Besom: The Witch's Broom and How to Bind One

If you go looking for the origin of the witch's broom, you do not land in a pagan rite. You land in a book illustration — and in a courtroom.

1451: the oldest picture

Martin Le Franc was a Burgundian cleric and poet who wrote, around 1440, an enormous verse work called Le Champion des Dames — a defense of women. In a 1451 manuscript of that poem, an illuminator, most likely Peronet Lamy of Savoy, drew two women in the margin: one astride a plain stick, one on a twig broom, both airborne. That is the oldest known depiction of the motif we now consider obvious.

The context is the part that matters. Those drawings were made in the orbit of the Valais witch trials, which ran from 1428 to 1447 — one of the earliest large persecution waves in Europe. The image of the witch on a broom is therefore not a memory of a practice. It is an illustration to a charge.

I say that plainly, as someone who practices, because it does not flatter us: the broom came out of the persecution literature. It was assigned to witches before any witch claimed it.

1453: the first confession, from a priest

Two years after the manuscript comes the first recorded statement by an actual person that he had ridden a broom. It did not come from a village herbalist. It came from a clergyman.

Guillaume Edelin was a priest at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, near Paris. He had publicly criticized the Church's warnings about witches — that is, he had questioned the persecution itself. In 1453 he was arrested and charged with witchcraft. His confession, that he had ridden a broom to a sabbath, was obtained under torture. He later recanted, was pardoned, and spent the rest of his life in prison.

The case teaches three things at once. It shows how a motif travels from learned imagination into an official record — not through observation, but through questions asked under pain. It shows that the first broom-rider on record was a man, against all later iconography. And it shows what happened to people who criticized the witch panic.

The flying-ointment thesis, and what survives of it

The explanation you will read almost everywhere runs roughly like this: witches made a salve from nightshades, the active compounds were absorbed through mucous membranes, the broom handle served as the applicator, and the resulting altered state felt like flight.

It is an elegant story and it appears to explain everything at once. It is also not as well supported as its popularity suggests. It rests on a small number of late-medieval and early-modern passages that mention salves and apparent flight — texts written, as a rule, by prosecutors or their informants, not by practitioners. Whether the practice ever existed, or whether we are once again reading the imagination of the accusation, is not settled in the scholarship.

The pharmacology is not the weak point. It is not in dispute that tropane alkaloids in henbane, belladonna and datura can produce strong hallucinations and a sensation of weightlessness — and equally not in dispute that a slightly higher dose is toxic. What is missing is evidence for the broom-handle detail.

The other broom: threshold, deterrent, wedding

Alongside the trial motif runs a second, much quieter strand — and that one is far better attested in folklife records.

In European tradition the broom belongs to the threshold. It is laid across the door, stood behind it, pushed under the bed. One of the recorded reasons is wonderfully concrete: a witch must count every twig before she can come in, and morning will arrive first. That is the same logic as scattering grain or salt — a deterrent made of delay rather than of force. Our guide to warding a home covers how that logic is used now, and the salt question is its closest relative.

Jumping the broom

This one is told wrong constantly, and in the United States it matters that it is told right.

The custom is documented among Welsh Roma and, separately, in the marriage practice of enslaved people in the United States, who were denied legally recognized marriage. That is a serious history with specific bearers. The ceremony carried real weight precisely because the law would not: a couple stepped over a broom in front of their community, and the community held the marriage even though the state refused to. The custom was widely revived in African American weddings from the late twentieth century onward, and it is a living practice today.

A Celtic or pre-Christian origin for it is not documented. Draping that claim over the custom takes away what it actually means — and what it actually means is a good deal more powerful than a borrowed antiquity.

And a small pleasure: common broom is Cytisus scoparius. Scoparius means 'belonging to the broom.' Historical twig brooms were bound from whatever grew nearby — broom, birch, heather, brush. Not from a recipe.

Claim against record

What the besom is actually for

What today's practice does with the broom is a twentieth-century invention — and a good one.

The besom sweeps no dirt. It is passed above the floor before a working, usually clockwise, without touching down. What it accomplishes is not cleaning in any physical sense. It is a time marker: from here, this room is a different room. That is why many traditions hold that the ritual broom is never used for real sweeping — not because it would 'lose energy', but because an object only functions as a signal for as long as it does nothing else.

Which is the point I want to be honest about: the broom works through attention, not through force. It marks a transition, and people need transitions. If you are building a practice from scratch, casting a circle is the step that usually follows the sweep.

How to bind your own

A besom you bound yourself serves this purpose better than any bought one, for the plain reason that afterward you are holding the hour you spent on it.

Storage: standing head-up or hanging, so the brush does not bend, and dry — natural cord molds in damp corners.

What people actually run into

No invented testimonials here, just the patterns that come up again and again.

• The most common beginner mistake is a besom that is too big. A tool that hits the ceiling light in a living room does not get used. Short and handy beats impressive.
• People who accidentally use the besom for real sweeping almost all report the same thing: the next ritual feels wrong. That is not energy, it is association — and it is exactly why the separation rule works.
• Hand-bound brooms last less time than bought ones and get used more anyway. That tells you what the object is for.
• The law on gathering is routinely underestimated. Fallen brush in small amounts is usually fine; cutting living branches on land that is not yours is not.

If the history side interests you more than the craft side, a 1668 witch book and the Brocken as witch mountain both sit on the same shelf as the Le Franc illustration.

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