The hearth fire in a Scottish crofter’s cottage did not go out until Beltane. Come the first of May, every household let their hearth die. The whole village waited on one new flame, coaxed from a friction drill on oak and fir. That flame relit every hearth in the valley. And the tool that swept the old ash away before the new fire arrived was a bundle of birch twigs bound to a hazel handle: the besom.
The besom is a broom made of natural materials, traditionally birch twigs bound to a hazel or ash handle, used in European folk magic for purification, protection, and threshold rituals. Its recorded use in witchcraft trials, seasonal customs, and household magic spans at least four centuries of documented practice.
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What Exactly Is a Besom?
A besom is not a modern witchcraft accessory. It is a specific tool defined by its construction: a bundle of twigs, most often birch, bound around a wooden handle with cord or withies (flexible willow shoots used as natural twine). The bristles are left untrimmed and slightly splayed, giving the besom its characteristic fan shape. The handle is cut from hazel, ash, or rowan — woods with their own protective reputations in British and Celtic folk magic.
The word itself is old. “Besom” appears in Middle English texts by the 1300s, derived from Old English besma, meaning a bundle of twigs. It predates “broom,” which originally referred to the flowering shrub Cytisus scoparius whose branches were cut for sweeping. Over time, “broom” replaced “besom” in everyday speech, but the older term stayed in ritual contexts.
A besom used in magic is not the same as a household broom. The two share a shape and a function, but their roles in folk tradition diverged sharply. One cleared the floor. The other cleared the space.
Where the Besom Entered Witchcraft: 1647 and After
The besom’s link to witchcraft appears first in early modern trial records, not in ancient pagan texts. The earliest sustained reference comes from the 1647 trial of Janet Barker in Scotland, who confessed under interrogation that she and other witches had danced with the Devil using brooms as their “horses.” The image stuck. By the time of the 1662 trial of Isobel Gowdie in Auldearn, the broom had become a fixture: Gowdie described riding a beanstalk, a straw, and a broom to sabbaths, each tool capable of carrying her through the air if she spoke the right words.
These confessions were extracted under torture. Their content tells us less about what witches actually did and more about what interrogators expected to find. But the consistency across dozens of confessions across Scotland, England, and later New England suggests that the broom had acquired a folk association with flight before the trials began. The interrogators did not invent the connection. They exploited it.
What those earlier associations were remains debated. One theory points to the practice of applying hallucinogenic ointments to the skin. A broom handle rubbed between the legs left the ointment in contact with mucous membranes, and the sensation of flying was part of the ointment’s effect, not a literal claim. Another theory points to ecstatic trance dancing, where a broom might serve as a hobby horse for ritual movement. Both explanations treat the broom as a tool of altered states, not a vehicle.
Sources disagree on which came first: the ointment theory was proposed by folklorist Margaret Murray in The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) and later refined by historian Michael Harner in the 1970s. The trance-dance theory has stronger documentary support in early modern festival accounts. Neither is proven. Both are plausible.
What the Besom Meant to the People Who Used It
That history explains why the broom carried weight in the villages where trials happened. What follows is what it meant before and after.
The besom was the most common tool in a peasant household. Everyone owned one. Everyone used one. When it appeared in a folk charm or a seasonal custom, it carried the authority of the ordinary made sacred. You did not need a specialist. You needed what you already held.
The symbolic logic was simple. Sweeping removes. What you sweep with shapes what you attract. Birch twigs had their own reputation: birch was the first tree to regrow after a forest fire, a symbol of renewal and new beginnings. Hazel handles brought the protection of a tree associated with wisdom and boundaries. Rowan, when used, carried the strongest protective associations in Gaelic tradition, planted at gates and tied to cattle horns to ward off the fair folk.
The household broom swept dirt out of the door. The ritual besom swept spiritual residue out of a space. The gesture was the same. The intention was not.
A Roman priest once told a Greek colleague that his gods had no myths, only rituals. The Greek laughed. The Roman was not joking. The same could be said of the besom in folk custom. It had no single mythology. It had a calendar.
Beltane Eve, April 30
The most documented ritual use of the besom occurs at Beltane. In Scotland and northern England, households swept their floors with birch besoms before sunset on Beltane Eve. The sweeping was not for cleanliness. It was to remove any influence left over from the dark half of the year. After the sweep, the hearth fire was allowed to die. The family then lit a new fire from the communal Beltane flame, and the besom was sometimes placed across the threshold to prevent any lingering ill from reentering.
The broom over the door is not a modern decorative trope. It is a documented practice in 19th-century Scottish Highland accounts, recorded by folklorist Alexander Carmichael in the Carmina Gadelica (1900). The broom stayed there through the night of May Eve, when the fair folk were thought to be most active.
Warding and Divination
In parts of Wales and the English West Country, a besom placed bristles-up in a chimney was thought to block witches from entering. Placed bristles-down, it invited good fortune. The orientation mattered as much as the tool.
Brooms also appeared in love divination. A girl who wanted to see her future husband might sweep the house at midnight with a besom, then place it under her bed. The first man to enter the house the next morning, not the dream, was the candidate. The practice is recorded in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878), though Hardy was drawing on Dorset folk custom, not inventing it.
Wedding Customs
Jumping the broom is the best-known survival of besom ritual in the English-speaking world. The custom involved a couple leaping over a broom placed on the ground, with the height of the jump taken as an omen of their success. The practice was documented among Romani communities in Wales and England as early as the 1700s and later carried into African American wedding traditions under enslavement, where legal marriage was denied.
The broom used in jumping was often decorated with ribbons and kept afterward as a household charm. The association between brooms and marriage boundaries, crossing a threshold, entering a new space as a couple, reflects the besom’s deeper role as a marker of transitions.
We light ours in a fireproof bowl on the balcony, not in a cold hearth. But the logic holds.
Modern witchcraft traditions have revived the besom as a ritual tool of purification. The practice is older than most Wiccan innovations: Gerald Gardner, who published Witchcraft Today in 1954, described the besom as one of the traditional tools of the craft, drawn from the trial records and folk customs he studied. But Gardner did not invent its ritual use. He codified what folk magic had already preserved.
In contemporary practice, the besom is used to cleanse a circle before ritual. The practitioner sweeps the perimeter in a counterclockwise direction, then clockwise to close. The physical act of sweeping, the sound of the twigs on the floor, the motion of the body, the collected dust, anchors the intention of purification in a concrete action.
Some traditions reserve the besom for the broom cup or the broom dance, where it is held rather than used for sweeping. Others treat it as a threshold guardian, kept beside the door or hung above it. The material matters: a synthetic broom does not carry the same symbolic weight in a tradition that values natural materials.
The besom is often misunderstood, and some of the confusion comes from well-meaning revivalists.
The besom is not exclusively a flying vehicle. The flight association is late (mid-1600s) and specific to trial confessions. Earlier folk customs treat the besom as a tool of sweeping, warding, and marking boundaries. Flying was a medieval accusation, not a medieval practice.
The besom is not a phallic symbol in any pre-modern source. This interpretation appeared in 20th-century psychological readings of folklore, notably in the work of Robert Graves in The White Goddess (1948). Graves was a poet, not a folklorist, and his claims about the broom’s sexual symbolism are not supported by any primary source from the 1600s or earlier.
A besom is not a corn broom. A corn broom is made from sorghum bristles machine-stitched to a handle. A traditional besom is lashed by hand, with the twigs secured by natural withies, not wire or stitching. The distinction matters in ritual contexts where the materials carry symbolic meaning.
FAQ
Did witches actually fly on brooms? No historical evidence exists for literal flight. The ointment theory and the trance-dance theory offer two plausible explanations for why brooms appear in confessions, but both are interpretations of coerced testimony.
What are besoms made from traditionally? Birch twigs bound to a hazel handle with withies or natural cord. Ash and rowan are also documented. Modern ritual besoms sometimes substitute dried lavender or rosemary for scent.
Can you buy a besom for ritual use? Yes. Traditional handcrafted besoms are available from rural craftspeople in England and Scotland. Mass-produced brooms are not substitutes if the material matters to your practice.
Is jumping the broom a pagan tradition? The custom predates modern paganism. It is documented in Romani, Welsh, and African American wedding traditions from the 1700s onward. Many modern pagan weddings incorporate the practice.
The besom was never about the broom. It was about the threshold. It was about the sweep that separates one state from another: the old fire from the new, the winter from the summer, the unmarried from the married, the ordinary from the sacred. A bundle of birch twigs on a hazel handle does not look like much. It looked like enough to the people who trusted it with their boundaries.
For more on the tools and symbols of European folk magic, see our folk magic guide. The besom shares its boundary-keeping role with other threshold tools like the horseshoe. If you are interested in the seasonal rituals where the besom appears, our Beltane guide covers the full fire festival tradition.