According to the demonologists of early modern Europe, a witch couldn't simply fly to the sabbath. She had to prepare. The handbooks described ointments rubbed on the skin or on a broomstick or stool, made from ingredients that ranged from the grotesque to the botanical, including plants like henbane, belladonna and mandrake. Modern researchers have pointed out that several of those plants contain compounds that can cause delirium and the sensation of flying, which raises a fascinating question about where some of the stories came from. Witches Preparing for the Sabbath, an engraving made by Andries Stock around 1610, shows the busy, sinister kitchen where that preparation happens.
The design came from Jacques de Gheyn II, one of the leading Dutch artists of the day, who had made a series of extraordinary drawings of witches. Stock, a Netherlandish engraver working in The Hague, translated one of those designs into a large copper plate, meant for collectors who liked to be frightened at a safe distance.
De Gheyn was a keen student of nature, and the creatures he drew into his witch scenes are rendered with the same precision as his natural history studies, which gives the fantasy an eerie believability. Historians still debate whether the image is sincere horror or learned satire. In the Dutch Republic of 1610, both readings were possible.
That context matters. The Dutch had largely stopped executing people for witchcraft by about 1600, earlier than almost anywhere else in Europe. Meanwhile, in parts of Germany, the trials were entering their worst decades. A print like this could be a thrill for a Leiden scholar and evidence for a zealous prosecutor, depending on who held it.
The sabbath imagined by the demonologists was a dark mirror of daily domestic life, turning the kitchen, the hearth and the women who worked there into sources of fear. That inversion says as much about the anxieties of the period as about any real practice.
Four centuries later the image is still gripping, and a little uncomfortable. It is a masterpiece of printmaking made from a set of beliefs that cost tens of thousands of real people their lives.
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