Queen’s to host symposium unpacking media representations of witchcraft

August 5, 2021 Zoha Khalid

Augmented reality artwork in-progress, After the Witch of Malleghem, by local artists Jenn E Norton, Emily Pelstring, and Edie Soleil, created for the Witch Institute.

A week-long virtual symposium is organized from August 16 to 22 by The Witch Institute, a one-time symposium hosted by the Department of Film and Media at Queen’s University in Katarokwi/Kingston. The Witch Institute is a collaborative meeting space for people who want to share diverse understandings of witches and witchcraft and “complicate, reframe, and remediate media representations that often continue to perpetuate colonial, misogynistic, and Eurocentric stereotypes of the archetypal figure,” according to the organization’s website.

“We noticed a recent trend in witch-related media across television, film, music, and fashion where the witch is often cast as a feminist icon, and we wanted to understand the significance of this recent resurgence of witch imagery,” said Emily Pelstring, Co-Organizer of The Witch Institute.

The symposium constitutes seven planned events, including 18 roundtables, 14 workshops, and many exciting screenings, talks, and performances. It includes a lecture by Dr. Silvia Federici on the role of witch hunts in colonization and globalization processes; a conversation between the star of the iconic 90s witch film The Craft, Rachel True, and Dani Bethea about the representation of black femininity in witch horror; a screening and conversation around Anna Biller’s feminist satire The Love Witch; and an expanded version of the short film program Spellbound, with an accompanying workshop and raffled multimedia Collective Spell Package, curated by Geneviève Wallen.

“We suspect that this rise in interest in witchcraft and the reclamation of witch-identity is in part a response to the intensification of the conservative politics that we are seeing across the globe. If this is the case on some level, it is worth asking more questions about how these reclamations respond to the current conditions and what witchcraft and related practices mean for marginalized communities,” said Pelstring.

The symposium is free to attend for the public and is virtual, but ticket reservation is required due to limited numbers.

“We hope that this week-long symposium effectively brings together voices from various communities with different approaches to sharing knowledge. We are hosting roundtables and workshops where scholars, artists, and practitioners of witchcraft will come into dialogue with one another. This can only enrich the conversations we have around the roles of media, spirituality, creativity, and political activism in our lives,” said Pelstring.

Visit www.witchinstiute.com for a full schedule of events and to reserve

 tickets.

New Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magick Exhibit Demonstrates How Art Can Heal

Posted By Jeff Niesel on Tue, Mar 9, 2021 at 1:59 pm

• Courtesy of the Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magick
• Transmutations: Witches, Healers and Oracles is now on exhibit.

Stephen Romano has curated several exhibits for Cleveland's Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magick. He was the man behind the following exhibits: the wildly popular William Mortensen's WITCHES, an exhibit that featured a selection from Romano's comprehensive collection of works by the artist; Barry William Hale, the first ever solo exhibition by the world renowned Australian artist who's a member of Ordo Templi Orients; and Apparitions, an exhibit that presented more than 40 works from Stephen Romano's collection on the subject of ghosts, spirits and the paranormal ranging in dates of creation from the early 1600s to the present.

Now, he’s teamed up once again with the museum to present Transmutations: Witches, Healers and Oracles, an exhibit dedicated to the esoteric photographic works of Destiny Turner, Alexis Karl, Courtney Brooke, Lorena Torres Martell and Nahw Yg with words by renowned author Kristen J. Sollee.

“The exhibition features artists who have channeled their life experiences into their art making practice using the languages and aesthetics of the esoteric, witchcraft, shamanism, and other contexts which imply the conjuring and manipulation of forces outside of mundane sensory perception,” reads a press release about the exhibit, which through April 30.

The exhibition will also feature vernacular and historical photographic works, including works from our collection of vintage lobby cards, as well as the early 20th century photography of William Mortensen, Walter Bird, John Everard, Roland Henricks and many others.

"The title of the exhibition, 'transmutations,' came in conversation with the artist Destiny Turner, who is also a poetess, and suggests the action of changing or the state of being changed into another form.. either in actual form from matriarch to witch or shaman (and back again), from darkness to light, from mundane to supernatural,” says Romano in a press release. “The possibilities are endless, and Kristien J. Sollee's texts best compliment how that applies to the works in this exhibition. The show features artists whom I call ‘authentic,’ as they have channeled their true life experiences directly into their art making practice. These artists use the language and claim the imagery of the esoteric, witchcraft and healing to perpetuate what is to me the noblest and highest ambition an artist can have, to use art as a social healing device."

To ensure social distancing, the museum only allows visitors via ticketed appointments. Masks must be worn. Tickets to Transmutations: Witches, Healers and Oracles are available now.

Film Coven of Sisters gets a lot right about

 the terrible 1609 Basque witch-hunt

An engraving of the sabbath from Pierre de Lancre’s Tableau de l'inconstance des mauvais anges. Author provided

Pierre de Rosteguy de Lancre’s 1612 book, Tableau de l'inconstance des mauvais anges et démons (Tableau of the Inconstancy of Evil Angels and Demons), is the most sensationalist account of a sabbat, the nocturnal gathering of witches, ever written. Recounting a witch hunt the judge had conducted in the French Basque country in 1609, the book is replete with allegations of cannibalism, vampirism and a great deal of demonic sex.

Historians have not quite known what to do with de Lancre, who may have executed as many as 80 women and men as witches. They’ve either desperately tried to make him out to be the very “picture of the Catholic Reformation man”. Or they descend into unhelpful denunciations of his “attitude bordering on imbecility”.

The Spanish film Akelarre (translated as Coven of Sisters) succeeds where the historians fail, capturing de Lancre’s personality – a blend of piety, curiosity and erotic fixation with the sabbat. It takes the material from de Lancre’s book and asks the simple question: how did de Lancre obtain this wealth of material about the witches’ sabbat? (“akelarre” in Basque.)
Spellbound by the Sabbat

The film, by the Argentinian director Pablo Agüero, centres on the relationship between a Spanish judge called Rostegui (based on de Lancre) and a group of teenagers suspected of witchcraft. In an attempt to evade execution, the six teenage girls decide to tell the judge what he wants to hear. Their leader, Ana, realises that the judge is desperate to prove the reality of the sabbat. They plan to string him along, even offering to re-enact the sabbat, with the hope of winning enough time for their fathers – sailors who had gone to the New World – to return and rescue them from the judge’s clutches.

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De Lancre’s Tableau highlights the contrast between elite French culture and that of the Basque border territory. It even likens the inhabitants to Native Americans from the New World. This clash of cultures is well represented in the film – Basque food, language, and dress are cursed and mocked.


Indeed, the contrast was more profound in real life. Like the film’s Spanish judge, de Lancre did not speak Basque. Every encounter had to pass through an interpreter, causing him considerable distress about possible deceptions. The film also captures this insecurity. The girls speak Spanish but switch into Basque to keep their secrets and undermine the judge’s superiority, just as de Lancre feared.

It might seem implausible that the judge desired to know every intimate detail of the sabbat but many scenes in the film are based on de Lancre’s account. The real French judges (de Lancre had a colleague) had the teenagers re-enact the dances they performed at the sabbat. The judges also asked one witch to fly off in front of them. When she could not, she promised to bring back the necessary potion the next time she went to the sabbat. Even the rather comic scene where the judge inquires about the size of the devil’s penis has roots in the Tableau.
From the “witches” perspective

While the film gets a lot right, it misses two crucial complicating factors.

The film, first of all, presents witchcraft as a novelty. The girls use the Spanish word for witch, bruja, even when speaking in Basque, as if it was unfamiliar to them. Yet Basques had a long, disturbing history of prosecuting witches. When the Spanish Inquisition first dealt with witchcraft in the late 15th century, its officials did not refer to supposed witches as brujas – they used the Basque equivalent sorginak.

Secondly, the abduction of children and teenagers by witches was a persistent part of Basque witchcraft lore on both the Spanish and French side of the border

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Akelarre film poster. Wikimedia

De Lancre did not consider his teenagers to be witches, he called them “witnesses”. Brought to the sabbat against their will, their role was to denounce those who had abducted them as witches. Although their bodies were searched for the devil’s mark – the film’s most harrowing scene – they were not usually at risk of death.

The French judges executed only one teenager, 17-year-old Marie Dindarte who made the mistake of confessing that she travelled to the sabbat on her own. De Lancre was delighted by her testimony. Marie, totally oblivious, confessed “continuously without torture”, implicating other witches. In vain, she recanted when she unexpectedly found herself on the scaffold.

These comments notwithstanding, Akelarre has got a lot right about the Basque witch-hunt’s most salient features: Pierre de Lancre’s erotic fascination with the sabbat and his strange collaboration with his teenage witnesses. Students of the early modern witch-hunt should take note of this film. And a wider audience might appreciate it more knowing how close to the truth it is.

April 15, 2021 

Author

Jan Machielsen
Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History, Cardiff University
Disclosure statement
Jan Machielsen is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at Cardiff University and a Humboldt Research Fellow at the TU Dresden. He is currently completing a book on the witch-hunt in the French Basque Country.
Partners
Cardiff University provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation UK.

Sirens, hags and rebels: Halloween witches draw on the history of women’s power


Witches have a long history dating back to Ancient Rome. This print from 1815 is by British engraver Edward Orme. (Wellcome Collection)

Notwithstanding the pandemic, witches in pointy black hats appear in the windows of stores and homes across my city this Halloween. Witch costumes are popular with young girls who, in ordinary times, parade the streets collecting candy, reinscribing an ancient stereotype that has roots in misogynistic fears and fantasies about female power and its dangers.

Young women and girls don this costume because it allows them to flirt with the daring possibilities of female agency — expressed as naughtiness and defiance — that is normally off limits to them. But what are the origins and history of the witch stereotype that explain its enduring cultural appeal as a symbol of women’s dangerous power?

My book, Naming the Witch: Magic, Ideology, and Stereotype in the Ancient World, investigates the origins of magic, focusing especially on its association with women in ancient representations.
The first witch

Circe in Homer’s Odyssey has often been identified as the first witch. She lured men into her compound and turned them into wild pigs with a magic potion. Interestingly, the Greek text identifies her as a goddess, affirming that her powers derive from legitimate and divine sources, rather than mageia, associated with the religion of Greece’s nemesis, Persia.

Medea the Sorceress is an oil painting by British painter Valentine Cameron Prinsep (1838–1904) that depicts Medea collecting funghi to make a poison. (Southwark Art Collection)

Medea, another prototype for the witch in ancient literature, similarly derives her power from divine sources: she is a granddaughter of the sun and priestess of Hecate, a goddess from Caria (in modern Turkey), who is identified with magic by the fifth century BCE. Hecate presides over liminal transitions — births and deaths — and was believed to lead a horde of restless souls on moonless nights, which needed to be placated by offerings at the crossroads.

It is likely this association with the restless dead that led Hecate to be frequently petitioned on curse tablets and binding spells from ancient Greece and Rome. By the Renaissance, she had become the witch’s goddess par excellence, as reflected in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
Depravation and witches

The image of the witch begins to take shape in earnest during the Roman period: the Roman poet Lucan’s Pharsalia, which presents an account of the civil war that ended the Roman Republic, depicts a necromantic hag to graphically signify the depths of depravity to which civil war leads. Erictho prowls cemeteries and battlefields, reviving corpses to learn from them the outcome of the war. She gorges out eyeballs, gnaws on desiccated fingernails and scrapes the flesh off crucifixes.

This image of an old hag — wizened, grey-faced and mutilating the dead — provides an important template for later representations of witches.

A print made from an engraving by Robert Threw of ‘Macbeth, the three witches,

 Hecate, and the eight kings, in a cave,’ originally painted by Joshua Reynold. (The Wellcome Collection)

More influential still are the Roman poet Horace’s many depictions of Canidia and her cohort of lusty hags who dig for bones in a pauper’s cemetery and kill a child to use his liver in a love potion.

Scholars have speculated on the real identity of these women, missing the point that they are caricatures. These characters do not illuminate the secret rituals of real Roman women, but are literary tropes that function in different texts to convey ideas about legitimate authority, masculinity and social order.

Images of depraved women, cravenly committing infanticide, violating their biological role as mothers, making potions to control men and violating male prerogative in a patriarchal society indicate more about the fears ancient writers had regarding patriarchal authority and the proper governance of society.
Magic versus religion

Accusations of illicit magic appear across the spectrum of ancient writings, including early Christian texts. Charges of practising magic functioned to denounce messianic competitors such as Simon of Samaria (also know as Simon Magus) or to delegitimize prophets and priests of alternative forms of Christianity that were subsequently denounced as heresy. Accusing these leaders of wielding magic (rather than miracle) was part and parcel of an effort to delegitimize them in favour of bishops and leaders of churches that came to form the Catholic Apostolic Church.

In Jewish writings also, depictions of using magic occurred within contexts of religious competition and were often linked to charges of heresy. In many cases, men are depicted using magic, but women are universally charged. In fact, the Babylonian Talmud states that most women practise magic.

The burning of three witches in Baden, illustrated by Swiss clergyman Johann Jacob Wick in 1585. (Wikimedia Commons)

Witch hunts and social order

This history of associating magic with heresy and social disruption contributed to the witch hunts of the early modern era. Many people incorrectly assume that witch-burning was primarily a medieval phenomenon but, in fact, witch-hunting peaks in the modern era: The Reformation challenged religious authority, exploration exploded the limited view of the world previously held, and capitalism and urbanization disrupted the social networks that protected people and gave them a sense of security.

Within this context, accusations of witchcraft offered plausible solutions to people’s problems: if a poor neighbour asked for bread, the guilt of denying her might be assuaged by accusing her of witchcraft; if science was challenging belief that God exists, torturing a woman into falsely confessing she had sex with a demon might offer tangible “proof” for the existence of supernatural beings.

Women who challenged male authority might garner an accusation of witchcraft, as could women suspected of sexual immorality. Witch-hunting functioned as a method of social control that sought to channel female behaviour into certain acceptable moulds.
Today’s witches

While witch-burnings and the torturing of women merely for looking or acting different ended in the 18th century, the use of this stereotype to malign women, especially women in power, has not. During the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton was often either satirically depicted as a witch or was outright accused of committing acts, such as child murder, that have been associated with witches for centuries

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Witches are experiencing a resurgence, and not just at Halloween. (Shutterstock)

The shadow cast by Medea, Erictho and Canidia continues to haunt powerful women who question male authority or deviate from traditionally prescribed female roles of subservient wife and mother.

How, then, should we understand the popularity of witch costumes on Halloween? Or the increasingly wide appeal and legal recognition of Wicca as a new religious movement that appeals to both men and women?

Read more: This Halloween, witches are casting spells to defeat Trump and #WitchTheVote in the U.S. election

Wiccans actively reclaim the label “witch” and construct an alternative identity for themselves through a myth of pre-Christian paganism. Witches filter ancient myths through an eco-feminist lens to formulate religious values that prioritize the Earth, elevate the female (without denigrating the male) and promote a non-hierarchical decentralized movement catering to personal needs and expressions of spirituality. This vision of witchcraft appeals to an ever-growing number of people today.

This Halloween, my three-year-old daughter and I are both dressing up as witches. In doing so, I hope to deepen her sense of opportunity and possibility in the world that lies before her.

October 29, 2020 

AUTHOR

Kimberly Stratton

Associate Professor, Humanities, Carleton University

Disclosure statement

Kimberly Stratton received funding from the American Association of University Women (AAUW) and the Josephine de Kármán Fellowship Trust for research related to this article.