Judika Illes - The Element Encyclopedia of Witchcraft - The Complete A–Z for the Entire Magical World

While others mortified their flesh, the witches applied sensual unguents. While others deprived themselves, the witches indulged. It’s not surprising that on Halloween, a night when repressions are set free, so many don the garb of the witch. In a time of repression, witches danced secretly in the forest. They were accused of flying away from their husbands and responsibilities to consort with the devil, portrayed by the witch-hunters as a being of tremendous, unflagging sexuality. The devil, at least as portrayed in trial transcripts, never gets tired and never demands that you do your housework.

Cards on the table. According to the tenets of French postmodernist literature, it is impossible for an author to remove themselves completely from the content of their work. In other words, no author is capable of writing a completely unbiased work and thus should address their personal beliefs and biases up front. This is probably particularly true when writing about a topic like witchcraft that inspires such passionate emotion. Therefore, I feel I should come clean about my own perceptions of witchcraft.

I confess: ever since I was old enough to toddle, I’ve dressed up as a witch on Halloween, never as anything else, even into adulthood. Even now, I own a “Morticia” dress. Once at a masquerade party a man who knew next to nothing about me commented how comfortable I seemed in that dress, my “costume.” It’s true: as a child, had I been this articulate, I would have said that Halloween was the only night of the year that I wasn’t dressing up.

I love witches and have done ever since I can remember. I craved fairy tales as a child: the witch resonated in my soul (my version of her anyway) and I identified with her instead of fearing her as I knew, even then, was the expected response.

What is it that I loved about the witch? These are hard things to articulate because, as the Jungians write, the witch-figure touches such deep primal emotions that an exploration of what attracts or repels us about witchcraft becomes an exploration of one’s deepest self. Certainly the magical aspect of witchcraft attracted me; I was simultaneously attracted to astrology, divination, and occult philosophy. But I also think that, as a child raised to be very “good,” “well-behaved,” and “obedient” the defiant quality inherent in witches was extremely attractive. Of course, the witch can afford to be defiant (at least in folk tales) because she has the power to back up her disobedience. As a child raised amid adults possessing many psychic wounds, a child raised to have a lot of fear, the witch’s lack of fear, her knowledge of secret defenses, her willingness to have fun and break rules, as well as her ability to instill fear in others resonated deeply within me, as I think it does for so many regardless of spiritual affiliation or belief in the existence of magic, although that resonance may inspire either devotion or revulsion depending upon the individual.

If you read studies of witchcraft, especially older or more academic ones, it’s clear that it never occurs to many authors that were the witch-hunts to resume they too might be accused, condemned by their very interest in the topic. However, it is not the victim with whom they identify, hence the focus on the Witch-hunters, judges, and general public. For a variety of reasons, I have never had any doubt as to which end of the stake I’d find myself on.

I identify with the witch, always. As a child, my least favorite fairy tales were the ones where the witch is made to appear irredeemably grotesque— Hansel and Gretel, for instance. Even then, I understood this as defamation and distortion and perceived that in some way it was directed toward me. Frankly the French postmodernists are right: I can no more write neutrally about witch-hunters than I could about Nazi genocide, white supremacists or serial killers. (Although, as the French postmodernists would point out, neither can anyone else, whether they realize it or not.)

That said, I also appreciate that many who perceive the witch as evil, corrupt, and devilish do so from sincerity and religious conviction, not from foolishness and superstition. Witchcraft touches enormous chords within the human soul and not all perceive these chords as positive. Denying the reactions, making fun of those who perceive the witch as dangerous, further denies the complexity of the witch.

As a child, I loved pretty much anything featuring a witch: Wendy Witch , Bewitched , Baba Yaga, Andrew Lang’s fairy tales. The only entertainment featuring a witch that I didn’t enjoy—positively dreaded when it appeared on TV annually—was the film version of The Wizard of Oz . The winged monkeys did scare me, although the wicked witch didn’t. I found Margaret Hamilton much more frightening in her guise as Miss Gulch. What really terrified me, though was Dorothy’s family, her aunt and uncle, who would not defy Miss Gulch and save Toto, either openly and defiantly or sneakily and surreptitiously. I found their passivity terrifying. I thought Dorothy was an idiot for returning to Kansas and the people who, although she loved them, had already demonstrated their unwillingness to protect her and her interests.

My perspective may have been unique and probably reflects my experiences as a small child raised amid an immigrant community of adult survivors of concentration camps, extermination camps, labor camps, displaced persons camps and European prison camps. I was always aware of how crucial and vital it is to have people who will protect you, defend you, hide you, take risks for you and not deny you.

Thus, unlike to many scholars and witches alike, the Burning Times are not an abstraction to me. They are very real. It is not a coincidence to me that the extermination of witches occurred in the same areas of Europe that would but a few hundred years later exterminate Jews and Gypsies, my family among them. It is not a coincidence to me that the genocide associated with World War II began in the same areas of Europe where killing witches was most virulent. According to records, there were towns in Germany left without women, just as years later there would be towns left without Jews.

Except for studies specifically devoted to them, history books rarely discuss the witch-hunts except as a footnote or as an aberration, as an example of how superstitious and ignorant people used to be. It’s treated as an embarrassment to be rushed over (and of course, honest discussion of witches and witchcraft, as we’ve seen, introduces all sorts of sensitive issues); focus tends to be limited to the nature of the perpetrators (why were they so crazy about killing witches?) and of the victims: were they or were they not really witches? More sympathetic studies tend to emphasize that they were not, as if this somehow makes the killing more tragic.

Then the witch-hunts just go away. We mourn the many dead. There is little if any focus on the impact that this era, an era that lasted for centuries in some areas, not mere years or decades, had on the survivors, including those who narrowly escaped the clutches of the Witch-hunters, those whose families were tragically affected, the many who profited from the witch-hunts as well as those who watched on the sidelines. Yet I can personally guarantee you that that impact must have been tremendous, having spent my life with similar survivors.

After the witch-craze was over, presumably the survivors, bystanders, and perpetrators all went back to a normal life together, side-by-side. And the impact? Women of the Victorian age and beyond, basically until the 1960s (coinciding coincidentally with the resurgence of public witchcraft), are frequently criticized for their passive, submissive, obedient natures. I suspect that this passivity is a survival skill, learned in the wake of the witch-hunts. Even today the word “ witch ” used as a pejorative holds an implicit threat: behave yourself or else…