Witches' Sabbath (The Great He-Goat) during the Logroño Inquisition, was an appalling regression to liberals such as Goya. As court painter Goya was a part of the established order; surviving evidence indicates he was acquiesced to the wishes of his patrons. Yet numerous paintings and etchings have emerged since, suggesting he had convictions favouring liberalism, enlightenment, and reason. He seems to have kept such beliefs private, only expressing them in his private art; his more sensitive works were not published at the time, probably for fear of reprisal or persecution. In "Witches' Sabbath" Goya mocks and ridicules the superstition, fear and irrationality of the ignorant
Witches' Sabbath accounts viewed them as a kind of Witches' Sabbath, but they are not. Some African communities believe in witchcraft, but as in the European witch trials, people they believe to be "witches" are condemned rather than embraced. Other historians, including Carlo Ginzburg, Éva Pócs, Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen hold that these testimonies can give insights into the belief systems of the accused. Ginzburg famously discovered records of a group of individuals in northern Italy, calling themselves "benandanti", who believed that they went out of their bodies in spirit and fought amongst the clouds against evil spirits to secure prosperity