Milton’s Night-Hag and Fuseli’s Vision of Lapland Witches

In Henry Fuseli’s oil painting The Night-Hag Visiting Lapland Witches (c. 1796), a wild nocturnal ritual springs to life – witches whirl in frenzy, a demoness hurtles through the moonlit sky, and a child lies eerily tranquil on a sacrificial altar. Fuseli drew his inspiration directly from a brief but vivid simile in John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost, transforming Milton’s lines into a grand Gothic tableau. The result is a chilling visualization of 17th-century fears: northern sorcery at the edge of the world, phantom hounds on a spectral hunt, and the terror of a witch’s Sabbath under an eclipsed moon.

Milton’s Lapland Night-Hag in Paradise Lost

In Book II of Paradise Lost (1667), Milton conjures a frightening image to convey the horror of Hell’s guardians. As Satan approaches the gates of Hell, he encounters the grotesque figure of Sin and her ravenous hellhounds. Milton likens those hellhounds to creatures that “follow the night-hag when, called, / In secret, riding through the air she comes, Lured with the smell of infant blood, to dance / With Lapland witches, while the laboring moon Eclipses at their charms”. In these lines, Milton compresses a world of dark folklore into a single simile. The “night-hag” – historically another name for Hecate, goddess of witchcraft – is imagined as a malevolent witch-demon flying through the sky with her awful retinue. Drawn by the “smell of infant blood”, she joins a coven of Lapland witches dancing beneath a moon blotted out by sorcery. Milton’s audience would have recognized this scene as the ultimate witches’ Sabbath, evoking legends of nightly aerial rides and even the fabled Wild Hunt. In folklore, the night-hag or nightmare was often envisioned as a “mounted supernatural hag, scouring the countryside with nine demons as her offspring, a kind of female Wild Hunt”. Milton taps into that terrifying tradition – a spectral witch-queen and her hellish pack roaming the night – to heighten the sense of dread. His reference to remote Lapland underscores the exotic horror: in Milton’s time, Lapland (in the far north of Europe) was proverbial for sorcery and pagan magic. Contemporary travelogues reinforced this notion, describing Laplanders as “addicted to idolatry and to magic”, as if tutored by “Zoroaster or Circe,” and practicing uncanny rites even into the 17th century. By invoking a Lapland witch gathering, Milton folded into his Christian epic the era’s darkest folk fears – of witches who blight the moon, sacrifice infants, and ride the night winds in league with demons.

Fuseli’s Painting: Milton’s Nightmare Come to Life

Fuseli, a Swiss-British artist famed for his taste for the macabre (he painted the iconic Nightmare in 1781), seized on Milton’s brief simile and expanded it into a full visual drama. The Night-Hag Visiting Lapland Witches was created for Fuseli’s ambitious Milton Gallery – a series of paintings illustrating Milton’s works. In fact, Fuseli initially titled the piece “The Night-Hag”, and by the time it was exhibited in 1799 he provocatively renamed it “Lapland Orgies”, hinting at the scandalous spectacle depicted. The painting indeed presents a kind of demonic revelry true to that title. In the upper background, Fuseli paints the Night-Hag as a “thinly painted and phantom-like” apparition on a wildly galloping horse, “accompanied by a reeling pack of hellhounds.” She hurtles toward the coven, bathed in eerie moonlight. Fuseli’s night-hag is not a three-faced Hecate of classical myth, but a singular “ethereal demon mounted on a wildly twisting horse,” barely discernible amid a ghostly glow. The artist pointedly includes nine infernal hounds trailing behind her – a direct nod to Milton’s hellhounds and the folkloric “nightmare’s” nine-fold brood. This night-hag and her devil-dogs literally embody Milton’s simile, transforming it from narrative aside into the central event of the painting.

In the middle ground, chaos and ritual unfold among the Lapland witches. To the right, witches join hands in a “strange round” dance, backs turned and circling leftward in a grotesque parody of a folk dance. Their motions follow descriptions from English literature of witches dancing “back to back, hip to hip… circles backward, to the left” in uncanny rhythm. On the left, other witches beat on drums with frantic intensity, their figures illuminated in infernal red glow. Fuseli likely drew this detail from accounts of Lapland sorcery – travelers to the far north reported that Lapp shamans would heat and pound drums with reindeer bones to work themselves into “a state of satanic possession.” Drumming was also associated with eclipses in folklore (people would drum and clash cymbals to “relieve” the laboring moon from witchcraft), which may explain why Fuseli’s witches pound away under the spell-darkened moon. Everything in the painting’s middle section speaks to a frenzied witches’ Sabbath. The wild dance, the backward circle, the pounding of ritual drums, and the presence of grotesque, winged familiars (some witches in the canvas even sport peculiar attributes like Medusa-like winged heads) all amplify Milton’s brief hints into a full-blown nightmarish gathering.

Finally, in the foreground, Fuseli makes explicit the horror that Milton only implied: an infant sacrifice in progress. Front and center, a robust witch draped in shaggy furs leans over a slab where a naked baby boy lies exposed. The infant’s cheeks are rosy and, eerily, he appears to be peacefully asleep – “innocent, untroubled,” like a drowsy Cupid amid the Lapland witches and a host of demons. This ghastly innocence at the heart of the scene underscores the blasphemy of the ritual. One of the witch’s hands hovers over the child and her long braided hair juts out “dagger-like,” pointing at the infant’s throat. Directly in front, only visible by muscular arms, a figure ascends a ladder brandishing a gleaming knife, ready to spill the “infant blood” that has lured the night-hag to the feast. In Fuseli’s imagining, Milton’s “smell of infant blood” is not just a poetic device but a literal gruesome sacrificial rite. The artist has staged the very moment before the kill: the witch gazes upward awaiting the arriving Night-Hag, hand outstretched for the sacrificial blade. By visualizing this climactic (and horrifying) detail, Fuseli expands Milton’s few lines into a lurid narrative scene, leaving no doubt about the “orgies” taking place in Lapland. It’s as if we are witnessing the witches’ darkest fantasy that Milton only alludes to – a graphic tableau of nocturnal terror designed to shock and awe.

Northern Sorcery, Wild Hunts, and Nocturnal Terror

Fuseli’s painting not only mirrors Milton’s text but also engages with the wider web of folklore and fears surrounding it. Both Milton and Fuseli were working with the archetype of the witch’s Sabbath and the pan-European terror of female sorcery in far-flung places. Lapland, “the last part of Europe to be Christianized,” long held a reputation in Europe’s imagination as a bastion of witchcraft and pagan rites. Writers from Shakespeare to Dryden mentioned Lapland witches and sorcerers to invoke this sense of uncanny, remote evil. Fuseli deftly incorporates the details reported by northern travelers – the heated drums, the ecstasies of possession, the wild dances under a midnight sun – grounding his fantastical scene in what his audience would have believed about “real” witch gatherings. The eclipsed moon looming over the composition speaks to the age-old fear of cosmic disorder caused by witchcraft. In the painting, the moon’s light is sickly and dim, embattled by the witches’ “charms,” just as Milton described. Such an image would recall for 18th-century viewers how witches were said to blight crops and even halt heavenly bodies – a true nightmare scenario of nature overturned at the hands of devilish women.

Moreover, Fuseli’s night-hag captures the essence of the Wild Hunt mythos that so fascinated the Romantic imagination. His aerial demoness on a charging horse, wreathed in hell-hounds, is essentially a witches’ version of the Wild Hunt leader. This spectral hunt of folklore – often a fiendish god or ghostly hunter chasing souls with a pack of hounds across the night sky – finds a female incarnation in the figure of Hecate/“Night-Hag.” As one folklorist described, the primitive nightmare hag was essentially “a kind of female Wild Hunt” roving by night with her nine familiars. Fuseli’s scene gives form to that idea: the Night-Hag’s “reeling pack of hellhounds” and her wild ride through the air turn Milton’s metaphor into a literal chase. The painting thus taps into a deep vein of cultural terror – the image of a spectral nocturnal procession, whether witches flying to a sabbath or phantoms on a hunt. This was the stuff of fireside tales and old superstitions, now rendered in oil on canvas. Viewers of Fuseli’s work in 1799 would have brought these associations to it, feeling both the thrill and fear of recognizing so many horror motifs woven together.

Despite (or because of) its horrifying content, Fuseli’s The Night-Hag Visiting Lapland Witches was meant to captivate the imagination. It reads like a Gothic fever-dream sprung from Milton’s brief aside. Fuseli takes the “inconspicuous simile” from Paradise Lost and blows it up into a full spectacle of witches, demons, and dark northern magic. In doing so, he also comments on the psychology of his age. The painting channels the period’s morbid fascination with the supernatural and the unknown. Much as Fuseli’s earlier Nightmare captured the intimate terror of a demon crouching on a sleeper’s chest, the Night-Hag canvas captures a more sprawling terror: the nightmare of a witches’ sabbath in all its gory detail. It’s no accident that Fuseli and his contemporary Goya (who painted his own witchcraft scenes in Spain) used such imagery to explore the psyche of a Europe experiencing revolutions and upheaval. Witches and phantoms became symbols of chaos and fear. Fuseli’s Night-Hag is thus both a faithful illustration of Milton and an imaginative expansion on it – a painting that “requires a poetic mind to feel and love,” as Fuseli said of this work. In Milton’s poetry, the Lapland night-hag appears for only a moment, but in Fuseli’s art she fully comes to life: a wild witch-queen racing through an infernal night, embodying the enduring thrill of northern sorcery, spectral hunts, and nocturnal terror that so haunted the cultural imagination.

Sources: Milton, Paradise Lost, Book II; Henry Fuseli, The Night-Hag Visiting Lapland Witches (1796), Metropolitan Museum of Art; Lawrence Feingold, “Fuseli, Another Nightmare: The Night-Hag Visiting Lapland Witches,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 17 (1982); Jean François Regnard, Voyage de Laponie (1681); Dryden, “Annus Mirabilis”.