We’ve all seen them. The hooked nose. The green skin. That weirdly tall, pointed hat that looks like it would blow off in a light breeze. When you search for pictures of the witches, your screen usually fills up with Halloween decorations and grainy stills from 1930s cinema. It’s a trope. It's a vibe. Honestly, it's a total fabrication.
The gap between the "wicked crone" we see in pop culture and the actual women (and men) captured in historical woodcuts or early photography is massive. History is messy. It isn't filtered through a Hollywood lens. Most of what we consider "accurate" imagery of witchcraft is actually a mix of 17th-century propaganda, anti-Semitic caricatures, and some very clever marketing from the early days of film.
If you want to understand the visual history of magic, you have to look past the Disney version. You have to look at the grime.
The woodcuts that started the panic
Long before cameras existed, the only pictures of the witches people saw were crude woodcuts. These weren't meant to be art. They were the clickbait of the 1600s. Printers in London and Germany realized that if they put a scary image of a woman hovering over a cauldron on a pamphlet, it would sell out in hours.
Take the famous images from the Matthew Hopkins era. Hopkins was the self-appointed "Witchfinder General" during the English Civil War. The woodcuts associated with his trials didn't show women with green skin. They showed ordinary people in bonnets and wool dresses. But there was always a "familiar"—a cat, a toad, or a dog—somewhere in the frame. That was the visual "tell." To a 17th-century peasant, a picture of a woman feeding a cat wasn't cute. It was evidence of a demonic pact.
The famous 1487 book Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches) didn't actually have illustrations in its earliest editions, but later versions and similar manuals started adding them to "educate" the illiterate public. These images established the visual vocabulary of the witch. They showed "witches" flying on sticks, but not just brooms. They flew on shovels, cows, or even fence posts. It was supposed to look ridiculous and terrifying at the same time. Basically, the goal was to strip away the humanity of the person being accused.
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Why the pointed hat?
It’s a weird fashion choice, right? You won't find many pictures of the witches from the actual Salem trials wearing those iconic cones. In fact, in 1692, the people accused in Salem were wearing the same drab, puritanical clothes as their accusers.
Historians like Malcolm Gaskill have pointed out that the pointed hat likely evolved from a few different places. Some think it’s a leftover from the "judenhat" (Jewish hat) that medieval Jews were forced to wear, a way of visually linking "heresy" to witchcraft. Others argue it’s a distorted version of the fashionable "hennin" worn by noblewomen, which became a symbol of vanity and sin once it went out of style.
Then you have the "alewife" theory. In the Middle Ages, women who brewed beer—alewives—often wore tall, pointed hats so they could be seen above the crowds in the marketplace. They also kept cats to protect the grain from mice and used brooms as signs outside their doors. Sound familiar? When the brewing industry became big business, men pushed the women out, and suddenly, those visual markers of a legitimate trade were rebranded as the uniform of a devil-worshipper.
The shift to the "Glamour" witch
Fast forward a few centuries. The industrial revolution happened. Science took over. People stopped being genuinely afraid that their neighbor was curdling the milk with a curse. This is when pictures of the witches took a hard turn into the "sexy" or "mysterious" territory.
Victorian artists loved the idea of the femme fatale. Painters like John William Waterhouse gave us "The Magic Circle" (1886). In this painting, the witch is young, beautiful, and barefoot. She isn't a hag; she's a priestess. This was a massive shift. Suddenly, magic was something aesthetic. It was about ritual and power, not just being an outcast living in a hut.
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Then came the movies. The Wizard of Oz (1939) is the ultimate culprit for why we think witches are green. Margaret Hamilton’s portrayal of the Wicked Witch of the West was so iconic that it basically rewrote the collective memory of an entire species of folklore. The green makeup was a technical choice to show off the new Technicolor process, but it stuck. Now, if you draw a witch and she isn't green, people feel like something is missing.
Real photography and the "Witch of Wall Street"
When photography arrived, people started looking for "real" pictures of the witches. Of course, they didn't find them. What they found were people like Hetty Green.
Hetty Green wasn't a witch. She was a genius financier who became the richest woman in the world during the Gilded Age. But because she dressed in black, lived frugally, and was a powerful woman in a man's world, the press called her the "Witch of Wall Street." The photographs of her—old, unsmiling, dressed in mourning clothes—became a new kind of witch imagery. It was the "scary old woman" trope brought into the modern era. It showed that society still used the visual language of witchcraft to punish women who didn't conform to social norms.
The 1960s and the "Aesthetic" Revolution
If you look at pictures of the witches from the 1960s and 70s, everything changes again. This is the era of Bewitched and the rise of Wicca as a public religion.
The imagery became domestic. Samantha Stephens was a suburban housewife. This was a subversive kind of visual. It suggested that the witch was next door. It was the "Secret Life" trope. At the same time, the "Witchy" look (think Stevie Nicks) took over the music world. Flowing lace, velvet, crescent moons, and heavy eyeliner. This wasn't about scaring people; it was about reclaiming the "witch" as a symbol of feminist autonomy.
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Common misconceptions in modern imagery
- The Broomstick: In historical woodcuts, the broom was often a "phallic" symbol used in fertility rites or simply a common household object. The idea of "riding" it was a way for inquisitors to add a sexualized, "deviant" element to the accusations.
- The Cauldron: These were just standard cooking pots. Every house had one. Showing a woman by a cauldron in an old picture was just a way of showing her in her "natural" domestic setting, which the church then twisted into a place where she brewed poisons.
- The Black Cat: Cats were actually common pets. The idea that they are "familiars" was a specific English obsession during the 17th century. In many other parts of Europe, witches didn't have animal sidekicks at all.
How to find authentic historical images
If you’re doing research and want to see what things actually looked like, you need to search for specific archives rather than generic image banks.
- The Cornell University Witchcraft Collection: This is one of the best digital archives in the world. It has thousands of digitized pamphlets and woodcuts from the 16th and 17th centuries.
- The Wellcome Collection: Great for seeing the intersection of "magic" and early medicine. You’ll see pictures of "witches" who were actually just herbalists or midwives.
- The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic (Boscastle): They have a massive physical and digital collection of "charms" and ritual objects. The photos of these items give a much better sense of "folk magic" than any movie poster ever could.
What we get wrong about Salem
When people look for pictures of the witches of Salem, they often find 19th-century paintings of women being burned at the stake.
Fact check: Nobody was burned at the stake in Salem. They were hanged. Burning was a European practice. Also, many of the famous paintings of the Salem trials were created 200 years after the events happened. They reflect Victorian fashion and drama more than 1692 reality. The accused in Salem were often poor, but some were wealthy landowners. The images usually show them as cowering victims, but the court records show many of them were incredibly defiant.
Making sense of the visual legacy
So, what are we actually looking at when we see these images? Most of the time, we’re looking at a mirror of what society feared at that moment. In the 1600s, we feared the "devil" in our neighbors. In the 1930s, we wanted a colorful villain for a fairy tale. Today, we often use witch imagery to represent "main character energy" or a connection to nature.
The "real" picture is usually just a person trying to survive in a world that didn't understand them.
Next Steps for Research:
- Visit the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) and search for "witchcraft woodcuts" to see the original 17th-century propaganda.
- Compare the visual evolution by looking at "The Three Witches" from various Macbeth productions over the last 100 years.
- Check out "The Witch" (2015) film if you want to see a rare modern example of a movie that actually tries to replicate the 17th-century visual "feel" of a witch panic based on primary sources.