Witches' Sabbath (The Great He-Goat) powdered glass, orpiment and iron oxides. He likely worked with mixed materials. Technical analysis indicates that most of the Black Paintings begun with preparatory drawings. "Witches' Sabbath" is the exception; the final composition seems to have been painted directly onto the wall. Art historian Fred Licht notes that Goya's brushwork appears "clumsy, ponderous, and rough" and lacking finish compared to his earlier work. Licht believes this was a deliberate ploy to physically convey dismay at human inadequacy and his own feelings of personal doubt. Unique in the series, "Witches' Sabbath" was not significantly altered by Goya after his initial work.
Witches' Sabbath Rob Zombie's "The Lords of Salem" incorporates such imagery as flashbacks into the titular town's backstory. Depictions in painting include the following: In spite of the number of times that religious authorities retold stories of gatherings of witches, modern researchers have been unable to find any corroboration that any such event ever physically occurred. The historian Scott E. Hendrix presents a two-fold explanation for why these stories were so commonly told in spite of the fact that sabbats likely never actually occurred in his study "The Pursuit of Witches and the Sexual Discourse of the Sabbat." First, belief in the