This image is from Robert Hunt's book on Cornish folklore (1865) - and I am certain this is not the oldest visual reference; the image of the earliest witch's hat clearly predates the Wizard of Oz, which means Wiki may be wrong - a moment in history just in itself.

I have seen speculation that the pointed hat descends from traditional women's hats on the Welsh/Cornish Celtic fringe, and that's probably as good a point of origin as any. Presumably, this cultural outlier was perceived as being more magical than others, and so the old women - the keepers of the old ways - with their traditional garb, would have become the source of the image of a witch. But a lot of that is speculation.

Rosemary Ellen Guiley, The Encyclopedia of Witches and Witchcraft (1999), suggests that "there are different hypotheses as to why brooms are associated with witches. One is that brooms are a symbol of female domesticity, a tool of every woman, and most witches were women." This is a fairly weak link, but lacking a stronger one, it may be all we have.

To the lay reader, the Atlantic article you link, "Why do witches ride brooms?" seems to answer the question fairly comprehensively: it marshals historical detail and connects the dots, tells a good story.

Except that it fails as history.

Whatever our conception of the black hatted, broom stick riding, potions armed witch, she had been stripped of the demonological sources which so inspired fear in her and solidified her place in lore. We'll keep specifically to the question of broomsticks.

The witch of the 15-17th century witch hunts were devil-worshipping, cannibalistic sorceress (and sorcerers), who performed sabbats with other witches, crossing immense distances to attend their synagogues. She was invented in the late 15 through 16th century, but she was not conjured by demonologists from nowhere. We can trace her antecedents very closely in the striga and the malifica. Here we will concentrate on the striga.

The Roman strix, whose name descends from the Greek for 'screech', was in first conception a bird-like creature. However,

Pliny the Elder admitted he could not fit the strix into any recognized species of bird; and he added that according to popular belief it offered it's breasts to babies to suck. It's purpose for doing so was sinister: Serenus Sammonicus, who wrote about medical science, considered that it's milk was poisonous.

The strix (also striges, striga) appear in Ovid, Petronius, Apuleius with shifts towards woman-like forms practicing various sorcery and spells and cannibalism,

Thus the [2nd century] grammarian Festus, in his work on the meanings of words, defines the late Latin word strigae as 'the name given to women who practise sorcery, and who are also called flying women.'

Norman Cohn treats these as Roman literary creations, as 'ornamental' and not real. He argues that the Roman idea of strigae gets wedded to real beliefs in early medieval Germany, finding it represented in Salic Law, Lex Salica. Here the striga (medieval Latin jurists kept the name) are issued fines and punishments if they are found to have performed cannibalism; fines are also issued for false accusations. The more Christianized law of following centuries still address some obvious customary belief in these things but made clear they were not real, including Charlemagne's 789 CE capitulary for Saxons:

"If anyone, deceived by the Devil, shall believe, as is customary amongst pagans, that any man or woman is a striga, and eats men, and shall on that account burn that person to death or eat his or her flesh, or give it to others to eat, he shall be executed."

The choice of striga was telling. She was not malefica, that word some times deployed for the magic practicing sorcerer/sorceress, but who could not fly. Nor was the striga considered 'of the devil' or related to the devil. In fact those who thought striga existed were considered to be inspired to think such by the Devil.

The striga continues to appear - cannibal, night flying, a woman - in the high middle ages in the 11th c. penitential the Corrector by Burchard, and in 13th c poetry. The anonymous 13th c poet of Tyrol,

mocked these same popular beliefs about cannibalistic night-witches. Jokingly, he says that he has gone from university to university, in many countries; nowhere has he heard any scholar lecture on these uncanny beings. Indeed, he adds, it would be a wondrous thing to see a woman riding on a calf or a broomstick or a poker, over mountains and villages.

In the same century the English Gervaese of Tillbury recounts the German "idea that certain men and women fly by night through vast distances, enter homes, dissolve bones, suck human blood, and move infants from place to place." This is the striga in the Germanic context through to the 13th century. There are variants of the same in southern areas through the same time period, but that is not our point. Our point is that the striga was a night-flying woman, a cannibal, but from the perspective of the learned culture she was not real, not a demon nor demonic.

I do not have the space here to recount the parallel path of the malefica, the medieval sorcerer/sorceress. Like the striga, medievals paid fairly little attention to maleficium (low magic) unless it involved a crime. Otherwise, such beliefs were dismissed. The point is to suggest that there is a genealogy to certain beliefs to the later middle ages. At the transition from medieval to early modern era, the striga is merged into the malefica, for very particular reasons.

The medieval inquisition began in the 13th century focused on heresy. What constituted heresy was a fairly nebulous thing and could change over time. It did and I've written about it before. 100 years into the inquisitions, maleficium (sorcery) began to be subjected to scrutiny by inquisitors like Bernardo Gui and found to be heretical; striga played no part, it was too fantastic to be believed. But in the 200 years between Gui and the witch hunting heights of the 16th century, malefica became the witch we know, the anti-Christian society of heretical, cannibalistic, devil worshippers, celebrating the devil's sabbat. But for demonologists a certain practical obstacle remained to connecting witches in a geographically vast conspiracy. How could the malefica traverse great distances to sabbat without being noticeably absent for days? The answer again lay in the rich soil of folk culture: the striga.

To see the effect of this, and refute the Atlantic article's claims, we need to dig deep into actual demonological beliefs about the witch at the height of persecutions. Here is Norman Cohn's summary of resulting demonology inspired by confessions of the likes of Guillaume Adeline at Evreux in 1453, Pierre Vallen at La Tour du Pin in 1438 and a hermit at Langres in 1459:

At regular intervals witches were required to betake themselves to the sacrilegious and orgiastic gatherings known first as 'synagogues', later as 'sabbats'. There were ordinary sabbats, which were usually held on Fridays and were small affairs, involving only the witches of a given neighbourhood; and there were occumenical sabbats, held with great ceremony there or four times a years, and attended by witches from all quarters. A sabbat was always a nocturnal happening, ending either at midnight or, at the very latest, at cockcrow. As for the locality, it might be a churchyard, a cross-roads, the foot of a gallows; though the larger sabbats were commonly held at the summit of some famous mountain in a faraway region.

To attend the sabbat, and in particular to attend the occumenical sabbat, witches had to cover great distances in very litle tie. They did so by flying. Having anointed themselves with they magic salve they would fly straight out of the bedrooms, borne aloft on demonic rams, goats, pigs, oxen, black horses; or else on sticks, shovels, spits, broomsticks. And meanwhile the husband or wife would sleep peacefully, quite unaware of these strange happenings; sometimes a stick laid in the bed would not only take the place but also the appearance of the absent spouse.

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Here we can turn back to the article and deal with specific claim of the broomstick, potions and vaginal insertion.

1. The article cites two quotes about 'ointments' and 'potions' from dubious references.^1 To be sure there are plenty of cases where these are cited, including Johann Nider in his Formicarius of 1435 who writes in great detail about a peasant woman who claimed to fly at night, and she offered to show a doubtful Dominican how exactly she did it. In front of the Dominican (and another witness) she performed a ritual of applying an ointment and fell to the floor unable to be woken. Sometime later, she roused herself and claimed that she had flown. The problem with this story, as all stories we have of these ointments, is that they are never directly witnessed by the writer. In this case Nider was writing down a story told to him by his teacher once about an unnamed Dominican. What ointment recipes we do have from the earliest days are actually not narcotics or psychedelics but the flesh of snakes, lizards and children; ointments containing things like belladonna show up 150 years later. And these ointments may be applied to the person, or a variety of riding devices, as in the 1475 chronicle of Mathias Widman of Kemnat.

2. If we get through the great problem of what an ointment was and where it was applied we face a barrier that demolishes the stereotype: absorbing the potion through vagina. As you we can note from the above, flying witches included men. Estimates range between 10-20% of witches burned were men. Even if ointments and potions were being used, those fellows aren't going to absorb anything through their balls.

Why we only see the broom now is a question of how culture has winnowed down the latter day image of the witch along gender. But at the height of witch trials the malefica, the witches, did not just ride brooms on her way to the sabbat, they rode all manner of objects and animals. They used ointments in a variety of ways, on a variety of things, and the evidence (dubious as it is) suggests less psychedelics and more devil's creatures like those of stereotypical in witches chants ('eye of newt', etc).

As /u/itsallfolklore stated above, any desire to attribute the entire iconography to psychedelics is distorting and indeed overlooking the sources to fit a wholly inadequate theory.

hi! here are a few other posts that may be of interest

• What is the origin and purpose of the pointed hat we commonly associate with witches and wizards

• Where does the concept of the pointy witches hat come from? Was this actually a form of fashion that came to be associated with witches?

• Where did the idea start that witches flew on broomsticks?