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

by Pam Grossman

She’s a pariah, a persona non grata, a bogeywoman to defeat and discard. Though she has often been deemed a destructive entity, in actuality a witchy woman has historically been far more susceptible to attack than an inflictor of violence herself.

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.

As we age, we’re supposed to stop filling our heads with such “nonsense.” Unicorns are to be traded in for Barbie dolls (though both are mythical creatures, to be sure). We lose our tooth fairies, walk away from our wizards. Dragons get slain on the altar of youth. Most kids grow out of their “magic phase.” I grew further into mine.

Witches, I learned from the book, are complicated creatures, sources of great comfort and great terror. And no matter how good a witch might be, she would often become the target of misunderstanding at best and persecution at worst. The witch is always at risk. Nevertheless, she persists.

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. Virgins, whores, daughters, mothers, wives—each of these is defined by whom she is sleeping with or not, the care that she is giving or that is given to her, or some sort of symbiotic debt that she must eventually pay. 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.

I call myself witch for other reasons, too. It is a means of identifying how I carry myself in the world, and the kind of energetic current I wish to be a conduit for. At any given time, it can signify that I am a feminist; someone who celebrates freedom for all and who will fight against injustice using every tool at her disposal; a person who values intuition and self-expression; a kindred spirit with other people who favor the unconventional, the underground, and the uncanny. Or it can simply refer to the fact that I am a woman who dares to speak her own mind and display the full gamut of human emotion—behavior that is still met by society with judgment or disdain. Like many others these days, I use this word with both absolute conviction and with my tongue in my cheek. And like many such epithets, it is loaded and coded. I’m thoughtful about how I use it, when and why and with whom, because it is a word that carries weight, even as it liberates. It resists being flattened or reduced. It bristles at binary. And that’s also why I love it, because, hey, so do I.

What the witch trials actually proved is that non-magical human beings are capable of the very malice and murder that they fear from so-called witches.

Michelet suggests that the word witch was a slur that the Church used against any gifted female healer or “High-priestess of Nature.”

As Gage writes: “Whatever the pretext made for witchcraft persecution we have abundant proof that the so-called ‘witch’ was among the most profoundly scientific persons of the age. The church having forbidden its offices and all external methods of knowledge to woman, was profoundly stirred with indignation at her having through her own wisdom, penetrated into some of the most deeply subtle secrets of nature: and it was a subject of debate during the middle ages if learning for woman was not an additional capacity for evil, as owing to her, knowledge had first been introduced in the world.”

From her perspective, calling brilliant women “witches” was a way for the Church to demonize them and rationalize bringing about their demise. (Or as Lisa Simpson would put it 115 years later, “Why is it whenever a woman is confident and powerful, they call her a witch?”)

And both of these things—female delight and female desire—are so often demonized. We call “witch” any woman who wants.

Feeling like a freak, an outsider, or misunderstood is, ironically, a pretty common experience. We watch the witch with great interest, because some part of us wants her to win. After all, we too fear being crushed, drowned, vanquished by the alpha Dorothys. Each of us harbors a secret wish to be spotlit and adored, warts and all.

So often we try to classify. To put one another into distinct, labeled envelopes, and then seal them shut with the flick of a tongue. We resist nuance at every turn, and that goes tenfold for women. They are prudes or sluts, passive or pushy, babes or bitches, harlots or hags. If you show interest in fashion and beauty and sparkly dresses, you’re considered vapid, a lightweight, and dismissed or discredited. If you voice your opinions or ambition, or talk too often or laugh too loud, you are domineering, thirsty, a harpy, a nag.

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.

When you’re a weird kid, you learn to put guardrails around the things you love. You keep them hidden heart-deep, lest someone try to take them, mock them, or co-opt them out of cruelty or just plain clumsiness.

HISTORIAN JULES MICHELET understood the attraction of the Prince of Darkness when he wrote the aforementioned sympathetic witch book, La Sorcière, in 1862. He felt that you couldn’t blame women of the Middle Ages for turning to Satanism. According to him, they were constantly being abused, neglected, and told they were unclean, so why not seek out an empowering alternative? In his words: “The Devil only, women’s ally of old and her confidant in the Garden, and the Witch, the perverse creature who does everything backwards and upside down, in direct contradiction to the world of religion, ever thought of unhappy womanhood, ever dared to tread custom underfoot and care for her health in spite of her own prejudices.”

At the end of the book, she and the devil meet at last, and she tells him that he has saved her: I think you are a kind of black knight, wandering about and succoring decayed gentlewomen. . . . That’s why we become witches: to show our scorn of pretending life’s a safe business, to satisfy our passion for adventure. . . . One doesn’t become a witch to run round being harmful, or to run round being helpful either, a district visitor on a broomstick. It’s to escape all that—to have a life of one’s own.

WHEN ALL IS said and done, these Mephistophelian fictions beg the question: How much agency do these witch women actually have? Haven’t they just traded one patriarchal prison for another? After all, the devil is, by all accounts, a dude, and now he is their master and keeper. Must phallocentrism exist even in the inferno? But for me, that oversimplifies the point. I think these tales about devils and witches represent something more, for they are commentaries upon the fallacy of female deficiency. They offer a different kind of fantasy: a vision of a world where women can live unrestrained and unashamed. In these stories, the witch is lit up at last: not from being burned at the stake, but rather from the blaze of her own inner fire.

At the opening of her 2012 exhibition of scratchy, nude self-portraits, the globally acclaimed artist Tracey Emin said, “My work is about not wanting to have a child. In society, if you don’t want to have children, people think that you’re a bit of a witch.” And she’s right. Women who don’t have children are treated as worrisome. Is there something wrong with her body? Is there something wrong with her mind? Does she envy my family? Is she wishing us ill? At best, a woman of childbearing age or older who doesn’t have kids sparks curiosity. At worst, she’s seen as a violation of the natural order.

The witch’s plotlines rarely focus on the desire to be a mother. She’s busy making other things.

Denying women birth control is to prevent them from choosing if and when they become mothers, and this decision impacts every aspect of their lives from their economic mobility to their mental and physical well-being.

But it was Roman naturalist and writer, Pliny the Elder who popularized the idea that menstruating women were possessors of dark magic. At the end of the first century CE, he wrote the following in his thirty-seven-volume Naturalis Historia or Natural History: Contact with the monthly flux of women turns new wine sour, makes crops wither, kills grafts, dries seeds in gardens, causes the fruit of trees to fall off, dims the bright surface of mirrors, dulls the edge of steel and the gleam of ivory, kills bees, rusts iron and bronze, and causes a horrible smell to fill the air. Dogs who taste the blood become mad, and their bite becomes poisonous as in rabies. The Dead Sea, thick with salt, cannot be drawn asunder except by a thread soaked in the poisonous fluid of the menstruous blood. A thread from an infected dress is sufficient. Linen, touched by the woman while boiling and washing it in water, turns black. So magical is the power of women during their monthly periods that they say that hailstorms and whirlwinds are driven away if menstrual fluid is exposed to the flashes of lightning.

Rarer, though, are instances when the protagonist of a story is the crone herself.

Story idea?

“People under seventy and over seven are very unreliable if they are not cats.”

The fashion witch is powerful because she upends the expectations of female display in general. While she may be alluring, she’s not inviting. Witch wear is wonderfully unwelcoming. It says, “Don’t cross me,” or as Carmen Maria Machado put it in a November 2018 Harper’s Bazaar article, witch fashion is “Luxe meets feeling yourself meets fuck off.”

While a witchy wardrobe can certainly be sexy at times, it doesn’t tend to prioritize body consciousness. More often than not witchy fashion is about loose layers that veil the form or fabrics that cloak and cover. It conceals more than it reveals. It creates a shroud, albeit one emblazoned with spangles and talismanic symbols. And so the wearer is self-modulating and self-protected, a walking woven spell. If she’s shocking, it’s because she wants to be. This witch is a voluntary disturbance. Women have been told over many lifetimes that their bodies are wrong and unbecoming—that they belong to other people. The fashion witch is self-possessed, first and foremost. She controls how much of herself she shows and shares. Whether others consider her anatomy a monstrosity, or a thing of majesty, is of little concern. She knows her body is her own. And that is true power.

The fear of women with paranormal abilities has been with us for centuries. The Bible certainly doesn’t mince words when it comes to witchery. Its most notorious remark on the matter is when God tells Moses during their law-of-the-land debriefing, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” (Exodus 22:18, King James Version). Or as Leviticus 20:27 puts it, “A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death: they shall stone them with stones: their blood shall be upon them.” Or Deutoronomy 18:10: “There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch.”

All of this is to say that, according to the Old Testament at least, being a person with special powers was a deal-breaker for the Big Guy in the Sky (unless he bestowed the powers himself, which he usually did to men such as Moses). This meant that if you were an occult practitioner, the Lord’s adherents would make sure you paid for it with your life.

We may never know the truth. But it’s appealing to think about Stone Age art sorceresses, because the annoying fact is that for most of human civilization, it has by and large been men who have been allowed to create work for public consumption, or who have at least gotten most of the accolades. And because what male artists made was often images of women, they could dictate what was considered desirable or repugnant, both aesthetically and behaviorally, in regard to the opposite sex. This is particularly clear when we delve into the topic of witches in art.

But regarding the advent of European abstract art, two witchy women beat them all to the punch: Georgiana Houghton and Hilma af Klint.

Unbeknownst to her, Smith created the sort of legacy that artists dream about. That she was paid so little for her work and received no royalties to speak of is a tragedy. Though she kept illustrating and exhibiting her art after the deck’s release, she continued to struggle financially and never achieved the sort of recognition she hoped for in her lifetime. 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.

AS WE’VE SEEN, when someone describes themselves as a “witch,” it can mean any number of things, since the term has now expanded beyond spiritual descriptor. But no matter the fluid intentions behind it, when a person uses it to refer to herself, these days it’s more likely to be an act of self-fortification. One knowingly takes on the word with all of its terrifying history and becomes stronger and braver in doing so.

“. . . witches aren’t monsters, they’re just women. They’re fuckin’ women who cum and giggle and play in the night. And that’s why everybody wants to set ’em on fire, ’cause they’re so fucking jealous!”

Sylvia Plath’s well-documented mental health struggles are alluded to in her 1959 poem “Witch Burning.” On its surface, it is about a witch who is being put to death on a pyre, but it can also be read as a metaphor for being consumed by the flames of depression: “My ankles brighten. Brightness ascends my thighs. / I am lost, I am lost, in the robes of all this light.”

The metaphor of witches and writers is particularly apt when one considers that the words grammar and grimoire are sprouted from the same etymological seed.

There is a reason that the archetype of the witch resonates with those who feel different or oppressed: she is an outsider herself, after all. In declaring allegiance to her, one forges a sacred bond with anyone who has been overlooked, underrepresented, pushed aside, or cast out.

The redemption of witches and the ascension of women will be forever interlinked. That both are happening at this moment in time is no coincidence. Each is a reflection of the other. Witch. Woman.

The witch’s mother is Magic, but her father is Fear. She was born from a disdain for the feminine, a hatred of the female body and how it creates and ages and wants and is wanted. To love her is to embrace this tragedy and to turn her trauma into triumph.

The witch is a relative of goddesses and fairies and devils and monsters, yet is wholly her own breed because of one crucial differential: she is usually human. And so we not only relate to her, we can become her. In choosing to take on her mantle, we cloak ourselves in her many associations, both her fictions and her truths. And in bringing our selves to her, we further add to her meaning. This is how she has survived for so long, and why she thrives still. She is a creature of accretion.

Her route to the top of popular consciousness has been riddled with contradiction. She’s been dreaded and desired, executed and exalted. She’s a murderer and a martyr, a being who honors nature even as she defies it. She’s surrounded by beasts and demons and spirits and sisters, and she stands entirely alone. And that is why those who feel outside or “other” are so drawn to her. She offers an under...

I believe her upsurge of popularity is indicative not of a trend, but rather a sea change. May more of us feel the pull of her nocturnal tide. But let us also realize that this waxing age of the witch has come at great cost. The very fact that so many of us can now joyfully speak the witch’s name aloud is a glorious thing. But we must remember the many thousands of people who have had their lives threatened or taken in her name as well—and this continues around the world to this day. To call oneself a witch with pride, whether ironically or with full-throated sincerity, is a marker of great privilege. Though it’s never an entirely safe thing to do, those of us who use this moniker in public are very fortunate to feel able to take the risk.