Demonic Possession in the Enlightenment

Goya’s Flying Witches

G U Y TA L
Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art

Supernatural and fantastic works hold a significant place in Francisco Goya’s

oeuvre, yet their meaning is often open to debate.1 Works such as the
Caprichos series (1799) and the so-called “Black Paintings” (1819–23, Museo
del Prado) have been interpreted in various ways: as autobiographical records
of a mental condition, artistic inventions, political, religious, and social satires,
and examples of the proclivity toward the irrational in the Age of Reason.
These works often perplex viewers not only on symbolic and satirical levels
but also on the more elementary level of subject matter and narrative. Among
Goya’s enigmatic works is Flying Witches (Fig. 1), one of six cabinet pictures
of witchcraft (each is approximately forty-three by thirty-one centimeters)
purchased by the Duke and Duchess of Osuna in June 1798 to decorate their
newly refurbished country house, La Alameda, on the outskirts of Madrid.2

I am indebted to Gal Ventura, Claire Fanger, and the anonymous reviewers for
Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft for their invaluable suggestions. I would also like to thank
Mitchell Merback for his helpful insights on an early draft of this article.
1. Exhibition catalogues echo the dichotomous nature of Goya’s works: Juliet
Wilson-Bareau and Manuela B. Mena Marqués, Goya: Truth and Fantasy, The Small
Paintings, exh. cat. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994); José Man-
uel Matilla and Manuela B. Mena Marqués, eds., Goya: Luces y sombras, exh. cat.
(Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado; Barcelona: Obra Social “La Caixa,” 2012); and
Stephanie Stepanek, Frederick Ilchman, and Janis A. Tomlinson, eds., Goya: Order
and Disorder, exh. cat. (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2014).
2. The payment document of June 27, 1798 reads: “Cuenta de seis quadros de
conposición de asuntos de Brujas, que están en la Alameda, seis mil reales vellón”
(Account for six paintings of Witches, which are in La Alameda, six thousand reales).
See Ángel Canellas López, ed., Francisco de Goya, Diplomatario (Zaragoza: Institución
Fernando el Católico, 1981), no. 209; and Sarah Symmons, Goya: A Life in Letters
(London: Pimlico, 2004), no. 254. For the entire series, see Folke Nordström, Goya,
Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the Art of Goya (Stockholm, Goteborg, and Uppsala:

Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft (Winter 2016)

Copyright ! 2016 University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved.

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Tal ! Demonic Possession in the Enlightenment 177

An examination of this picture will be used as a case study to demonstrate an

approach to early modern images of the supernatural, interpreting them not
as indecipherable riddles divorced from our experiences and cultural prac-
tices, but as stimulating tableaux constructed from established visual codes,
bodily semiotics, and artistic references.
Flying Witches has recently garnered exceptional attention and praise. Since
the Museo del Prado acquired it from a private owner in 1999 and put it on
public display, this painting has enjoyed continually increasing popularity and
has appeared on book covers and in special exhibitions and has even been
featured in a British film.3 Scholars consider it “by far the most beautiful
and powerful” picture in Goya’s witchcraft series and “far more sinister and
frightening” than any of the other paintings in the set.4 Evoking Edmund
Burke’s aesthetics of the sublime, Flying Witches is undeniably electrifying.5
Dramatically illuminated against an inky sky, three robust witches floating
high in the air carry a nude man, who, in a vain attempt to resist them,
frenetically flings his arms wide and screams in anguish. The witches are
arranged in an impressive triangular structure that culminates in the conver-
gence of their tall conical caps, which resemble the mitras (also known as
corozas) worn by Inquisitorial defendants. Below the aerial group, two fright-
ened passersby, accompanied by an ass, try to evade the tumult above them:
one lies prone on the ground covering his ears, while the other protects
himself with a white cloth draped over his head and shoulders.
As enchanting as this painting is, it is also baffling. Joan Curbet correctly
asserts that “the innovative force of the picture lies in its refusal to allow a

Almquist & Wiksell, 1962), 153–71; Pierre Gassier and Juliet Wilson, The Life and
Complete Work of Francisco Goya (New York: Reynal, 1971), cat. nos. 659–64; and
Wilson-Bareau and Mena Marqués, 212–21.
3. See the covers of José Guidol, Goya (Barcelona: Poligrafa, 2008); John Harvey,
The Story of Black (London: Reaktion, 2013); and Tzvetan Todorov, La peinture des
Lumières: de Watteau à Goya (Paris: Seuil, 2014). In addition to numerous exhibitions
dedicated to Goya, the painting was displayed in “Dark Romanticism: From Goya to
Max Ernst” in Musée d’Orsay, 2013. The plot of the film Trance, directed by Danny
Boyle in 2013, revolves around Flying Witches.
4. Robert Hughes, Goya (New York: Knopf, 2003), 154; and Wilson-Bareau and
Mena Marqués, 213, respectively.
5. For Goya’s witchcraft series as an example of the sublime, see Janis Tomlinson,
Francisco Goya y Lucientes, 1746–1828 (London: Phaidon, 1994), 102; Sarah Sym-
mons, Goya (London: Phaidon, 1998), 158–61; and especially Peter K. Klein, “Insan-
ity and the Sublime: Aesthetics and Theories of Mental Illness in Goya’s Yard with
Lunatics and Related Works,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 61 (1998):
240, 243.

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178 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft ! Winter 2016

Figure 1. Francisco Goya, Flying Witches, 1797–98, oil on canvas.

Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid (Photo: Museo Nacional del
Prado/Art Resource, NY)

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Tal ! Demonic Possession in the Enlightenment 179

full didactic, allegorical reading of it, whilst simultaneously hinting at such a

reading.”6 Defying also a basic iconographic reading, the painting has thus
far remained largely impenetrable. Whereas two canvases in the witchcraft
series—The Stone Guest and Bewitched against His Will—derive their subjects
from plays by Antonio Zamora, Flying Witches has not been convincingly
linked to any specific text. Three other canvases in the series depict witches
engaged in recognizable practices—a departure for the Sabbath through a
chimney in The Witches’ Kitchen, a spell being cast on a terrified victim in
The Spell, and a sacrifice of children to the Devil in The Witches’ Sabbath.
However, the witches’ behavior in Flying Witches needs to be clarified. Evi-
dently, they operate some kind of a ritual, perhaps initiation, in which they
abduct a man and inflict suffering on him. But what is the nature of this
infliction? How does the suffering of their captive pertain to and acquire
meaning from the other constituents in the scene, primarily his contorted
movements, the levitation, and the inclusion of frightened witnesses? In
this essay, I propose answers to these queries by exploring three inter-
related aspects in Flying Witches: subject matter, visual tradition, and satirical
meaning.
Before I proceed to my analysis, I would like to offer some instructive
remarks on each of these aspects. The enigmatic nature of the subject matter
in Flying Witches may be elucidated by analyzing the bodily semiotics in the
scene. The focus on bodily semiotics accords with an observation made by
André Chastel, who remarked, “if the scenario happens to be unknown to
us . . . our reaction will begin with the gestures as the most useful expressive
reference points.”7 An examination of body language is eminently suitable
when interpreting Goya’s works, in which, as scholars have shown, expres-
sive corporal communication serves as a prominent conduit of meaning.8 It

6. Joan Curbet, “ ‘Hallelujah to your dying screams of torture’: Representations of

Ritual Violence in English and Spanish Romanticism,” in European Gothic: A Spirited
Exchange 1760–1960, ed. Avril Horner (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2002), 168.
7. André Chastel, “Gesture in Painting: Problems in Semiology,” Renaissance and
Reformation 10 (1986): 5.
8. Eleanor A. Sayre, “Goya Gebärdensprache,” in Goya: Zeichnungen und Druck-
graphik, exh. cat. (Frankfurt a.M.: Städtische Galerie, 1981), 82–87; Martin Warnke,
“Goyas Gesten,” in Goya “Alle warden fallen,” ed. Werner Hofmann, Edith Helman,
and Martin Warnke (Frankfurt a.M.: Athenäum, 1987), 115–77; Reva Wolf, Goya
and the Satirical Print in England and on the Continent, 1730 to 1850 (Boston: Boston
College Museum of Art, 1991), 69–88; Roberto Alcalá Flecha, “Expresion y gesto
en la obra de Goya,” Goya 252 (1996): 341–52; Barbara Kornmeier, “ ‘Ydioma
universal’—Goyas Taubstummenalphabet im context seines Geniekonzepts,” Zeit-

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180 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft ! Winter 2016

has been pointed out that Flying Witches contains an eloquent gesture readily
decipherable by the viewers of the time. In thrusting both his thumbs
between the index and middle fingers of his clenched fists, the passerby per-
forms the higa (fig), a symbolic gesture popularly believed to ward off the evil
eye.9 There is, however, another figure whose bodily expressiveness merits
attention: the airborne victim. A cursory examination shows his stance and
gestures intermingled with those of his three aggressors, forming an indistinct
tangle of limbs. If his body is pondered in isolation from the other figures,
his movements may seem simply fortuitous and involuntary: writhing in the
grip of the witches, he simultaneously convulsively waves his arms, flails his
legs, heaves his chest, throws back his head, and opens his mouth. His posture
also seems coincidental, as it appears to be partly forced upon him: lacking
support, his head is thrown back, and the arm of a witch that is thrust
between his legs bends his right knee. The impression that his posture was
thoughtlessly arranged perhaps explains why it has hitherto escaped deeper
consideration.10 It is nevertheless my central contention that Goya premedi-
tated the bodily gestures of this figure according to a visual code deeply
entrenched in art historical traditions. Only by reading the victim’s posture
in this way can one decipher the main supernatural phenomenon portrayed
in the scene.
This argument will also offer insight into Goya’s potential sources of inspi-
ration. Attempts to identify textual sources for Flying Witches—perhaps
assuming that because two of the pictures in the series portray scenes from
Zamora’s plays, the entire series is literarily based—have not proven success-
ful.11 I argue that the pictorial tradition, though seldom discussed in relation
to the witchcraft series, was equally if not more valuable to Goya than textual

schrift für Kunstgeschichte, 61 (1998): 1–17; Antonio Gascón Ricao, “Las cifras de la
mano de Francisco de Goya,” Boletino del Museo e Instituto Camon Aznar 82 (2000):
273–84; and Guy Tal, “The Gestural Language in Francisco Goya’s Sleep of Reason
Produces Monsters,” Word & Image 26 (2010): 115–27.
9. Margarita Moreno de las Heras, “The Devil’s Lamp; The Witches’ Sabbath;
Witches in the Air,” in Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment, ed. Alfonso E. Pérez Sán-
chez and Eleanor A. Sayre, exh. cat. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989), 62–64; and
Wilson-Bareau and Mena Marqués, 213–14.
10. This figure is generally described as a terrified victim: Nordström, Goya,
Saturn and Melancholy, 168; Frank I. Heckes, “Supernatural Themes in the Art of
Francisco de Goya” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1985), 1:130; Moreno de
las Heras, 62; Manuela B. Mena Marqués, ed., Goya en tiempos de Guerra, exh. cat.
(Madrid: Museo del Prado, 2008), 161; and Hughes, 155.
11. Frank Heckes, in “Supernatural Themes,” 1:131–36, and “Goya y sus seis
‘Asuntos de brujas,’ ” Goya, 295–96 (2003): 198–200, suggests that Flying Witches

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Tal ! Demonic Possession in the Enlightenment 181

sources in conceiving the four other pictures in the series. Two pictures
exemplify this point. In The Witches’ Sabbath (Fig. 2), the Devil in the guise
of a he-goat is seated amid a circle of witches. This grouping is an adaptation
of a recurring image in witchcraft treatises (the particular likeness to Figure
10 will be discussed later).12 In the now-lost Witches’ Kitchen (Fig. 3), set in a
kitchen equipped with magic apparatuses, the congregation of witches
departing for the Sabbath through a chimney is arranged à la David Teniers
the Younger. Goya, who could have viewed Teniers’s cabinet pictures in the
collection of the Palacio Real and through printed copies, surely valued them
as intriguing models (Fig. 4). As if to underscore his indebtedness to the
Flemish artist, he augmented the fanciful rendezvous with a man urinating
against the back wall, a hallmark of Teniers’s peasant and tavern scenes.13

presents a scene from the mid-eighteenth-century popular comedy El dómine Lucas

by José de Cañizares. Edith Helman has interpreted the scene with reference to one
of the confessions recorded in the Logroño inquisitorial trial of 1610. Accounts of
these proceedings would have been accessible to Goya through his friend, playwright
Leandro Fernández de Moratı́n, who had begun annotating them in 1797 (they were
not published until 1811). See Edith Helman, “The Younger Moratı́n and Goya: On
Duendes and Brujas,” Hispanic Review 27 (1959): 111; and “Algunos sueños y brujas
de Goya,” in Goya: Nuevas Visiones: Homenaje a Enrique Lafuente Ferrari, ed. Isabel
Garcı́a de la Rasilla and Francisco Calvo Serraller (Madrid: Amigos del Museo del
Prado, 1987), 203. The connection between Goya’s works and Moratı́n’s Logroño
records was convincingly rejected by René Andioc, “Sobre Goya y Moratı́n hijo,”
Hispanic Review 50 (1982): 119–32; and Moreno de las Heras, 64, n. 26. In any event,
the texts offered by Helman and Heckes fail to explain several puzzling features in the
painting, primarily those related to the aerial grouping. For an interpretation of Flying
Witches as a reference to freemasonry and its ceremonies, see Mena Marqués, 161.
12. Jeannine Baticle, “Goya et la sorcellerie: enquête sur l’une des motivations des
Caprices,” Connaissance des Arts 489 (1992): 110–17, proposes Jan Ziarnko’s foldout
engraving of the Sabbath in Pierre de Lancre’s Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais
anges et démons (Paris, 1613) as a visual source for two Caprichos plates. For additional
comparable images, see Jane P. Davidson, The Witch in Northern European Art, 1470–
1750 (Freren: Luca Verlag, 1987), pls. 34 and 35; and Francesco Maria Guazzo, Com-
pendium Maleficarum, trans. Montague Summers (New York: Dover, 1988), 98. For a
seventeenth-century illustration of the Molech as a visual origin for Goya’s Witches’
Sabbath, see Avigdor W. G. Posèq, “The Goat in Goya’s Witches’ Sabbath,” Source:
Notes in the History of Art 18:4 (1999): 30–39.
13. For eighteenth-century engravings after Teniers’s witchcraft paintings, see Mar-
gret Klinge and Dietmar Lüdke, David Teniers der Jüngere 1610–1690: Alltag und Vergnü-
gen in Flandern (Heidelberg: Kehrer, 2005), 342–43. A urinating man is featured in at
least three paintings by Teniers that were held in the collection of Charles IV at the
Palacio Real in 1794: The King Drinks, Smokers in a Tavern, and The Skittles Game.
See the Prado database at https://www.museodelprado.es/coleccion/galeria-on-line/
galeria-on-line (accessed 22 October 2015). That Goya’s snuffbox was most likely deco-

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182 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft ! Winter 2016

Flying Witches also engages with visual precedents, but tracing them requires
expanding the search beyond the visual repository of witchcraft.
As would have been fairly obvious to Goya’s intended audience, the
witchcraft series displays a satirical exposé of false beliefs in keeping with the
spirit of Enlightenment. This notion is lent credence by the numerous visual
and conceptual analogies between the witchcraft series and the Caprichos, a
series of eighty etchings ridiculing the follies of human behavior and beliefs
in witchcraft and superstition, which Goya conceived under the title Sueños
in 1796–99.14 The Osunas, who bought four sets of the Caprichos in January
1799, might have seen some of Goya’s preparatory drawings earlier and
recalled them when viewing the witchcraft series.15 At any rate, it will be
shown that Flying Witches satirizes belief in the supernatural and censures the
Inquisition by other means than analogies to the Sueños and Caprichos.16
THE CONVULSIVE BODY
When Goya painted Flying Witches, he had been preoccupied with the suffer-
ing human body for at least a decade. A horizontal body imbued with signs
of extreme emotion was first depicted in one of his early works commis-
sioned by the Osunas, Saint Francis Borgia at the Deathbed of an Impenitent,
which was painted in 1788 for their chapel in the Valencia Cathedral (Fig. 5).
Andrew Schulz considers the tormented impenitent, who moans, heaves his
torso, and stretches his foot, to represent a turning point in Goya’s oeuvre
“toward a more naturalistic mode of imitation and a greater emphasis on
extremes and accidents of expression.”17 This naturalistic depiction of the

rated with six paintings by Teniers reinforces this connection. See Mercedes Cerón,
“Goya’s Lost Snuffbox,” The Burlington Magazine 152 (October 2010): 675–77.
14. Goya proclaimed the goals of the Caprichos in an advertisement in the Diario
de Madrid: Canellas, no. 211; and Symmons, A Life in Letters, no. 258. Analogies
between the witchcraft series and the Caprichos are discussed in Wilson-Bareau and
Mena Marqués, 213–14.
15. Symmons, A Life in Letters, no. 257.
16. Analogous satirical features include the higa amulet dangling from the out-
moded dress of a childish man in Nanny’s Boy (El de la royona, plate 4); the figures
closing their eyes and covering their ears to evade the fantastic creatures hovering
above them in Blasts of Wind (Soplones, plate 48); and the witches wearing mitras and
serving as prelates in a diabolical ceremony in Devout Profession (Devota profesion, plate
70; formerly titled Sueño / De Brujas in the Sueños).
17. Andrew Schulz, “The Expressive Body in Goya’s Saint Francis Borgia at the
Deathbed of an Impenitent,” Art Bulletin 80 (1998): 678. Earlier works showing the
suffering human body naturalistically include an etching of the Garrotted Man
(c. 1778; Gassier and Wilson, cat. no. 122) and a painting of the Crucifixion (1780;
Gassier and Wilson, cat. no. 176).

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Tal ! Demonic Possession in the Enlightenment 183

Figure 2. Francisco Goya, The Witches’ Sabbath, 1797–98, oil on canvas. Museo
Lázaro Galdiano, Madrid (Photo: Art Resource, NY)

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184 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft ! Winter 2016

Figure 3. Francisco Goya, The Witches’ Kitchen, 1797–98, oil on canvas.

Unknown location (Photo: Fototeca del Instituto del Patrimonio Cultural de
España, Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte)

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Tal ! Demonic Possession in the Enlightenment 185

Figure 4. Jacques Aliamet, after David Teniers the Younger, Departure to the
Sabbath, engraving and etching, 1755. British Museum, London (Photo: !
Trustees of the British Museum)

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186 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft ! Winter 2016

agonized body reappears in a series of cabinet paintings produced in 1793–

94, immediately following Goya’s convalescence from a severe illness that
left him deaf for life. Conceivably mirroring the artist’s mental condition at
the time, two of the paintings—Fire at Night and Shipwreck—show exhausted
naked men in horizontal positions with back-tilted heads, heaving chests, and
outspread arms among the victims of natural disasters.18 Suffering figures in a
horizontal position are also present in the Caprichos. In plate eight, Que se la
llevaron (They carried her off ), a hapless woman, head tossed back in a scream,
is seized by two brutal men. And in plate sixty, Ensayos (Trials; plate two in
the Sueños), a woman squirms frenziedly, albeit comically, and contorts her
limbs as she is miraculously lifted from the ground by a witch (Fig. 6).
The victim in Flying Witches initially seems to differ little from the tor-
mented figures mentioned above. Upon closer scrutiny, however, the con-
figuration of his head, posture, and gestures distinguishes him by conforming
to what Aby Warburg famously termed Pathosformel, a semiotic formula for
intense emotion.19 The Pathosformel germane to this case evolved from the
Hellenistic group sculpture Laocoön and his Sons. Since being disinterred in
Rome in 1506, this statue has had a considerable impact on artists, including
those in the eighteenth century, and the figure of Laocoön has become a
prototype for the simultaneous expression of physical and emotional agony.20

18. Gassier and Wilson, cat. nos. 328 and 329.

19. This concept is first mentioned in Aby Warburg, “Dürer and Italian Antiq-
uity” (1905), in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, ed. Kurt W. Forster, trans. David
Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1999), 555.
20. Warburg (ibid., 558) singles out the Laocoön as the ancient work that gave Renais-
sance artists a sense of the “extremes of gestural and physiognomic expression.”
Eighteenth-century Spanish authors reiterated the veneration bestowed on the Laocoön
by Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Anton Raphael Mengs. See Pedro de Silva, Distri-
bucion de los premios (Madrid: Joachin Ibarra, 1772), 60; and José Nicolás de Azara, “Com-
entario al Tratado de la Belleza de Mengs,” in Obras de D. Antonio Rafael Mengs (Madrid:
Imprenta Real de la Gazeta, 1780), 81. The Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid
acquired plaster casts of the Laocoön to be copied by students. For the Laocoön in Spanish
art and in the Royal Academy, see J. J. Martı́n González, “El Laoconte y la escultura
española,” Boletin del Seminario de esrudios de arte y de arqueologia 56 (1990): 459–66 (esp.
465–66); and Andrew Schulz, Goya’s “Caprichos”: Aesthetics, Perception, and the Body
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 49. For print collections of antique
statues, including the Laocoön, in the Academy’s library, see Claude Bédat, “La biblioteca
de la Real Academia de San Fernando en 1793,” Academia: Boletin de la Real Academia de
Bellas Artes de S. Fernando 25 (1967): 5–52, and 26 (1968): 33–85. Other studies on the
legacy of the Laocoön in the eighteenth century include Jean-Pierre Cuzin, Jean-René
Gaborit, and Alain Pasquier, eds., D’après l’antique, exh. cat. (Paris: Musée du Louvre,
2000), 228–73; and Penelope Curtis and Stephen Feeke, eds., Towards a New Laocoön
(Leeds: Henry Moore Institute, 2007), with additional bibliography.

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PAGE 186
Tal ! Demonic Possession in the Enlightenment 187

Figure 5. Francisco Goya, Saint Francis Borgia at the Deathbed of an Impenitent,

1788, oil on canvas. Valencia Cathedral (Photo: Album/Art Resource, NY)

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188 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft ! Winter 2016

Figure 6. Francisco Goya, Ensayos (Trials), plate 60 from Los Caprichos, 1799,
etching and aquatint. British Museum, London (Photo: ! Trustees of the
British Museum)

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Tal ! Demonic Possession in the Enlightenment 189

Figure 7. The Laocoön Group, Roman copy of a Hellenistic original,

early-first-century AD, marble. Vatican Museums, Rome
(Photo: !Vanni Archive/Art Resource, NY)

The victim in Flying Witches is remarkably similar to Laocoön when turned

on his side and viewed from a slightly right angle (Fig. 7), imitating the head
thrown back with an open mouth, the convulsing torso, the outstretched left
leg, the right leg with a bent knee, and, to a lesser degree, the upraised and
outstretched right arm and the left lowered arm, which is straight, unlike
Laocoön’s bent arm.21 While it is plausible to construe the victim’s posture
as a sign of extreme suffering, this interpretation raises two pressing questions.
First, if all Goya’s singular purpose was to represent an agonized body, why
did he resort to Pathosformel instead of portraying it more naturalistically, as
he typically did? Second, Nigel Spivey asserts that “a pathos formula is an
accumulative phenomenon. It gathers new memories and fresh associations
as its flexibility and usefulness are proved by artists over and again.”22 Are
there any other meanings to be derived from the victim’s Laocoönic pose?

21. Laocoön’s right arm was erroneously restored by Giovanni Angelo Montorsoli
in 1532–33. His bent right arm was discovered in 1906 and attached to the statue in
1957.
22. Nigel Spivey, Enduring Creation: Art, Pain and Fortitude (London: Thames &
Hudson, 2001), 125.

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190 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft ! Winter 2016

Figure 8. Pieter Xavery, Two Madmen, 1673, terracotta. Rijksmuseum,

Amsterdam (Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

The answers to both questions converge in an alternative interpretation for

the victim’s posture. As I will demonstrate, this interpretation assumes a for-
mulaic body and is more thoroughly harmonized through the thematic and
compositional framing of the victim.
To reach this conclusion, it is important to understand that the Laocoönic
pose was often employed not as a pathos formula but as what might be called
a pathological formula—a bodily configuration that represents the frenzied,
uncontrolled behavior caused by physically and mentally abnormal condi-
tions. As early as the second half of the sixteenth century, artists and art
theorists recognized the figure of Laocoön as representing a wide array of
illnesses and mental disorders, including depression, desperation, nervous
tension, madness, and epilepsy.23 For example, the two chained madmen
sculpted in terracotta by the seventeenth-century Flemish artist Pieter Xavery
are essentially Laocoönesque—the seated figure alludes to the statue in his

23. For example, Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, Trattato dell’arte della pittura, book II,
chap. XVI, quoted in Salvatore Settis, Laocoonte: Fama e stile (Rome: Donzelli, 1999),
194: “De i moti del dolore, meraviglia, morte, pazzia, infingardagine, disperatione,
molestia, capriccio, patentia et epilepsia” (for pain, marvel, death, madness, depres-
sion, desperation, nervous tension, caprice, endurance, and epilepsy).

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Tal ! Demonic Possession in the Enlightenment 191

physiognomy, muscularity, and leg position and the reclining figure in his
back-tilted head, rolled eyes, and screaming mouth (Fig. 8).24 Goya was
familiar with the codified physiognomy and gestures of madness. It has been
noted that the inmates in his Yard with Lunatics (1793–94) reflect the institu-
tional codes of insanity (melancholic gestures, maniacal physiognomy, etc.)
rather than exhibiting actual behavior.25 While this precedent suggests a reas-
sessment of the victim in Flying Witches in such terms, identifying him as a
“lunatic” would defy the supernatural framework.
The supernatural framework does coincide with another abnormality
invoked by the Laocoön formula: demonic possession. The interior violation
of the body by a demon was thought to result in a loss of bodily control,
as manifested by a cluster of abnormal symptoms, both physiological and
behavioral.26 These symptoms were crystallized in a conventional set of
somatic signs (Figs. 9 and 10), all of which are shown in the convulsions of
Goya’s victim: the arched body, the heaving torso, the spastically writhing
limbs, the abrupt backward thrust of the head, and the mouth open in a
scream.27 Because these conventional signs are key in identifying a possessed
figure, it is reasonable that Goya resorted to the use of a formulaic body.

24. The resemblance of this statue to the Laocoön has been overlooked by Sander
L. Gilman, Seeing the Insane: A Cultural History of Madness and Art in the Western World
(Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1996 [1st ed. 1982]), 18–20; and
Jane Kromm, The Art of Frenzy: Public Madness in the Visual Culture of Europe, 1500–
1850 (London and New York: Continuum, 2002), 80–85.
25. The inmate standing on the left and the one squatting on the right are compa-
rable, in their frenzied facial expressions and the way that their arms are pressed to
their bodies as if transfixed, to illustrations in medical treatises of maniacs wearing
straitjackets. The two wrestlers in the center assume two melancholic gestures: the
intertwined fingers and the head laid on folded arms. Both anticipate the use of these
postures in The Sleep/Dream of Reason Produces Monsters (El sueño de la razon produce
monstruos, plate 43 of Los Caprichos), the former in the first preparatory study and the
latter in the second preparatory study and final print. Klein, 216–17, with elaboration
in his “ ‘La fantasia abandonada de la razón’: Zur Darstellung des Wahnsinns in Goyas
‘Hof der Irren,’ ” in Goya: Neue Forschungen. Das internationale Symposium 1991 in
Osnabrück, ed. Jutta Held (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1994), 161–94; and Tal, “The
Gestural Language,” 120–22.
26. Brian P. Levack, The Devil Within: Possession and Exorcism in the Christian West
(London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 6–15.
27. For images of demoniacs, see Jean-Martin Charcot and Paul Richer, Les démon-
iaque dans l’art (Paris: Adrien Delahaye et Émile Lecrosnier, 1887); Gilman, 22–28;
Rebecca Zorach, “Despoiled at the Source,” Art History 22 (1999): 244–69; Kromm,
69–76; and Nancy Caciola, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Mid-
dle Ages (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003).

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192 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft ! Winter 2016

Figure 9. Johan Wierix, attr., after Gerard van Groeningen, Christ Healing a
Demoniac, in or before 1574, engraving. British Museum, London (Photo: !
Trustees of the British Museum)

The conflation of Laocoön with a demoniac with stiffened limbs, muscular

flexibility of the arched back, and protruding eyes made the Laocoön group a
suitable model for Goya, just as earlier artists employed other ancient proto-
types of ecstatic behavior to portray the demoniac, such as the dancing mae-
nads in Bacchic rituals.28

THE DEMONIAC R EFRAMED

Though the thematic framework of witchcraft accommodates the identifica-

tion of the victim as a demoniac, it also seems to prevent the modern viewer
from arriving at such an understanding because Flying Witches starkly departs
from the pictorial context in which demoniacs are typically featured, namely,
an exorcism ritual. A standard scene of exorcism has a binary structure that
juxtaposes the demoniac and the exorcising saint or clergyman; each is often
accompanied by a few figures, the former by those who restrain him or her
and the latter by his entourage (Fig. 10). Does the binary structure of Flying
Witches imply the presence of additional traces of exorcism imagery? One
could, for instance, interpret the witches’ grasp on the demoniac as a parody
of the necessity of supporting demoniacs’ backs lest they collapse; or one

28. Gilman, 22; and Kromm, 70–84.

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Tal ! Demonic Possession in the Enlightenment 193

Figure 10. Hieronymus Wierix, Saint Ignatius of Loyola Exorcising Demons, c. 1613,
engraving. British Museum, London (Photo: ! Trustees of the British Museum)

could view the passerby’s ineffective superstitious higa as a satirical inversion

of the exorcist’s effective gesture of blessing.29 However, there is a salient
difference between Flying Witches and an exorcism scene. Goya conspicu-
ously omitted the devilish imps being emitted from the demoniac’s mouth—
the sole visual indication that the demon has successfully been expelled from
the body.30 In other words, Flying Witches does not present a “closed narra-
tive” in which salvation is guaranteed. Rather, it depicts a demoniac who
endures a ceaseless possession with no cure forthcoming.31 As we shall now

29. On the use of the higa in the eighteenth century and its censure by intellectu-
als, see Joseph Townsend, A Journey through Spain in the Years 1786 and 1787 (London:
C. Dilly, 1791), 3:166; W. L. Hildburgh, “Images of the Human Hand as Amulets in
Spain,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 18 (1955): 67–89; and Moreno
de las Heras, 64.
30. Schulz, “The Expressive Body,” 677, explains that the appearance of a fleeing
demon in Goya’s preparatory drawing for Saint Francis Borgia at the Deathbed of an
Impenitent indicates that, before deciding on a scene of damnation, he intended to
depict a scene of exorcism (or unction). The fleeing demon perhaps derived from a
print after Rubens’s St. Ignatius Loyola Healing a Demoniac (c. 1630). In a drawing of
c. 1817–20, titled Scene of Exorcism (Gassier and Wilson, cat. no. 1453), an afflicted
woman is elevated from the ground by two figures and a priest prays for her recovery.
However, as Michael Armstrong Roche argues (“Seeking a Cure,” in Goya and the

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194 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft ! Winter 2016

see, Flying Witches is particularly close to two widely differing images—one

being a book illustration and the other, a celebrated masterpiece—that belong
to the iconographic subcategory of “possession sans exorcism.” Although it
cannot be determined whether these two images were consciously employed
by Goya as direct sources or were absorbed as part of his visual repertoire and
education, I believe that they can shed light on the painting. These two
images not only portray demoniacs in postures similar to that of Goya’s vic-
tim; they also offer an account of the otherwise unexplained constituents in
Flying Witches, including the levitation, the demoniac’s assailants, the pres-
ence of witnesses, and the spatial division between the celestial and terrestrial
zones. They might also have supplied Goya with a number of visual devices
that would have allowed him to communicate his denial of the supernatural.
The first image is an engraving in L’histoire des imaginations extravagantes de
Monsieur Oufle (A History of the Ridiculous Extravagancies of Monsieur Oufle)
written by the abbot and theologian, Laurent Bordelon, and published simul-
taneously in Amsterdam and Paris in 1710. This comic novel enjoyed fame
across Europe and throughout the eighteenth century, as attested by its trans-
lation into English, German, and Italian, as well as French reissues in 1754,
1789, and 1793.32 In two volumes, Bordelon recounts the wide range of
supernatural phenomena and superstitions—magic, witchcraft, astrology, fair-
ies, specters, and the like—in which Mr. Oufle (an anagram of le fou, the
mad) believes, only to reject them as preposterous and to ridicule the protag-
onist for his credulity. Each of Oufle’s passionate testimonies of his beliefs is
followed by a contradicting account by his brother Noncrede who, as his
name indicates, debunks all beliefs. The book includes eight engravings
signed “Crespy” by the French engraver and publisher, Jean Crépy; in each,
Oufle witnesses, or, more precisely, hallucinates a supernatural event, while a
fool, the visual stand-in for Noncrede’s critique, mocks him from behind.
Goya’s acquaintance with this book, which was not issued in Spanish,
cannot be ascertained but is entirely plausible.33 This conjectural link is sup-
ported by the visual analogies between the witchcraft series and the book’s

Spirit of Enlightenment, 326–28), with no signs of possession, she is more likely sick or
even dead.
31. I borrow the term “closed narrative” for an exorcism scene from James Clif-
ton, “The Face of a Fiend: Convulsion, Inversion, and the Horror of the Disempow-
ered Body,” Oxford Art Journal 34 (2011): 391.
32. Kay S. Wilkins, “Attitudes to Witchcraft and Demonic Possession in France
during the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of European Studies 3 (1973): 351–52; and
Kay S. Wilkins, “Some Aspects of the Irrational in 18th-Century France,” Studies on
Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 115 (1975): 107–201.
33. One of his numerous Francophile friends could have introduced him to this

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Tal ! Demonic Possession in the Enlightenment 195

illustrations. Among the early modern illustrations of witches paying respect

to a goat-like Devil, Crespy’s foldout engraving bears the closest resemblance
to Goya’s Witches’ Sabbath (Fig. 2). In keeping with Bordelon’s skepticism,
Crespy depicts a light-hearted Sabbath governed by a cheerful goat and ridi-
culed by the fool (Fig. 11). The frivolous atmosphere, the circular arrange-
ment of the witches around the Devil, and the Devil’s leftward inclination to
accept a sacrificial child from a witch link this image to that of Goya.
The most relevant engraving to Flying Witches in Bordelon’s book con-
cerns the corporeal embodiment of the devils with respect to their shape,
their embodiment as objects and animals, and their invasion of the human
body (Fig. 12). Trailed by the fool, Oufle encounters a cluster of devils in
assorted disguises: large and small demons, dogs and asses, a widow dressed
in black (on the right), and others specified by the text.34 Oufle’s attention,
however, is fixed on one spectacular occurrence: an aerial grouping of three
devils carrying a man whose convulsions and the cloud of black imps issuing
from his mouth indicate that the devils have already penetrated his body and
are now controlling his movements. (This is an extremely rare case in which
the imps spewed from the demoniac’s mouth are not a sign of exorcism.) This
episode illustrates both Oufle’s testimony of demonic possession—which,
according to him, “our Religion does not allow us to doubt”—and Non-
crede’s utter rejection of its validity, as he exposes claims of exorcism and
possession as fraudulent.35

book, knowing that the complementary illustrations, rarely found in eighteenth-

century treatises about the supernatural, would appeal to him as an artist interested in
such subjects. On the access of the Osunas to prohibited books, see The Spanish
Journal of Elizabeth Lady Holland, ed. Earl of Ilchester (London: Longmans, Green,
1910), 195–96. The Osunas’ library included treatises on magic and witchcraft, plays
on the supernatural, and records of inquisitorial trials, all listed in Isabel Pérez Hernán-
dez, “Análisis de la obra ‘Asuntos de brujas’ realizada por Francisco de Goya para la
Casa de campo de la Alameda de la condesa duquesa de Benavente,” AxA. Una
Revista de Arte y Arquitectura (2012): 8–9, in http://www.uax.es/publicacion/analisis
-de-la-obra-asuntos-de-brujas-realizada-por-francisco-de-goya.pdf (accessed 22 Octo-
ber 2015). For evidence that Goya learned French, see Juliet Wilson-Bareau, “Goya
and France,” in Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting, ed. Gary
Tinterow and Geneviève Lacambre (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and
New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), 141. Linda C. Hults, The
Witch as Muse: Art, Gender, and Power in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 216, conjectures, with no further elaboration, that Goya
“may very well have known Bordelon’s book.”
34. Laurent Bordelon, A History of the Ridiculous Extravagancies of Monsieur Oufle
(London: J. Morphew, 1711), 176–78.
35. Oufle reports: “ ’[T]is on these possess’d Wretches that the Devils triumph;

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196 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft ! Winter 2016

Figure 11. Jean Crépy (Crespy), Witches’ Sabbat, engraving, from Laurent
Bordelon, L’histoire des imaginations extravagantes de Monsieur Oufle, Paris, 1754
(Photo: Courtesy, The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana)

The parallels between Flying Witches and the Crespy illustration are strik-
ing. In both scenes, a horrid trio endowed with supernatural powers floats
high in the air while fiercely clasping a demoniac (Figs. 13 and 14). The two
aerial groups are similar, down to the arrangement of the aggressors (two
front views and one back view) and the aggressor who bends the demoniac’s
leg. Furthermore, both scenes include credulous bystanders responding to the
commotion above them.
By alluding to a blatantly skeptical treatise on the supernatural, Goya aligned

’tis in them that they rule with such an absolute Power that they equally dispose of
both Soul and Body [. . .] they delight to make use of these Distortions to affright the
Spectators, and intimidate those who endeavour to eject them. [. . .] [F]requently
several of them joyn together to take the faster hold, and resist with the greater Vigor.
All this is certain [. . .] our Religion does not allow us to doubt of it” (ibid., 182–84).
Noncrede responds: “I don’t easily give way to all that is related concerning Persons
who pretend to be Possess’d. How many Cheats have been discover’d amongst those
pretended Possessions! It has also been observ’d amongst those who undertake to cast
Devils out of the Bodies of Daemoniacs, that there have been some who thro’ Weak-
ness or Ignorance, believ’d they were possess’d, or only seem’d to belive [sic] so out
of Interest, Human Considerations, by Instigation, or other Motives which Discretion
obliges me to pass over in silence, lest I shou’d be thought to confound the honest
Exorcists with those whose only Aim is to seduce the Spectators” (ibid., 207–8).

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Tal ! Demonic Possession in the Enlightenment 197

Figure 12. Jean Crépy (Crespy), Oufle Witnessing an Airborne Possession, engraving,
from Laurent Bordelon, L’histoire des imaginations extravagantes de Monsieur Oufle,
Paris, 1754 (Photo: Courtesy, The Lilly Library, Indiana University,
Bloomington, Indiana)

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198 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft ! Winter 2016

Figure 13. Crépy, detail of Fig. 12 in reverse, showing three devils

possessing a man. (Photo: Courtesy, The Lilly Library, Indiana University,
Bloomington, Indiana)

Figure 14. Goya, detail of Fig. 1, showing the demoniac. (Photo: Museo Nacional
del Prado/Art Resource, NY)

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Tal ! Demonic Possession in the Enlightenment 199

his witchcraft series with Enlightenment ideas. Like Bordelon, most Enlighten-
ment intellectuals tended to be deeply skeptical about occult phenomena,
including demonic possession. Enlightenment physicians and philosophers dis-
missed the Devil’s supposed ability to physically interfere with the human brain,
and argued that apparent manifestations of demonic possession might rather be
symptoms of natural diseases, especially hysteria, epilepsy, or, to a lesser degree,
melancholy.36 The fallacy of possession was also proclaimed in Spain. One of
the fundamental texts of the Spanish Ilustración was the multivolume collection
of essays by the Benedictine Father Benito Jerónimo Feijoo, Teatro crı́tico univer-
sal (Madrid, 1726–39), which by 1780 had been reissued fifteen times. In his
essay “Demonı́acos,” he warns against false manifestations of possession, which
he divides into two types: those who feign possession with the intention of
eliciting alms and liberating themselves from social and moral restraints, and
those who imagine that they are possessed because of their ignorance of their
actual pathological state. He estimated that, for every five hundred cases of
possession, no more than twenty or thirty cases were authentic.37
Flying Witches contains no visual evidence that would allow the possession
depicted to be rationalized as fraud or disease. Rather, skepticism is expressed
through the signs of folly and absurdity conveyed by the image’s visual affin-
ities with the Crespy illustration. First among these signs is the group levita-
tion. If the unnatural aerial abduction or initiation was hitherto only observed
in the magical flight of witches, the Crespy illustration also associates it with

36. Roy Porter, “Witchcraft and Magic in Enlightenment, Romantic and Liberal
Thought,” in Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,
ed. Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1999), 227–35; Edward Bever, “Witchcraft Prosecutions and the Decline of Magic,”
Journal of Interdisciplinary History 40 (2009): 263–93; and Levack, 113–29.
37. Father Benito Jerónimo Feijoo, “Discurso sexto: Demonı́acos,” in Teatro crı́tico
universal, 8 vols (Madrid, 1726–39), VIII, in Proyecto Filosofı́a en español, http://www
.filosofia.org/bjf/bjft806.htm (accessed 22 October 2015). See also Marı́a Tausiet,
“From Illusion to Disenchantment: Feijoo versus the ‘Falsely Possessed’ in Eighteenth-
Century Spain,” in Beyond the Witch Trials: Witchcraft and Magic in Enlightenment Europe,
ed. Owen Davies and Willem de Blécourt (Manchester and New York: Manchester
University Press, 2004), 45–60. On the popularity of Feijoo in the late eighteenth
century, see Richard Herr, The Eighteenth-Century Revolution in Spain (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1958), 37–41. Similarities between texts related to the
Caprichos project and the Teatro suggest that Goya was familiar with Feijoo’s writings:
John Dowling, “The Crisis of the Spanish Enlightenment: Capricho 43 and Goya’s Sec-
ond Portrait of Jovellanos,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 18 (1985): 331–59 (esp. 346); and
Andre Stoll, “Goyas Illumionatio – Zum ästhetischen Genesisbericht der Caprichos,”
in Spanische Bilderwelten: Literatur, Kunst und Film im intermedialen Dialog, ed. Christoph
Strosetzki and Andre Stoll (Frankfurt a.M.: Vervuert, 1993), 31.

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200 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft ! Winter 2016

possession. Early modern accounts report demoniacs being lifted by devils

above the ground and suspended for a few minutes in the air.38 The difficulty
of explaining such a staggering event in terms of natural causes such as
illness—which resulted, according to Brian Levack, in the paucity of reports of
levitation39 —may have motivated Crespy and Goya to portray this physiologi-
cal symptom. The symptom of levitation both discourages the viewer from
rationalizing the demoniac as fraudulent or ill and forces the viewer either to
accept the possession as real or to reject it altogether as utter nonsense. Goya
further intimated the preposterousness of possession by substituting Crespy’s
devils with witches. The proximity of their mouths to the victim’s body, which
suggests that they are biting him or marking his skin with a stigma diabolicum,
evokes the belief that witches could command devils to possess the bodies of
their targeted victims.40 However, by the end of the eighteenth century,
although the illiterate public still believed in the power of devils to possess, the
belief that humans could inflict such possession on others had been drastically
diminished. A final satirical cue, the ass that accompanies the passersby, targets
the credulous who believe in the reality of possession. Rather than comparing
it to the ass depicted as one of the demonic embodiments in Crespy’s engrav-
ing, its raison-d’être is more intriguing if it is treated as Goya’s variation of the
fool’s cap, in keeping with its representation of human folly and ignorance in
the Caprichos and his other works.41
The second possible source for Flying Witches is derived from the pictorial
tradition of biblical visions.42 Manuela Mena Marqués has proposed that Goya
may have alluded to the Ascension of Christ, while Robert Hughes views
the scene in Flying Witches as a moral inversion of the Resurrection, equating
the figures who refuse to look upon the diabolical event to the sleeping
guards at the garden tomb who fail to witness the divine Resurrection.43

38. The famous case that involved levitation was the seventeenth-century posses-
sion in Loudun. It was evidently known to the Osunas through the Histoire des diables
de Loudun, which was listed in their library’s inventory; Hernández, “Análisis,” 9. For
additional cases, see Levack, 8, 218, 222.
39. Levack, 8.
40. Ibid., 21, 23.
41. Pérez Sánchez and Sayre, 101–9, 130–32.
42. It should be noted that Crespy’s scene of demonic possession also recalls Chris-
tian iconography, specifically images of Saint Anthony borne through the air by tor-
menting demons (the prints of Martin Schongauer and Lucas Cranach immediately
come to mind), except that the role of the devils has been changed from attacking
the body (obsessio) to penetrating it (possessio), that is, afflicting both body and soul.
For obsessio and possessio, see Levack, 16–17; and Harley, 310–11.
43. Mena Marqués, 161; Hughes, 155. Werner Hofmann, Goya: “To Every Story

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Tal ! Demonic Possession in the Enlightenment 201

However, Goya’s passersby seem to react differently than the witnesses in

these theophanic scenes; they do not look upward, as do the apostles in scenes
of the Ascension, nor do they remain oblivious, as do the slumbering guards
at Christ’s tomb. Instead, they are keenly aware of and frightened by the
supernatural levitation, shielding their eyes and ears. Their response recalls
the witnesses of another biblical theophany, the Transfiguration, when Peter,
James, and John avert their gaze from the overpowering radiance of Christ
(Matthew 17.6).
This observation seems particularly sound when comparing Flying Witches
to a specific representation of the Transfiguration: Raphael’s masterpiece (Fig.
15). Goya may have seen it during his 1770–71 visit to Italy, but it is unlikely
that he would have been able to recollect the painting so precisely three
decades later. It is more reasonable to infer that he referenced a copy, one
that he could have easily acquired in the reproductive print holdings of the
Royal Academy, where Raphael was the best-represented artist.44 The popu-
larity of Raphael in eighteenth-century Spain reverberates in Goya’s 1792
letter to the Royal Academy, in which he extols the Italian master as the
culmination of the Renaissance: “Annibale Carracci revived Painting that
since the time of Raphael had fallen into decline.”45 Flying Witches shares a

There Belongs Another” (London: Thames & Hudson, 2003), 95, considers the scene
as an “anti-Heaven from which no message of salvation can be expected.”
44. Bédat, Appendix III, 85. Raphael’s Transfiguration was also known in Spain
through painted copies; for example, the 1571 fresco by Romulo Cincinato in the
principal cloister of the Escorial. See Juan Agustı́n Céan Bermúdez, Diccionario histórico
de los más ilustres profesores de las Bellas Artes en España (Madrid: Viuda de Ibarra, 1800),
332–33.
45. Translated with a Spanish transcription in Tomlinson, Goya in the Twilight of
Enlightenment, 191–94. According to an 1812 document, the duchess of Osuna deco-
rated the Alameda with several copies of Raphael’s paintings in the Vatican. See Isabel
Pérez Hernández, “Reconstrucción del emplazamiento de los cuadros realizados por
Francisco de Goya para la Casa de campo de la Alameda de la condesa duquesa de
Benavente,” AxA. Una Revista de Arte y Arquitectura (2012), 11, http://www.uax.es/
publicacion/reconstruccion-del-emplazamiento-de-los-cuadros-realizados-por-fran
cisco.pdf (accessed 22 October 2015). The popularity of Raphael in eighteenth-
century Spain was largely due to the Bohemian Neoclassicist Anton Raphael Mengs,
the first court painter of Charles III in 1761–79, who held the Italian master in high
esteem and valued the Transfiguration as his finest work. Anton Raphael Mengs, “Pen-
samientos sobre los grandes pintores Rafael, Corregio, Tiziano, y los antiguos,” in
Obras de D. Antonio Rafael Mengs, Primer Pintor de Cámara del Rey, trans. José Nicolás
de Azara (Madrid: Imprenta de la Gazeta, 1780), 108–14. Influenced by Mengs,
Spanish art theorists recommended that artists study the expressive bodies and physi-
ognomy of Raphael’s figures. See Schulz, Goya’s “Caprichos,” 27–28. Raphael’s

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202 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft ! Winter 2016

Figure 15. Raphael, Transfiguration, 1519, oil on panel. Pinacoteca, Vatican

(Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY)

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Tal ! Demonic Possession in the Enlightenment 203

number of elements with Raphael’s Transfiguration. One of Goya’s passersby

cowers prostrate on the ground in a manner closely resembling one of
Raphael’s disciples, and the second passerby, who blocks his sight with a
sheet, may mimic the other two disciples as they cover their eyes with their
hands. The parallelism persists in the aerial sphere, where Goya replaced
Christ, Moses, and Elijah with three witches but preserved the trio’s triangu-
lar configuration. Raphael also depicted a demoniac, evidently referring to
the disciples’ recent failed attempt to cast out a devil from a boy at the base
of Mount Tabor, as narrated in Matthew 17.1–20. The absence of a demoniac
from other images of the Transfiguration makes Goya’s reliance on Raphael
explicit. Rotating Raphael’s possessed boy to a horizontal position indeed
reveals the striking resemblance of the two figures (Figs. 14 and 16).145
The resemblance to Raphael’s Transfiguration suggests that the Flying
Witches represents a double-leveled reality in which the visionary figures
occupy the lower level of the pictorial space and their vision occupies the
upper level. Accordingly, the demoniac and the witches would be figments
of the passersby’s imagination. In interpreting the passersby as delusional (in
contrast to Christ’s disciples who experience a genuine vision), I concur with
Margarita Moreno de las Heras, who argues that their blocked eyes and ears
are signs of their delusionary minds.46 This reading may seem problematic
given the unclear division between the corporeal and the fantastic. Goya
did not utilize any of the conventional pictorial methods for differentiating
heavenly phenomena and physical reality, such as enclosing the fantastic
within a cloud.47 Structural ambiguities have been noted as a major character-
istic of Goya’s artistic language. For example, Charles Baudelaire observed

Transfiguration was among the numerous pieces of art that Napoleon confiscated from
Italy in 1797 and brought to Paris in a triumphal procession on 27 July 1798. Martin
Rosenberg, Raphael and France: The Artist as Paradigm and Symbol (University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995); Martin Rosenberg, “Raphael’s Transfigu-
ration and Napoleon’s Cultural Politics,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 19 (1985–86),
180–205; and Giovanna Perini, “Raphael’s European Fame in the 17th and 18th
Centuries,” in The Cambridge Companion to Raphael, ed. Marcia B. Hall (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005), 261–75.
46. Moreno de las Heras, 62. That the aerial grouping is a figment of the two
passersby’s imagination is seconded by Janis A. Tomlinson, “Superstition and Bad
Dreams,” in Goya: Order and Disorder, 250–52.
47. This vague demarcation between reality and fantasy is apparent in another
scene in the series, The Spell. In it, the plot of witches attacking the victim can be
read the other way round, as a victim whose melancholy (denoted by his gesture of
clasped hands with intertwined fingers) causes him to imagine witches. See Guy Tal,
“An ‘Enlightened’ View of Witches: Melancholy and Delusionary Experience in
Goya’s Spell,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 75 (2012): 33–50.

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204 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft ! Winter 2016

that, in the Caprichos, “the point of juncture between the real and the fantastic
is impossible to grasp; it is a vague frontier which not even the subtlest analyst
could trace.”48 In Flying Witches, this ambiguity effectively conveys the expe-
rience of the delusional passersby, who cannot distinguish their hallucinations
from reality and thereby fall prey to their own imaginations. Reinforcing
this ambiguity, a similar perceptual uncertainty between the sensory and the
imaginary is also experienced by the viewer. The passersby are smaller than
the levitating figures, who initially appear to hover above the head of the
walking passerby but are, in fact, closer to the picture plane. It is as if the
demoniac and his possessors are about to spill into the viewer’s space and
become real. A comparable strategy typifies the Caprichos plates that, accord-
ing to Schulz, “call into question not only the perceptual and cognitive facul-
ties of represented figures . . . but also those of the viewer.”49
Altogether, the web of thematic, formal, and compositional allusions to
Raphael’s Transfiguration and Crespy’s engraving that informs Flying Witches
provides compelling evidence that Goya conceived this painting as a scene of
demonic possession. Along with these two images, Flying Witches belongs to
an extremely limited corpus of works that focuses on an enduring possession
rather than on a scene of exorcism.

Figure 16. Raphael, detail of Fig. 15, showing the demoniac.

(Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY)

48. Charles Baudelaire, The Mirror of Art: Critical Studies by Baudelaire, trans. Jona-
than Mayne (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956), 185–86. See also
Fred Licht, Goya: The Origins of the Modern Temper in Art (New York: Harper & Row,
1983), 188; and Hofmann, 135.
49. Schulz, Goya’s “Caprichos,” 186.

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Tal ! Demonic Possession in the Enlightenment 205

P O S S E S S E D B Y TH E I N Q U I S I T I O N

A final constituent that deserves attention, the witches’ mitra-like headgear,

permits a reading of Flying Witches as satirical commentary on a contemporary
situation. If the witchcraft series invites the viewers on a journey into a fan-
tasy realm, this motif brings them back to grave reality, for there is little doubt
that, in using this headgear, Goya sought to censure the Inquisition.50 His
exact message is, however, a subject of conjecture. The mitras and revealed
torsos conflate the witches with penitential prisoners. Yet this cannot be per-
ceived as a criticism of the Inquisition for denouncing individuals who alleg-
edly practiced witchcraft or inflicted possession, since by the end of the
eighteenth century, inquisitors shared the ilustrados’ skepticism about the exis-
tence of witches and the ability of humans to possess others. Between 1780
and 1810, only two cases of witchcraft were brought before the Spanish
tribunals, and the rare prosecutions for possession and exorcism dealt only
with cases of imposture.51 Persecutions and prosecutions of alleged witches
had happened in the past, but it is unlikely that Goya censured the Inquisition
for past actions. Complicating further the message against the Inquisition is
the cleft in the witches’ mitras, a fabricated element that creates a visual dou-
ble entendre with the bishops’ mitres.52 How, then, are we to understand the
witches’ inquisitorial headgear?
Indictments of the Inquisition gathered momentum toward the end of the
eighteenth century because of two dramatic events that occurred while Goya
was working on the witchcraft series. On February 27, 1798, bishop of Blois
Henri Grégoire sent a letter to inquisitor-general Joaquı́n Lorenzo, urging
him to suppress the power of the Inquisition and to opt for tolerance to
redeem Spain. The letter was promptly translated into Spanish and copies of
it were widely circulated in Spain.53 Earlier that month, on February 15,
1798, King Charles IV requested Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, the minister

50. For Goya’s censure of the Inquisition, see Vance Holloway, “Goya’s
Caprichos, the Church, the Inquisition, Witchcraft, and Abjection,” Dieciocho 35
(2012): 21–48; and Gudrun Maurer, “Inquisition and Judgment,” in Goya: Order and
Disorder, 294–303.
51. Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition of Spain (New York and London:
Macmillan, 1907), 4:241, and 348–52.
52. Moreno de las Heras, 62; and Wilson-Bareau and Mena Marqués, 213. For
the two opposite meanings of the mitra, see Joseph Baretti, A Dictionary: Spanish and
English, and English and Spanish, 2nd ed. (London: Nourse, 1778), s.v. “mitra.”
53. Lea, 4:397–98.

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206 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft ! Winter 2016

of Grace and Justice, to evaluate the authority held by the Inquisition.

Jovellanos consulted the secretary of the Supreme Council, Juan Antonio
Llorente, who, in 1798, submitted his own report on the Inquisition solicited
by the grand inquisitor in 1793. In this report, Llorente urged the reduction
of the autonomy of the Inquisition and recommended that it be placed under
the control of ordinary civil justice. In the same spirit, Jovellanos considered
the Inquisition an inefficient system filled with ignorant members.54
A month later, in March 1798, Goya met Jovellanos in Aranjuez for a
portrait session that became a significant event in Goya’s life. Goya wrote to
his close friend Martin Zapater about the warm welcome that he received
from the minister, who took him for a ride in his coach, invited him to meals,
paused during his dinner to converse with him in sign language (Goya had
been deaf since 1793), and urged him to extend his visit.55 Although whether
Jovellanos informed Goya about his recent indictments of the Inquisition is
unknown, two of Jovellanos’s main accusations reverberate in Flying Witches.
First, Jovellanos, corroborating Llorente, blamed the Inquisition for usurping
the jurisdictional powers of the bishops in matters of faith and heresy, respon-
sibilities that he recommended be restored to them.56 The cleft mitras express
this overlap between the inquisitors’ and the bishops’ duties. Second, Jovel-
lanos reprimanded the institution for monitoring, censoring, and prohibiting
French literature containing progressive ideas and for persecuting those who
owned such material, an experience he underwent when his own library was
inspected in 1795.57 To satirize this inquisitorial ban, Goya composed a scene
based on an illustration from one of these books and ironically implanted
the Inquisition within it. The three witches therefore appear to embody the
Inquisition. As Albert Boime asserts, the anxious passersby show how the
“threat of the Inquisition, like that of witchcraft itself, forced society to
ignore, or to hide from, the frightful process and allow it to go on without
interference.”58 The act of possession metaphorically epitomizes this threat:

54. Ibid., 4:394–95; Joseph Pérez, The Spanish Inquisition: A History (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2005), 94–97.
55. For the letter to Martin Zapater and the payment for the portrait, see Sym-
mons, A Life in Letters, nos. 252 and 255. Whether or not Goya met Llorente before
portraying him in 1810 is unknown. See Margarita Moreno de las Heras, “Juan Anto-
nio Llorente,” in Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment, 164–67.
56. Lea, 4:394–95; and Pérez, 94–97.
57. Marcelin Defourneaux, L’Inquisition espagnole et les livres français au XVIIIe siècle
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963); Albert Boime, Art in the Age of Bona-
partism 1800–1815 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 253.
58. Boime, 258.

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Tal ! Demonic Possession in the Enlightenment 207

the Inquisition penetrates the souls of Spaniards and fills them with fear and
archaic ideas.
As ilustrados, the Osunas and their guests at the Alameda must have
appreciated this satirical commentary against the Inquisition and the other
artistic and intellectual references to demonic possession. Understanding
body language as the iconographic key of Flying Witches (especially after
noticing the higa gesture), they would have recognized the formulaic outline
of the victim’s convulsive body, and decoded it as a sign of extreme suffering
or demonic possession. The visual connections to images of possession, par-
ticularly those by Raphael and Crespy, would have engaged the cultured
audience in an intervisual game in which they could glean hints of Goya’s
refutation of the existence of possession. Eventually, however, they would
realize that Flying Witches is an inscrutable puzzle that leaves its viewers both
enchanted and frustrated. At any rate, the eccentric assembly of witches,
hobgoblins, devils, giants, apparitions, monsters, and chinchillas inhabiting
Goya’s fantastic works can now be augmented with a new member: the
demoniac.

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