would have made for effective mousers.
(Witch hunt tourism is lucrative. It also obscures a tragic history.)
Brooms
It’s a sweeping misconception. Witches never actually flew on brooms. The origin of the erroneous association might be as banal as the fact that brooms were used exclusively by women to clean. Or it might be mercantile. A broom leaning outside a door was a sign left by medieval alewives to indicate their brews were for sale inside.
Yet brooms were not considered the only means of flight at witches’ disposal. Animals, such as goats that represented Satan, cooking sticks, and other wooden objects were also thought to be in play. In 2019, historian Julian Goodare noted for National Geographic that the 1644 trial of Margaret Watson recorded the following startling details: “Thou hast confessed that . . . Mallie Paterson rode upon a cat, Janet Lockie rode upon a cock, thy aunt Margaret Watson rode upon a hawthorn tree, thou thyself rode upon a bundle of straw, and Jean Lachlan rode upon an elder tree.”
European artists were inspired by popular imaginings of witches’ travel, and their resulting works influenced public understanding in turn. Molitor’s De Lamiis et Phitonicis Mulieribus (Of Witches and Women Fortune Tellers), likely was the first to impress witches’ flight into the collective memory in the late 15th century by including visuals of three shape-shifting witches flying on a pitchfork and a male witch riding a wolf. Albrecht Dürer’s “Witch Riding Backwards on a Goat” (ca 1500) depicts a subversion of the natural order of things by having the witch and goat face in opposite directions. Francisco Goya’s Plate 68 of “Los Caprichos” (The Caprices) shows a wizened hag teaching an attractive young witch how to fly a broomstick.
But it was celluloid that gave the world arguably the most iconic image of a broomstick ride: the Wizard of Oz’s Wicked Witch of the West scrawling “Surrender Dorothy” across the sky, written in the black smoke trailing from her broomstick. Do you dare doubt that someone so wicked can fly?
