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.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profs-and-pints-black-squirrel/philadelphia-witches .]

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 earned rave reviews in giving this talk at the Black Squirrel Club a year ago and has captivated audiences at this Fishtown venue with her past discussions of 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 heroes on quests, or monsters to be vanquished. They can represent a threat to the community by snatching children or by 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 inside a giant mortar while clutching a big pestle. Lee 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 presented witches as entirely malevolent figures who gain magical powers through a pact with the Devil (usually signed with menstrual blood). They depicted witches as using a special ointment that empowers them to fly to a Witches’ Sabbath to 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. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Doors open at 3:30 pm. Talk starts at 4:30. )

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