The contemporary image of the witch incorporates detritus from many religious sects over many millennia. Like the wall of a Crusader castle in the Middle East, it rests upon a foundation of remnants from a variety of periods. Like Hecate and Diana, the witch is associated with the moon and lunar power. Like Aphrodite and Venus, she can make love potions and fly through the air. Each attribute of the witch once belonged to a goddess.
All over the ancient world goddesses were worshiped. These goddesses represented womanhood distilled to its ultimate essence. Ishtar, Astoreth, Aphrodite (as she was eventually known), held sway over love, procreation, fecundity—and most of the gods obeyed her urgings. Many-breasted, in charge of flowers, wheat, all blossoming, she echoed something primal in the human heart. Born of woman ourselves, we find godhead natural in womanhood. Any faith that renounces the mother is bound to see her creep back in another form—as Mary perhaps, the mother of the sacrificed god.
Witchcraft in Europe and America is essentially this harking back to female divinity within a patriarchal culture. If you insist long enough that God is the father, a nostalgia for the mother goddess will be born. If you exclude women from church rites, they will practice their magic in the fields, in forests, in their kitchens. The point is, female power cannot be suppressed; it can only be driven underground.
Take a little honey in a jar. Write your deepest wish on a bit of brown paper and hide it in the honey. Focus all your energy on your intention (which must be sweet), and eventually your wish will be granted. Intention counts for everything. It must be positive. And the more witches there are sitting in a circle practicing communal intention, the more potency the magic will have. The desire for magic cannot be eradicated. Even the most supposedly rational people attempt to practice magic in love and war. We simultaneously possess the most primitive of brain stems and the most sophisticated of cortices. The imperatives of each coexist uneasily.
We may even prefer to see the witch as an outsider, a practitioner of the forbidden arts, because that makes her even more powerful. Perhaps we are ashamed of our wish to control others and would rather pay a maker of magic than confess to these wishes ourselves. Perhaps we would rather not be in charge of magic that might backfire.
Since we believe witches can make wishes real, we both need and fear them. If they have the power to kill our enemies, couldn’t they also kill us? If they have the power to grant love, couldn’t they also snatch it away? Witches remind us of the darkness of human wishes. That is why we periodically find reasons to burn them.
In
The White Goddess,
Robert Graves asserts that all real poetry is an invocation of the triple goddess of antiquity—she who controls birth, death, procreation—and that it is the poet’s fealty to her that determines the authenticity of his work. “The main theme of poetry,” Graves says, “is the relations of man and woman, rather than those of man and man, as the Apollonian classicists would have it.” The male poet woos the goddess with words in order to partake of her magic. He is at once her supplicant and her priest. Where does this leave the female poet? She must become an incarnation of the triple goddess herself, incorporating all her aspects, creative and destructive. This is why it is so dangerous to be a female poet. It is a little like being a witch.
Adelaide Crapsey’s
5
poem “The Witch” evokes this well:
When I was a girl by Nilus stream
I watched the desert stars arise;
My lover, he who dreamed the Sphinx,
learned all his dreaming from my eyes.
I bore in Greece a burning name,
And I have been in Italy
Madonna to a painter-lad,
And mistress to a Medici.
And have you heard (and I have heard)
Of puzzled men with decorous mien.
Who judged—the wench knows far too much—
And hanged her on the Salem green.
Adolescence is a time when witchcraft exercises a great fascination. Disempowered by society and overwhelmed with physical changes, teenage girls fall in love with the idea of forming covens. Whatever bric-a-brac of magic is around they will pick up and shape to their own uses.
Writing a book about witches made me a heroine to my friends’ daughters. It also became the most banned of all my books—probably because the idea of female godhead is still anathema to many people. Once, I received a Polaroid picture of
Witches
that showed it burned around the edges. The letter accompanying it said: “My father burned your book. Could you send me another copy?” So much for the efficacy of censorship.
The more disempowered people are, the more they long for magic, which explains why magic becomes the province of women in a sexist society. And what are most spells about? Procuring love, with usually, the hexing of enemies running a close second. When men turn to magic, they are more likely to seek infinite power (think of Dr. Faustus) or infinite 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 blossoms spring up with another. The witch can vaporize people at will, keep spring on earth all year long, make the lion lie down with the lamb. She can fly and enable others to fly. She can abolish death.
Surely we would like to be like her, and a book about witchcraft can only be a beginning. Like all secret arts, witchcraft is learned by apprenticeship. Its deepest secrets are printed nowhere. One witch hands down her
grimoire
to her successor, who alone can decipher its coded spells and recipes. If a true witch were to publish her secrets for all to see, she would immediately lose her powers.
“Power shared is power lost,” say the witches. Legend has it that true books on witchcraft have at times been published, but the pages spontaneously burned to cinders before they could be bound. So I had to be very careful when I published
Witches.
Like the weaver of a great rug who does not wish to arouse the wrath of Allah, I had to introduce small errors. I had to code certain messages and print my recipes and spells with missing ingredients or missing steps. Otherwise the book would go up in smoke before it could be read. But the clever reader, the witch-to-be, the natural adept of
magick,
will read about witchcraft holding in her hand a pen dipped in invisible ink. Guided by the unseen force, that hand will supply whatever is missing from my imperfect text. With practice, with deep concentration, the hand of the adept will fill in the missing formulae. Just as the Delphic oracle uttered words whose import she could not divine, the hand of the true witch-in-training will scribble the truth. Watch for those words. They are all the
magick
you will need to know.
5
BLOOD AND GUTS: A WOMAN WRITER IN THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY
It was better to be in a jail where you could bang the walls than in a jail you could not see.
—CARSON MCCULLERS
In Cynthia Ozick’s short story
“Virility,” a talentless male poet gains fame by publishing the verses of his talented aunt under his own name. The book is entitled
Virility
and is accordingly praised for its “masculine” virtues: strength, power, mastery. The poet wins the homage of critics and the love of women, collects large lecture fees, and for a little while enjoys the kind of unambivalent success that is possible for men in a man’s world. When the aunt dies, the poet breaks down. In a fit of remorse, he publishes her last poems under her own name and confesses his imposture. Do critics thereby conclude that genius has no gender? Do they praise her work at last on its own merits? Of course not. “Lovely girlish verses,” the critics say; “thin, womanish perceptions.” A rose by any other name does not smell as sweet. A poem under a man’s name smells
virile.
Under a woman’s name, the same poem smells thin.
One of the most notable and faintly horrifying memories from my college years is of the time a distinguished critic came to my creative writing class and delivered himself of this thundering judgment: “Women can’t be writers. They don’t know blood and guts, and puking in the streets, and fucking whores, and swaggering through Pigalle at five A.M. . . .” But the most amazing thing was the response—or lack of it. It was 1961 or ’62, and we all sat there, aspiring women writers that we were, and listened to this claptrap without a word of protest. Our hands folded on our laps, our eyes modestly downcast, our hearts cast even lower than our eyes, we listened meekly—while the male voice of authority told us what women could or couldn’t write.
Things have changed since then. When I went to college (from 1959 to 1963), there were no women’s studies courses, no anthologies that stressed a female heritage, no public women’s movement. Poetry meant William Butler Yeats, James Dickey, Robert Lowell. Without even realizing it, I assumed that the voice of the poet had to be male. Not that I didn’t get a good literary education. I did. Barnard was a miraculous place where they actually gave you a degree for losing yourself in a library with volumes of Chaucer and Shakespeare, Byron and Keats, but the whole female side of the literary heritage was something I would have to discover for myself years later, propelled by the steam generated by the women’s movement.
No critic, however distinguished, would dare say such things to a college class today, however much he might privately think them. Sexism is somewhat better hidden now, though far from eradicated. And no college class would sit listening meekly to such rubbish. That is one of the things that have happened in the years since I graduated from college, and I am proud to have been part of the process. Now, when I go to read my work at colleges, I find the students reading and discussing contemporary writing by women as if there had never been a time when a critic could say “Women can’t be writers”—even in jest. I am grateful for that change, but it has not been won without pain. Nor is it necessarily a lasting change. Like the feminists of the twenties, we could easily see the interest in female accomplishments eclipsed once again by reactionary sexism, only to have to be passionately rediscovered yet again, several decades later.