Pointed hat

We've an incredible jumping-off point for this, thanks to a source sent in by you, our listener.

It's a brilliant piece from Mental Floss titled Why Are Witches Depicted With Pointy Hats?, written by Chelsea Thatcher, and it was published on October 11, 2026.

A fantastic article.

Really fantastic.

It really is.

Film has an unparalleled ability to dictate our collective memory.

To be fair to history, witches were occasionally depicted with pointy hats in woodcuts and engravings during the actual trial eras.

We've seen some of those early colonial prints, but they weren't universal.

They started showing them with pointed hats on their heads.

And most people who work on later Christian art have been saying for, for decades, many, many decades, the pointed hat is the sign of a Jew.

And, uh, the first thing I had to sort of realize and remind my readers is that it's not the sign of the Jew the first time it's introduced on the head of a Jew.

How can it signify Jew if nobody ever seen it on the head of a Jew before? I did establish that it had nothing to do with the kinds of hats that Jews wore.

Jews didn't even cover their heads traditionally.

Kippah were not introduced until the 16th century.

Um, never mind odd-looking pointed hats.

So I determined that these pointed hats, um, had, had kind of two origins.