Wicca, Wiccan Magick, Witchcraft, and Magic Spells

The traditional companion of the witches was the broom or broomstick—handle with enchanted brush, employed for their wild and profane flights by the night and probably in Sabbat of some distant witches.

The legends of the witches flying on brushes turns over until the beginning of the common era. The known confession earliest of a flight of witch on a brush took place in 1453, when Guillaume Edelin of Germain-in-Bush hammer of street, close to Paris, declared that it had made thus. In 1563, Martin Tulouff de Guernesey said to have seen his/her old mother drawing aside the legs a broom and beating it to the top of the chimney and out of the house on top, to say go from the rocks and the spines in the name of devil and Lucifer of surplus. In 1598 Claudine Boban and her mother, witch of the province of Frank-Comt, in Eastern France, also spoke to fly to the top of the chimney of a stick. Belief to fly to far although the chimney firmly became built-in in the popular tradition, although only few people ever mentioned to make thus. It was suggested that this idea was connected to the old habit to push a brush to the top of the chimney to indicate the absence of the housewife. The Germanic goddess Holda or Holle is also connected to the chimney. Thus making number of real confessions of the witches is remarkably small. Usually the confessions declare that they went to the Sabbath to foot or horse.

Other indications which lead to the popular belief that the witches really flew on handles to brush can be found in an old habit to dance with a brush between the legs, jumping high in the sky. In book of the Scot of Reginald, Discoverie of sorcery, published in 1584, we find a description similar:

At these magic assemblies, the witches never failed to dance; and in their dance they sing these words, Har, har, divell of divell, dance here the dance here, wound of wound here here, Sabbath, Sabbath. And the master key sing and dance, always a hath a brush in its hand, and holdeth it upwards in top. The Scot quoted these descriptions of the rites of witch of a French demonologist, Jean Bodin, who made observations of a kind of jumping dance, going up on personnel. These habits could have contributed to the popular image of the witches of broom-horsemanship by the air.

In 1665, confession of Julian Cox, one of Somerset coven, mentioned that one equalizing it walks outside to approximately one thousand of his own Chambre and there came horsemanship towards its three people out of three Brush-bars, born to the top approximately from the years and a half of the ground. Two of them that she formerly knew, which was a witch and a magician.

Some authors claim that the known source oldest of the witches flying on handles with brush is a manuscript called the Ladies of the Champion of by Martin Lefranc, 1440. This could be one of the oldest images representing a witch on a broom, but it is certainly not the first. A painting of wall of the 12th century in the cathedral of Schlesswig shows with the horsemanship of Frigg of deity of norses its personnel.

If we dig really a little deeper in the history, we will note that Roman world there are reports/ratios which mention of the witches flying on handles with brush as after by using ointments, as of the first century. They were called Straigae, Barn Owl, and Lamiae of the Greek culture had the similar characteristics. Later in the Roman history, the Diana goddess was the chief of wild hunting:

It should not also be omitted which some bad woman, perverted by devil, allured by illusions and the phantasm of the demons, to consider and profess themselves in the hours of the night to go up on certain animals with Diana, the goddess of pagan, and an innumerable multitude women, and in the silence of died of the night to cross great spaces of the ground, and to obey it of the orders in date of their mistress, and to be destined for its service certain nights.

The similar belief existed in many parts of Europe. Mythology of norses, one said that we know that the army of the women, wire by Odin, Wodan, called the Valkyrie, go up by the skies on horses, gathering the hearts of deaths. In continental Germanic sectors, one also said that carries out wild hunting and is connected the goddess Holda or Holle to the chimneys and sorcery. Berchta or Perchta, another Germanic goddess, who can be identified with Holda, has the similar characteristics.

Still in Celtic traditions, God with Cernunnos horns, and/or Herne the hunter were a chief of wild hunting and it was also said that the Scottish goddess Nicneven of witch flies by the night with her disciples. The sources of Eastern Europe also have a richness of folklore about the witches flying by the air. Thus flying by the air, obviously, was a mythological topic deeply enraciné, been dependent on wander free of the spirit, with the separation of the heart and the body.

The broom is a symbol female and masculine, the stem which penetrated the bush. Its symbolism and interpretation are thus purely sexual.

There are councils of its use as artificial penis or dildo. In an old curious book, a dictionary of the slang, the jargon and the slope, by Albert BarrSre and Charles Godfrey Leland, 1897-1899, we are known as that the limit of slang in these days for a dildo or an artificial penis was brush-handle, and the female genitals were known vulgarly like brush. To have a brush was to have sexual relations. Remarkable of the tests of witch mentioning the cold hard member of the devil itself is the obviousness. In 1662, Isabel Gowdie, shows sorcery, makes a confession which could suggest that a certain kind of artificial phallus of horn or leather could be employed:

Its members are to exceed large and long; the members of any man are so long and very tall that they are, it is, a meikle, a black, a rough man, very a cold, and me found its nature also cold at home because the water of arises-well. it can more measures some for us that the manner that any man can be, only it is heavy like one malt-to return, an enormous nature, very cold, like ice.