Johannes Praetorius: The Man Who Made the Brocken Germany's Witch Mountain
A portrait of the Leipzig compiler whose 1668 book fixed the Brocken as Germany's witch mountain - and which argues, at length, that the flight never happened.
Every German child knows the witches fly to the Brocken on the night before May Day. Far fewer people know that the mountain got that job relatively late, and that you can name the book which gave it to him. This is a portrait of the man who wrote it — a Leipzig compiler who never held a university post, published more than fifty books, and accidentally supplied Goethe and the Brothers Grimm with a national legend.
Contents
Johannes Praetorius (1630-1680) was a Leipzig writer and compiler. His Blockes-Berges Verrichtung of 1668 gathered everything then in print about the Brocken and the witches' sabbath said to happen there on Walpurgis Night. He did not invent the legend - the name Blocksberg is documented from 1485 - but his book fixed it, and after him the Brocken was the German witch mountain rather than one of several. Goethe used him for Faust; the Grimms called him their most important written source. The book itself reproduces, at length, the argument that the flight never physically happened.
Praetorius was born Hans Schultze in Zethlingen in 1630 and died of plague in Leipzig in 1680
Blockes-Berges Verrichtung was printed in Leipzig and Frankfurt am Main in 1668
The ten paragraphs of his Blocksberg chapter spell BROCKSBERG as an acrostic
Chapter II of part two argues both sides of whether the flight is bodily or imagined
The Brothers Grimm named his works their most important written source
Goethe drew on his material for the Walpurgis Night scene in Faust
The name Blokkesberghe is documented from 1485, long before his book
The Brocken is the yearly gathering place of witches from all Germany
Flight ointments produced the experience of travelling while the body lay still
Burning frankincense and myrrh while reading old sources as atmosphere
That Praetorius personally believed in bodily witch flight
That Praetorius ever witnessed a witch trial
VERIFIED = verifiable in scientific or official sources · TRADITIONAL = historically or culturally recorded · LIVED PRACTICE = widely practiced, experiential knowledge · NOT PROVEN = spiritual interpretation, not scientifically established.
In short
Johannes Praetorius (1630–1680), born Hans Schultze in the Altmark, was a Leipzig writer and compiler of curiosities. His Blockes-Berges Verrichtung, printed in 1668, gathered everything then available in print about the Brocken in the Harz mountains and the witches' sabbath said to take place there on Walpurgis Night. He did not invent the legend — the name Blocksberg is documented from 1485 — but his book fixed it, and after him the Brocken was the German witch mountain rather than one candidate among several. Goethe drew on him for the Walpurgis Night scene in Faust; the Brothers Grimm named his work the most important written source for their Deutsche Sagen. The book itself is stranger than its reputation: it is a compilation, and it reproduces at length the argument that the flight never physically happened at all.
A war child who turned reading into a trade
He was born on 22 October 1630 in Zethlingen in the Altmark, the son of an innkeeper, and his name was Hans Schultze. Praetorius is the Latin form he gave himself, as half his educated generation did. He is usually called Praetorius Zetlingensis after his birthplace, because the seventeenth century was full of men called Praetorius.
The Thirty Years' War reached him at five. In 1636 the family fled Swedish troops and the father's farmstead burned. He went to school in Salzwedel from 1640, to the Lutheran Gymnasium in Halle in 1650, and followed his rector to Leipzig, where he matriculated in the autumn of 1652. He took his baccalaureate in 1654 and his master's degree in January 1655, with disputations on the winter solstice and on where storks spend the winter — he argued, following an expression of Aristotle, that they lie up in marshes and clefts.
What he never got was a post. He lived from about 1658 until his death in the Kollegium Paulinum of the university, was awarded the title Poeta Laureatus Caesareus in 1659, and gave lectures on palmistry between 1658 and 1661, but he appears to have held no academic office. In the 1660s he lived on what he wrote. He married in June 1659 and had two daughters. On 25 October 1680, three days after his fiftieth birthday, he died of the plague then raging in Leipzig.
That is the shape of the man: a war refugee with an excellent education, no salary, and a printing trade at his door. Leipzig was a book-fair city and he wrote for it — on comets, Turkish prophecies, palmistry, childbed customs, wonders and mountain spirits.
What the book of 1668 actually is
The title page is the first thing worth reading, because it is an advertisement. The book announces itself as a thorough geographical report of the high, excellently old and famous Blocksberg: likewise of the witches' ride and sorcerers' sabbath which the fiends from all Germany are said to hold on that mountain yearly on 1 May in Saint Walpurgis' Night. Compiled from many authors and adorned with fine rarities together with the appertaining figures. It was printed in Leipzig by Johann Scheibe and sold in Frankfurt am Main by Friedrich Arnst, in 1668.
Two things in that title do the commercial work. From many authors promises that the reader will be let into learned knowledge without having to read the learned books. With the appertaining figures promises pictures — and the frontispiece, witches arriving on goats and forks above a burning mountain, became one of the most reproduced images of a sabbath ever printed.
The construction is worth knowing before you open a digitised copy and get lost. There is no introduction and no conclusion; the text simply stops. It opens not with an argument but with a travel report of a party riding up from Ballenstedt on 5 July 1653 to see the ruin of Reinstein and the Baumann cave. Only then does a first part describe the mountain itself, and a second, far longer part deal with witches in seven chapters, marching through the questions in strict scholastic order: which places, whether bodily, which place, by what means, for what reasons, in what manner, at what time.
And in the chapter describing the mountain, Praetorius shows you exactly what kind of author he is. He announces ten paragraphs — naming, spelling, location, likeness, herbs and trees, silver and mining, streams, particular animals, weather signs, and the witches' feast. Take the first letter of each in his German: B-R-O-C-K-S-B-E-R-G. The chapter structure spells the mountain's name. That is not scholarship. That is a man enjoying himself, and it tells you how to read the other 570 pages.
Energetic Cleanse Ritual Incense — Frankincense & Myrrh
Frankincense and myrrh are the two resins that turn up on every seventeenth-century apothecary's shelf, in Praetorius's pages and in the inventories of the people he wrote about. If you want to read a strange old book with the room smelling the way its author's room did, this is the honest way to do it: as smoke and atmosphere, nothing more.
$24.95
See the incense →The chapter that asks whether they fly at all
Here is the part that almost nobody who cites this book mentions. The second chapter of the second part is titled, in his spelling, a question: whether the witches come to their banquets and assemblies in deed and in truth, bodily — or only in thought, according to their fantasy and imagination. He then spends dozens of pages on it, and he argues both sides.
For the sceptical side he reproduces, in Latin and again in German, the most famous experiment in the early-modern literature: Giambattista della Porta's account in the second book of his Magia naturalis. Della Porta has an old woman rub herself all over with an ointment in front of witnesses. She collapses insensible, lies there some three hours, and on waking reports news from distant lands. Praetorius lets the conclusion stand in plain German: these are devilish dreams and strong imaginings of a corrupted fantasy. He adds a second case from a French president: a woman stretched out by the fire who travelled only in her mind.
For the other side he quotes scripture — Christ carried by the devil to the pinnacle of the temple and to the high mountain — and argues that a dream cannot be a temptation of God, so the carrying must have been bodily. Then, with the intellectual honesty of a man who cannot stop collecting, he immediately records the objection: many learned men read that passage as vision and imagination rather than body, and he names Bucer and Calvin for it.
Count the authorities and the picture sharpens. Jean Bodin, who demanded that witches burn, is named more than eighty times. Johann Weyer, who argued that the accused were deluded and ill, appears in his various spellings around thirty. Both are in the book. Neither wins it.
So did Praetorius believe in the flight?
The scholarship does not agree, and it is more useful to say so than to pick a side. The biographical entry in the Neue Deutsche Biographie places him squarely inside the elite magical learning of his day and records that he held witches and werewolves to be works of the devil. Rita Voltmer's entry in the English-language Encyclopedia of Witchcraft puts him among the authors who took the reality of the thing for granted.
Against that stands what the book does not do. It never demands prosecution, and it offers no theological condemnation — no sin, no heresy, no apostasy. It takes its anecdotes indifferently from Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed and pagan authors, from defenders and opponents of the trials alike.
The courts themselves are present, which is easy to miss and worth correcting: Praetorius repeatedly cites Benedict Carpzov's Practica nova rerum criminalium by part and question number, and the verdicts of the Leipzig Schöppenstuhl that Carpzov had collected. Carpzov, who had died in Leipzig two years before the book appeared, was the standard authority on Saxon criminal law. But Praetorius cites him the way he cites everyone — as material — and sets Justus Oldekop's tract against Carpzov beside him on the same page. He hands you the prosecution and the objection to it, and declines to rule.
Our own reading, offered as a reading and not as a finding: the contradiction dissolves once you stop treating the book as an argument. A compilation's job is to contain everything. Praetorius was paid by the sheet, not by the conclusion, and a question left open sells better than a question closed. He was, in the most literal sense, the first man to discover that the witch trials made excellent entertainment — which is why he can fairly be called an ancestor of the horror genre, and why his book was useless to the demonologists and gold to the poets.
How a compiler became the source
He was famous in his lifetime and forgotten shortly after it; most of his titles were not reprinted past the 1720s. Romanticism revived him. Achim von Arnim, Clemens Brentano and Johann Gustav Büsching went back to him as a witness to popular belief, precisely because he had written down what educated men usually threw away.
The Brothers Grimm were blunt about the debt. In the preface to their Deutsche Sagen they wrote that among the written sources, the works of Johannes Praetorius were by far the most significant to them, and they singled out his legends from the Elbe and Saale country, the Magdeburg lands and the Altmark — his own home. Goethe took the Brocken material into the Walpurgis Night scene of Faust, published in 1808. Grimmelshausen had already used motifs from him in Simplicissimus in his own century.
That is the mechanism this magazine keeps running into. A place with real drama gets its supposedly ancient meaning from an early-modern author with a printing press, and two generations of canonical writers then make the invention permanent. The broomstick in every children's book is downstream of a man in Leipzig who needed to make rent.
Heinrich Heine, reading him in the 1830s, called his contents a heap of nonsense and scavenged superstition — though fairness demands the footnote that Heine aimed this at a different Praetorius book, the Anthropodemus plutonicus of 1666.
What is proven and what is not
| Claim | Evidence | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Life dates 1630–1680, birth name Hans Schultze | Biographical reference works; death by plague in Leipzig | Verified |
| The 1668 title, printers and structure | The digitised first edition itself | Verified |
| The chapter arguing both sides of the flight | Chapter II of part two, read in the original | Verified |
| Grimms' and Goethe's use of him | Grimm preface; Faust scholarship | Verified |
| That he personally believed the bodily flight | Asserted by reference works, undercut by his own text | Not proven |
| That he ever attended or witnessed a witch trial | No mention in his work or the literature | Not proven |
Temple tip
Read him in the original scan rather than in quotation. The 1668 edition is digitised and freely searchable, and an hour with the actual page teaches what no summary will. Search the text for a single word — ointment, goat, imagination — and watch the argument change sides under you.
Reading a seventeenth-century source without being fooled by it
1. Separate the author from the material. Praetorius collected genuinely old popular belief and dressed it in his own showmanship. The belief can be older than the book even when the book is the only place it survives.
2. Ask who paid. He was a freelance in a book-fair city with no salary. Sensational framing, learned Latin sprinkled through German, number play, promised pictures — these are sales decisions, and they shape what got written down.
3. Notice what is missing. In a witchcraft book of 1668, the absence of any legal or theological demand is information. Silence is evidence too, and it is usually the part a summary drops.
4. Do not confuse a source with a proof. That Praetorius reports a thing tells you it was told in 1668 — nothing about whether it happened, and little about how old the telling is.
What we don't promise
We make no claim that the Brocken has measurable energy, that Walpurgis Night has power of its own, or that any of the herbs named in the old flight recipes should be put on skin. Several of them are seriously toxic, and the historical ointments belong in a history of poisoning as much as in a history of magic. Incense is scent and an occasion to sit still — it is not a treatment and it does not act on any illness. And the witch trials in the background of this book were not folklore: they killed people, disproportionately women, on evidence obtained under torture.
Frequently asked questions
Who was Johannes Praetorius?
A German writer, polymath and compiler, born Hans Schultze in Zethlingen in 1630 and dead of plague in Leipzig in 1680. He published more than fifty books of curiosities and is best remembered for his collection of some 250 legends of the Silesian mountain spirit Rübezahl and for his 1668 book on the Blocksberg.
Did Praetorius invent the Brocken witch legend?
No. The name Blokkesberghe is documented in a Lübeck prayer book of 1485, and a witch trial record of 1540 already links the mountain with Walpurgis Night. What his 1668 book did was make the Brocken the national gathering place rather than one of several regional Blocksbergs.
Did Goethe really use this book for Faust?
Yes. Goethe drew on Praetorius's material for the Walpurgis Night scene of Faust, published in 1808, and the Brothers Grimm named Praetorius the most important written source for their Deutsche Sagen.
Did Praetorius believe witches really flew?
The reference literature says he accepted the reality of witchcraft, but his own chapter on the journey reproduces the opposing case at length, including Della Porta's ointment experiment and the reading of it as drugged dreaming. He never demands prosecution anywhere in the book. The honest answer is that his position cannot be pinned down from this text.
Can I read Blockes-Berges Verrichtung today?
Yes. The first edition of 1668 is digitised in full with a searchable transcription in the Deutsches Textarchiv, and a facsimile reprint with an introduction by Hans Henning appeared in 1968. The German is early modern and the type is Fraktur, but the transcription is readable.
If this way of reading a legend interests you, we asked the same question of the mountain itself in how Germany's witch mountain got its reputation, and of a festival in whether Mabon is really an ancient holiday. For the resins and herbs that turn up on every page of a book like this, see our sacred smoke and cleansing shelf, and for decks and reading material, tarot, books and divination.
Sources & further reading
- Johannes Praetorius, Blockes-Berges Verrichtung, Leipzig (Johann Scheibe) and Frankfurt am Main (Friedrich Arnst) 1668 — digitised with full searchable transcription in the Deutsches Textarchiv. Used as a historical document and read directly for the title page, the chapter structure, the BROCKSBERG acrostic and the chapter on the journey.
- Stefan Jordan, „Praetorius, Johannes“, in: Neue Deutsche Biographie, vol. 20, Berlin 2001, pp. 667–668 — life, output, intellectual position.
- Ines Köhler-Zülch, „Praetorius, Johannes“, in: Enzyklopädie des Märchens, vol. 10 (2002), cols. 1230–1239 — method, pseudonyms, readership.
- Rita Voltmer, „Praetorius, Johannes (1630–80)“, in: Richard M. Golden (ed.), Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition, vol. 3, Santa Barbara 2006, pp. 929–930.
- Gerhild Scholz Williams, Ways of Knowing in Early Modern Germany: Johannes Praetorius as a Witness to his Time, Ashgate 2006 — the standard English-language study, covering eight of his works.
- Sebastian Dregger, „Zwischen manischem Hexenglauben und Überwindung des frühneuzeitlichen Hexenwahns“, aventinus nova 10 (2008) — structure and contradictions of the 1668 book; the Heine attribution is discussed in its footnotes.
- Helmut Waibler, „Johannes Prätorius (1630–1680). Ein Barockautor und seine Werke“, in: Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens 20 (1979), pp. 953–1151 — the bibliographical survey.
- Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, preface to Deutsche Sagen (1816) — for their assessment of Praetorius as a source.