Before you dress up your little princess as a Halloween witch this afternoon...

... And dig that antique whisk broom out of the closet for her to ride house-to-house on.

Let me give you a little background on that imagery.

What are the 3 top symbols associated with witches?

I'd say they would be: 

1.) The black cat that always slinks around at her wart-filled ankles.

2.) The beat-up broom that she mounts before flying across the full moon.

and 3.) That bubbling cauldron filled with witches brew.

I will not comment on the first only because I am deathly allergic to cats.  I hate them, and I am happy to pretend that they don't exist.

(Sorry, Kate)

So let's get right to the broom… The broom was a symbol of female domesticity AND was also phallic, so riding on one was a symbol of female sexuality and domesticity gone wild.

There was also once a common pagan fertility ritual where poles, pitchforks, and brooms (any phallic object, really) were piloted through the fields with people jumping as high as they could to entice the crops to grow to that height. (A tradition related to the "jumping of the broom" wedding traditions.)

So now combine pagans, brooms, phallic fertility symbols, and jumping into the air, and you have all the ingredients you need for the myth of the flying witch. 

But what if the broom was representative of something else?… We'll circle back to that in a sec.

The second symbol I mentioned above (technically the third, but we're still ignoring cats) is of old hags brewing up a witches brew, the old “double, double toil and trouble” of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, written in the early 1600s. 

But just what were these witches actually brewing up? 

Well, around the same time as the first reports of witches flying broomsticks is the mention of “flying ointments” made up of hallucinogenic plants.

First among these was the rye mold containing ergot fungi.  With effects on humans similar to LSD, ergot was a powerful hallucinogen.  And among other readily accessible hallucinogenic plants were henbane, deadly nightshade, and mandrake, which were all principal ingredients in any witch’s “flying ointment.”

So we have a trippy drug, brewed in a big cauldron, but how do we get it into our (witches') bodies safely?

The big problem with drinking such a potent witches brew was that it can make the drinker quite sick, and could even be deadly. 

But among the other ways to ingest a hallucinogenic drug besides swallowing it is through the mucous membranes, such as under the armpits, through the anus (boofing), or for women, through the mucous membranes of their vaginas. 

And how might such an ointment be best applied to those delicate mucous membranes?

That’s right… Big old wooden dildos.

SO I will wrap this up… 

I am not saying you should change little Tiffany's costume last minute after reading this little blog.

What I am saying is that save the pictures you take of her today because they may explain 15 years from now when the seedy strip-club DJ booth blurts out… 

"And coming to the main stage, put your hands together and get your singles ready for TIFFANY- MASTER OF THE DILDOS!"

Take a report.

-Large

If you enjoy shit like this, then you'll love this week's Twisted History of Halloween… Give it a listen.