Witch's Hat

According to Gary Jensen, a former professor at Vanderbilt and author of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Path-Devil-Early-Modern/dp/0742546977" target="blank">The Path of the Devil: Early Modern Witch Hunts</a>, the pointed cap became an easy, evocative way to signal dark magic. Witches in peaked hats started to appear on postcards from the American colonies. Legendary figures like <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=f2cyAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA169&lpg=PA169&dq=mother+goose+peaked+hat&source=bl&ots=ew8odUjJ6K&sig=-Lg5ndZj_skjKLKtZwyYxmO1hoA&hl=en&sa=X&ei=3-NeUuDNA4iE8gTjuID4Ag&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=mother%20goose%20peaked%20hat&f=false" target="blank">Mother Goose</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Befana" target="blank">La Belfana</a>—an Italian mother deranged by the death of her infant, said to fly through the night air delivering gifts to children—acquired pointy hats. During the Salem Witch Trials, witnesses reported seeing the devil: “a large black man with a <a href="http://www.loyno.edu/_{history/journal/1990-1/westwood.htm}" target="blank">high, crowned hat</a>.” Later, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ingoldsby_Legends" target="_blank">Victorian-era storybooks</a> further developed the theme.

"The two explanations that seem most plausible have to do with real-life marginalized groups. In his book, Jensen describes how the 1215 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Council_of_the_Lateran" target="blank">Fourth Council of the Lateran</a> required all Jews to identify themselves by wearing the Judenhat (“Jewish hat” or “horned skullcap”). The style soon became a target for Anti-Semitism. Artists painted devils muttering curses beneath Jewish crowns. In 1431, Hungarian legal codes required first-time sorcery offenders <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Path-Devil-Early-Modern/dp/0742546977" target="blank">to walk among their peers in “peaked Jews’ caps</a>.” <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=7he42ihezJcC&pg=PA136&lpg=PA136&dq=pointed+hat+woodcut&source=bl&ots=MP6Bzg92Nq&sig=qDqtyok4ddOnBnRxZWLaaaSG7ME&hl=en&sa=X&ei=nqxeUvugI4rpkAejo4H4Cg&ved=0CEwQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=pointed%20hat%20woodcut&f=false" target="blank">Medieval representations tying Jews to Satan</a> were nothing new, and by the late 13th century, Jewish attributes had soaked up enough ugly significance to tar all “unbelievers, hypocrites, heretics, pagans, and demons,” Jensen writes. So does the Wicked Witch of the West’s <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0002121/" target="blank">iconic chapeau</a> reflect an ancient association between black magic and the Chosen People?"

A second theory holds that the pairing of witches and peaked hats flows from anti-Quaker prejudice. A minority sect in colonial America, the Quakers were thought to consort with devils and dabble in witchcraft. Puritan backlash against the community was cresting in the mid-18th century, at around the same time that the figure of the cone-headed spell-weaver began to insinuate herself into American folklore. There’s just one problem with this hypothesis: Quakers didn’t wear pointed hats. But the theory may yet hold water. Quaker headgear was itself the locus of squall and controversy. The movement’s founder, George Fox, famously <a href="http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Littell's_Living_Age/Volume_128/Issue_1658/The_Quaker's_Hat" target="blank">refused to doff his hat in the presence of Cromwell’s ministers</a>. "When the Lord sent me forth into the world He forbade me to put off my hat to any, high or low,” Fox told the magistrates. (Why? Because such “hat-honour” was “invented by men in the fall and in the alienation from God.”) Fox endured three separate prison stays for his disrespect; in the colonies, Friends honored his example by keeping their hair covered at all times. In 1876, an American magazine called <a href="http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Littell%27s_Living_Age/Volume_128" target="blank">Littell’s Living Age</a> hailed the Quaker hat as “the war-standard of this quaint army of non-fighters.” Colonial Puritans, though, were not so kind, at times using the hats as an excuse to prosecute their religious rivals. Jensen suspects that it was a short hop from the Quaker cap as a symbol of doctrinal insubordination to the witch’s hat as an emblem of infernal craft.

Witch's Hat

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