The origins of broomstick dynamics
WHAT
Stories about air borne witches have intrigued the world for a long time. Even though there is little evidence that broomstick flying ever took place, the eery consistency of the stories of broomstick flying is too persistent to ignore it. So what was it with broomsticks?
In many cases, historic records -mostly of courtcases- leave us a quite precise description of the way witches were perceived to be operating their wicked or evil magic on the rest of society in the Middle Ages. Accounts of broomstick escapades feature in several cases in the lists of allegations that often led to the bitter demise of the women and men on trial.
In England, witchcraft was outlawed in legal acts in 1542 and 1736 but the laws did not forbid flying. Probably because the legal profession did not believe it a possibility. But there are still many accounts of witches having been seen leaving one place only to turn up several miles away without passing by on the road.
"A linked belief was that witches knew far too much about other people's business, reporting secrets they could not have known or overhearing conversations from far off", says Shantell Powell, who runs a research site on the issue called shanmonster.com.
Often the accounts of witches' ability to conduct supernatural acts were made by the people in their immediate environment. Historians say that the persons telling the court what they believed they'd witnessed in very many cases shows that they clearly misunderstood some happenings and that in as many cases gross exaggeration was employed to make stories fit.
Yet the many misgivings revealed by the old historic records do not necessarily mean that the actual accusations themselves were never based on any truth whatsoever.
"The [broomstick flying] can be accounted for when the form of early mound-dwellings is taken into consideration", says Margaret Alice Murray, author of "The Witch Cult in Western Europe", an extensive work not only of witch trials but also a well documented study of the beliefs of ancient witch organisations.
Murray believes that savage European tribes tended to maintain elaborate taboos connected with the door that can be linked to witches' preferred means of departure through windows and chimneys. She also says that the broom was connected to fertility rites, an issue that of course creates the necessary hype in that it is intricately mysterious easily explaining any links with older women.
For the extent to which broomstick flying stories are part of many European, North American, Asian, African and Middle Eastern countries' folklore, the number of direct confessions or testimonial accounts of broomstick flying is very small, Murray writes in her research. One eye witness account historically recorded is made by a certain Julian Cox, a woman who in 1664 testified that one evening about a mile from her house, she saw riding towards her three persons on as many "broom-staves". The three were flying at a height of one and a half yards from the ground, she said.
Another documented account is known as the New England witches and dates back to 1692. Two selfprofessed witches including a Mary Osgood, confessed to riding on a pole and being carried through the air to five-mile pond and back again. Wonder where to? Why, pray, a witches' meeting of course.
Other stories reveal even juicier details. There's even one detailing a flight accident. Not only did the two of the witches named in this documented story independently of each other confess to being carried through the air by the Devil, but both confirmed that they experienced a crash because one of their broomsticks broke. One witch apparently hung about her fellow coleague's neck for a while and then dragged both of them down. They were injured and one of them was bed ridden for months afterwards.
If the possibly quite strange body position that broomstick flying was likely to have required would have been viewed with utmost suspicion at the time, the punishment of witches might have mimicked such bizarre bodily positioning. Many accounts reveal that the preferred punishment for suspicion of witchcraft (which often ended in death) was a water ordeal in which a person was tied with his right thumb to the left big toe and the left thumb to the right big toe and then thrown in the water. If the person sank, they were considered innocent, but if they somehow kept floating, they could end up being killed. The test would be conducted not by the masses (something that happened in many other circumstances, when hoards of people would turn against a person suspected of being a witch, usually after an incident) but by a few high placed people, in England usually the minister of the parish and other highly regarded persons.
There are some scientific explanations for the act of flying on a broomstick or "tree riding" as the activity is known in historic records too. Witches were said to fly through the window or up a chimney. Murray's study documents that one of the earliest cases on record of stick-riding does not definitely state that the witch flew through the air the way you still read about in fairy tales or Harry Potter stories. She cites the case of Lady Alice Kyteler. Historic texts reveal that a pipe with ointment was found in this lady's closet, apparently for the use of greasing a stick 'upon the which she ambled and galloped through thick and thin, when and in what maner she listed'. Similar accounts are found elsewhere in the UK and the wording is also quite close to the way the stick-riding of Arab witches is described.
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