ABSTRACT
The title of Erica Jong's novel, Fear of Flying (1973), with its play on the association between flying and female sexual experience, is particularly pertinent to the traditional image of the witch and witchcraft. From as early as the mid-fifteenth century the witch was often represented as a woman mounted on a forked stick, a broom or an animal, blazing through the sky, ready to engage in her carnal and diabolical rituals and to perpetrate her evil on the world below. 1 The flying witch was not only a figure of evil but also communicated fears about the threat of female sexuality. And just as Jong's novel symbolises the interest in sexuality as one of the critical aspects of human experience for Western societies of the 1970s, so Northern European societies of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries used the witch to develop their discourse about the key role of sexuality in human affairs. However, the differences in the use to which the metaphor was put are marked. In the 1970s and 80s it involved an attempt to renegotiate the role of male and female bodies and sexuality in the formation of personal identity and social practices, and in that way to draw critical links between the realm of the personal and that of the political. The later fifteenth to seventeenth centuries on the other hand, were marked by a concern to develop a concerted programme of moral reform, aimed at repressing sexuality and subordinating the lower body, especially the lower female body. Bodies, sexed bodies, were brought into the public domain and became the subject of a discourse which made the desire and fantasy associated with the body a matter of urgent social and political concern. In this way, responsibility for the body passed into the hands of public authorities. The European witch-hunt, I would claim, constituted a key instrument in the realisation of this strategy.
