Witches' Flight are implicitly equated with superstition and ritualized sacrifice. The bystanders can then be understood either as appalled but unable to do anything or willfully ignorant and unwilling to intervene. The donkey, finally, is the traditional symbol of ignorance. Witches' Flight Witches' Flight (; also known as Witches in Flight or Witches in the Air), is an oil on canvas painting completed in 1798 by the Spanish painter Francisco Goya. It was part of a series of six paintings related to witchcraft acquired by the Duke and Duchess of Osuna in 1798. It has been described as "the most beautiful and
Witches' Sabbath A number of recipes for such 'flying ointments have survived from early modern times, permitting not only an assessment of their likely pharmacological effects – based on their various plant (and to a lesser extent animal) ingredients – but also the actual recreation of and experimentation with such fat or oil-based preparations. It is surprising (given the relative wealth of material available) that Ginzburg makes only the most fleeting of references to the use of entheogens in European witchcraft at the very end of his extraordinarily wide-ranging and detailed analysis of the Witches Sabbath, mentioning only the fungi Claviceps purpurea