divinity within a patriarchal culture. If you insist long enough that God is the father, a nostalgia for the mother goddess will be born. If you exclude women from church rites, they will practice their magic in the fields, in forests, in their kitchens. The point is, female power cannot be suppressed; it can only be driven underground.
Take a little honey in a jar. Write your deepest wish on a bit of brown paper and hide it in the honey. Focus all your energy on your intention (which must be sweet), and eventually your wish will be granted. Intention counts for everything. It must be positive. And the more witches there are sitting in a circle practicing communal intention, the more potency the magic will have. The desire for magic cannot be eradicated. Even the most supposedly rational people attempt to practice magic in love and war. We simultaneously possess the most primitive of brain stems and the most sophisticated of cortices. The imperatives of each coexist uneasily.
We may even prefer to see the witch as an outsider, a practitioner of the forbidden arts, because that makes her even more powerful. Perhaps we are ashamed of our wish to control others and would rather pay a maker of magic than confess to these wishes ourselves. Perhaps we would rather not be in charge of magic that might backfire.
Since we believe witches can make wishes real, we both need and fear them. If they have the power to kill our enemies, couldn’t they also kill us? If they have the power to grant love, couldn’t they also snatch it away? Witches remind us of the darkness of human wishes. That is why we periodically find reasons to burn them.
In The White Goddess, Robert Graves asserts that all real poetry is an invocation of the triple goddess of antiquity—she who controls birth, death, procreation—and that it is the poet’s fealty to her that determines the authenticity of his work. “The main theme of poetry,” Graves says, “is the relations of man and woman, rather than those of man and man, as the Apollonian classicists would have it.” The male poet woos the goddess with words in order to partake of her magic. He is at once her supplicant and her priest. Where does this leave the female poet? She must become an incarnation of the triple goddess herself, incorporating all her aspects, creative and destructive. This is why it is so dangerous to be a female poet. It is a little like being a witch.
Adelaide Crapsey’s 5 poem “The Witch” evokes this well:
When I was a girl by Nilus stream
I watched the desert stars arise;
My lover, he who dreamed the Sphinx,
learned all his dreaming from my eyes.
I bore in Greece a burning name,
And I have been in Italy
Madonna to a painter-lad,
And mistress to a Medici.
And have you heard (and I have heard)
Of puzzled men with decorous mien.
Who judged—the wench knows far too much—
And hanged her on the Salem green.
Adolescence is a time when witchcraft exercises a great fascination. Disempowered by society and overwhelmed with physical changes, teenage girls fall in love with the idea of forming covens. Whatever bric-a-brac of magic is around they will pick up and shape to their own uses.
Writing a book about witches made me a heroine to my friends’ daughters. It also became the most banned of all my books—probably because the idea of female godhead is still anathema to many people. Once, I received a Polaroid picture of Witches that showed it burned around the edges. The letter accompanying it said: “My father burned your book. Could you send me another copy?” So much for the efficacy of censorship.
The more disempowered people are, the more they long for magic, which explains why magic becomes the province of women in a sexist society. And what are most spells about? Procuring love, with usually, the hexing of enemies running a close second. When men turn to magic, they are more likely to seek infinite power (think of Dr. Faustus) or infinite
Take a little honey in a jar. Write your deepest wish on a bit of brown paper and hide it in the honey. Focus all your energy on your intention (which must be sweet), and eventually your wish will be granted. Intention counts for everything. It must be positive. And the more witches there are sitting in a circle practicing communal intention, the more potency the magic will have. The desire for magic cannot be eradicated. Even the most supposedly rational people attempt to practice magic in love and war. We simultaneously possess the most primitive of brain stems and the most sophisticated of cortices. The imperatives of each coexist uneasily.
We may even prefer to see the witch as an outsider, a practitioner of the forbidden arts, because that makes her even more powerful. Perhaps we are ashamed of our wish to control others and would rather pay a maker of magic than confess to these wishes ourselves. Perhaps we would rather not be in charge of magic that might backfire.
Since we believe witches can make wishes real, we both need and fear them. If they have the power to kill our enemies, couldn’t they also kill us? If they have the power to grant love, couldn’t they also snatch it away? Witches remind us of the darkness of human wishes. That is why we periodically find reasons to burn them.
In The White Goddess, Robert Graves asserts that all real poetry is an invocation of the triple goddess of antiquity—she who controls birth, death, procreation—and that it is the poet’s fealty to her that determines the authenticity of his work. “The main theme of poetry,” Graves says, “is the relations of man and woman, rather than those of man and man, as the Apollonian classicists would have it.” The male poet woos the goddess with words in order to partake of her magic. He is at once her supplicant and her priest. Where does this leave the female poet? She must become an incarnation of the triple goddess herself, incorporating all her aspects, creative and destructive. This is why it is so dangerous to be a female poet. It is a little like being a witch.
Adelaide Crapsey’s 5 poem “The Witch” evokes this well:
When I was a girl by Nilus stream
I watched the desert stars arise;
My lover, he who dreamed the Sphinx,
learned all his dreaming from my eyes.
I bore in Greece a burning name,
And I have been in Italy
Madonna to a painter-lad,
And mistress to a Medici.
And have you heard (and I have heard)
Of puzzled men with decorous mien.
Who judged—the wench knows far too much—
And hanged her on the Salem green.
Adolescence is a time when witchcraft exercises a great fascination. Disempowered by society and overwhelmed with physical changes, teenage girls fall in love with the idea of forming covens. Whatever bric-a-brac of magic is around they will pick up and shape to their own uses.
Writing a book about witches made me a heroine to my friends’ daughters. It also became the most banned of all my books—probably because the idea of female godhead is still anathema to many people. Once, I received a Polaroid picture of Witches that showed it burned around the edges. The letter accompanying it said: “My father burned your book. Could you send me another copy?” So much for the efficacy of censorship.
The more disempowered people are, the more they long for magic, which explains why magic becomes the province of women in a sexist society. And what are most spells about? Procuring love, with usually, the hexing of enemies running a close second. When men turn to magic, they are more likely to seek infinite power (think of Dr. Faustus) or infinite
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