To Ride the Broom: Witches, Demons, and the Psychotechnology of the Sabbath
Forget the cartoonish hag cackling on a broomstick, what we’re dealing with is something older, and something real…
Forget the cartoonish hag cackling through the night on a twiggy broomstick. Strip away the church-fueled paranoia of medieval Europe. Peel back the pharmacological reductionism that relegates it all to “a bad trip on belladonna.” What we’re left with is something stranger — something that might be true in ways we’ve forgotten how to measure.
Witches rode broomsticks, yes. And they met the Devil on mountaintops. The Brocken, the legendary peak shrouded in mist, was one of many waystations on the borderland between the seen and unseen. But this wasn’t fantasy. Nor hallucination. This was technology — the old kind, the dangerous kind. Ritual tech. Psychic engineering.
The broomstick, then, wasn’t a mere household object or a crude hallucinatory metaphor. It was a symbolic vehicle — and perhaps more than symbolic. A tuned instrument. A transmitter. Not unlike a Tibetan phurba or a circuit board etched in copper, the broomstick could bridge domains. Its shape, its form, its tradition — all pointed to motion through planes.
The ointments used? Sure, they were loaded with tropane alkaloids—nightshade, henbane, mandrake. But they weren’t taken recreationally. They were applied. Mucosal membranes absorbed them. Not to chase visions, but to exit the sensory grid altogether. This wasn’t escape. It was insertion into another operating system.
And the destination?
A congress. A convergence. The Sabbath. Not metaphor but architecture — an actual psychic arena. A datasphere before the internet, accessed not through code but through ritual interface. Sabbats were not wild parties of heretics and goat-men. They were download sessions, upload stations, flesh-and-spirit gatherings conducted across astral channels — each witch a node in a distributed system of forbidden knowledge.
Enter the Devil.
Not the Christian Satan of fire and pitchforks. The Devil of the witches was a gatekeeper. The Black Man. The Horned Initiator. The Outsider who offers power in exchange for truth — terrible, unbearable truth. In this view, the Devil is not evil. He’s beyond our binary. He’s the root daemon, to borrow a term from computing. Not malware. Not antivirus. Something older. Something indifferent.
And if we take a cue from James Blish, the stakes climb.
In Black Easter, Blish crafts a world where demons are real. Summonable. Accountable. Dangerous in the way plutonium is dangerous — not malevolent, but ruinous if handled without precision. He lays out a working magical system as rigorous as nuclear physics. Magic isn’t wishful thinking — it’s a kind of weaponized ritual syntax, tapping into the real structure of existence.
So what if the witches, knowingly or not, were doing this?
What if the Brocken wasn’t just a lonely mountain — but one of many ritual servers on an ancient magical grid? What if the broomstick, the flight, the ointments, the Sabbath — they were protocols, not fantasies? A magical operating system with passwords in Latin and command lines in Enochian. A system that still works, if one dares to log in.
We look back and scoff. Primitive women in dark forests. Folklore. Fairytales.
But we are the primitives now.
We don’t know the power of symbols anymore. We lost the syntax. We trust only what we can code, what we can upload, what we can monetize. And yet, in our dreams, we still fly. In our nightmares, we still meet him. And some of us — outliers, throwbacks, cyber-mages in hoodies and hexagram tattoos — some of us still ride the broom.
Not to escape.
To remember.
👉 Watch Doktor Snake’s video essay on Youtube.