What if everything you think you know about the Witches’ Sabbath is wrong?
The broomsticks, the Devil, the midnight orgies on remote mountaintops: this image has haunted the Western imagination for nearly six hundred years. But where did it actually come from? Was it an inquisitorial fantasy imposed from above? A distortion of real folk traditions of spirit-flight and nocturnal procession? A recycled conspiracy theory older than Christianity itself? Or something stranger than any of those?
In this video I trace the Sabbath from its origins in a handful of Alpine witch trials in the 1430s, through the great demonological texts of the early modern period, to its reinvention by romantics, feminists, and modern practitioners who know the image was constructed and use it anyway. I cover the Cohn vs Ginzburg debate that still organises the field, the Friulian benandanti who fought witches in their sleep, the antisemitic roots of the word “sabbath” itself, Margaret Murray’s influential and almost entirely wrong witch-cult hypothesis, and why the Wheel of the Year is a twentieth-century invention. I also look at where the term “esbat” actually comes from (spoiler: not where you think), the connection between the Sabbath and the Wild Hunt, and what contemporary Italian folk practitioners make of all this today.
This is serious historiography made accessible, not dumbed down. If you want the real story behind one of the most persistent and misunderstood images in Western culture, this is it.
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00:00 Introduction: The Witches’ Sabbath Explained
01:41 What Is the Witches’ Sabbath?
04:61 The Alpine Origins of the Witches’ Sabbath
09:01 Demonology, the Malleus, and the Stakes of Witchcraft
15:01 Cohn vs Ginzburg: Who Created the Witches’ Sabbath?
22:36 Folk Traditions, Night Travel, and Regional Witch Beliefs
25:26 From Michelet to Murray: How Modern Witchcraft Reused the Sabbath
30:50 The Witches’ Sabbath Today: Politics, Film, and Online Witchcraft
30:06 Flying Ointments: What the Evidence Really Shows
38:49 Reading the Witches’ Sabbath as a Palimpsest
41:33 Celebrate your Sabbaths in Angela’s vibrant Inner Symposium
️ Copyright of Dr Angela Puca, in all of its parts ️
Music by Erose MusicBand. Check them out!
Published on May 17, 2026
