George Fox

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.