Saul and the Witch of Endor

The date on this panel is exact to the day, 29 November 1526, written on a small slip at the bottom beside the painter's initials. King Saul, facing the Philistines, asks a woman at Endor to call up the dead prophet Samuel. Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen pushes that Bible episode to the margins. The king waits with his soldiers at the side, the prophet rises from his grave through a ruined arch, and the battle in which Saul dies is a distant skirmish. The foreground belongs to a witches' sabbath. The sorceress sits bare to the waist inside a chalk circle, among other witches, satyrs and strange creatures on the ground and in the air. The Rijksmuseum links details such as the book of spells and a candle made of human fat to magic handbooks of the time. The banner above cites the passage as 1 Kings 28, the Latin numbering for what we call 1 Samuel.