“A witch ought never be frightened in the darkest forest because she should be sure in her soul that the most terrifying thing in the forest was her.”
Terry Pratchett considers, through the character of Esmerelda “Granny” Weatherwax, that a witch’s self-assuredness and acceptance of her own personality, even the deepest, darkest aspects, is her power.
Power. Witches have it. The patriarchy exerts it. We seek it.
Granny describes precisely what it means to be a witch today: a female who has addressed all the feelings and desires she’s been told to suppress by patriarchal society, embracing the monstrous aspects of her own consciousness and finding her own definition of femininity. Prior to the Middle Ages, the term ‘witch’ was neutral, simply one of other thirty terms the old English language employed to describe magical practitioners and practices. It lost its neutrality somewhere during the 15th century, morphing from an accusation of magical terrorism into an insult hurled at women who were deemed too sexual, too angry, too knowledgeable: too much.
Until recently, ‘witch’ was usually what somebody else called you, not a term you’d self-identify with. From the 1970s, radical feminism has seized the power that ‘witch’ held over women’s consciousness and turned it on itself, reaching for the witch not because of her historical significance but for her symbolic potential. The mythic status of the witch stems from the well-worn story of a natural, single midwife living on the outskirts of her community, persecuted by those fearful of her independence: by freedom-threatened men. This tale has been told and retold over and over throughout the popular consciousness. There is no evidence that the majority of those accused in the Burning Times were healers or midwives, unmarried, sexually liberated or lesbian, and men were not solely responsible for accusations. Yet, millions of women identify with this tale of the persecuted innocent healer despite the widespread acknowledgement that is only partly true.
The myth has gained cultural significance not because of its historical truth but because of its mythic significance: it laments what women could be without the patriarchy. It turns a complex story of group solidarity, fear of the righteous divine and scapegoating into a tale with a good ‘guy’ and a bad guy. This myth has woven its way into our cultural landscape, its roots so deep in our collective imagination that we imagine the witch and her Goddess-worshipping religion to have blossomed in a matriarchal society, before the ‘Imperialist Phallic Society took over and began to destroy nature and human society’, as the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy From Hell chose to describe it.
The Feminist Witch
The witch has been selected by popular culture as a language of resistance: against the patriarchy, normative constructions of gender, formal institutionalisation and homogeneity. She is the cultural leader of the army of female monsters that signify everything a woman should not be. The witch, the vampire, the succubus, unlike male monsters, only need to be angry, greedy or sexual to be monstrous. Feminine monstrosity stems from the repression of all sinister feelings, restraining any wildness in sexuality, bodily autonomy or emotion: historically, the privilege of rage, and all other emotions have been reserved for men. From childhood, little girls have always been encouraged to identify with the passive princess awaiting rescue, not with the powerful female villains who dare to think for themselves. Although time has loosened the fear of the witch, that image of the withered old hag, her green skin peppered with warts, hunched over her bubbling cauldron or cackling through the night sky atop a broomstick, is an indelible imprint on our imaginations. The witch can be simultaneously loved and despised, empowering and inspiring yet terrifying and disrupting in equal measures. She symbolises a resistance to cultural norms, particularly in the family structure, and demands the right to define beauty and the use of a ‘primal femininity that exceeds conventional gender constructions.’
The witch is marked as a symbol of innate wickedness, an abject figure who delights in disturbing social order. Grimm fairytales use witches to represent women prone to madness and fantasy and to stand as a warning of the evil that women are capable of if we’re not careful! The Evil Queen in Snow White and Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty are both ambitious characters who take action for their goals, while Snow White and Aurora are kind-hearted, beautiful, and rely on their hero. Witches are characteristic of difference: in Roald Dahl’s classic children’s novel The Witches, exists an underground cabal of bald, square-footed, blue-spitted evil women who stop at nothing to kidnap and torture children. Indeed, the 2020 film adaptations take artistic liberties even further, giving Anne Hathaway’s protagonist ‘the Grand Witch’, Ectrodactyly, or ‘split hand’, perpetuating deep-seated cultural notions that disability and different are abnormal, frightening, and unnatural.
Female monstrosity and abjection have been appropriated across the spectrum of popular culture, first as misogynist spectacle and now as rejection. Florence Welch has embraced her ‘good witch’ persona for her entire career, foraying into the darker side of femininity in more recent releases. The music video for ‘Big God’ is backdropped by an ominous, howling wind while Florence and her coven perform a passionate, animalistic dance, evoking the witch’s connotations to ecstatic dance, even Bacchantic ritual.
As she howls ‘Jesus Christ, it hurts!’ her dancers levitate above her, invoking Francisco Goya’s famous painting, Witches Flight (1798). Stretching her voice into a guttural, demonic sound as the music video comes to a close, Florence runs her hands across her body and pushes her fingers into her mouth, truly embodying the female abject spectacle. Robert Eggers’ 2019 film, The Witch, uses overt imagery of abjection and the female body to evoke the vilified woman as witch and inner turmoil. She embraces her sexuality, indulging in a moonlit dance round a roaring fire, rubbing what seems to be animal blood over her naked torso. Eventually accused and issued a death sentence, her fate is sealed as a persecuted witch for embracing her female power.
So, despite the dubiety of the wronged woman to witch pipeline, the myth of the witch is one that resonates with us, we feel it in our very soul. To be a woman, is to know fear. To know that society fears our bodies, our actions, our powers so vehemently that it insists on placing stringent restrictions to keep us in check.
Why is it that the witch and the monstrous feminine is resurging everywhere? After examining the witch’s symbolism within feminism, the answers seem to present themselves. As the witch is resurrected as a popular figure, so too are far-right politics.
The leader of the most powerful country in the world is a sexual predator.
Millions of women have lost the right to reproductive care in the United States of America in the last two years. Billions have never had that right.
Gisèle Pelicot’s husband drugged her and charged strangers to rape her for years. She waived her right to anonymity so her abuser’s identities could be publicised. Her request was denied.
As women’s rights are restricted, femicide rises and far-right political parties take control of countries around the world, the witch resurges as women invest their fantasies in her, using her to express their unspeakable fears and desires. The witch stands in the face of patriarchal control and violence, as feminists chant ‘We are the granddaughters of the witches you couldn’t burn!’ in solidarity as they march around the globe, they reinvest in the myth of the wronged woman. The feminist affiliation with the witch is not invalidated because of its historical inaccuracy, it strengthens the fantastical possibility of the witch to employ a mystical power that could create change in a world that does all it can to strip her of power.
The witch isn’t just rising in opposition to democracy, but as a response to globalisation and postmodernism. Our world is increasingly characterised by what Marc Auge terms ‘non-places’ of anonymity, in which you pass through without making any meaningful social connection – and it’s beginning to chip away at our humanity.
As our society becomes increasingly digitally connected yet physically disconnected, postmodernity has replaced tradition. Radical change is now the norm – we’re used to momentous paradigmatic shifts in government and ways of life, and we increasingly accept notions of truth and cultural relativism. Everything is up for debate, everything can be questioned, everyone has the right to view the world in their own way. It is in this environment, this petri dish of globalisation, of questioning, of oligarchical control – Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg, we’re looking at you – that educated Westerners begin to consider magic and Witchcraft as a reasonable option.
Yearning for Tradition
The witch, nature and antiquity are inextricably entwined; the branches of a gnarled Hornbeam stretching up through a dense forest, backdropping a twilight sabbat and naked circle dance. Witchcraft is lauded as the fastest growing religion in the West, which is most likely an exaggeration from the remnants of the 20th century ‘Satanic Panic’, yet it is undeniably that the witch is edging her way into the cultural mainstream.
Witchcraft and contemporary Paganism embrace the iconography of the horror aesthetics and retain an ambivalence to formal institutionalism and homogeneity that attracts Westerners disillusioned and overwhelmed with the society around them. Most practitioners of Witchcraft and Paganism acknowledge that their religion is relatively new, and the links to an ancient fertility cult were largely conjured up by Gerald Gardner and Margaret Murray, so why do people in search of tradition and stability find solace in the witch?
Simply, because the aesthetics and practices take inspiration from what we feel to be our past. The continuous unbroken link of a coven with roots in antiquity, forced underground during the Burning Times, to the present is yet another branch of the witch’s mythological tree. There is a comforting grounding in previous, simpler, times, that doesn’t require the historical proof of a trackable lineage. In an age of constant over-stimulation, over-availability and over-familiarity, the obscurity of the witch is a haven for those seeking connection to the past, worshipping the natural world and the Goddess in an act of feminism, environmentalism, catharsis and resistance.
The witch is a figure for contestation and romanticisation and thus can be whatever you want her to be. The reason for a crop failure in a 15th century Scottish farming town. A theatrical allegory for McCarthyism. A cinematic representation of girlhood, female friendship and the dangers of love. An aesthetic influence in subcultures that value pale skin, dark makeup and black clothes. A mythological link to sisters persecuted by the patriarchy past, present and future, spitting in the face of misogyny and those who see difference and non-conformity as dangerous or abject. A sanctuary from the relentless vortex of late-stage capitalism, rising fascism and conflict in which we find ourselves.
The witch has mirrored, shaped and distorted trends in culture and society for centuries, and she’s not going anywhere.
Bibliography
Auge, Marc. Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity (New York: Verso Books, 2009).
Goodacre, Julian. ‘Scottish Witchcraft in its European Context’ in Witchcraft and Belief in Early Modern Scotland, ed. Julian Goodacre (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
Hutton, Ronald. ‘The Meaning of the Word “Witch”’ Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 13, no. 11 (2018).
Purkiss, Diane. The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth Century Representations (New York: Taylor & Francis Group, 1996).
Pizza, Murphy and Lewis, James. ‘Introduction’ in Handbook of Contemporary Paganism, ed. Murphy Pizza and James Lewis (London: Brill, 2008).
Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider. Crossing Press, 1984.
Krzywinska, Tanya. A Skin for Dancing In: Possession, Witchcraft and Voodoo in Film. (Wiltshire: Flicks Books, 2000).
Savage, Candace. The Witch: The Wild Ride From Wicked to Wicca. (Greystone Books, 2000).
Rubin, Rebecca. ‘Warner Bros. Apologizes After ‘The Witches’ Sparks Backlash From People With Disabilities’ Variety, accessed 20th February 2025. https://variety.com/2020/film/news/the-witches-backlash-warner-bros-apologizes-1234823081/