Cave opening and witchcraft imagery

“Seeing the Unseen World”

Seeing the Unseen World: Countering the Vision-Centric Landscape in Narratives of the Witches’ Sabbath

By Aaron John Henry Larsen

What makes a landscape? Is it the physical features that we can see and sense? Or is a landscape tied to a deeper emotional connection at the crossroads of the senses, the self, and the imagination? In his 2008 magnum opus Geography and Vision: Seeing, Imagining, and Representing the World, lauded historical geographer Denis Cosgrove argued that “[i]nsofar as human geography concerns the natural or physical world, geographical space remains space that can be seen, or at least visualized.”[1] To Cosgrove, landscape was constructed through vision, allowing us to understand, interpret, and interact with the world around us. Such arguments placed sight over all other senses in the context of spatial thinking, narrowing the lens with which we explore landscape history to a single sense. However, in circumstances where seeing is not possible, such as those that largely exist in the imagination, how are people able to identify and apply meaning to landscapes? Does the landscape still exist on a theoretical level, or does it become something different, between reality and imagination? To explore this question, we might turn to a phenomenon of early modern Europe that already blurs the line between the seen and unseen world: the witches’ sabbath.

As an invisible crime, the only way to convict an accused witch under early modern law was to obtain a confession.[2] Often obtained through use of torture, these confessions required a set narrative that blended the real world and the world of fantasy, including stories of the Devil’s pact, maleficent crimes, and the witches’ sabbath. The witches’ sabbath was the belief that witches would gather in the dark recesses of the world in secret to worship the Devil, perform dark magic, dance with demons, and engage in orgiastic sex. Narratives of the witches’ sabbath appear across the continent, from Portugal to Norwegian Finnmark, populating the confessions of the accused with unimaginable horrors entirely rooted in the realm of fantasy.[3] In order to make these confessions believable, the accused would construct their narratives of the sabbath in places they felt these events belonged, spaces where witches and demons would logically gather to perform their diabolical rites. From the most distant mountain peaks to the confines of their own homes, the landscapes of the witches’ sabbath were as varied as the cultures in which they were constructed, reflecting the relationship early modern Europeans had with the world around them.

However, despite playing a major role in the sabbath narratives, these landscapes were not always centred upon vision. Rather, the landscapes of the witches’ sabbath had variable levels of visibility, ranging from spaces that dominate the landscape to those that do not exist at all in the real world. As a crime that blurred the line between fantasy and reality, the landscapes of the sabbath also existed simultaneously in two worlds, combining in the imagination of the interrogator and the accused and shifting their perceptions of the world around them. Therefore, the semi-fantastical and entirely invisible witches’ sabbath makes the perfect case study for examining and countering Cosgrove’s vision-centric landscape theory. For this study, we will examine two sabbath landscapes that exist in a space where vision comes secondary to the other senses and to the imagination – Łysa Góra or Bald Mountain of the Polish witchcraft tradition, and the valleys and caves seen in sabbath stories across Europe.

As one of the essential landscapes of the witches’ sabbath, mountains such as Łysa Góra have long occupied a liminal space between seen and unseen worlds in the human imagination, serving as both sacred sites and sources of fear. Across the Eurasian continent, mountains have been central to sacred beliefs of both localized and broader universal religious groups for millennia.[4] Lofty summits have long been associated with the ability to commune with gods and encounter the supernatural, including in the Christian tradition. However, shifts in early modern attitudes regarding mountain landscapes caused the blurred lines of fantasy and reality to take on a dark new twist. Where once mountains were pathways to the divine and the unseen world, early modern desires for ordered and controlled landscapes made the untameable mountains sites of fear and anxiety, an aberration of God’s plan and a blight upon creation.[5] By placing the witches’ sabbath, an unseen inversion of the sacred and everyday upon mountains, where the veil between worlds has traditionally been thin in the European imagination, early modern witchcraft narratives added a new layer to the relationship with mountain landscapes. The Polish Łysa Gora or Bald Mountain tradition represents a unique syncretism of the sacred mountain concept, the witches’ sabbath, and the unseen world. Unlike other mountains used for the sabbath across Europe, such as Germany’s Brocken or France’s La Rhune, the actual site of Łysa Góra was permanently in flux, an intermediary between the realms of fantasy and reality. Some believed that an actual Łysa Góra existed in the Świętokrzyskie mountains, where a Benedictine monastery once stood.[6] This Bald Mountain would fit perfectly within the model of sacred mountains and the intermediary between reality and the unseen world, yet Polish sabbath beliefs were far more complex. In other cases, the name Łysa Góra was assigned to other, differently named, mountains or hills, and in other cases to an imagined high place somewhere “at the border.”[7] In some cases, Bald Mountain did not refer to a mountain at all, but was a symbolic term for the site of the sabbath, meaning that castles, barns, forests, and Jewish cemeteries could all be Łysa Góra.[8]

The example of Łysa Góra points toward an interesting paradox in Cosgrove’s theory of vision and landscape. Dramatically rising from the surrounding terrain and covering much of the horizon, human eyes are constantly drawn to the mountains, a reaction noted by Cosgrove in his own exploration of high places: “[t]hanks to their majesty and well-defined profiles, high mountain peaks are primary geographical objects on the landscape to capture the human gaze. In their metaphorical use, mountains seem to help us grasp the ungraspable and visualise the indefinite.”[9] However, the nature of Łysa Góra both actively confirms and refutes Cosgrove’s approach at the same time, a paradox of place. The presence of an actual Bald Mountain in the Świętokrzyskie mountain range, visible and tangible with a historic link to the sacred connected people to the landscape, allows it to live in their spatial imaginations. The real Bald Mountain seems to ascertain the primacy of vision, as it would have allowed for early modern Europeans to imagine and interact with a real and visible landscape where the invisible sabbath supposedly occurred. However, the multilayered nature of Łysa Góra means that the line between vision and landscape is blurred when the narrative is removed from this specific peak. When any location could become Łysa Góra so long as it was located at the border, the landscape was not constructed by what could be seen, but by the narrative context of the witches’ sabbath said to occur there. More importantly, in cases where the Bald Mountain described by the accused as an entirely imagined location, the landscape was defined specifically by what could not be seen, an invisible space that maintained all the meaning and significance of the visible world.

The sabbath landscapes of Bald Mountain in the Polish witch trials demonstrate the paradox of the vision-centric landscape, where a supposedly singular landscape can occupy both the physical world and the imagined world simultaneously. Conversely, caves and valleys demonstrate further flaws within Cosgrove’s model of the landscape by removing vision either partially or entirely. In the case of Zug, Switzerland, valleys and caves have a long connection with both the witches’ sabbath and the construction of space. Located beyond the outskirts of the city of Zug, the Lorzentobel is a steep valley carved from the Zugerberg plateau by the Lorze river as it rushes from the alpine Ägerisee to the Zugersee below. This valley was part of the witchcraft narratives of the local people across the early modern era. In the 1737 trial, seventy-year-old Elisabeth (Lisi) Bossard confessed to meeting the Devil forty years before along the banks of the Lorze, seducing her and giving her a flying stick that would take her to the sabbath in the Meilacher.[10] Amidst the 1652 wave of trials, Maria Müller, Anna Staub, and Veronica Reidhaar confessed to a lengthy relationship with the Lorzentobel. Maria stated “firstly that she had met the Evil Spirt for three years in the Lorzentobel, wearing green spitzhosen, known as Little Hans…”[11] Anna Staubin likewise claimed that this green clad Little Hans had given her a green salve, which she would use to anoint her stick in the Devil’s name and fly to the witches’ sabbath at the Lorzentobel, where she would feast on all manner of foods except for bread and salt.[12]

With such a presence in the witchcraft narratives, the Lorzentobel was a landscape that defined the understanding of the witches’ sabbath in early modern Zug. However, it was also a landscape that was defined by a lack of visibility. The valley is bounded by steep, heavily forested walls. While the plateau above and the floodplain below were defined by their rich agrarian and pastoral land, any hint of the worlds above and below are masked by the trees and the topography, creating a deep sense of claustrophobia. This feeling is further intensified by the temperature inversions created by the topography. The cool and wet air coming from the Lorze river at the centre of the Lorzentobel causes thick mists to fill the valley, held in by the topography, while the surrounding area remains clear. When the fog thickens and vision is limited, the Lorzentobel gains a mystical quality, intensifying fear and anxiety. However, the Lorzentobel is not the only space in which fog is associated with a landscape of the witches’ sabbath. Atop the Brocken, Germany’s most famous sabbath landscape, dense fogs often roll up toward the summit from the surrounding plains, causing a lack of vision and a sense of disorientation. Such feelings of disorientation have long been identified as major factors in the construction of a landscape of fear, allowing the world to be populated with threats both real and imagined.[13]

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the Lorzentobel’s landscape is that which draws the most people to the valley today, but also the aspect that most directly stands against Cosgrove’s theory of vision: the underground world. The lower walls of the valley are pockmarked by small caves in the tuffaceous stone and soil, but close to the exit of the Lorzentobel an immense cave network was discovered in 1863 and opened to the public in 1887.[14] Though discovered one century after Zug’s last witch trial, these caves took the valley’s dark past and contributed to the active place-making of the landscape with locals naming the caves the Baarer Höllgrotten, or the “Baar Hell Grottoes,” after the area’s long tradition of diabolical narratives. Though the Höllgrotten were discovered too late to appear in the narratives of the sabbath in Zug, caves and underground landscapes were essential sabbath landscapes across the continent. In the Spanish Basque country, the sorginak supposedly gathered for their sabbath in caves outside of Zugarramurdi.[15] Francesco-Maria Guazzo described a sabbath in a cave outside of Wijk, a town in the Netherlands, and in a subterranean cavern within a barrow in York, England, in his demonology, the Compendium Maleficarum.[16] Much like the mountains explored earlier, caves have also historically been the sites of the blending between the natural and supernatural worlds as sacred landscapes.[17]

Even during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when scientific empiricism dominated the natural sciences in European culture, the lack of light encouraged scientists and cartographers to explore caves more imaginatively, relying on their other senses and their perceptions of the landscape to explore the caves.[18] These landscapes are entirely defined by the inability to see, meaning that under Cosgrove’s theory, these cannot be classified as landscapes. These subterranean spaces were distinguished by their darkness, allowing the human imagination to populate caves with gods and goddesses, witches and demons. In her exploration of caves in Christianity, Veronica della Dora argued that the lack of vision in caves changes their classification from a landscape to an anti-landscape, an inverted form of landscape where the other senses take control beyond sight.[19] However, I argue that such a perspective is driven by semantics.

As demonstrated by the landscapes we have explored in this article, mountains, valleys, and caves, the understanding of these spaces was not entirely built upon vision, especially when these places blurred the lines between the seen and unseen world. By constructing narratives of the witches’ sabbath in landscapes that feature either restricted vision, an inability to see, or that exist entirely within the realm of imagination, we can understand that landscape is not reliant on a single sense, but on a combination of all senses and the human imagination. Moreover, breaking beyond Cosgrove’s theory of vision and landscape allows for new interpretations of the early modern landscape through other senses. Staying within the bounds of sabbath studies, does the all-encompassing sound of the Lorze river hurtling down the Lorzentobel valley and echoing against the high canyon walls isolate this space from all others in Zug? Did the scent of rot and decay in aging and poorly managed forests inspire fantasies of fear and inversion at the heart of the sabbath narrative? While some work has been done already on the creation of landscape identity through the five senses, there is an immense need for more explorations of the role of the senses in inspiring the imagination of landscapes, real, fantastical, or somewhere in between.[20] By countering the vision-centric landscape first proposed by Cosgrove, we are afforded new opportunities to examine the relationship between space, place, and all the other senses across time.


[1] Denis Cosgrove, Geography and Vision: Seeing, Imagining, and Representing the World (London: I.B. Taurus, 2008), 15.

[2] Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 46.

[3] See: Francisco Bethencourt, “Portugal: A Scrupulous Inquisition” in Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries, eds. Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); Liv Helene Willumsen, Witches of the North: Scotland and Finnmark (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 254.

[4] Edwin Bernbaum, Sacred Mountains of the World, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022)

[5] Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500-1800 (London: Allen Lane, 1983), 14-15, 258-259.

[6] Michael Ostling, Between the Devil and the Host: Imagining Witchcraft in Early Modern Poland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 135.

[7] Ostling, Between the Devil and the Host, 135.

[8] Ostling, Between the Devil and the Host, 135.

[9] Denis Cosgrove and Veronica della Dora, “Introduction” in High Places: Cultural Geographies of Mountains, Ice, and Science (London: I.B. Taurus, 2009), 8.

[10] StAZG A 105/6 fol. 43B.

[11] “…erstlich der Böß Geyst vor drüen Jahren im Lorzen thobel in grünen Spitzhoßen gekleidt, der sich hanßli genannt…” StAZG A 105/1 fol. 124A.

[12] StAZG A 105/1 fol. 124B.

[13] Yi-Fu Tuan, Landscapes of Fear (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979), 19.

[14] Martin Arnold et al., Naturdenkmäler der Schweiz: Das grosse Wander- und Erlebnisbuch (Aarau: AT Verlag, 2013), 80.

[15] Jan Machielsen, The Basque Witch-Hunt: A Secret History (London: Bloomsbury, 2024), 40.

[16] Francesco-Maria Guazzo, Compendium Maleficarum (Mediolani: Ex Collegis Ambrosinus Typographia, 1626), 82, 90.

[17] See: Holly Moyes, ed., Sacred Darkness: A Global Perspective on the Ritual Use of Caves, (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2012)

[18] Johannes Mattes, “Mapping the Invisible: Knowledge, Credibility and Visions of Earth in Early Modern Cave Maps” in The British Journal for the History of Science 55, No. 1 (March 2022), 59.

[19] Veronica della Dora, “Anti-Landscapes: Caves and Apophasis in the Christian East” in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29, no. 5 (2011): 762.

[20] See: Maja Kljenak et al., “Experiencing Dalmatia: What Constitutes the Sensory Landscape Identity of the Dalmatia Region?” in Društvena istraživanja – Časopis za opća društvena pitanja 22, no. 2 (2013): 277-292; Chris Woolgar, “The Social Life of the Senses: Experiencing the Self, Others, and Environments” in A Cultural History of Senses in the Middle Ages, ed. Richard G. Newhauser (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 23-44; Roland Betancourt, Sight, Touch, and Imagination in Byzantium (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
nemos (November 14, 2024). “Seeing the Unseen World” NEMoS. Retrieved February 13, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/12rm1


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