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 (Goya, 1798) "Witches' Sabbath" shows the devil in the form of a garlanded goat, surrounded by a coven of disfigured, young and aging witches in a moonlit barren landscape. The goat possesses large horns and is crowned by a wreath of oak leaves. An old witch holds an infant in her hands. The devil seems to be acting as priest at an initiation ceremony for the child, though popular superstition at the time believed the devil often fed on children and human fetuses. The skeletons of two infants can be seen; one discarded to the left, the other held by a crone