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RESEARCH
ROSE GIROUX, Harvard College '26
Blasted, Bound, and Bald: the Abject Properties of Witch Hair
THURJ Volume 14 | Issue 2
Abstract
The witch’s blasted hair in Early Modern visual culture is moving and evolving. Her hair is untamable, animated by a wind and a force unknowable to the viewer. The artists who captured this “blasted” hair in the 16th century, including Hans Baldung Grien, Hans Sebald Beham, and Albrecht Dürer, found themselves working in opposition to what appears, at first glance, a formidable “other:” women’s agency and sexuality, frozen in bodily form as strands of hair. Little research has been dedicated to an earnest analysis of the witch’s amorphous hair so this paper consists primarily of original research and the application of philosophical and anthropological theory. Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection is a key tenet of this paper’s central argument. The witch is not an “other” directly opposed to a mainstream, she is a third intermediary thing: Kristeva’s “abject.” She is a personification of the skin on the surface of sour milk, instilling disgust in the potential consumer. She is the abject precisely because she is embedded in the object; her hair is the most explicit vehicle for this argument. Friedrich Speevon Langenfield’s accounts of forced hair removal and contemporary literature from Raymond Firth, Barbara Baert, and E.R. Leach inform this reading of witch hair as the abject. This paper concludes that the visual translation of blasted hair is an attempt to remove it and its female sexual connotation from the imagination to a more accessible visual medium. The artist’s renderings are meant to turn the abject into an easily digestible object, a complete “other.”
Introduction
In Hans Baldung Grien’s The Witches (Figure 1), a cohort of witches perform a vague ritual, limbs shaded and curved in the same fashion as the air, trees, and animals that surround them. Of particular note is the tree that rises on the right side of the print — distinctly fleshy and made up of the same mild curves that constitute the witches. The witches themselves wear their hair in a way that mimics the waves of air that unfurl around them. They are fully integrated into their environment: the central witch’s hair moves upwards, disappearing behind a dish and then emerging from it as cloth. Hair is useful as a “manipulable representation of the entire person…”(Firth 1973, 296). At its most basic level, hair is a biological thing and an artistic symbol. It is living and growing, being cut and combed. Hair, and the witch’s hair in particular, is not fully tamable by the artist.
As for the artist Hans Baldung Grien, scholar Yvonne Owens writes extensively about Baldung’s emotional community and how it informed his depictions of witches and women. Owens extrapolates on Barbara H. Rosenwein’s Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages to inform her reading of Baldung’s work. Rosenwein argues that the early medieval period was a bridge connecting the classical tradition of putting words to emotions with modern Western civilization. Owens creates a line of reasoning between the male-dominated artistic and emotional community Baldung occupied with his charged engravings of witches. I argue that this artistic and emotional community, born from the classical tradition and carried through the early modern period, is the same one that later birthed psychoanalytic theory. The men who engraved, painted, and printed witches did so in a misogynistic world that allowed for the violent persecution of witches and went on to originate psychoanalytic theory. In summation, “the themes are always the same” (Didion 1968, 120).
Psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection is most applicable to witch art because it delineates a distinctly feminine subconscious. Derived from Freud’s theories of the unconscious, Kristeva’s abjection relates directly to themes of gender, religion, and terror that permeate most early modern depictions of witches and their hair. Abjection is the human reaction (horror, vomit) to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object or between self and other (Felluga). Abjection helps delineate the emotional, primordial, and visceral basis for any argument on the European witch. Witch imagery and the witch’s hair are representatives of women’s sexuality, and that very sexuality is their most abject property. Situated between private and public symbol, between individual production and collective interpretation, the ambiguous nature of hair makes it an ideal medium for historical and gendered abjections prevalent in early modern Europe.
The technical aspect of capturing hair in art also lends it a unique flexibility and freedom. There is no formal, classical, or “ideal” of a woman’s hair during the Renaissance period; it operates outside the constraints of convention. Lines are drawn sans expectations — agency is given to the artist in curves. The artist is “containing” hair, he is capturing it on a metal plate, on a woodblock, or in aquatint. In this process of confinement, the artist who depicts witches finds a mesmerizing predicament. The witch is neither subject nor object, she is that third intermediary “abject.” If hair can be taken additionally as a symbol, then it can be argued that hair “not only ‘says’ something, it also arouses emotion and consequently ‘does’ something” (Leach 1958, 147). Hair is alive within witchcraft illustrations both through its mobility and through its emotional impact on the viewer. By seeking to harness the witch and her hair, and spinning them into objects, the artist himself is drawn in by the abject through emotional channels. He is ultimately straying from the object and “lead[ing] [him]self away from meaning” (Kristeva 2002, 230).
Fig. 1. Baldung Grien Hans, The Witches, engraving, 1510 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Hans Sebald Beham's Eve: Biblical Woman and Witch
Hans Sebald Beham’s Eve (Figure 2) is shockingly petite. A small white margin called a plate mark separates the print from where it was originally situated. The tone of the engraving is produced through the meticulous system of hatching, lining, dotting, and dashing the metal (Niederman 2017, 264). Beham’s technique involved great precision — he had to be sure not to draw these marks too closely together to prevent bleeding and overflow. Overabundance of ink and lines pose real threats to the integrity of the work. Eve, who I interpret as a witch, sits on a tree stump, hunched against the trunk of another, living tree. She holds a sphere in her left hand, perhaps an apple and a biblical reference (Genesis III). The flesh of her body is etched in concentric circles and curves, and her hair emerges from behind her body, pushing out from her head in waves, undone curvilinear forms. A snake grasps the branch above her head, also taking on the unstructured, liberated form of Eve’s hair. The form of the witch more closely resembles the natural elements than the village. She is the sole human subject of the work, yet perches at a distance as the abject. The witch’s back finds symmetry, a mirrored image, and icon in the curved branch above her head. Adam is notably absent. Beham’s print has lived in various collections, and at different times has been labeled both Eve and The Witch (Koerner 2023). This evolving nomenclature is indicative of the unequivocal relationship between Eve and the witch, the woman’s biblical role and her pagan one. Kristeva’s theory of abjection corroborates this claim and explains necessarily the discomfort of Eve. Abjection assumes and is conflated with biblical works because it is primordial. Abjection is an urge that precedes, and in certain instances, supersedes religious structuring (Kristeva, 242). The womanly form, whether it appears as Eve or a witch, is wildly threatening to the artist and viewer. Eve was a woman who crept close to the male form. She was drawn from Adam’s torso and considered a crippled, deformed iteration of him just as the woman’s body was considered a disfigured version of the early modern European man’s (Koerner 2023). The dissonance between man and woman as binary opposites was solidified in Christian doctrine, but following Kristeva’s theory of abjection, our discomfort with Eve as a character springs from something besides her being an “other” to Adam and God. Eve is meant to be a creator: a mother of infants, life, and humanity. Under abjection, what disturbs us most about Eve is her destruction of God’s expectations by taking that apple and biting it. God, in this context, can be taken as a substitute for our own human and moral consciousness.
Applied to Beham’s Eve/The Witch, each visual element is newly sinister. The tree that supports the woman could be the biblical tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The biblical tree could also have been felled, and still appear in the print as the tree stump under a witch’s rear. Perhaps the sphere in the woman’s left hand is not an apple, and instead represents a connection to the pagan goddess Fortuna (Byrne 2011, 37). The snake above the woman’s head could be read as either Satan in animal form or as a witch’s familiar, a small demon companion (Britannica 2016). The temporality and setting of this print are also called into question. After being stripped of her immortality, Eve lived before the buildings etched into the background could have been built. The woman shown in this print is primordial and witch-like because she surveys a European village. She is a historical figure grounded in an early modern European billage, not in the pre-civilized Eden. She wears no clothes, existing up and away from the reach of society and referencing the primordial universe in her nakedness. Both Hans Baldung Grien and Hans Sebald Beham’s women have “blasted” hair, vitalized by a force unknowable to the artist and the viewer.
Fig. 2. Beham Hans Sebald, Eve/The Witch, engraving, 1519 (Busch-Reisinger Museum)
Durer's Witches: Wind-Blasted Women
German artist Albrecht Dürer is well known for his depictions of witches, often using the same engraving medium as Hans Sebald Beham. Baldung was a member of Dürer’s atelier, and the two artists maintained a lifelong friendship and artistic partnership (Hand 1993, 12-13). Hans Sebald Beham belonged to the generation following Baldung and Dürer, drawing inspiration from the older artists in both style and technique (Stewart 2012, 4). The three men operated within the same emotional community, drawing on shared literature and one another. Dürer, however, carried an outsized influence on the other two artists. Baldung was one of Dürer’s proteges, as indicated by a lock of Dürer’s hair discovered in Hans Baldung’s estate (Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe 2023). Beham was accused of plagiarizing Dürer’s book on human proportions (Stewart, 4).
Dürer’s witch depictions vary in how they treat the female form but are universally dynamic and erupting with movement. Witch Riding Backwards on a Goat (Figure 3) serves as an excellent example of this dynamism. An older witch sits backward on a goat, a cluster of putti forming a circular frame within the rectangular print. Her body differs from the witch of Beham’s aforementioned Eve/The Witch. This witch is loose and hunched, her flesh and musculature defined and quick to the bone. She directs the viewer towards her crotch with a spindle, a domestic object dramatically incongruous with the wild, outdoor setting of the ritual. Grasping this spindle with a weathered right hand, the witch wears no threaded clothing. Though the goat and witch seem to move toward the left of the piece, the witch’s hair is blasted in the
opposite direction, solidifying her magical status. Her hair, of varying chopped lengths, is remarkable as a material and as a symbol. This witch’s hair contradicts the custom of her time. In early modern Europe, a girl wore her hair long until late adolescence (Firth, 268). Then, it was tied up into a bun as a sign of maturity and marriageability. Not only is her hair a representative of the witch’s status as an “other,” but the translation from Dürer’s imagination to this print underlines the abject nature of witch hair.
Hair is typically styled as an object in works of art, static with rare exceptions of movement produced by some external wind that moves universally across the work. Here, the witch’s hair is alive and animated. It is moving without reason, and in doing so it defies our expectations and becomes an abject object. Art historian Barbara Baert also connects hair more directly to the abject. Hair is a “dry and aesthetic version” of liquid and more recognizably abject bodily fluids like blood and semen (Baert 2018, 157). Hair is unique because it is simultaneously a part of the physical and aesthetic self while also being abject. Blood and semen are given their abject properties by their private nature; head hair is readily visible. Hair functions as both a private and public symbol. It is an associative medium, gesturing towards notions of gender and power, sex and liberation. Though not shown outwardly in the selected works, body hair also has the additional property of trapping and enhancing the potency of pheromones linked to sexual attraction (Grammer, Fink, and Neave 2005, 135-42). Drawing emphasis to the hair of a witch inevitably draws the artist towards the topic of her sexuality and its allusiveness. The process of binding up hair was traditionally associated with sexual control and maturity.
Dürer’s The Four Witches (Figure 4) engraving shows women with this bound hair. The piece immediately
invokes the classical iconography of the three graces (Figure 5). Paragons of beauty, the fourth body is nearly
concealed from the viewer save her face and its disinterested expression. She is inaccessible and beyond the
reach of the viewer’s sight. All four figures come together to ascribe a sense of secrecy and ambiguity to the
engraving. These witches are classically beautiful, with rounded flesh and soft features. They are turned from the artist and viewer, though, avoiding the gaze of those who seek to see and understand them. The rightmost figure conceals her genitals with a cloth that flows from her head wrap to drag on the ground in the direction of a monstrous beast in the left corner. All but one woman wears a head covering, indicative of their domestic role and sexual maturity. Face concealed and stance locked in the third position, the central witch wears a partially undone bun. A breeze moves the bun’s tail, one unlikely to originate in the women’s domestic setting. The unknowable nature of the woman is fortified by the haphazard hairstyle of this central witch. As an indicator of a witch’s power, the careful observation of hair reveals the abject strength of the witch in the process of practicing magic. What, then, occurs when hair is removed from our reading of the witch and her power?
Fig. 3. Durer Albrecht, Witch riding on a Goat, engraving, 1501-1502 (National Gallery of Art)
Fig. 4. Durer Albrecht, The Four Witches, engraving, 1497, (National Gallery of Canada)
Fig. 5. Unknown, Les Trois Graces, marble, 2nd century A.D. (Musee du Louvre)
Blasted to Bald: Forced Hair Removal and Bald Witch
Friedrich von Spee details the witch inquisition and trials in the often-referenced Cautio Criminalis (Spee 2003, 148). Most peculiarly, von Spee takes note of forced hair removal during witch trials:
Before he tortures her, the torturer leads her aside, so that she may not strengthen herself against the pain with some kind of magic charm, he shaves and searches her entire body – even that part by which her sex shows is most impudently searched. Of course to this day nothing has ever been found. . . Once Gaia has been searched and shaved, she is tortured so that she recounts the truth, that is, she simply pronounces herself to be guilty. Whatever else she might say is not the truth, nor can it be.
The emotional impact of hair removal and its distinct connection with shame weighs heavily on both women and witches. Lucas Cranach the Younger’s woodcut print of the Execution of Four Persons Convicted of Witchcraft (Figure 6) demonstrates the fear tactics used in witchcraft trials to induce confessions. The body is different here — it is disjointed, inelegant, and “done in reverse” as a woodcut. As compared to the engraved witches of Beham and Dürer, woodcut emerges as a unique counterpoint to arguments on the witch’s power. The negative white space emerges as Cranach applies the diligent and intensive action of scraping and shearing to a surface that will not appear in the print. The viewer’s omission or negation is the artist’s production or affirmation. The piece's thesis comes about in the places of the print untouched by the artist. Woodcuts pass through the artist’s imagination, are translated into their inverse, applied to wood, and then applied to paper. This method is removed from and removes the power of the witch. The convicted witches are angular, not curved. They face the viewer directly and contort their limbs uncomfortably at the top of wooden posts. These are individuals who are not naked as symbolic liberation but as coerced humiliation. Their nakedness is subverted for the viewer and inquisitor.
The convicted witches are bald, presumably having had their hair removed or burnt away as part of their trials. A firm transition from one social state to another is also demarcated here, the “deliberate shaving of the head…has taken on a ritual quality” (Firth 288). Witches lack a clear impetus for their craft because they exist outside the broader society. Perhaps hair removal is an attempt to familiarize the witch, to reign in her abject powers as represented by her hair, and to indoctrinate her into the visual and symbolic culture of mainstream society. This is a futile attempt, for the concept of a witch is already deeply embedded in Christian literature. Applying Kristeva’s theory of abjection more directly, abjection “accompanies all religious structurings” (Kristeva 242). The witch is, again, not an “other” but an abject. The witch and her hair are intimately acquainted with the viewer. Her hair is a public and private symbol, a physical material to be manipulated, harnessed, and removed in lieu of the witch concept. Cranach’s print is disturbing, but not
revolting. It is the witch’s inevitable downfall at the hands of social and religious authorities. These four executed individuals are examples of fallen witches, with the artist working as an authority capturing and applauding their demise. Far more disturbing are images of women and witches who lack hair but maintain their abject powers. Francisco de Goya’s images of women, witches, and prostitutes in Los Caprichos are notable for their cryptic messaging. In the engraving San Fernando ¡Cómo hilan! (Figure 7) Goya depicts three prostitutes sitting in a prison cell. Light enters from the left of the etching and falls on the women’s cropped hair. These women were detained, shaved, and made to spin thread to finance the prison system. In the language of the time, “spinning” was a euphemism for prostitution, while the spindle represented a phallus (Fundación Goya en Aragón 2022). The thread also has a fascinating unity with the human hair and women’s agency. Weaving and thread are easily associated with acts of creation and what Baert characterizes as material emergence from “the liquid darkness of nothingness” (Baert 161). These prostitutes wield the same magical powers of creation, reproduction, and sexuality that the witch does, and similarly subvert these abilities. Goya’s juxtaposition of witches and prostitutes is intentional and reflects a general attitude towards women and efforts to reign in their sexuality. Following the ironic theme of Los Caprichos,
Goya’s spinning prostitutes are practicing their new craft with mischievous eyes, flaunting their spinning and demonstrating the ineffectiveness of the institution that seeks to reform them. Part of
this reforming effort reveals itself in forced hair removal, a practice dating back to the emotional
community of Baldung, Beham, Cranach, and Dürer and the treatment of convicted witches. In Goya’s work, women and witches retain their sexuality and independence even through the removal of their abject hair that moves without wind.
Fig. 6. Lucas Cranach the Younger, Execution of Four Persons Convicted of Witchcraft, woodcut, 1540
Fig. 7. Goya Francisco de, San Fernando como Hilan! ink and aquatint, 1794-1997, (Fundacion Goya en Aragon)
Hair as an Abject Object
Hair is above all an individual creation. Hair is a bodily product an individual chooses to grow, nurture and imbue with symbolic meaning. For the witch in art, hair is an explicit sexual metaphor, threatening because it often represents the artist’s failed efforts to comprehend and control it. Hans Baldung Grien’s witches integrate explicitly into their natural settings with hair as a key vehicle and physical indicator of the process. A witch’s hair is established as a malleable representation of her agency and magic. In Hans Sebald Beham’s Eve/The Witch, a woman demonstrates the blasted hair of a witch while affirming the primordial association between women and the abject through her dual identity as Eve. In either reading of Eve/The Witch, the viewer is disturbed principally by the thwarted expectation of the woman’s behavior, not by the literal content of her action. Lucas Cranach’s bald, convicted witches and Goya’s shaved prostitutes offer developing arguments on hair’s role as an enhancer or detractor from abjection. Cranach’s images present a witch stripped entirely of her power after being recognized and punished for her social and religious indiscretions while Goya presents prostitutes continuing to spin and create their own sexual practices. To Goya’s prostitutes, the sex act is not for propagation, a belief abject for an audience of Christians. The prostitute is misusing her sexuality just as the witch does.
These works are visual fictions that do not aim to convey realities in the form of subject and object. Instead, the artist seeks that ambitious abject and the accompanying emotional weight through the strands of a witch’s hair. Whether undertaken in engraving, woodcut, or aquatint, this is a process that ultimately endangers the artist himself and reflects the underlying anxiety of his emotional, social, and historical situation. Abjection appears at the time of religion’s birth and
collapse, destined to outlast it and the artist’s circumstances (Kristeva, 242). These witch works demonstrate demise, themselves products of witchcraft inquisitions and the seismic shift of the 16th-century Protestant Reformation in Germany and fear of heresy during the Spanish Inquisition (Ledray 2016, 4). Hair, whether blasted, bound, or shaved clean, is indicative of the artist’s struggle to imprison, digest, and represent the abject during times of great uncertainty.
References
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