immortality (think of the pharaohs of ancient Egypt). Contemporary moguls who spend fortunes to assure that their corpses will be frozen are not likely to be attracted to love spells. Their love is self-love. They want their DNA to endure singly, not to commingle with a lover’s.
So witchcraft remains a woman’s obsession.
John Updike captured the essence of women’s urge to practice witchcraft in his novel The Witches of Eastwick. Disempowered women use their coven to become the secret legislators of their little town. Their magic cannot be separated from their sexuality. That is, of course, the point.
I would love to be a witch. I would love to learn to control the uncontrollable by making secret spells. (Who wouldn’t?) I believe I was really motivated to write Witches because I hoped I would learn to master my own fate through magick. In that I was like Fanny, the heroine of my third novel, who was also drawn into the study of witchcraft as a means of mastery. In Fanny, Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones, my eighteenth-century heroine is a powerless orphan, raped by her guardian, who turns to witchcraft in the hope that it will equalize her power with men. I imagined a coven of proto-feminist witches who attempted to compensate for the female’s lack of power in society by making spells and riding through the air. They initiated Fanny into the craft, and her newfound power stayed with her the rest of her life, helping her in different ways than she first expected. Witchcraft in Fanny proves to be the magic with which mothers inspire daughters and vice versa. It proves to be women’s wisdom—ancient and life-giving.
We have come a long way since the days when it was impossible to imagine a female deity. Now the idea of an inspiring goddess has almost become commonplace. Yet women are still not equal to men politically or economically. Will we ever be? Is our ultimate power still the power to give life? And if so, will we never be forgiven for it?
Since the goddess of birth is also the goddess of death, women are accused of bringing death into the world as well as life. This is why the witch is depicted as young, beautiful, and bedecked with flowers, and also as a frightening crone covered with cobwebs. She represents all the cycles of life, and if she is terrifying, it is because the cycles of life terrify. They are inexorable. They remind us of the mutability of all living things.
In certain periods it seemed less disturbing to worship beautiful young males—Michelangelo’s David, the perfect boys of Platonic discourse—because they could be more easily seen as detached from change and decay. Periodically, our belief systems go through this cataclysm, from the worship of the female cycles of birth and decline to the isolated perfection of young maleness. The Socratic notion that true love was possible only between males represents both the denial of woman and the denial of death. The rejection of females’ bloody cycles, mewling infants, and chthonic vendettas reasserts itself in many cultures. Woman is made the scapegoat for mortality itself. Then she is punished as if she were responsible for all nature’s capriciousness, as if she were Mother Nature incarnate—which of course is true.
Since we inherit a worldview that sees man as reason and woman as nature, we are still in the grip of the beliefs that fostered witch burning. We must understand the witch to understand misogyny in our culture. We must understand the witch to know why women have been denigrated for centuries. The witch is a projection of our worst fears of women. Whether fattening children for food in “Hansel and Gretel” or disappearing into a puddle of ooze in The Wizard of Oz , the witch inhabits a dimension where the primitive fears of children become the wishes of reality.
Love is only a magic poppet away. Mountains of gold glimmer beneath the earth. Enemies disappear with one magic formula, while
So witchcraft remains a woman’s obsession.
John Updike captured the essence of women’s urge to practice witchcraft in his novel The Witches of Eastwick. Disempowered women use their coven to become the secret legislators of their little town. Their magic cannot be separated from their sexuality. That is, of course, the point.
I would love to be a witch. I would love to learn to control the uncontrollable by making secret spells. (Who wouldn’t?) I believe I was really motivated to write Witches because I hoped I would learn to master my own fate through magick. In that I was like Fanny, the heroine of my third novel, who was also drawn into the study of witchcraft as a means of mastery. In Fanny, Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones, my eighteenth-century heroine is a powerless orphan, raped by her guardian, who turns to witchcraft in the hope that it will equalize her power with men. I imagined a coven of proto-feminist witches who attempted to compensate for the female’s lack of power in society by making spells and riding through the air. They initiated Fanny into the craft, and her newfound power stayed with her the rest of her life, helping her in different ways than she first expected. Witchcraft in Fanny proves to be the magic with which mothers inspire daughters and vice versa. It proves to be women’s wisdom—ancient and life-giving.
We have come a long way since the days when it was impossible to imagine a female deity. Now the idea of an inspiring goddess has almost become commonplace. Yet women are still not equal to men politically or economically. Will we ever be? Is our ultimate power still the power to give life? And if so, will we never be forgiven for it?
Since the goddess of birth is also the goddess of death, women are accused of bringing death into the world as well as life. This is why the witch is depicted as young, beautiful, and bedecked with flowers, and also as a frightening crone covered with cobwebs. She represents all the cycles of life, and if she is terrifying, it is because the cycles of life terrify. They are inexorable. They remind us of the mutability of all living things.
In certain periods it seemed less disturbing to worship beautiful young males—Michelangelo’s David, the perfect boys of Platonic discourse—because they could be more easily seen as detached from change and decay. Periodically, our belief systems go through this cataclysm, from the worship of the female cycles of birth and decline to the isolated perfection of young maleness. The Socratic notion that true love was possible only between males represents both the denial of woman and the denial of death. The rejection of females’ bloody cycles, mewling infants, and chthonic vendettas reasserts itself in many cultures. Woman is made the scapegoat for mortality itself. Then she is punished as if she were responsible for all nature’s capriciousness, as if she were Mother Nature incarnate—which of course is true.
Since we inherit a worldview that sees man as reason and woman as nature, we are still in the grip of the beliefs that fostered witch burning. We must understand the witch to understand misogyny in our culture. We must understand the witch to know why women have been denigrated for centuries. The witch is a projection of our worst fears of women. Whether fattening children for food in “Hansel and Gretel” or disappearing into a puddle of ooze in The Wizard of Oz , the witch inhabits a dimension where the primitive fears of children become the wishes of reality.
Love is only a magic poppet away. Mountains of gold glimmer beneath the earth. Enemies disappear with one magic formula, while
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