by Sady Doyle
In a way, this was tradition. The witch has always been the feminist monster of choice. In 1968, the group WITCH descended upon Wall Street in black pointy hats and cloaks, semi-seriously intending to hex it. They also released hundreds of live mice into Madison Square Garden during a bridal fair. (Marriage was a recurring target of ire; the leaflet announcing the action chummily invited women everywhere to “CONFRONT THE WHOREMAKERS.”)13
“Witches have always been women who dared to be: groovy, courageous, aggressive, intelligent, nonconformist, explorative, curious, independent, sexually liberated, revolutionary,” read the manifesto. “You are a Witch by being female, untamed, angry, joyous, and immortal.”14
All that, and you didn’t even have to eat a baby. “Because WITCH actions could be done with a small group and were both fun and political, they quickly spread around the country. Boston women hexed bars. DC women hexed the Presidential inauguration. Chicago women zapped everything,” Jo Freeman wrote in her reckoning of the movement.15 The subversive idea that powered both the witch hunts and the ’90s wave of teen witches—the idea that, by gathering together and hatching plots, women might obtain heretofore unthinkable power—has also fueled much feminist organizing throughout history. Men were right to be worried. Feminists weren’t literally going to steal their dicks and hide them in trees, as medieval witches were known to do, but that did turn out to be a surprisingly apt metaphor for their work.
And, though the WITCHes were joking, the witches weren’t. Romero wasn’t exaggerating much; witchcraft and occultism really were heavily associated with a certain kind of mid-twentieth-century cool. The Beatles put Aleister Crowley on the cover of Sergeant Pepper, David Bowie studied ceremonial magic and Kabbalah, Led Zeppelin incorporated Tarot cards into their album artwork, Stevie Nicks sang about ancient Welsh fairy-brides and posed with a seemingly endless array of scrying crystals. Most people’s interest was merely aesthetic (and still is), but, then as now, some found that witchcraft resonated on a much deeper level. The San Francisco Bay Area—the center of Boomer youth culture in the United States—saw an explosion of neo-pagan traditions, including the witches’ coven that initiated Miriam Simos, or, as she soon came to be known, Starhawk.
Starhawk’s 1979 book The Spiral Dance, quickly outstripped Mastering Witchcraft to become the premier text for self-taught witches. As seen through Starhawk’s anarchist, ecofeminist lens, witchcraft was not just a way to acquire magical powers, but a deeply political act: “The word Witch carries so many negative connotations that people wonder why we use it at all,” she wrote. “Yet to reclaim the word Witch is to reclaim our right, as women, to be powerful; as men, to know the feminine within as divine.”16
Some trashed The Spiral Dance for being a New Age self-help manual disguised as a radical manifesto; others complained that it smeared its far-left feminist agenda all over what was supposed to be a spiritual text. Either way, The Spiral Dance sold vastly more copies than your average book on feminism, and had a far greater impact, in part because it came in such a deceptively mystical package. There is no way to know how many women stumbled across sentences like “women are not encouraged to explore their own strengths and realizations; they are taught to submit to male authority, to identify masculine perceptions as their spiritual ideals, to deny their bodies and sexuality, to fit a male mold” and emerged radicalized on the other end, but I do know one who did.17 The Spiral Dance was the book my friends and I moved on to when The Wicca Spellbook lost its allure, making it—by my count—the first book of feminist theory that I ever owned.
When the witch emerged as a contemporary figure of resistance, it was hard to tell where she came from; Hollywood iconography, feminist history, the coming of age of the Craft generation, or just the optics of the 2016 election, in which a presumed-to-be-monstrous woman was ritually castigated by a man who led crowds in chants of “lock her up.” (Watching the chants take over the floor at the Republican National Convention, Rebecca Traister wrote, “I was not the only person in the room to be reminded of 17th-century witch trials, the blustering magistrate and rowdy crowd condemning a woman to death for her crimes.”)18 The new feminist identification with witches seemed to draw from every version of the myth at once: mystical and monstrous, feminist academia and horrorcore aesthetics, drawing them together in one angry, intentionally ugly repudiation of American patriarchy.
This is not to suggest that witch fever was always admirable, or never silly. Witchcraft, like feminism itself, went mainstream, and in so doing, lost some of its vital power to shock and disturb oppressors. The “spirituality” tag of Gwyneth Paltrow’s GOOP contained articles on Tarot. Urban Outfitters stocked spell books. The makeup brand Urban Decay released an “Elements” eye shadow palette decorated with alchemical sigils; Sephora briefly offered “witch kits” with Tarot cards and bundles of sage inside, which was pulled due to public outcry. (Pagans accused Sephora of trivializing their beliefs, but Native American protesters also pointed out that smudging with sage—a practice that comes attached to its own long history of religious persecution—wasn’t for witches or luxury beauty retailers to claim.) At its lowest points, witchcraft stopped being subversive or frightening and became just another costume.
But the old, dark power—the choice to worship something other than patriarchy’s gods, to reject and read backward the narratives of the dominant culture—was still there. The Trump administration represented a breaking point for many women. After decades in which sophisticated thinkers dismissed patriarchy as simplistic or irrelevant, it was revealed to be alive, well, and out for blood—the ethos which still ruled the US government and defined, or ended, countless women’s lives.
The resurgence of patriarchy was partly embodied by Trump himself, whose fear of women, and embrace of sexual violence as a means of correcting them, was never less than 100 percent obvious; Trump was not only repeatedly accused of sexual assault, he confessed to some of it on tape. But partly, this political awakening was just a matter of stripping back our denial to realize how we’d always been living: Yes, Trump was accused of sexual misconduct, but so were several previous presidents. Yes, Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh was confirmed over multiple reports of sexual assault, but the same thing had happened thirty years ago, with Clarence Thomas. Yes, Roe v. Wade was going to fall, but in most parts of the country, abortion access had been stripped so far down that it might as well be illegal. Patriarchy had been the truth all along. It was progress that was the phantom.
The witch lives between dark and daylight, the safely settled village and the wild unknown of the woods beyond. The backlash years of the early twenty-first century revealed to many women something we had always suspected: we had never belonged to that daylight world. We had tried; we had worked; we had been loyal to the rules and values of society as we knew it. But no matter how far we thought we’d come, or how often our mothers told us we could do anything, we still lived within a system that used female bodies as grist to maintain male rule. In the story that patriarchy told about itself, we were always going to be the villains. And if that was the case, we might as well make some magic out of it. If the village didn’t want us, we might as well head out into the woods.
Beautiful Wickedness
Magic is a funny thing. We think of it as rare, or imaginary, but it’s always been common; even in Salem, girls told each other’s fortunes, peering into scrying bowls in the dark. If you’ve ever hung a horseshoe over a door for “luck” (fairies hate iron) then you’ve done it. Which means there are women who’ve made the walk out before us—women who turned to witchcraft as a way of life, or a way to save their lives. Women like Biddy Early.
Biddy was once a real woman, who lived and died in nineteenth-century Ireland, though her story has accumulated heavy layers of myth over the years. Her neighbors claimed that she gained strange powers after the fairies took her son. In some versions of the story, she was taken herself, and held captive
for seven years. Most people, faced with that kind of pain, would harden themselves against the unseen world, or declare war on it. Biddy Early evidently decided to open negotiations. She learned how the fairies thought, and what they wanted; she was able to see, and bargain with, the monsters on the edge of the dark. Biddy could see things that hadn’t happened yet, cure an illness no doctor could treat, lay a curse or lift one, all because she had family in the other world.
Mothers called on Biddy Early to recover their fairy-taken children. Who better to ask than a woman who had experienced the loss herself? Imagine the resilience it took to go on that way, the expansiveness of Biddy’s broken heart. Imagine those conversations: Hello. I’m the woman whose son you took. I miss him every day. You owe me; now, give my friend her child.
“The priests were against her, but they were wrong,” said one man, who claimed that Biddy had healed a badly infected wound that nearly cost him his hand. “How could that be evil doing that was all charity and kindness and healing?”19
In the Scottish ballad of Thomas the Rhymer, the Queen of Elfland takes a mortal man to her kingdom. She gives him fine wine to drink, lays his head in her lap, and gifts him with a tongue that cannot lie. But first, he must reach the land of Faery. It lies exactly between heaven and hell, on the far shore of a vast river of blood, which Thomas must wade through in total darkness:
For forty days and forty nights
He wade thro red blude to the knee
And he saw neither sun nor moon
But heard the roaring of the sea.20
This is, perhaps, the wine-dark sea of the Underworld that Circe opened for Odysseus’s ships. It is the black uterine water we all swim through to be born; the sea that is warm as blood.* It is the space between death and life, which we all cross barefoot, hoping the woman on the other shore will hold us and feed us, and give us gifts of speech.
But this much seems true: to arrive at the place of female power—the land of monsters—every woman must walk through a river of blood. Menstruation, sexual initiation, gender transition, childbirth are all blood rivers, places where we cross from one life to the next; so, too, in their own way, are sexual violence, domestic violence, grief, loss, places where we are broken and blood flows against our will. Those experiences also transform us; they, too, force us to confront the hidden face of the world. Biddy Early crossed her river of
blood by losing her son. It was not the journey any mother would have chosen. But she emerged a different woman—more wounded, but also wiser, one who had descended into a dark place and found her gift.
Patriarchy tells us to conquer what threatens us. It tells us to hold the world at a distance with tools and rules and weapons, either forbidding the acknowledgment of uncomfortable truths or punishing those who bring them to light. But a witch, whose authority derives from something deeper and older than patriarchy, engages with the messy, organic fact of the world—even the parts of the world other people won’t touch; the parts that we don’t speak about in the hopes that ignoring them will keep them away from our doors. It is frightening to acknowledge patriarchy’s violence. But until we acknowledge it, we cannot begin to imagine other possibilities. Witches are healers. But we cannot heal our culture unless we admit it’s sick. In her steady gaze toward the darkness, her fearless acknowledgment of life’s pain and terror, the witch’s power is born.
Apokálypsis
There is a journey we all take through dark waters, traveling to a land we have never seen. Imagine how scared you were, that day, pulled from darkness into darkness, dragged inexorably toward the unknown. Imagine what you felt as you emerged into the light and saw it: the world’s body, the person who was an ocean, the shining face of God.
We can find powerful and awe-inspiring visions of ourselves, hidden inside and underneath the stories patriarchy tells to shame us. But first, we must make another journey from dark to dark, give up our certainty once again. The witch always brings an element of choice into the equation. Most monsters simply are monsters, but you have to become a witch. Women simply are outcasts, under the terms of patriarchy. But we can become outcasts with meaning and purpose; we can work wonders from the edges of the world.
We can only do this by facing our demons; by acknowledging the presence of those rebellious, dangerous women under the surface, who cry out for some justice or some vengeance or at least some acknowledgment of all they’ve lost. We have to walk out into the woods and become familiar with the dark things that live there. But when we walk back into the daylight, we will know things others don’t know. We will be able to do things others can’t do. We can use our exclusion, our rage, and even our trauma as a way of seeing more deeply into the world.
When we reach out into the dark, there’s no telling what we will find there: what buried pain we may unearth, what histories of violence and control and degradation we will find ourselves heir to. There is no knowing what long-lost, suppressed selves we will find—or how hungry those women will be, how enraged they are by their long captivity, what havoc they will wreak when we finally set them loose. This is black work, blood magic. It requires daring. But when we’ve found our monstrosity, our daring cannot be far behind.
There is a fire on the horizon. You can see it burning, out on the edges of the world. The wind is hot and tastes of ashes—the ashes of Bridget Cleary, the ashes of Mercy Brown, the ashes of a thousand women burned for showing a single forbidden spark of power. This is the fire that haunted the dreams of Mary Shelley and filled them with monsters. This is the light of the Furies, too long forgotten, coming to keep their end of the bargain. This is the fire at the end of the world, and it will consume everything you know.
But we are that fire. We are the Apocalypse, the risen Furies, the scarlet woman riding her red dragon over the horizon, because we know that the woman and the dragon were always one and the same. Dead blondes and bad mothers, harlots and abominations, witches at the gate of light and darkness; we are the end of the world that was, and the first sign of the world to come, in the age after patriarchy, when monsters rule the earth. Our blood holds magic; our stories do, too. The violence we’ve survived can be our guide to what needs to change. The fire that burned the witches can be the fire that lights our way. Our power is waiting for us, out in forbidden spaces, beyond the world of men. Step forward and claim it. Step forward into the boundless and female dark.
* If you’ve read all those baby sleep guides—as I have—then you know that experts recommend playing white noise, like the sound of waves crashing, at bedtime. The noise mimics the sound of a mother’s heartbeat, the way her blood rushes and whooshes around us in utero; we remember the roaring of the sea that made us.
APPENDIX: RESOURCE GUIDE
This book was built on a mountain of stuff—movies, books, poems, news items, feminists whose work demanded citation, real-life women whose stories mattered to the problems I was discussing, myths that seemed to explain everything. There is so much stuff in here, in fact, that some of the most influential works wound up getting compressed into a half-sentence, or not being mentioned at all.
It’s my hope that you are curious about these things, so, rather than a traditional bibliography, I’ve put together a resource guide, which contains a (very partial) list of works cited or drawn upon to create this book, along with a brief mention of why they matter. You can read this as a list of recommendations if you like—it partly is one—but keep in mind that I’ve also included works and creators I strongly disapprove of, disagree with, or dislike. After all, it’s sexist men’s fears that often reveal the most about female power.
CHAPTER ONE: PUBERTY
FILM
Aster, Ari. Hereditary. Streaming. New York, NY: A24, 2018.
Starts out as a standard possessed-tween-girl story before heading in a direction you don’t expect. Notable for two things: First, the demonic invasion is explicitly rooted in mons
trous mothering. Second, critic Sasha Geffen convincingly argues that it’s one of the few movies to frame adolescent possession from a transmasculine perspective.
de Palma, Brian. The Fury. Streaming. From a novel by John Farris. Los Angeles, CA: Twentieth Century Fox, 1978.
De Palma’s second trip to the telekinesis well, after Carrie. Pros: features a boy telekinetic. Cons: features a boy telekinetic. The girl psychic makes people bleed with her mind, which, as you can guess, requires certain precautions on the part of the female scientists studying her.
Derrickson, Scott. The Exorcism of Emily Rose. Streaming. USA: Sony Pictures, 2005.
this Page.
Fawcett, John. Ginger Snaps. Streaming. Montreal, QC: Motion International, 2000.
A female-scripted and explicitly feminist take on the menstruation-as-monstrosity genre. Katharine Isabelle is attacked by a mysterious beast, causing her to get hornier, hairier, and angrier, especially whenever there’s a full moon.
Friedkin, William. The Exorcist [Director’s Cut]. DVD. From a novel by William Peter Blatty. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2000.
Obviously. this Page.
Håfström, Mikael. The Rite. Streaming. From an autobiography by Matt Baglio. USA: Warner Bros., 2011.
Based on the memoirs of an exorcist, making it useful as a document of the Church’s viewpoint. Contains a rare instance of exorcism’s subtext—a foreign entity being removed from a woman’s body by male professionals—being made text, in the person of a possessed, pregnant teen girl who’s been raped by her father.
Hooper, Tobe, and Steven Spielberg (uncredited). Poltergeist. Beverley Hills, CA: MGM/UA Entertainment Co., 1982.
