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 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