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The word “witch” may conjure up thoughts of Halloween, or Elphaba and Glinda on the stage and screen. Maybe you picture magic wands, flying broomsticks or bubbling cauldrons. The concepts of magic and witchcraft are ancient ones, and there are certain images and ideas about them that have developed over the centuries.
“Cunning Folk: Witchcraft, Magic, and Occult Knowledge,” an exhibition at Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center, explores depictions of witchcraft and magic specifically in connection with early modern Europe (roughly c.e. 1500-1750), a time when print culture was blossoming, allowing literary and artistic works to spread rapidly.
Curated by the Cantor’s Sara Lent Frier, “Cunning Folk” is divided into four parts: “Sabbath,” “Spell,” “Stranger” and “Suspicion.” It includes prints and paintings, books, magical objects, sound recordings and even a few contemporary works in conversation with the historical pieces – some from the Cantor’s own collection, some borrowed from Stanford Libraries’ Special Collections and other sources.
The exhibition is “engaging not just with the idea of witchcraft as a whole but with the specific early modern visual and material art histories of witchcraft,” Frier said. “I really wanted to show how these things fly through time and resonate across time.”
The term “cunning” stems from the Anglo-Saxon “cunnan,” meaning “to know,” Frier said, and the exhibition encompasses a range of early modern European concepts of magical practitioners of all kinds, from those who offered healing remedies and protective charms to educated scholars of occult texts to those believed to practice the “wicked” type of witchcraft, known as malefic or diabolic witchcraft.
“Of course it’s a mythological idea; of course this is a belief that’s very old. There’s been a belief in this harmful and helpful magic since time immemorial, but really my interest in this show is the way that in this early modern moment, they kind of come together under this concept of ‘cunning,'” Frier said.
The works included in the “Sabbath” section are “maybe the most visually resonant with people who know witchcraft through Halloween and ideas of the witch as this kind of scary, intimidating, diabolic figure,” Frier said. The image of a witches’ sabbath – a nocturnal meeting of folks, usually women, together for maleficent reasons: feasting, dancing, conducting secret rituals, flying on brooms, etc. – proved highly inspiring for artists in the early modern timeframe.
French artist Dominique Vivant Denon’s 18th-century etching “A Coven of Witches,” after an older painting by Flemish artist David Teniers II, shows a fairly cozy domestic scene, with witches studying a grimoire (book of magic) while demons illuminate their reading via torches, and one witch mounts her broom. The work is rich in detail, such as the inclusion of a “hand of glory” candle, said to have been made from the hand of an executed person and used in certain spells.
German artist Hans Baldung’s chiaroscuro woodcut “Witches’ Sabbath” from 1510 was “famous in its time for disseminating some of these visual tropes,” she said. In “Witches’ Sabbath,” nude women gather and make preparations while another rides backward on a flying goat. A vessel inscribed with pseudo-Hebraic characters gives the sense that the event has religious connections, as well as reflects antisemitic sentiments.
In many cases, there is an association between female bodies and female sexuality with demonic temptation, which has even older, biblical connotations. The invention of the printing press helped assure that these types of visuals became recognizable clues for denoting witchcraft.
“Many of these are thought of as these direct kind of demonic inversions of Christian eucaristic Mass,” she noted of the activities depicted in some “sabbath” scenes. “It was believed that these were real. We of course want to make very clear in the show, they were not. It’s an invented mythology perpetuated by literature and art.”
The “Spell” section of “Cunning Folk” offers a look at witchcraft as understood to be a skill, involving specialized knowledge and practical applications.
“I really wanted to explore not just that practice of diabolic witchcraft but also … people who practice magic as a type of learned discipline, not just something they get from the devil to do bad,” Frier said. “This show is about all of these things existing together at the same time in different ways.”
In addition to artwork including portraits of magical practitioners such as Medea and Circe (characters dating to antiquity), this section also offers some fascinating bits of artifacts used by, or very similar to those made by, cunning folks who believed in the protective power of witchcraft.
A long scroll, covered in tiny writing and drawings on both sides, dates to around 1790, from southern Germany or Austria. The “magic roll” is full of prayers, symbols and ritual formulas, and would have been worn on the body as an amulet.
“It just goes to show you the intricacy of the spells, of the knowledge that goes into them,” Frier said, noting that Christian symbols are included, emphasizing that Christianity and magic co-existed.
“This is very much used by a Christian person to help protect their body from all forms of misfortune, warfare, death in childbirth; all kinds of different things that might happen,” she said. Another amulet on view was designed to protect the user from bad weather, “which was believed to be one of the main things witches often did – control the weather, mess up people’s cattle and crops,” Frier said.
Bellarmine jugs (stoneware vessel manufactured in Germany in the 16th and 17th centuries featuring embossed bearded faces) were often used as “witch bottles,” filled with items such as hair, twigs, pins, fingernail clippings and even urine, then hidden in walls or under floorboards to offer protection against malefic magic. The particular jug in the exhibition was not itself used as a witch bottle but is similar to many that have been found. A felt heart, bent nails and locks of hair are on display to show an example of what might have been inside. Those locks of hair were contributed by Frier and another Cantor staff member, Frier revealed with a laugh (and after the exhibition ends, she said she’ll keep hers as a memento).
Adam Lonicer’s book “Kreuterbüch” (Herbal), dating to 1557 Germany, is open to a page discussing plant species including St. John’s wort, called fuga daemonum (demon flight) in Latin and recommended for wound care and warding off witchcraft alike. The pages of the book are full of marginalia – both medical notes and Christian prayers – showing its heavy use. “Many of us take St. John’s wort today,” Frier said, noting that herbal knowledge remains valuable and relevant.
A frontispiece engraving by Thomas Cross from the 1651 English book “Popular errours” by James Primrose shows an angel advising an ill patient to take medical advice from a male physician, rather than a female traditional healer, even though many of their practices and remedies would have been similar.
“While you had cunning people, who were often women and peasants, practicing folk traditions … you also have the rise of the early modern medicine institutions at this time,” Frier said. “Some of these things start to overlap and some of them end up at odds with each other.”
The “Stranger” section of the show explores how witchcraft has long been associated with “otherness” and exoticism. In the early modern period in Europe, this comes through both more locally, in conjunction with stereotypical and invented depictions of non-Christian religious communities, including Jewish and Islamic populations, as well as in depictions of interactions with cultures farther away, as European colonialism spread to what became known as the Americas. Artists and writers created sensationalized, xenophobic imagery and projected associations with European witchcraft tropes on these “foreign” cultures and figures.
In Theodor de Bry’s 1590 engraving “Praestigiator” (meaning conjurer), from the Latin edition of Thomas Harriot’s “A Briefe and True Report of the Newfound Land of Virginia,” an Algonquian healer performs a ritual dance. This illustration is based on colonist John White’s watercolors of scenes from his journey to what is now North Carolina, which he labeled “the flyer.” In de Bry’s engraving, though, the figure is retitled “conjuror,” implying a practitioner of trickery and diabolic magic, Frier said.
American artist Candice Lin’s “Sycorax’s Collection (Herbarium),” a 2011 mixed-media piece incorporating dried herbs, is one of the contemporary works included in “Cunning Folk.” Sycorax is a character mentioned in William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” a “damned witch” who was exiled to an island and was the mother of the monster Caliban. In the play, a European nobleman seizes the island and enslaves Caliban, which Frier said is understood today as reflecting European colonialism and oppression of Indigenous peoples.
In Lin’s piece, Sycorax is pictured with cats and herbs in her garden, including plants that have been used to induce abortions. Lin is drawing a parallel between the persecution of women herbalists in Europe and the brutal subjugation of people in the Americas due to European colonialism using “this focal point of plant practice, which is such a form of secret empowering knowledge for both of those groups,” Frier said.
The “Suspicion” section of the exhibition reckons with “the stakes of a lot of these narratives, the culmination of some of these beliefs in the witch trials in both Europe and America, which ended in the execution of at least 50,000 people,” Frier said. “I wanted to give space to that and talk about the various forms of doubt, which underlie a belief in witchcraft on both sides.”
Selections from two haunting songs are played in rotation, audible throughout the exhibition’s space in the Ruth Levison Halperin Gallery. These ballads come from early modern printed broadsides that spread information not only through text and illustrations but also through song, with the words set to familiar tunes of the day. Musician Leslie Lancaster Allison sung and recorded two of these English ballads especially for “Cunning Folk,” one of which, “Damnable Practises of three Lincolne-shire Witches,” tells of a servant woman and her daughters executed for allegedly using witchcraft to kill the heirs of their noble employer.
A copy of German inquisitor Heinrich Kramer’s 1520 “Malleus maleficarum” (“The Hammer of Witches”), which was hugely influential, is on display. There’s also a 1655 political grievance from Newcastle, England, complaining that the authorities hired a fraudulent witch hunter, ultimately sending more than 200 local women to their deaths. Spanish artist Francisco de Goya y Lucientes’ “Linda Maestra!” (“Pretty Teacher!”), one in a series of satirical etchings from 1797-1798, depicts a nude crone and her young apprentice riding a broomstick.
Another piece by a contemporary artist, the Bay Area’s own Sunny Smith, is rooted in personal lineage. “Salem Witch Bureau” is an enlarged reproduction of an actual bureau owned by Smith’s ancestors, residents of Salem, Massachusetts, during its witch-trial frenzy (allegedly, a witch jumped out of one of the drawers). Smith worked with an expert in early modern furniture to craft the piece. This year, they collaborated with fellow American artist Rachel Howe, a descendant of Elizabeth Howe, who was executed at Salem. They placed ritual objects inside the bureau, envisioning it as a portal through which to connect with the past and their intertwined history.
“I had people coming and telling me stories, sharing a lot of things with me,” Frier said, of her experience putting “Cunning Folk” together. “It was just a really good reminder that obviously this is a very historicized show that’s meant to really be encapsulated within its specific historical context, but also something that continues to speak so strongly to others in all kinds of personal and different ways.”
“Cunning Folk: Witchcraft, Magic, and Occult Knowledge” runs through Feb. 22, at the Cantor Arts Center, 328 Lomita Drive, Stanford; free; museum.stanford.edu/exhibitions/cunning-folk.
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