“Where Did the Witch’s Hat Come From? The Checkered Past of a Pointy Icon”
In this presentation, I deal with the Welsh national costume for women as a possible source and inspiration for what is now the familiar image of the Witch’s hat and delve into the ale-wives’ tall hat, a millinery device to advertise their wares in crowded markets and street fairs. The 17th and 18-centuries’ positive fashion influences on elite Witch figures, the negative anti-Puritan and anti-Quaker influences, and some other related discussions are explored. But there are also the medieval ladies’ pointy headdresses, called henins, and the magical Scythian women’s tall, pointed headdresses to think of. The famed ‘Siberian Ice Maiden’ is the mummy of a woman from the 5th century BC, found in 1993 in a kurgan (mound burial chamber) of the Pazyryk culture in Republic of Altai, Russia. She was buried in her full regalia, including a tall conical hat, as a magical personage, which is to say a shaman, warrior and/or priestess- queen. A very ancient Hittite Goddess of Hurrian descent, Sauska (also known as Shaushka, Sausga, and Anzili) was a deity of fertility, war, and healing. She is thought by some scholars to be the original source for Inanna, and Ishtar stylings. She wore a very tall conical hat as part of her sacred regalia. The pointy black hat was just one of many symbols connected to witchcraft in the past. Some early images of witches did include the wide-brimmed pointy hat, but basically the conical Witch’s hat is an early modern convention. The depiction of witches with conical hats was especially popular in England and Scotland.
Bio
Yvonne Owens is a past Research Fellow at the University College of London, and holds an M.Phil. (European Studies) and Ph.D. (History of Art) from UCL. She was awarded a Marie Curie Ph.D. Fellowship in 2005 for her interdisciplinary dissertation on Renaissance portrayals of women in art and sixteenth-century Witch Hunt discourses. Her publications to date have mainly focused on representations of women and the gendering of evil “defect” in classical humanist discourses, cross-referencing these figures to historical art, natural philosophy, medicine, theology, science and literature. Her book, Abject Eroticism in Northern Renaissance Art: the Witches and Femme Fatales of Hans Baldung Grien (Bloomsbury London) was published in 2020 and her edited anthology of collected essays, titled Trans-Disciplinary Migrations: Science, the Sacred, and the Arts, was published by Cambridge Scholars Publishers in 2024. Previous books include The Witch’s Book of Days (1993, Beach Holme Publishing, with Jessica North and Jeanne Kozocari), The Cup of Mari Anu (1994, Horned Owl), and The Journey of the Bard (1995, Horned Owl).
Curated & Hosted by:
Marguerite Johnson is a cultural historian of the ancient Mediterranean, specialising in sexuality and gender, particularly in the poetry of Sappho, Catullus, and Ovid, as well as magical traditions in Greece, Rome, and the Near East. She also researches Classical Reception Studies, with a regular focus on Australia. In addition to ancient world studies, Marguerite is interested in sexual histories in modernity as well as magic in the west more broadly, especially the practices and art of Australian witch, Rosaleen Norton. She is Honorary Professor of Classics and Ancient History at The University of Queensland, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
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The picture credit is: Portrait of an innkeeper known as ‘Mother Louse’, after David Loggan, c. 1650-1700, The British Museum.
