Waking the Witch: Reflections on Women, Magic, and Power (Witchcraft Bestseller)

by Pam Grossman

I do know this for sure though: show me your witches, and I’ll show you your feelings about women. The fact that the resurgence of feminism and the popularity of the witch are ascending at the same time is no coincidence: the two are reflections of each other.

At any given time, I might use the word witch to signify my spiritual beliefs, my supernatural interests, or my role as an unapologetically complex, dynamic female in a world that prefers its women to be smiling and still. I use it with equal parts sincerity and salt: with a bow to a rich and often painful history of worldwide witchcraft, and a wink to other members of our not-so-secret society of people who fight from the fringes for the liberty to be our weirdest and most wondrous selves. Magic is made in the margins.

More than anything, though, the witch is a shining and shadowy symbol of female power and a force for subverting the status quo.

Whether the witch is depicted as villainous or valorous, she is always a figure of freedom—both its loss and its gain. She is perhaps the only female archetype who is an independent operator.

The witch owes nothing. That is what makes her dangerous. And that is what makes her divine. Witches have power on their own terms. They have agency. They create. They praise. They commune with the spiritual realm, freely and free of any mediator. They metamorphose, and they make things happen. They are change agents whose primary purpose is to transform the world as it is into the world they would like it to be.

The witch is the ultimate feminist icon because she is a fully rounded symbol of female oppression and liberation.

I honor nature and the divinity that is inside me and all living beings, and I strive to spread light and to be in service of something higher than myself: Spirit, the gods, the Goddess, the Mystery—that which language is too restrictive to name.

Doing witchcraft is a way for us to strive to be the best version of ourselves, to honor the sacred, and ultimately to try to make the planet a better place. It also allows for the fact that both light and darkness can offer great gifts.

female delight and female desire—are so often demonized. We call “witch” any woman who wants.

Yes, I’m a good witch and a good person. But I also embrace complexity. I intend to wear a black cape over my proverbial pink gown. To laugh too loud and get real mad and defend myself and the people I care about. I want more out of life than to float gently along in a bubble. I want to wear the pointy hat and the crown. To live as vividly as I can, as I am. To be wicked and winsome and wild and whole. I want to be more than either/or.

Accused witches often had fewer children than the typical woman; sometimes they had none at all.” It was believed that the witch’s jealousy of larger families might prompt her to curse them, to punish them for having what she is supposed to want. But even though natal care and medical knowledge on the whole have advanced significantly since then, the image of the monstrous antimother is still with us. Even today, in this age of “you do you” self-actualization, the choice to not even try to have children is met with suspicion.

I aspire to be such a woman to the children I know. To swirl into their lives with great magic and devotion but to have the liberty to leave when the winds change. I’m lucky I have that choice.

there’s another insidious implication to the anti–birth control argument, which brings us back to where we started: that a woman only has value when she is breeding; ergo fornicating for pleasure and without the intent of producing offspring is unnatural or shameful behavior.

despite all scientific developments, the greatest mysteries of our existence still revolve around death, destiny, and the invisible realm: What happens when we die? Are there ghosts or spirits, and can we interact with them? Do we control our fate, or are we being pulled by celestial strings? It is witches—Shakespearean sages and suffragist-Spiritualists alike—who remind us that, after thousands of years of asking, we still don’t have any clear answers to these questions.

It’s hard to say which is more galling: the paltry sum she received, or the repeated lack of credit for her tarot designs. To this day, the Rider-Waite deck is a household name. Pamela Colman Smith is not.

To practice in a group requires both a loosening of self-consciousness and a tightening grip on the rudder of sincerity. You have to care, and you have to let others see you caring. And you have to bear witness to their caring in turn.

Gardner further cemented two crucial ideas into popular consciousness: First, that witches are positive and holy beings, not diabolical at all. And second, that their powers increase when working with other like-minded—or like-spirited—individuals, and that this pooled transformative energy can be directed toward achieving a shared goal.

the witch is a being who honors all of life; therefore activism is a large component of her practice. As she sees it, witchcraft is a process of dissolving estrangement—or rather, the false idea of estrangement—from other living beings. And once you do that, you realize that taking care of others is a holy responsibility, because everything is interconnected. Involvement with ecology and environmentalism, civil rights discourse, and antiwar efforts are all included in Starhawk’s spiritual system, which she now classifies as “modern earth-based spirituality and ecofeminism,”