Collecting Witches

Halloween is almost upon us. For pagans, it’s a sacred holiday—a holy
day, which is what “holiday” means. It’s a lot like
Día de los Muertos, when we gather in ritual space to remember our
ancestors and friends deceased from this earth but living in other worlds
and welcome them back to our world if they want to come for a short visit.
For the last decade or so, however, intolerant people have decided we should
not see Halloween associated with anything holy, even if the word itself
comes from “hallowed,” as in “hallowed be thy name” in the famous prayer.
These people want to force their children and everyone else to believe
our holy day is nothing more than a mere harvest festival or a just a night
for stupid zombies, dead presidents, Frankenstein monsters, cartoon characters,
and ghouls, spiders, and superheroes to run around.

Halloween’s coming. Just look in any store. What do you see for sale in
September and October? What we saw back in the mid-80s, when I first started
collecting witches, was a multitude of witches. That was during the second
wave of feminism, when
Marija Gimbutas was excavating the sites and writing about the civilization
of the Goddess in Old Europe. When
Z. Budapest  introduced feminist spirituality to feminist politics
at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. When Starhawk wrote the first edition
of

The Spiral Dance.  When Max Dashu was researching and archiving
her
Suppressed Histories. When other ovular books were being published.
Yes, “ovular.” A book on feminist spirituality can hardly be called “seminal.”
(Books of feminist wisdom do not squirt out of Freudian symbols.) In those
days, we were reinventing an old religion, rehabilitating the word “witch,”
and reconstituting the wisdom of witches. Today, as intolerant people are
trying to take us back to the 1950s (when the world was mostly witch-free),
I guess we need to start all over again.

My collection currently hovers—note that I use that verb on purpose—at
between 340 and 350 witches that range in size from an inch tall to as
big as a Muppet. I’ve done witch censuses around my home, so I’m pretty
sure I’ve got them all counted. But “one never knows. Do one.” (Thank you,
Fats Waller.) Some of my witches are expensive works of art, some are authentic
collectibles, some are majorly cheap and tacky. That’s OK. I cherish them
all.




Here are photos of a few of my witches. I can’t show them all because
that would make this blog as big as a movie to download. I bought Hazel
(though not her red chair) at Nordstrom. I bought the Halloween pumpkin
at the gift shop of the Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles. I
have a witch riding a spider that I bought at the St. Mary Hospital gift
shop. I have five Barbies dressed in witchy clothing, four of them, including
Barbie as Samantha from
Bewitched, in their original Mattell boxes. The fifth I bought at
the Long Beach WomanSpirit solstice fair several years ago. “Does Mattell
know you dressed Barbie up like this?” I asked the artist. He refused to
answer. I have Elphaba and Galinda in a Time Dragon Clock snow globe that
I bought at the Ozdust Boutique. I have Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, Magrat,
and Tiffany Aching from Discworld. They’re tiny pewter game pieces, but
I have no idea what the game might be. I have two small Madame Alexander
Oz witches that came (I think) with Happy Meals. I have a gorgeous witch
teapot that I bought in an extremely expensive gift store. I have witches
riding owls and one riding a goose, two riding in vegetable-cars, and one
as the top of a nutcracker, plus several on their customary broomsticks.
I have witches that cost under $10 and witches that cost well over $100.
There are forty-odd witches on shelves above my bed. These are all stuffed
cloth dolls because if the Big One strikes, I don’t want witches made of
wood, resin, metal, wire, ceramic, bone, and any combination thereof raining
down on me in the middle of the night. When I look up from my pillow, I
see witchy feet.




For twenty-five years, as surely as September comes ’round, I go shopping
for witches. I used to go to malls. I once found a large, expensive witch
in a large, expensive garden store in a mall. I also go to Michaels and
Pic ’n’ Sav (now called Big Lots). At a marketplace here in Long Beach,
I used to start at a mailbox place that also sold gifts. Then I walked
around the corner to a shop called Rainbows that sold flowers, candles,
and toys, including witches. Next, to Home Economics, a store that sold
mostly kitchenware, plus witches in October. Then to the Hallmark store
and a huge fabric store, then to a store that sold high-priced crystal
and tableware, and finally to a children’s store. There were witches in
all these stores. But many of the stores are gone now, thanks to the Republican
recession, and the ones that are still in business are mostly witchless.
Why is that? Intolerance and intimidation.




I had a long chat with my friend Gregory the other day. Gregory owns a
shop called Babcock & Cooke, and I’ve been buying witches from him
every single year since at least 1988. He and Mike, who works there, joke
that they always know it’s fall when they see me come in the door. Over
the years, Gregory has told me about the buying trips he used to make across
the country looking for witches and other items to sell in the store. About
ten years ago, he started telling me how he was having trouble finding
witches. Intolerant people were forcing artists and stores to abandon witches
because, they said, Halloween and witches and anything pagan came straight
from the depths of hell, and if you’re gonna celebrate anything at the
end of October, it has to be a tame little harvest festival. Gregory has
told me many stories about the intimidation of artists whose work he used
to buy. Just last week, he told me about another company that is being
forced to shut down.




You can still go on line and buy witches (which I did about five minutes
ago), but it’s harder and harder to find witches in stores. Try it yourself.
Go out and look. If you find a good-looking witch, buy her. Support artists.
Support witches. I’m persistent. I hope I can keep finding witches. Happy
Hallows Eve. And thanks to Alexis, my web designer, for sizing the photos
in this blog for me.