Owing to the increased number of confessions regarding nocturnal flights, as well as early images of witches on brooms like the earliest example from 1451 that illuminate the margins of the poem Le Champion des Dames by Martin Le Franc, illustrations of witchcraft became dominated with the iconography of the witch on the broom. Sometimes it was said that the witch didn’t actually leave their home physically, but rather it was the spectral form of the witch that rode to The Sabbath, a very legitimate experience that would be instigated by the use of hallucinogens in the flying ointment. The broom itself, like the back of a goat, was said to be The Devil Himself, and that the witch was carried aloft by His power. Witches, both male and female, were believed to rub flying ointment under their arms, on their genitals, and in their rectums to achieve flight. It was most likely when witches began to talk about the ointment they would rub on their “hairy parts” that it would become sexualized. This would mean that in its earliest form, it wasn’t linked to the feminine or the phallic image, but simply a typical household tool, much like the staffs, sticks, stang, pitchfork, stools, and benches witches were said to ride to The Sabbath on as well. He is the very first witch to confess to riding a “balai” or “besom” to The Sabbath where he met with the Devil, made a pact, and kissed the Devil’s backside in 1453. It is common for scholars to speculate that the broom was linked to women’s domestication, and a symbol of the phallus making the broom an object of perversion of women’s sexual expression, but when we look at the history of the broom as a tool of flight in witchcraft it is traced to one source: a man named Guillaume Edelin, Prior of St. Symbolically the broom is linked to the witch’s use of common household objects to bewitch. When one hears the word “witch” it often conjures the image of a hag riding a broom with a conical hat and feline familiar taking to the skies in pursuit of The Sabbath.

Witch riding broom stick position