Witches? Which Witches?

Margaret Hamilton in a publicity still for The Wizard of Oz(1939)

With the arrival of Halloween, it seemed an appropriate time to do a post on at least one ghoulish/magical figure. What better candidate  than the witch? The first Halloween costume I wore was a witch and, with fitting symmetry, it  has been the costume of choice for the past couple Halloweens (a graduation gown can indeed have multiple uses). What is it about the Witch that provokes our imaginations? Whether she has been viewed as an object of fear or of admiration has depended hugely on historical milieu and cultural context, but her hold has always been tenacious. Fasten your broomsticks—it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

 

The word witch is derived from the Old English verb form wiccian, meaning to practice magic, with the noun wicce referring to a female and wicca to a male (this is also the word origin for Wicca, the benevolent nature-based pagan religion). But the figure of a person, especially a woman, who practices magic has been present since recorded history and literature. Book 10 of The Odyssey features Circe, ruler of Aeaea, who transforms Odysseus’ men into pigs. 

“She ushered them in to sit on high-backed chairs,

then she mixed them a potion—cheese, barley

and pale honey mulled in Pramnian wine—

but into the brew she stirred her wicked drugs

to wipe from their memories any thought of home.

Once they’d drained the bowls she filled, suddenly

she struck with her wand, drove them into her pigsties,

all of them bristling into swine—with grunts,

snouts—even their bodies, yes, and only

the men’s minds stayed as steadfast as before.

So off they went to their pens, sobbing, squealing

as Circe flung them acorns, cornel nuts and mast,

common fodder for hogs that root and roll in mud”(10. 256-269)

Attic vase, depicting Odysseus and Circe

Odysseus, clued in by the god Hermes, ingests a special herb to protect himself from the potion; the impressed Circe takes him to bed and he is wined and dined for a year before he and his men are allowed to proceed on their voyage. One of the other major Greco-Roman witches is Medea, who used her powers to help Jason win the Golden Fleece away from her father, King Aeetes of Colchis. Later, when Jason abandoned her for the Corinth princess Glauck, Medea took revenge by sending Glauck an enchanted dress that burned her to death and killing  her and Jason's children(there are multiple versions of the story that have the children dying by the hands of others, but Euripides' version, centering on Medea's act of infanticide, is by far the one that has taken deepest popular root).

Medea, fleeing Corinth in a chariot drawn by dragons

  In the Hebrew Bible, there is the episode in First Samuel when Saul, the flagging King of Israel destined to be supplanted by David, consults a witch from Endor to call up the ghost of the prophet Samuel.

 “Now Samuel had died, and all Israel had mourned for him and buried him in Ramah, his own city. Saul had expelled the mediums and wizards from the land. The Philistines assembled and came and encamped at Shunem. Saul gathered all Israel, and they encamped at Gilboa. When Saul saw the army of the Philistines, he was afraid and his heart trembled greatly. When Saul enquired of the Lord, the Lord did not answer him, not by dreams, or by Urim, or by the prophets. Then Saul said to his servants, ‘Seek out for me a woman who is a medium, so that I may go to her and inquire of her’. His servants said to him, ‘There is a medium at Endor.’”  (1Sam. 28: 1-7) 

"Saul and the Witch of Endor", by Salvator Rosa(1668)

The New Revised Standard translation uses the word medium, specifically in reference to a practitioner of magic through whom the dead speak to the living. But several other translations, including the King James Version, use witch. It is significant that the approved methods of divination are unavailable to Saul(a sign of Yahweh's disfavor), and that he now turns to those whose craft is forbidden by priestly law.  The Book of Leviticus, the code for ancient Judaic religious conduct and all around headache-inducing reading experience, contains three separate condemnations of witchcraft: 

“Do not turn to mediums or wizards; do not seek them out, to be defiled by them: I am the Lord your God.”(Lev. 19.31)

“If any turn to mediums and wizards, prostituting themselves to them, I will set my face against them, and will cut them off from the people.”(Lev. 20.6)

“A man or a woman who is a medium or a wizard shall be put to death; they shall be stoned to death, their blood is upon them.” (Lev. 20.27)

During the late Medieval/Early Modern period of European history this third verse was one of the most frequently cited Biblical passages; the result was  persecution and death for hundreds of women(America has the 1692 Salem Witch trails as our own tragic example of complicity). Indeed, even in what we would like to consider our more enlightened era, there have been literal-minded Christians who seek to ban JK Rowling's Harry Potter books from schools or libraries because of their supposed "promotion" of witchcraft. It bears asking, why are threatening, chthonic  powers so often aligned with women? It has to do, in many ways, with masculine fear of the feminine, which itself aligns with fears of the unknown; magic is the working of things in a way that seems to defy the way things are known. As Simone de Beauvoir observes,

 "an action is magical when, instead of being produced by an agent, it emanates from something passive. Just so men have always regarded woman as the immanence of what is given; if she produces harvests and children, it is not an act of her will; she is not subject, transcendence, creative power, but an object with fluids. In the societies where man worships these mysteries, woman, on account of these powers is associated with religion and venerated as priestess; but when man struggles to make society triumph over nature, reason over life, and the will over the inert, given nature of things, then woman is regarded as a sorceress...the perverse sorceress arrays passion against duty, the present moment against all time to come; she detains the traveler far from home, she pours him the drink of forgetfulness."  (The Second Sex, 173-4)

The power of women—especially scary older ones— is frequently tied to the workings of nature, or to the inversion of the workings of nature. The Weird Sisters in Shakespeare’s Macbeth(1606) are a case in point. They are associated with storms and rain. Their incantatory, deceptively simple language masks a host of sinister connotations.

"The Weird Sisters", by Johann Heinrich Fussli

“The weird sisters, hand in hand/Posters of the sea and land,/Thus do go about, about/Thrice to thine, and thrice to mine/And thrice again to make up nine.”(1.3.32-37) The original Jacobean audience would have recognized this recitation as a blasphemous parody of the Trinity; it is made just before Macbeth and his friend Banquo meet the witches for the first time. Banquo remarks of them, “You should be women,/ And yet your beards forbid me to interpret/That you are so.”(1.3.45-47)

Though there are several productions that depict the witches sans facial hair, the description is on point for what makes them “weird”: the sense that there is something about them that runs contrary to the natural order of the world.The same contrariness to rightful order will follow shortly with Macbeth's murder of the rightful king, Duncan.

One of the most common modes for showing the Western witch’s “unnatural” danger is through the trope of preying on children. As a “good woman” is supposed to be a nurturing mother and caregiver, the “evil woman” is one who seeks to consume the powerless. Think of all the Grimm’s fairy tales that center on a cannibal witch. 

"Hansel and Gretel", illustrated by Arthur Rackham

As Marina Warner points out, this designation can apply to the overtly supernatural, as well as the seemingly mundane. “Inhabitants of fairylands often live apart from human society—in the depths of the forest, or in a distant castle—but evil-doers also occupy the heart of the home...The wicked queen uses poison in ‘Snow White’; Mother Gothel, the old witch, imprisons Rapunzel in a high tower with no door and cuts off her hair when she tries to escape. Sometimes the evil figure doesn’t cast spells or work magic but acts against nature so profoundly that she exudes diabolical perversity, tantamount to black magic—when she abandons her children in the forest to die because the family has no food.”(Once Upon a Time, 24-25) Roald Dahl’s The Witches is a twentieth century variation on this motif—though witch nature is wildly reworked in typically bizarre Dahl fashion—. There is also the crone from Russia and Eastern Europe, Baba Yaga, with iron teeth, who lives in a house that stands on chicken feet with a fence made of stacked human skulls. One of the first books that I ever read was a children’s book by Joanna Cole called Bony-Legs, which it turns out is a takeoff on the formidable Russian witch; one of Baba Yaga’s nicknames is the Bony-legged One.

"Baba Yaga", by Ivan Bilibin. She travels by pestle, not broom

But there is a fascinating dual quality to Baba Yaga; she is both a terrifying threat, and potentially a savior. In a Russian variant of the Cinderella story called "Vasilisa the Beautiful", the heroine is sent deep into the woods to Baba Yaga's hut by her evil stepmother and stepsisters, who expect for her to die. Baba Yaga gives her three seemingly impossible tasks, which if she fails will mean Baba Yaga gets to eat her for supper. But Vasilisa, helped by a small talking doll, accomplishes them all. Baba Yaga tells her to go home, with a skull-lantern filled with burning coals. When Vasilisa returns, the skull-lantern instantly burns her stepmother and stepsister into ashes, setting Vasilisa free. The Jungian Clarissa Pinkola Estes, author of Women Who Run With Wolves, interprets "Vasilisa the Beautiful" as a story of female liberation, with Baba Yaga representing the "wild feminine" principle that Vasilisa learns and grows through connecting with. There several other stories where the witch serves a similar role. If Baba Yaga doesn't eat you, she might end up saving you.

In a fascinating paradox, it seems that the elements that once caused the witch’s persecution are now those same that feed into her being a symbol of empowerment. Her  surliness and aversion to domesticity, the things we think we should dislike and fear her for, can become the very things which provoke our imaginations and stir a species of admiration. Salman Rushdie, in his book-length essay on the iconic 1939 film of The Wizard of Oz, highlights this element in his reading of the contrast between the Glinda and the Wicked Witch of the West.

“Of the two witches, good and bad, can there be anyone who’d choose to spend five minutes with Glinda?...Of course Glinda is ‘good’ and the Wicked Witch ‘bad’; but Glinda is a trilling pain in the neck, and the Wicked Witch is lean and mean. Check out their clothes: frilly pink versus slimline black. No contest. Consider their attitudes to their fellow-women: Glinda simpers upon being called beautiful, and denigrates her unbeautiful sisters; whereas the Wicked Witch is in a rage over the death of her sister, demonstrating, one might say, a commendable sense of solidarity. We may hiss at her, and she may terrify us as children, but at least she doesn’t embarrass us the way Glinda does...just as feminism has sought to rehabilitate pejorative old words such as hag, crone, witch, so the Wicked Witch of the West could be said to represent the more positive of the two images of powerful womanhood on offer here.”(42-43)

Margaret Hamilton and Billie Burke

Rushdie’s essay was written  three years before Gregory Maguire’s book Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West was published, but he may as well have had a crystal ball. Maguire’s revisionist history of the Wicked Witch—whom he names Elphaba Thropp— enjoyed a cult following before serving as the basis for the Tony award-winning musical Wicked (I admit without shame to being an ardent fan girl of the musical). The key to its popularity lies in the reconsideration of the Witch, in seeing her power as inspiring rather than horrifying, her supposed ugliness more the result of prejudice than a real reflection of her character. She may be prickly and intimidating, but she also possesses integrity and an unapologetic understanding of her own possibilities. But the musical also significantly hinges on the friendship between Elphaba and Glinda; they navigate through their differences and, ultimately, change each other's lives for the better.

The official Broadway poster for "Wicked"

The witch and earth-bound women have much in common, and much to value, in one another. 

                                                                              Sources

Harper Collins Study Bible. New Revised Standard Edition. Print.

Beavoir, Simone de, The Second Sex. Trans. H.M. Parshley. Everyman's Library edit. 1993. Print. 

Estes, Pinkola Clarissa, Women Who Run With Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. Ballantine Books. 1992. Print. 

Homer, The Odyssey. Trans. Robert Fagles. Penguin. 1996. Print.

Rushdie, Salman. BFI Film Classics: The Wizard of Oz. BFI Publishing. 1992. Print.

Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. edit. Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason. Arden Third Series. 2015. Print.

Warner, Marina. Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale. Oxford University Press. 2014. Print.