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

by Pam Grossman

Orpheus and Eurydice,

see Willow’s story line as a metaphor for addiction or mental illness. It shows how when a person is in pain, they can demolish not only themselves but everyone around them. But it also offers hope that with the right treatment and support, recovery is possible for all involved.

Help me, Artemis. Help me, Nuit. Please, Great Goddesses of Night, hear my call in the dark.

trichotillomania,

books by Nadine Gordimer, Toni Morrison, Geoff Ryman, and Patrick McCabe. We read poetry by Sharon Olds and Molly Peacock and plays by Tom Stoppard

films from Häxan to The Devils to The Witches of Eastwick,

cabal

Early Greek and Roman literature is rife with seductive sorceresses like Circe, Medea, Canidia, and Pamphile,

The Greeks began a systemic classification of different types of magicians by the fifth century BCE, including the goēs who specialized in ghosts, pharmakeis (m) or pharmakides (f) who specialized in potions, and the magos who were generalized service magicians that practiced mageia, which eventually turned into the English word magic.

meted

The Alphabet of Ben Sira.

strix

piquant

Milton’s Paradise Lost

The colonial American Salem witch trials of 1692 came rather late in the order of events and its fatalities were relatively small in number compared to the tens of thousands in Europe.

mid-fifteenth-century texts including Johannes Nider’s Formicarius, the anonymously written Errores gazoriorum, and Claude Tholosan’s Ut magorum et maleficioreum errores

the Malleus Maleficarum or The Hammer of Witches. It’s often stated that this infamous witch-hunting manual was first published in Germany around 1486 by “Kramer and Sprenger,”

“unguents”

Kramer frames all of this by stating that, of the two sexes, it is usually women who are witches for a host of reasons that he details at length: they are more gullible, more impressionable, and more indiscreet than men, and “feebler in both mind and body.” He expounds on all of this for several paragraphs, citing historical and biblical examples, and quoting from other male writers to prove his points.

Most importantly though, Kramer emphasizes that women are more susceptible to the lure of witchcraft because of their inexorable libidos:

“All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is, in women, insatiable.”

phantasmagoric

Michael Harner’s 1973 book Hallucinogens and Shamanism

aplomb

ingénues—and

retinue

bacchanalian.

they were constantly being abused, neglected, and told they were unclean, so why not seek out an empowering alternative?

Sylvia Townsend Warner’s 1926 marvel of a novel Lolly Willowes

tenebrous

hamlet

Virigina Woolf’s 1929 book of lectures A Room of One’s Own,

2015. Robert Eggers’s The Witch

boon

wizened

Mephistophelian

promontory

The US is the only country in the developed world that does not have mandatory maternity leave, and within that same cohort, it also has the highest rate of maternal deaths.)

behest,

(east being the direction of new beginnings,

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.

Mary Douglas wrote in her 1966 book Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo:

menarche.

Hecate, the Greek goddess of witchcraft and necromancy.

The Hearing Trumpet, a novel written by Surrealist luminary Leonora Carrington.

remind me that it’s always a good idea to turn inward and connect with who I want to be rather than how I wish I looked.

Ardern Holt’s book Fancy Dresses Described; or, What To Wear at Fancy Balls

filigreed

Fashionista.com,

sibyls,