Long after fears of demonic sabbaths atop the Brocken had been generally assigned the status of superstitious lore rather than realistic threats to the well being of society, the Walpurgis Night continued to function as a vehicle for artistic communication on issues that were real and pressing matters of the present. By the mid-eighteenth century, it was sufficiently familiar as a cultural topos to be able to function as a point of convergence for any number of intellectual, religious, and social cross-currents. It thus naturally offered artists a means to deal literally with a calendrical and social event that was familiar even to uneducated individuals while also reflecting allegorically or symbolically on broader matters too sensitive or complex to serve this discursive function effectively. Since these convergent lines of perspective reflected their constantly changing contexts, artists' interpretations of the topic also shaped public perceptions of their artistic identity—the issues that were important to them, where they stood on those issues, and how they related to societal norms and deviations vis-à-vis those issues.