Witches' Sabbath (Goya, 1798) feature of Romanticism, and is to be found for example in Weber's opera "Der Freischütz". However, in a Spanish context, Goya's paintings have been seen as a protest against those who upheld and enforced the values of the Spanish Inquisition, which had been active in Witch hunting during the seventeenth-century Basque witch trials. The later "Witches Sabbath" was painted as a bitter struggle raged between liberals and those in favour of a church and a royalist-lead state, which culminated in the so-called Ominous Decade (1823-1833). Both paintings can be seen as an attack on the superstitious beliefs rife in Spain
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