The Truth about Witches

witch- noun \ˈwich\

: a woman who is thought to have magic powers
: a person who practices magic as part of a religion (such as Wicca)

: a very unpleasant woman

-Merriam Webster Dictionary

I have always loved witches. As a female role model they offer many delightful facets of being an alternative woman no matter what century, culture, fairy tale, or ghost story they are featured. They represent the 'bad' side of women frequently reviled in male dominated stories and historical facts. As the shadow side of a 'good' woman, witches are portrayed as wicked (my favorite word), profane, duplicitous, scheming, self-serving, and nefarious. Witches are the antithesis of how nice, maternal, nurturing women should be. How could I not be attracted to them?

As independent women, witches are usually linked to dark forces, special magic, and pagan religions. Christians they are not. This had me hypnotized when I was a small parochial school girl. Brujas do not act like the saintly women martyrs I studied in catechism. Witches defy convention, carve out their own lives as outsiders, and are a force to be reckoned with. They make good look boring. Being a CEO of a odious empire requires confidence in your curses, spells, and Machiavellian cunning. Daring to be different, witches reject the approval orientation that decent girls embrace. However, they do pay the ultimate price for their nonconformist ways by being burned at the stake, drowned, or hanged. 

"Éva Pócs states that reasons for accusations of witchcraft fall into four general categories:

1. A person was caught in the act of positive or negative sorcery
2. A well-meaning sorcerer or healer lost their clients' or the authorities' trust
3. A person did nothing more than gain the enmity of their neighbors
4. A person was reputed to be a witch and surrounded with an aura of witch-beliefs or Occultism

She identifies three varieties of witch in popular belief:

• The "neighborhood witch" or "social witch": a witch who curses a neighbor following some conflict.
• The "magical" or "sorcerer" witch: either a professional healer, sorcerer, seer or midwife, or a person who has through magic increased her fortune to the perceived detriment of a neighboring household; due to neighborly or community rivalries and the ambiguity between positive and negative magic, such individuals can become labelled as witches.
• The "supernatural" or "night" witch: portrayed in court narratives as a demon appearing in visions and dreams." -Wikipedia

Some of my personal favorite witches are:

• The Wicked Witch of the West. Margaret Hamilton's portrayal of a sinister hag jonesing for revenge cannot be beat. Her frightening demeanor and deviousness are mesmerizing. I loved how she addressed the naive Dorothy mockingly as "my pretty". All that wrangling over the symbolic red slippers gives us a clue that prepubescent hormonally-charged girls are also a force of nature.
• Dame Gothel, the witch from "Rapunzel". This Grimm tale starts off innocently with a man whose pregnant wife insatiably craves rampion (aka Campanula) which only grows in Dame Gothel's garden. When the husband is caught absconding with some of the witch's rampion, a deal is struck: he will get all the rampion he wants for his expectant wife but the unborn baby she carries will be given to Dame Gothel at birth. The baby, taken by the witch, is named Rapunzel and is endowed with long golden locks of hair. When Rapunzel turns twelve, right about when she would be getting her first period, Dame Gothel locks her away in a castle with no doors or stairs. To visit Rapunzel, the witch summons her to let down her 'golden hair which is used as a rope. 'Rapunzel, Rapunzel let down your hair." Eventually a handsome prince observes the witch  and attempts to liberate Rapunzel. Alas, he is cast down the castle onto some thorns and dies. So much for males outmaneuvering a superior witch.
• The witch from "Hansel and Gretel". Even in these days of horrific child abuse stories, this Grimm tale takes it up a notch. Here we have a poor widower with two small children who marries a woman (stepmothers always get a bad rap in most stories) wanting his children dispatched because they are a resource drain. The stepmother convinces her husband to take the two kids deep into the woods where they get lost and stumble upon a witch's candy house (witches know what attracts). The witch captures them, makes Gretel her slave, and plans on fattening up Hansel for her own Hannibal Lecter-like feast. Gretel, the heroine of this story, manages to push the witch into the fiery hot stove, incinerating her before Hansel becomes an entree. Immolation is part and parcel for most fairy tale witches.
• "The Witches" by Roald Dahl. You can't go wrong with a story about convention of witches called, "The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children". When a young orphaned boy and his ailing grandmother visit a hotel on vacation, they discover the creepy convention. Investigating the witches intent, the boy is is caught and turned into a mouse by the Grand High Witch. These wily witches with a loathing of children turn the youngsters into mice so that they are killed by frightened humans. Though Roald Dahl did not care for the film version, Angelica Huston made a stunning sorceress. The author took offense at the sanitized movie ending in which the boy is transformed back into being human. Witches, after all, are not the sanitary type.

Seeing the happy go lucky young witches at Hogwart's is too sugary for me. I like those gritty, gnarly, loathsome witches who wreck havoc on our natural world.