Can’t decide which mythology you want? Try Henry Fuseli’s The Night-Hag Visiting Lapland Witches—there’s a little bit of something in it for everyone.

Revisiting the themes explored in his iconic image of Gothic horror, The Nightmare (1781), Henry Fuseli takes as his subject in this painting the figure of the “night-hag,” a woman who has been associated in folklore through the ages with ideas as varied as witchcraft, succubi, wind spirits, the figure of Lilith, the Greek goddess Hecate, and nightmares (which, incidentally, meant something very different before the 18th century than it does now…but more on that later). The figure of the night-hag herself has unfortunately been obscured in this painting over time; all that’s left of her now is the eerily-spectral, brightly-illuminated shape situated at the upper center of the canvas, towards which the gaze of the foregrounded figure—one of the titular “Lapland Witches”—is directed. From the remaining outline, it looks as though our night-hag may have been flying toward the pictured scene on horseback, hoping to join in on a wild night of revelry and what appears to be… ritual infant sacrifice? What fun! 

Flying at her heels is a cluster of hellhounds, which, according to British folklore, are colossal black dogs with tangled fur and red eyes, known for guarding the entrance to the underworld and occasionally appearing to people as omens of their imminent death (some famous examples include the three-headed dog Cerberus of Greek mythology and the Grim in the Harry Potter series). The entire painting is an illustration of a passage from Milton’s "Paradise Lost," which Fuseli’s work—like that of many younger Romantic-period artists and writers, such as his pupil William Blake—was heavily influenced by. In the original passage, Milton is describing the hellhounds surrounding Sin at the entrance to Hell, comparing them to those 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 labouring moon

Eclipses at their charms.

The painting, then, is a depiction not of the actual events unfolding in Paradise Lost but rather of an elaborate simile—and it’s no great surprise that Fuseli would have singled out this particular figure of speech as the subject for this painting, since the night-hag and nightmares were subjects he returned to time and again in his work.

But who precisely is this night-hag? Legend tells us she’s a demon who visits unwary sleepers and sits on their chests, causing them to experience what modern science would refer to as sleep paralysis: sudden waking followed by the terrifying inability to move, a weighty sensation on the chest, and dreamlike hallucinations. This phenomenon was charmingly referred to as being “ridden” by the night-hag—a phrase with obvious sexual connotations, and which may be related to the night-hag’s association with succubi and incubi, as well as Fuseli’s choice to depict her here riding on horseback. Those who experienced sleep paralysis back in the day naturally woke up feeling completely exhausted by the whole ordeal, referring to themselves as “hag-rid” (ridden by the hag), which is one proposed etymology of the modern word “haggard”. The word “nightmare” was also originally a synonym for “night-hag,” mare being an Old English word which meant goblin, incubus, or monster. Its current association with unpleasant dreams wasn’t established until the mid-18th century, so Fuseli, working just a few decades later, would be well aware of the double-meaning contained within the term. Apparently, the night-hag or nightmare would come to the unwary sleeper and have sex with them until they died—or, barring that, they’d visit newborn babies instead, killing them out of spite. Yeesh. Given the choice between that and some regular ol’ sleep paralysis, I’d opt for the latter.

The figure of the “Lapland witch” is less well-documented than that of the night-hag, but it’s possible that Milton’s inclusion of this detail in "Paradise Lost" had something to do with the popular notion among the English, in both Milton's and Fuseli’s times, that far-northern reaches of the world (such as Lapland, a region in Finland) were shrouded in mystery and magic, a reputation stemming from the fact that they were the last parts of Europe to be Christianized. The witch who sits hunched in the foreground seems to be on verge of killing the infant lying sprawled with one arm flung over his head, similarly to the woman in The Nightmare, in a pose illustrating the vulnerability of the dreamer. Fuseli has also given two of the dancing witches behind her wings on their heads, aligning them with many Classical and Hellenistic depictions of medusa, in which she had not the headful of snakes we usually see her rocking these days, but instead a more subtle, serpentine necklace paired with the winged heads Fuseli incorporates here.

Fuseli’s fascination with dreams and the unconscious, demonstrated by his exploration of night-hags and nightmares not just in this painting but throughout his career, predates the 1899 publication of Sigmund Freud’s "The Interpretation of Dreams," looking forward to the wider dissemination of ideas about the psychological unconscious which occurred at the end of the 19th century. Freud himself even reputedly had a copy of The Nightmare hung in his Vienna apartment in the 1920s, suggesting a possible direct line of influence from Fuseli’s art to Freud’s psychoanalytic theories. As a Romantic, Fuseli was fascinated by emotional and subjective states, and this combined with his apparent determination to cram as much mythology as he could into a single canvas marks him as a notable predecessor to the Symbolist movement, which would kick off nearly a century later.