Profs & Pints Philadelphia: A Guide to Witches

Profs and Pints Philadelphia presents: “A Guide to Witches,” on the figure of the witch in history, legend, folklore, and fairy tales, with Linda Lee, lecturer in folklore and literature at the University of Pennsylvania.

Get ready for something spellbinding: A look at various depictions of witches as reflections of ideas about female sexuality, independence, agency, and power.

Offering up this pre-Halloween treat will be folklorist Linda Lee, who previously has given excellent talks at the Black Squirrel Club in Philadelphia’s Fishtown on dark Christmas folklore and the goddess Persephone.

We’ll start with an introduction to witches from European folklore, fairy tales, and legends. You’ll learn how they’re generally portrayed as powerful, solitary, and defiant figures who can be either helpful or harmful. They may appear as mothers, helpers who aid a hero on a quest, or monsters to be vanquished. They can represent a threat to the community by snatching children or pilfering cows’ milk.

Individual witches who will be conjured up include the child-eating witch from Grimms’ “Hansel and Gretel” and Baba Yaga, the ambiguous witch of Slavic folklore who lives in a hut on chicken legs and flies around with a mortar and pestle.

Lee will then contrast such fictional depictions with the ideas about witches and witchcraft espoused by Christian demonological thought.

You’ll learn how witches are described by early modern sources like Malleus Maleficarum, the 15th-century treatise on witchcraft which also served as a witch hunters’ manual. Such texts present witches as entirely malevolent figures who gain magical powers through a pact with the Devil (usually signed with menstrual blood). The witches in them are believed to use a special ointment that allowed them to fly to a Witches’ Sabbath, where they dance and perform demonic rituals.

You’ll see how such ideas were visually reinforced through engravings, woodcuts, and drawings, by artists like Albrecht Dürer, that depicted naked women riding broomsticks and dancing with devils.

You’ll come away with a better understanding of why witches are among the most versatile, notorious, and enduring figures from fairy tales and legends and remain an iconic part of contemporary Halloween traditions. Feel free to dress witchy if you wish. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Doors open at 3 pm. Talk starts at 3:30.)

Image: From “Preparation for the Witches’ Sabbath,” by 17th Century Flemish artist David Teniers the Younger.