A Shift in Perspective: Witches & Feminists

On the Walpurgis night of 1977, mobs of women stormed Rome in witch disguises, passing the night in rowdy drinking and dancing.  Trailing off American revivals of witchcraft in feminist organizations such as W.I.T.C.H (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell), these popular performative transgressions coalesced historical traditions of witchcraft circulating in the late 1950s and the political programs designed to mobilize non-hegemonic knowledge of the 1970s, prompted by Watergate, the gay rights movement, and the Vietnam War. Anne Kwaschik identifies this shift in the witch identity as the creation of artificial myth. 

The early modern witch was thought to be a slave to Satan who practiced heresy and indiscriminate sex, characteristics adopted through a merging of the traditional Roman witch and medieval Satanic cults. While collections of letters and personal accounts from Salem and the other Massachusetts towns during the peak of the witch hunts exist, there are only few that made it to public view. Arthur Miller’s infamous play The Crucible, written in 1953, serves as a fictional retelling of such first hand accounts, making sense of the letters’ talk about Puritan hysteria and the supernatural within the context of McCarthyism. The Crucible begins with a preface from Miller, which is also the most important piece of text in the play. He writes, “[for] good purposes, even high purposes, the people of Salem developed a theocracy, a combine of state and religious power whose function was to keep the community together, and to prevent any kind of disunity that might open it to destruction by material or ideological enemies.” 

Using Salem as a metaphor for McCarthyism, the larger message of The Crucible was not directed towards oppressed women specifically but to American society as a whole, disregarding class and social differences, pointing out its collective identity as a victim of McCarthy’s iron first. Miller continues to write, “[the] witch hunt was a perverse manifestation of the panic which set in among all classes when the balance began to turn toward greater individual freedom…The witch hunt was not…a mere repression…a long overdue opportunity for everyone so inclined to express publicly his guilty and sins, under the cover of accusations against the victims.” 

It was “patriotic” and “holy,” even, for a man to divert his own guilt onto the bodies of the innocents. In accusing innocent women for the calamitous threat that their biblically-forbidden knowledge poses to the integrity of Puritanical society, and in particular, the structure of the nuclear family, the patriarchy does not suffer at all. 

In relieving himself of guilt, the men of Salem and the other Puritan communities, following suit, employed the invidia complex onto the witch identity, establishing the Puritan correlation of witches with demonic knowledge and sexuality. The witch transgressed most Puritan values, but even she could not break free of the Puritan gender hierarchy, still remaining subservient to a man (Satan). Hence, in The Witch, Thomasin’s ascent into witchcraft arrives as a consequence of her subconscious role in deconstructing her family and causes the patriarchy’s ultimate anxiety to come to fruition. lacing the invidia complex in conjunction with the politics of retaliating against McCarthyism with individualism and self-liberation, Miller placed the seeds of second-wave feminism and the reclaiming of the pejorative witch identity.

The witch was transformed, under the backdrop of advancements in modern science, into a testament for the ancient knowledge and power of women, in ironic opposition to the Satanic witch. Gerald Gardner popularized the term “Wicca” in the 1950’s, which, leading into the 1960’s, became taken as the official pagan religion of the witches. It was thought that WIcca was a form of pre-medieval sorcery that originated in the pre-Christian British Isles. Persecuted by the church, Wicca became a secret coven’s art until the 1930’s, when Gardner claimed credit for reawakening Wicca to the world. So, second-wave feminists successfully recaptured the witch and the invidia complex and reframed it as a core symbol of organized, magical feminism. In defining magical feminism, Costa cites Wells, who claims that magical feminism takes on an egalitarian approach to feminism by calling out the asymmetrical distribution of power and then, using the unnaturality of witchcraft, to reverse the distribution. Magical feminism particularly emphasizes the woman’s power of choice as its main pillar. Wells also says, the point of magical feminism is to “avoid the essentializing trap of saying all women are essentially more moral and good than men are, a trap that can be as limiting as the negative one.” 

In the novel Dialectic of Sex, another German writer and activist Shumalit Firestone writes: “For example, witches must be seen as women in independent political revolt: Within two centuries, eight million women were burned at the stake by the Church—for religion was the politics of that period.” Therefore, in radical feminist circles, forging a connection between the historical persecution — and even extermination — of women and the control of women in staging political revolt became a key rhetoric. Kwaschik raises another example:

In the German-speaking world, one of the first journals published by the autonomous feminist movement uses the witch as an example of antipatriarchal self-empowerment. In its first issue, the Hexenpresse (Witches’ Press), a ‘critical organ of the second women’s movement’ published between  and  in Basel, derived its political mission by drawing parallels between the ‘murder societies’ of the past and the present: “DIE HEXENPRESSE appears at a time when the history of women begins. The name of the magazine recalls our prehistory, which is not yet over. 

The same derogatory stereotypes that were attributed to witches could also be interpreted in the opposite way. Old age, for example, could be read as empowerment: "The hag witch can be considered doubly transgressive for refusing to take up the mantle of invisibility required of aging women. Instead, she embraces her barren body as a source of power, spectacle and magic, becoming an image of unruly excess. The hag witch makes a mockery of the laws and boundaries that structure the symbolic order through her spectacular magic."

Feminists took their forbidden knowledge for pride instead of shame, and in doing so, reclaimed the pejorative identity that patriarchal societies invented for women. They also managed to reinvent the invidia complex as a feminist complex, as feminism, at its core, stems from a kind of gendered envy for masculine privilege. Like witches, they seek to reclaim the sort of power and vitality unequally granted to men. Understanding the invidia complex comes down to understanding the people and the context of the authority behind it. The witch, which was designed to demean women and elevate patriarchal principles, was effectively turned on its head by the same people it was created to oppress, and now serves as a subjective symbol of feminine power.