Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers

by Sady Doyle

  But in my experience, no girl watches The Craft for its ending. The part of the movie that inspired all those thousands or millions of copycats was the first act: outcast girls finding each other, and hence, finding their power. The most famous image from the movie is not Nancy’s downfall, but Nancy at her flaming, dangerous peak—killing not one, but two abusers, her face alight with rage so powerful and so righteous that it drags her up off her feet and sends her flying.

  Sarah was the good girl, the girl who never got angry, the girl who wanted love more than she wanted power or respect or even friendship. Sarah was not the point. The girl my friends and I really wanted to be, when we joined hands and muttered spells in our candlelit bedrooms, was Nancy. We identified not with Sarah’s niceness, but with Nancy’s Promethean recklessness—her quest not just to seize fire from the gods, but to become that fire.

  All the Colors of the Dark

  “Witch” is a word that contains multitudes: fairy tales, Disney villains, New Age chimes and crystals or black candles burning in pools of blood. It covers the orgiastic, blood-drinking, thrill-killing Satanists of medieval legend, giving their souls to the Devil and (according to some imaginative inquisitors) tonguing his asshole to seal the deal, but it also describes the sepia-lit, Lilith Fair–soundtracked sisters of Practical Magic, scolding clueless muggles that “there’s no Devil in the craft” as they use herbs and candles to find true love.

  Which is the “real” witchcraft? All of the above. The witch has always lived on the razor’s edge between benevolence and malevolence, horror and fairy tale. Circe, in The Odyssey, turns Odysseus’s men into pigs just for setting foot on her island. Yet she is also Odysseus’s lover and host for a year, plying him with wine and feasts, and it is her witchcraft that unlocks the gates to the Underworld so that Odysseus can travel through it. In Russian folklore, desperate people end up deep in the woods, at the cottage of Baba Yaga. She is a powerful hag with iron teeth and wild magic; she will bless them or eat them, and there’s no way to know in advance which one she’ll pick. Nor is the blessing necessarily the best outcome—in the tale of Vasilisa, Baba Yaga “fixes” a little girl’s relationship with her abusive family by giving her a lamp that burns down her entire house with the family still inside.

  A benefactor and a murderer; a wise woman and a cannibal; a woman standing at the gates of life and death, ushering men across that unknowable space between. Magic accumulates at liminal points, and the witch is a living embodiment of liminality: neither good nor evil, but always, somehow, both at once. Witches are what women would be if we were powerful. The ambiguity of witchcraft is the ambiguity of power itself, which is simultaneously horrible and wonderful, blood-drenched and life-giving, depending on who wields it and whether it’s wielded against you. Are you a good witch or a bad witch? That depends. Who’s asking?

  I’ll Get You, My Pretty

  Despite all the permutations and variations of the witch in our culture, a few features remain constant. The first is the part we’re taught as children, the horrible truth I knew in my fever dream, as I saw a green-skinned Margaret Hamilton creeping toward my bedroom door: witches eat babies.

  You can find witches preying on children everywhere, from Hansel and Gretel to The Conjuring; “the personage called by Christian writers ‘the Devil,’ was considered by the witches themselves to be God incarnate as a man,” the anthropologist Margaret Murray once wrote, in full earnestness, and “to this deity they made sacrifices of various kinds, the most important of such sacrifices being that of a child.”3

  In particular, witches were thought to take and eat unbaptized children, which was why parents were told to christen them early; in Ireland, parents did the same thing to protect the child from being taken by fairies. To say that actual child-eating never occurred is perhaps to belabor the obvious. The belief was probably meant to classify witches, like fairies, as a liminal threat, a group that lingered just outside of social boundaries and snatched up community members that went too far astray. If you got too distant from the church, or refused to raise your family within it, you would be accused of endangering your children by some Dark Ages equivalent of William and Martha Sears.

  But the relationship between witches and children seems too primal to be a mere guilt trip. The witch—hard-edged, selfish, cunning, cruel, sexually voracious, and perverse—is a distinctly unmaternal woman. “Good” women sacrifice themselves for children; the witch sacrifices children for herself. (When they couldn’t get unbaptized babies, Murray said, witches killed their own.) It’s not for nothing that the witch is so frequently portrayed as elderly. Either she’s never had children, or all her children have grown up and left home, or, you know, she’s eaten them, but either way, she is beyond the work of mothering; she doesn’t share that concern with other “normal” women.

  She also gives those “normal” women the means to escape their own motherhood, or control it. The fifteenth-century witch-hunting manual Malleus Maleficarum lists “seven methods by which [women] infect with witchcraft the venereal act and the conception of the womb: First, by inclining the minds of men to inordinate passion; second, by obstructing their generative force; third, by removing the members accommodated to that act; fourth, by changing men into beasts by their magic art; fifth, by destroying the generative force in women; sixth, by procuring abortion; seventh, by offering children to devils.”4

  The witch as devourer of children is also the woman who ends pregnancies, or prevents them; she is the midwife delivering babies without a man’s oversight or assistance, a woman with forbidden knowledge and dangerous skills. The archaic Mother is powerful because she is a force of nature, but she is also only nature—a pure and mindless extension of her own biological drives. The witch can talk back to nature, enter a dialogue with it, coax it into giving her what she needs. In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici argues that the call to hunt down midwives and kill them for “witchcraft” was how we constructed the whole apparatus of capitalist patriarchy. Witches located reproductive power within the actual pregnant person; their dark arts allowed women to command the forces of nature, turning their generative forces on and off as they saw fit. They had to be destroyed in order for patriarchs to assume their position as kings within the family.

  So if we want to unravel patriarchy, to end the cycle of sexual and social violence that demonizes girls and maims them into bad mothers, the witch—the midwife, the administrator of birth control, the woman adept in the craft of controlled fertility and recreational desire—is the key disruptive figure in that story. She puts her hand on the mechanisms of the universe; she makes things happen; by so doing, she stands to break the circle and allow for new possibilities to enter in. Maybe that terrible, world-shattering power is just power over her own body, after all.

  To Live Deliciously

  It would be nice to think so. But the witch is not quite so simple. Her reproductive agency is tied up in all sorts of other, darker exercises of will.

  “Three general vices appear to have special dominion over wicked women, namely, infidelity, ambition, and lust,” the Malleus Maleficarum tells us. “Therefore they are more than others inclined towards witchcraft, who more than others are given to these vices.”5

  Infidelity and lust are perhaps self-explanatory; again, these women allegedly spent their free time tossing Satan’s salad. But the ambition part demands some attention.

  Witches are not selfless types; they tend to use their magic to get stuff. Nancy, in The Craft, lifts her family out of poverty and into a penthouse. In The Witch, a young girl is hilariously promised “the taste of butter” in exchange for her immortal soul. Witches’ greed is particularly important in children’s stories, where it can substitute for other forms of insatiability. In Disney’s The Little Mermaid, Ursula the Sea Witch is a capitalist terror who lurks on the edges of town, selling fake cures to “poor, unfortunate souls,” and who describes herself (
in the climax of the song about how evil she is!) as “the boss.” The Wicked Witch of the West is defined by her desire to inherit her dead sister’s shoes.

  Again, there’s history here. American witch stories are always, inevitably, tainted with the legacy of Salem. That historical terror also started with a group of adolescent girls who dabbled in the occult, learning to tell each other’s fortunes. When the girls got in trouble, they followed the tradition of white girls everywhere, and blamed the closest woman of color. Specifically, they accused Tituba, an enslaved South American woman, of teaching them witchcraft.

  In Tituba’s coerced “confession,” which created the template for all the confessions to follow, she claimed the Devil had lured her with promises of wealth: “He tell me he God and I must believe him and serve him six years and he would give me many fine things,” she said.6 Soon enough, Satan was playing sugar daddy to half the town. Sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Knapp affirmed that the Devil offered her “money, silks, fine cloths, ease from labor, to show her the whole world.”7 To others, he offered land, or horses; one fancy lad was promised “French fall shoes,” and Tituba was getting a pet canary.8 The terms of the bargain differed, but witchcraft was always associated with a life of luxury, and with what one judge referred to as “sensual indulgences.”9

  This desire for material ease and comfort wasn’t shallow, or selfish. Many of the girls in the Salem case worked as domestic servants, a position that left them open to sexual assault and harassment. Tituba was enslaved. When these women tried to envision an offer so good they would give up their souls for it, what they came up with was “ease from labor”; freedom from degrading or dangerous jobs, time to rest. You could argue that the witch represents a workers’ revenge fantasy; witches, like aristocrats, enjoy wealth without having to earn it.

  But the witch is hardly a shining example of class solidarity. She doesn’t employ the daylight power of rallies or strikes to get what she wants. A witch strikes alone, in the dark, when no one can see her coming. She is dangerous, in part, because she is known to ruin the livelihoods of neighbors who offend her—and since witches don’t announce themselves, offending any woman might result in a failed crop, or a cow who no longer gives milk, or a sickness that kills all the sheep in a herd, or even a wife who dies in childbirth. The witch doesn’t just accumulate wealth for herself, she denies it to everyone else, so that whenever you are suffering, you can be sure some woman, somewhere, is to blame.

  So it’s not just that the witch is a woman of ill-gotten gains. She implicates all women’s gains as ill-gotten. Witches are women with social and economic clout; women who get what they want, and whom it is unwise to dismiss or demean. They give us a way to imagine female power, not through some condescending generalization about women’s inherently gentler and less selfish leadership, but with the ruthlessness of power as it is actually practiced in the world. Or, not to put too fine a point on it, the ruthlessness with which men have always exercised power over women.

  Who Killed My Sister?

  Some of the most interesting witch stories come from an era when women’s power was being newly and frighteningly introduced to the public consciousness. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, witches were ubiquitous at the box office, either through sleazy soft-core thrillers (Virgin Witch, The Naked Witch), or straight-ahead horror (Black Sunday, Suspiria), or some bizarre mutant combination of the two (Daughters of Satan features Tom Selleck’s doomed attempt to rise above a script that exists entirely to show naked ladies whipping each other in their “witchcraft” dungeon). Then there’s 1973’s Season of the Witch, the rare instance of sexy witch thriller as second-wave feminist manifesto, by socially conscious zombie king George A. Romero.

  What’s fascinating about Season is its attempt to portray witchcraft realistically. All the ceremonies therein are drawn from Paul Huson’s Mastering Witchcraft, a proto-Wiccan guide to home spell-casting. We never get any explicit confirmation of the supernatural; everything on-screen could be explained as a manifestation of the protagonist Joanie’s nervous breakdown. What matters to us most is Joanie herself—a middle-aged woman who’s coming apart at the seams, and who takes to witchcraft as a way to regain control over her own life.

  Witchcraft is initially presented to us as something like detox cleanses or CBD oil, an enjoyably bohemian, semi-scandalous lifestyle fad for the respectable moms in Joanie’s neighborhood: “In today’s age when anything goes, people are beginning to take it seriously,” a Tarot-reading neighbor tells her. “When I was a child, I was taught certain recipes and incantations, and then I was sworn to secrecy. Well, today, I could just go down to the bookstore and find a paperback primer for witches.”

  Which Joanie, of course, immediately does. It’s of a piece with everything else she’s trying to “actualize” herself and break through the living death of 1960s suburbia: weed, health-food stores, sleeping with her adult daughter’s creepy hippie boyfriend.

  Joanie’s walk on the wild side, however, doesn’t liberate her. The husband beats and berates her. The hippie boyfriend rapes her. Turning to a groovier, more youthful variety of patriarchy still only leaves her with patriarchy. She has to find some other solution. And she does: Surprised by her husband’s early return home from a business trip, she “accidentally” shoots and kills him. She joins an all-female coven shortly afterward, the circle of dangerous women in a suburban living room looking more than a little like a demonic feminist consciousness-raising group.

  This is the third eternal truth of witches: they kill men who harm women. Weirdly, this is such a baked-in part of the myth that it survives even in the lightest and most comedic incarnations: Nancy in The Craft racks up a body count of abusers, sure, but the sisters in Practical Magic also kill the younger sister’s abusive boyfriend, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s quippy, teen-friendly witch Willow Rosenberg flays her girlfriend’s killer alive. Sometimes the script asks us to root for the man, sometimes it doesn’t: Selleck’s attempt at a dignified exit from Daughters of Satan fails when he is stabbed to death by his own witch-bride, for obscure reasons that involve his having possibly burned her at the stake in a past life. But the association of witchcraft and dead husbands is clear, whether we’re on the husband’s side or not.

  It’s easy to embrace the witch in her guise as Ye Aulde Plannede Parenthoode; we know by now that “procuring abortion” is no great evil, or at least that our “generative forces” serve us better when we have condoms and birth control pills to contain them. But monsters are monsters for a reason. Witches are not just “countercultural,” but genuinely counter to culture: counter to patriarchy, counter to male power, counter to everything we tell women to be. The witch is the woman who castrates men under cover of darkness, who afflicts them with madness for the sake of a good lay or turns them into dogs and pigs for slighting her. She can seem, at times, like a superpowered Aileen Wuornos: meeting violent male power with violent female resistance, taking patriarchy down man by man by man. The question is how long women will see that as a bad thing, or an extreme reaction—and whether, if pushed beyond our limits, the witch’s one-woman war on men might not begin to look more like the first shots in a revolution.

  The Burning Times

  “This is the time for getting scary,” Andi Zeisler told ELLE magazine on the eve of the 2017 Women’s March. “We need to go full witch.”10

  At the dawn of the Trump administration, witches were suddenly everywhere. Neo-pagans used blogs and social media to circulate popular rituals for hexing “Stanford rapist” Brock Turner (who served less than three months after he was convicted of raping a woman behind a dumpster), Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh (accused of attempted rape or sexual assault by multiple women), and Donald Trump himself; the Trump curse was enacted by thousands of people, including pop star Lana Del Rey. “I’m a witch and I’m hunting you,”11 feminist author Lindy West declared in The New York Times; Jess Zimmerman an
d Jaya Saxena wrote a self-help book, Basic Witches, in which they explained that “if you speak when you’re told to be quiet, take pride when you’re told to feel shame, love what and who you love whether or not others approve, you’re practicing witchcraft;” half the women I know called their group chats “covens.” Trump developed a penchant for tweeting the phrase “WITCH HUNT” in all caps whenever he felt persecuted, which conservative political cartoonist A. F. Branco dramatized exactly the wrong way around, with Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi depicted as gun-toting witches on the hunt for a helpless mortal man. Pop culture exhumed every witch it could find: In 2018 alone, there were high-profile reboots of Charmed, Sabrina the Teenage Witch (Sabrina worships the Devil now; it’s very confusing), and Dario Argento’s Suspiria. In the final days of her 2016 campaign, Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton—the first female Democratic nominee in history—had been accused of participating in ritual sex magic, and attending a “witch’s church” with her female friends. By early 2019, right-wing religious groups were accusing socialist Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of belonging to “a coven of witches that casts spells on Trump 24 hours a day.”12