Recasting Images of Witchcraft in the Later Seventeenth Century: The Witch of Endor as Ritual Magician

Abstract

From the middle of the seventeenth century, images of the so-called witch of Endor, the female necromancer and diviner from the biblical story of King Saul in I Samuel 28, began to appear in greater numbers, in a greater variety of media, and as a subject appropriate for artistic consideration.1 A graphic example of the iconography of this figure in this period is found in a copperplate engraving executed c. 1733 by the Nuremberg-born, Augsburg engraver, Georg Daniel Heumann. The engraving was designed by the Swiss artist Johann Melchior Füßli, with ornamental borders by Johann Daniel Preißler, all completed under the direction of the printer and Imperial Engraver, Johann Andreas Pfeffel. It..