“…It is also not to be omitted that some wicked women, turned away after Satan and seduced by the illusions and phantasms of demons, believe and profess that, in the hours of the night, they ride upon certain beasts with Diana, goddess of the pagans, and an innumerable multitude of women, and in the silence of night traverse great spaces of earth, and obey her commands as of their mistress, and are summoned to her service on certain nights.”
Cannon Episcopi, X century
In the last quarter of the XIV century the stereotype of the witch was already well established drawing from a number of sources and one of the most relevant powers of the witch was her ability to fly at night to attend the diabolical meeting that came to be principally known as the Sabbath, but, unlike what is described in the passage of the Cannon Episcopi transcribed above, from the XIV century onwards the flight was no longer considered an illusion caused by demons or a remnant of superstitious thought but a real phenomena caused by ointments the witches concocted at their nightly reunions. Despite academic brawls and polemics, there is a strand of commonness regarding the supernatural flight of the soul. It is present in mankind’s oldest structured religious forms, it finds its way along the classical age, continues onwards through the medieval and modern period and nestles itself in contemporary mystical experiences. It is not, then, surprising that in many of traditional witchcraft pathways the flight and consequently the Sabbat became one of the cornerstones of the officium.
Looking at historical sources we know for certain that this night travel forms a core part of European Witchcraft as described in the middle ages and modern period. Supported by the work of Tomas Aquinas and his contemporaries on the nature of Evil and the activities of the Fallen with their followers, it became one of the most sought after descriptions by later medieval and renaissance inquisitors, however, before the systematization of an otherwise reactive and eclectic Christian cosmology, several elements regarding the flight were already in place and being commonly attributed to witches. The Strigae, winged demons who vampiricaly preyed on humans and the Bonnae Mulieres, a Latin term used to refer to the company of women that escorted the goddess Diana and that needed to be placated with offerings of food and drink are two of the most prominent examples of this with both terms being commonly used to describe witches. In Apuleius novel Metamorphosis, Lucian sees Pamphile speaking incantations to a lamp and rubbing her body with an ointment that causes her to develop characteristics that make her resemble a strix: she grows wings, feathers, a beak and talons and, although not related and in a much later period of time, the motifs of flight, animal shape and the use of incantations come to us narrated by Emma Wilby on her work “The visions of Isobel Gowdie”. Especially relevant due to its insular nature is also the case of the Benandanti, a group of men and women from the northern part of Italy who claimed to fly in spirit to wage a war against witches and secure crops or participate in a procession of dead souls and who also told of travelling on or in the shape of animals at times.
Nowadays, the iconic Witch is young, naked, and when preparing to depart to the Sabbath she is often accompanied by a broom. Although consistent with the crystallization of the witch stereotype timeframe, the broom is a later addition, dating from XV century and owing its existence to a marginal illustration of witches in the poem Le champion des Dames by Martin Le Frank. In this poem, the witches fly on several household items and also on farming instruments, something that maybe or may not be relevant symbolically and whose significance will rest on the eyes of the interpreter but before instruments were used, the witch required only herself, an incantation which is used due to the metric/rhythmic properties to induce trance and occasionally her ointment, to be on her way to cause mischief.
The examples related above are just a small drop in the ocean of sources that the movement of Modern Traditional Witchcraft drinks from. Understandably, there is high value on the experience of the flight. If you are interested in reading more about the nature of flight and how to achieve it I recommend reading The Witch of Forest Grove article on it. There she discusses the parallels between the flight and out of body experiences being an excellent initiatory reading. In addition she also provides several goods in her botanica that, although I haven’t tried myself, seem to be done with utmost care and devotion.
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