Witches' Sabbath (The Great He-Goat) placing their faith in ghouls, quack doctors and tyrants. Goya had used witchcraft imagery in his 1797–98 "Caprichos" print series, and in his similarly titled 1789 painting "Witches' Sabbath". In both the 1789 and 1822 Sabbath pictures, the Devil is presented as a goat surrounded by a ring of terrified women. The earlier painting uses witchcraft imagery in a manner that inverts the order of traditional Christian iconography. The goat extends his left rather than right hoof towards the child, the quarter moon faces out at the left hand corner of the canvas. These inversions may be metaphor for the
Witches' Sabbath and reflect only popular imagination of the times, influenced by ignorance, fear, and religious intolerance towards minority groups. Some of the existing accounts of the Sabbat were given when the person recounting them was being tortured. and so motivated to agree with suggestions put to them. Christopher F. Black claimed that the Roman Inquisition’s sparse employment of torture allowed accused witches to not feel pressured into mass accusation. This in turn means there were fewer alleged groups of witches in Italy and places under inquisitorial influence. Because the Sabbath is a gathering of collective witch groups, the lack of mass