An enduring philosophical problem: What are elderly women for? If a woman’s major function is to provide children, women who cannot do that are considered useless. The people most likely to be called witches were a category of people considered surplus to social requirements, without a place in village life: elderly, women, past childbearing age. When it comes to accusations of witchcraft, disability, gender and age intersect. One of my favourite contemporary horror films is The Ritual, in which the stag-horned God of the Forest has clearly influenced the monster. The Horned God is a classic syncretic deity. Actaeon ALSO had horns, see? When traditions/beliefs/rituals come from several different strains of thought, we call it ‘syncretic’. What’s he got to do with witchcraft? The Horned God is one of the two main deities of Wicca. He started running deeper into the woods, but he’d trained his dogs to hunt deer, you see. But then he heard his hunting dogs and called out to them. She told him not to speak again or he would transmogrify into a deer. The goddess caught him looking at her, entranced by her beauty. He was in the forest one day when he accidentally saw Artemis naked. The Greek hero came to a bit of an unfortunate end. A GLOSSARY OF WITCH WORDS ActaeonĪ famous hero in Greek mythology and, in Witchcraft, the actaeon is the stag-horned God of the Forest. She is not unshackled by the bounds of science, is wilful, disobedient, wild and free. Now we have a woman who is kind to animals. Second wave feminism went hand-in-hand with the ecological movement, so the witch and her ‘familiar’ was now recast. The witch became the every woman, and the epitome of intuitive, emotional feminine maturity. The second wave of feminism went further. She wanted American women to have the vote. Most thinking around the New Age Witch movement stems from Michelet: Witch as symbol of the people witch as young, attractive, intelligent woman (replacing the murderous hag) witch as wronged spirit of nature who heals and helps rather than harms.Īmerican Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826 - 1898) wrote in the abolitionist period who took those ideas further and linked them to the first wave of feminism. Though not a woman himself, French historian Jules Michelet (1798 - 1894) played a key early role in that. Women’s movements of the 20th century evolved the witch further. During the Romantic period, for instance, witches featured prominently in Gothic fiction. When the witch laws ended, the West clung on to the idea of witches, who now carry a dark lustre. Some witches can harm you by simply looking in your direction, but others must swap parts of their body (usually their blood) for the service of those occult powers. She perhaps wants to harm you because she’s envious, or because you’ve been rude to her outside a shop one day. When I sleep my spirit slips away from my body and dances naked with the Devil.” from The Witch, Robert Eggers (2015)įocusing on the time when most witch marks were made, a witch is someone who can do harm simply by wanting to do harm, by using a power intrinsic to her body or by calling on a larger, darker power in the cosmos. Later it meant women who were meant to cooperate with the devil or other evil spirits. It originally referred to men who practise witchcraft but 200 years later referred to female magicians and sorceresses. The definition of witch changes over time. What is Witchcraft? A Spiritual Understanding of the Meaning of Witchcraft
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