Hexensalbung, 1899
Luma von Flesch-Brunningen’s “Hexensalbung” [literally, "witch-anointing"] is another painting of a pretty young neophyte witch being anointed so she can fly to the sabbat. The theme of a, thankfully clothed, old witch anointing a, delightfully naked, young witch in front of a fire-place has long history in art. It features in the French postcard sequence I posted last week (see here), but it started with a series of paintings by Frans Francken the Younger and David Teniers the Younger in the seventeenth century. I will be doing a series of posts on these early artists shortly.
Little information is available concerning the artist, beyond the fact that he was born in Brünn/Brno on 31 March 1856 and died in Munich in 1934.
3 November 2008 at 4:35 PM
Why is the older witch “thankfully” clothed? I imagine that you are making a brief commentary on ageist social mores, rather than expressing a personal distaste for seeing naked older people…
3 November 2008 at 10:21 PM
Akhenaten, you are very generous. No, it isn’t primarily a commentary on ageist social mores. Amongst witches the three-way division of women into Maiden, Mother, Crone is not hierarchical: each Age of women (or the Goddess for that matter) simply having different attributes.
The crone teaches; she is valued for her wisdom, not her sexual appeal. This emphatically does not mean that Witches make older women wear a burqa because they do not want to look at them; and, in fact, in covens that practice skyclad, older women participate naked along with everyone else, as they ought.
But if you look at the name of this blog you will see that it is “Sexy Witch”: this title covers only two of the three aspects of the Goddess: Maiden and Mother. I could adduce various evolutionary or psychological reasons for not identifying the Crone with “Sexy”, but I feel no need to defend myself in this regard. And if that makes me ageist, so mote it be.
RW