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

by Pam Grossman

found myself attracted to belief systems that felt more individualized and mystical and that fully honored the feminine. Eventually I found my way to modern Paganism,

A hag in a pointy hat, cackling madly as she boils a pot of bones. A scarlet-lipped seductress slipping a potion into the drink of her unsuspecting paramour. A cross-dressing French revolutionary who hears the voices of angels and saints. A perfectly coiffed suburban housewife, twitching her nose to change her circumstances at will, despite her husband’s protests. A woman dancing in New York City’s Central Park with her coven to mark the change of the seasons or a new lunar phase. The witch has a green face and a fleet of flying monkeys. She wears scarves and leather and lace. She lives in Africa; on the island of Aeaea; in a tower; in a chicken-leg hut; in Peoria, Illinois. She lurks in the forests of fairy tales, in the gilded frames of paintings, in the plotlines of sitcoms and YA novels, and between the bars of ghostly blues songs. She is solitary. She comes in threes. She’s a member of a coven. Sometimes she’s a he. She is stunning, she is hideous, she is insidious, she is ubiquitous. She is our downfall. She is our deliverance.

We call “witch” any woman who wants.

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.

Christianity, the dominant American religion, holds up a mother—and a virgin one at that—as the highest ideal for a woman.

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

“Spiritualism became a major—if not the major—vehicle for the spread of women’s rights ideas in mid-nineteenth-century America. . . . While not all feminisists were Spiritualists, all Spiritualists advocated woman’s rights.”

the female form as a conductor of the divine.

These women taught me the true significance of the word craft. That it’s used in reference to both making art and doing magic is no coincidence, for engaging in either act is to do similar things.