The Love Potion is a 1903 painting by the English artist Evelyn De Morgan depicting a witch with a black cat familiar at her feet.

[2] The Love Potion pushed the boundaries of society's expectations of women by "exploring the nature of female authority through the practice of sorcery".

The sorceress is dressed in an ornate gold gown, which is symbolic of her mastery of skill and the final stage of the alchemical system of progression toward salvation.

Her mastery is further evidenced by leather bound books on the shelf, which were popular alchemy texts during the late nineteenth century.

Although the sorceress in The Love Potion is not a prostitute, the purpose of the cat may still work to symbolize similar taboo practices such as alchemy, which was also frowned upon in Edwardian society.

However, her spiritual iconography offers the viewer an interesting perspective:  "She uses her spiritualist vocabulary to subvert and renegotiates traditional roles and stereotypes of women, providing instead a strong, powerful, skilled, intelligent protagonist, capable of reaching the enlightenment she herself sought.

According to Smith this spiritual theory, this process involved several steps: "from calcination ('the death of the profane'), solution ('the purification of matter'), sublimation ('the suffering resulting from the mystic detachment from the world and the dedication to spiritual striving'), to philosophic congelation, a harmonious union of opposites, especially between the male or stable principle and the female or variable principle".