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

by Pam Grossman

Dario Argento’s 1977 horror film Suspiria.

pythoness

weird comes from the Old English word wyrd, which means “fate.”

beget

(These Spiritualist practices would then spread to Latin countries under the name Spiritism or espiritismo, largely due to the books of a Frenchman who wrote under the name Allan Kardec, though it’s important to note that his ideas were incorporated into already existing practices of ancestor worship in these regions.)

rarefied position of getting to transmit meaningful messages to large groups of people. Because of this, Spiritualism was deeply interlaced with various social justice movements, from abolitionism to children’s rights to feminism.

Victoria Woodhull

sobriquet

“Victoria’s belief in spirit guidance empowered her and her followers to challenge the law, the church, and the entrenched male establishment.”

comfortable with my decision to make other things instead of babies,

1915 called The Paintings for the Temple.

ovoid,

Rosicrucianism, Theosophy,

coterie

Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a society of artists and freethinkers who gathered to study occult teachings and engage in magical rituals.

members gained knowledge about such topics as Kabbalah, astrology, alchemy, and astral travel

Independent and Rectified Order of the Golden Dawn.

Pamela Colman Smith

first full biography of her, Pamela Colman Smith: The Untold Story.

Remedios Varo’s title for her 1960 painting, Nacer de Nuevo, translates to “Born Again.”

ephemera.

Unexpected Journeys: The Art and Life of Remedios Varo by Janet A. Kaplan.

Carrington’s paintings often depict rituals and transformations taking place in kitchens or involving food.

So often the female sphere is overlooked, taken for granted, or considered banal. Carrington and Varo showed that the everyday tasks and arenas of the feminine sphere were actually sites of enchantment.

“She read Alexandre Dumas, Jules Verne, and Edgar Allan Poe, as well as literature of mysticism and Eastern thought,”

their esoteric interests ran the gamut, including research into alchemy, Kabbalah, the I-Ching, astrology, sacred geometry, legends of the Holy Grail, Sufi mysticism, Tibetan Tantra, and Zen Buddhism, as well as the writings of Carl Jung, Robert Graves, Helena Blavatsky, and Meister Eckhart. They also attended meetings of the followers of mystics G. I. Gurdjieff and P. D. Ouspensky.

Mercado de Sonora (known as the Witchcraft Market),

kundalini

Yggdrasil, the Norse “world tree,”

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.

forfend,

thaumaturgical

idyll,

Robin Rose Bennett, the Green Witch of New York City.

I could be independent and interdependent.

In 2009, UNICEF estimated that there were fifty thousand street children in the Congo, and that as many as 70 percent of them had been accused of witchcraft and cast out because of it. Complicating matters is the fact that it’s not only indigenous beliefs that cause this: the spread of Christianity is also a factor.

The 2017 magical realism film I Am Not a Witch was based on director Rungano Nyoni’s

public fear of magic can exact great cost from individuals who are believed to be the conjurors of it.

Hermione is always the smartest person in the room but gets talked over,

invective

New witchcraft magazines like Sabat, Ravenous Zine, and Catland Books’s Venefica

new media platforms including The Hoodwitch, Sanctuary, and The Numinous

1971 Disney film Bedknobs and Broomsticks with the words “This is Eglantine Price. Eglantine learned Witchcraft to fight the Nazis. Be Like Eglantine. Hex the Fascists.”

Santería, the Afro-Caribbean religion that involves the worship of ancestors and deities or orishas.

Samantha Stephens’s character, a witch who must pretend to be “normal” to fit society’s standards, is a metaphor for having to dumb down one’s capabilities in order to make oneself more acceptable to small-minded people—something

There are still many contexts here in the West where declaring actual belief in witchcraft is to open oneself up to mistrust or mischaracterization at best, or accusations of blasphemy, mental instability, or evil-doing at worst.

seeing an archetype that’s so deeply linked to outsiderism being adopted by those who seem to represent the very privilege and status to which witches are in direct opposition.

white sage (which is said to be overharvested, and which many find an offensive appropriation of Indigenous American practices),

that’s where things get confusing, and it can seem as though the goalposts for what a “real witch” is are constantly moving. In truth, no one owns witches,

frenetic