Women's Solidarity Through Witchcraft

The concept of the ‘witch’ draws from the European Wicca traditions. Wicca is a Neo-pagan religion that was introduced to the world in a codified form in 1945 by former British civil servant Gerald Gardner.

Witches through the ages Shutterstock


Outlook Web Desk
UPDATED: 13 APR 2022 

We have all grown up with images of the scraggly witch on a broomstick in a pointy witch’s hat. Or the Indian witch or ‘dayan’ with bulging eyes, reversed foot and knotted unruly hair. The myth of witches has existed in India ever since time immemorial. Be it the ‘chudail’ or ‘Pichal Pairi’ of North India, Pishachini or Petni of West Bengal, or simply ‘Dayan’, the idea of the witch in either a demonic form or in the form of an evil priestess has been popularised in countless folk tales, films and pulp fiction horror stories. But much of the representation of witches in Indian films and literature is largely inaccurate. This is due to reasons — one is the misunderstanding of witches and witchcraft, and the second is patriarchy. Nevertheless, witches have usually been the demon of choice when it came to feminists representing themselves through the horror metaphor.

The concept of the ‘witch’ draws from the European Wicca traditions. Wicca is a Neo-pagan religion that was introduced to the world in a codified form in 1945 by former British civil servant Gerald Gardner. However, its origins can be traced to pre-Christian times. It encompasses various denominations and sects that are based on witchcraft and the duo theistic worship of the Supreme Gods and God. The religion is characterised by various rituals and was the first to formally acknowledge the pagan community of witches (men and women) that existed and practised for ‘Witchcraft’. While the community represented more than just witches, later representation in pop culture associating Wicca with cauldron swilling pagan witches further solidified the idea of Wiccan witches. Many followers of Wicca claim to believe in “magic” as a science. As performative magician and occultist Alistair Crowley had put it, magic is “the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will”.

The Witch’s Tale: Women In Indian Horror Films


In 1968, a manifesto by a women's group called WITCH read, "Witches have always been women who dared to be: groovy, courageous, aggressive, intelligent, nonconformist, explorative, curious, independent, sexually liberated, revolutionary...You are a witch by being female, untamed, angry, joyous and immortal". Thus witches have been a socio-political statement for women as much as a horror staple.

There is a thriving Wiccan witch community in India. The country’s first noted openly Wiccan witch was Ipsita Ray Chakravarty, daughter of a diplomat who grew up in Canada. According to interviews, she felt her first supernatural experience at the age of 10. In the late 80s, Chakravarty started speaking about the ancient tradition of witchcraft in India and has often spoken sternly against the representation of witches in Indian films as monstrous ‘dayans’.

The Wiccan tradition is what gives us the witch on a broomstick with a pointy hat trope. Today, many women in India claim Ito follow witchcraft. A thriving community of Wiccan witches on social media exists in which women not only talk about their experiences with witchcraft but also sell ‘magical’ items like totems, spells, incantations, even wands. The Harry Potter series of books also brought a new perspective on witches for urban Indian audiences who came face to face with anthropomorphised teen witches and wizards.

Nevertheless, the myth of the ‘Daayan’, the desi and monstrous version of the witch has remained popular in Indian horror films. Recent retellings o the witch’s tale have seen writers and directors experiment with themes of sexual violence and patriarchy to subvert the horror plots creating ‘daayans’ out of victims of patriarchy.

But the witch’s influence in Indian films and literature goes further back than just fiction or folk tales. In India, witchcraft is deeply rooted in Vedic Hindu religion. Witchcraft - or tantra Sadhna, is a pre-Vedic tradition part of the Tantra sect of Hinduism. Its followers, called Tantriks and Tantrikas, as often associated with witchcraft. While the men have been termed ‘sadhu’ or ascetic, however, women have often been dubbed as ‘witches’.

In fact, Daakinis and tantrikas were among the original healers before organised religion. According to Anubhuti Dalal, a practising Tantrik, daakinis have the ability to use magic, concoct potions and use their knowledge of herbs and poisons to heal people of both physical, and mental and metaphysical afflictions. They could make women stay young forever and make men fall in love. They could fix a broken heart or heal an infected body. This kind of manifestation of women’s power to manipulate energy has been recorded across the world including in Europe where a community of pagan witches have long existed under the Wiccan tradition. Witch societies are today studied through a feminist lens in that they have historically provided a safe space for women that organised religion could not provide.

In that way, the Indian Tantrik tradition has been similar to Wicca in providing a safe space and sisterhood to women within the community. Witches or practitioners of witchcraft often have their own language and ways of communication.

“A village daakini, before anything, is a friend of the persecuted women. She was supposed to be the custodian of women’s rights at a time when women had no representation. She could punish men for their wrong-doings, set things right for the woman at her household and empower them with justice,” adds Dalal. Dakinis, like Wiccan witches, are also known to be great doctors. Researchers of Wiccan witch rituals found that the ‘spells’ and recipes used by witches often use scary code names for herbs and plants. Newt’s eyes and dogs’ tongue - the famous ingredients used by Macbeth’s witches, for instance, actually refer to mustard seeds and the highly toxic plant houdstounge.

The Modern Witch Trials era in the West during which scores of women were burnt at the stake across England and other Anglo-Saxon countries vilified witches as sorceresses worshipping the Horned God. Later, Gardern's reiteration of Wicca brought forth evidence of the worship of the Mother Goddess - representing life and fertility - thus helping pagan witches destigmatise their image and move away from the Shakespearean representation of evil witches to a more free-spirited, pagan witch who used magic for good rather than evil.

Both Dalal and Wiccan witches like Ipsita have objected to the representation of witches in India. The skewed narratives of women in Indian (as well as Western) horror films and literature is an expression of the internalised cultural beliefs, mythology and pop culture. But today, women writers and filmmakers have tried to take over the genre and write stories that depict the witch not as a monster but as an avenger and vigilante. The change in tonality can be seen as a reflection of the growing empowerment of women and acknowledgement of culture and mythology as important building blocks of gender roles.

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The Inquisitor who wouldn’t burn witches

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. And nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition to show wise restraint in dealing with witchcraft–unless somebody has heard of Alonso de Salazar Frías.

October 28, 2023 Sandra Miesel The Dispatch 

Portrait of Alonso de Salazar, by Ricardo Sánchez (Wikipedia); right: A 17th-century rendering of "Witches' Sabbath on Brocken Mountain" by Michael Herr (Image: Wikipedia).

“… only ‘the wisdom and firmness of the Inquisition’ made the witch craze ‘comparatively harmless’ in Spain.” — William Monter, quoting Henry Charles Leaⁱ

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. And nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition to show wise restraint in dealing with witchcraft—unless somebody has heard of Alonso de Salazar Frías, ‘The Witches’ Advocate.” But before we meet this heroic Inquisitor who refused to let witches be burned, let us place him in his historical context.

Salazar’s employer, the Spanish Inquisition, founded at the request of “The Catholic Kings” Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, opened for business in 1480. Three years later, it formed one unified, government-controlled institution across both kingdoms. The initial purpose of the Spanish Inquisition was to ferret out converted Jews (conversos) who continued to practice Judaism in secret (Judaizers). It also came to prosecute unfaithful converts from Islam (Moriscos), Protestants, heretical mystics, heterodox Catholics, bigamists, blasphemers, the superstitious, and sexual sinners. The Inquisition also censored books that might foster such errors.

Contrary to the Black Legend, the Spanish Inquisition was notably less bloodthirsty than secular courts. Only about two per cent of its cases resulted in execution: possibly 3000 deaths inflicted in four centuries. Its judges were less likely to rely on evidence obtained by torture. But explanation is not absolution. The Inquisition was an expression of its own time, when differences in belief or behavior were judged worthy of death. The courts of the Inquisition did not operate by standards of justice governing Church or State today. For instance, its proceedings were so secret that prisoners were not told the charges against them nor allowed to confront their accusers. Instead, Inquisitors sought to probe the minds and souls of the accused to understand the intentions behind their supposed offenses. This quest for exactness, however, made trials excruciatingly slow, resulting in needlessly long imprisonment before cases were resolved. But even when the sentence was merely penance, public shame ruined convicted persons’ lives and tainted their families for generations.

Suppressing maleficent or diabolic witchcraft was a matter for secular courts in medieval Spain. The newly founded Spanish Inquisition initially was content with that arrangement, although it had five people burned in Saragossa at the very end of the fifteenth century. Twenty years later, it had added magic, sorcery, and witchcraft to its list of forbidden practices. But in 1526, a government-sponsored witch-hunt in Navarre prompted the Supreme Council of the Inquisition to order extreme caution when prosecuting witchcraft lest imaginary crimes be punished. An inquisitor who violated those instructions by burning seven women at Barcelona in 1549 was removed and his remaining victims freed. An investigator sent by headquarters called the cases “laughable.” Although secular authorities continued to try witches, the Inquisition demurred. It intervened from time to time, as when it saved 40 women’s lives during a panic at Navarre in 1575, but sporadically thereafter.

But in 1609, a witch-panic exploded in the Spanish Basque country. Hysteria—and terrified people—crossed the Pyrenees from France after King Henry IV sent a hyper-vigilant but credulous judge named Pierre de Lancre to hunt witches in the Basque region of Labourd. De Lancre was obsessed with the notion that a “sect” of diabolical witches—3000 strong—flourished among the backward Basques. He had at least eleven or perhaps as many as eighty witches executed but the court at Bordeaux released almost all his prisoners. Miffed by his colleagues’ skepticism, de Lancre wrote a treatise Description of the Inconstancy of Evil Angels and Demons (1612) defending the reality of devil-worship by witches. The book’s lurid illustration of a witches’ Sabbat may have had more impact than the text. (It may have even influenced Francesco Goya’s depictions of witches in his Caprichos two centuries later.)

So, what did de Lancre claim Basque witches (xorguimos and xorguinas) do beyond the usual evildoing and harming of man, beast, and crops attributed to their kind? He said that they really, physically travelled through the air to gather at secret assemblies (Akelarre) to worship Satan in the form of a He-goat (aker) in ceremonies parodying the Mass. The devilish court was strictly hierarchical and its subjects formed an “inverted Church.” Separated by grade, the witches feasted, danced, and fornicated. They enjoyed cannibal fare, brewed poisons, and initiated new members by marking them in the left eye with a shape like a frog’s foot. While the adults frolicked, the children herded toads—familiars or future potion ingredients—in a little pond off by themselves. (Stealing children to turn them into witches was a distinctive feature of Basque witchcraft and harm to children, including vampirism, was the most feared aspect.)

Anxiety about witches had filtered over the border a year before Pierre de Lancre had been sent to investigate in Labourd. A young Spanish Basque woman who had returned home after working on the French side mentioned that she had been a witch over there but had repented. She then identified several neighbors as witches. Although all of them reconciled with the Church, the spark had been lit for a new panic known as the Witches of Zugurramurdi.

The Inquisition became involved and went searching for more malefactors. After zealous special preachers fanned out into the mountain parishes to denounce the horrors of the “witch sect,” numerous children and youths suffered an epidemic of dreams about being taken to the Sabbat in their dreams. Accusations and confessions followed. Eventually, thirty-one people came under scrutiny. Twelve died in prison. Six who refused to confess were burnt at the stake in a spectacular auto de fe ceremony before a crowd of 30,000 people at the Inquisition’s regional base in Logroño in 1610.

The youngest of the three Inquisitors who judged these cases expressed misgivings about the outcome. This man was Alonso de Salazar Frías (1564-1536). Salazar, a lawyer’s son from a prosperous family of civil servants and merchants, had had a distinguished career as a canon lawyer serving two bishops before his appointment to the tribunal at Logroño. He was noted for his diplomatic skills, astute mind, tenacity, and formidable powers of concentration. In short: he never gave up.

But the Basque panic kept spreading despite the executions at Logroño. Almost 2,000 people—mostly children and young adolescents—had confessed or had attracted suspicion. Villagers had turned into vigilantes, torturing suspects on their own by methods crueler than the Inquisition ever used, trying to find the adults who had corrupted their children. There was even a fourteen-year-old French witch-finder in the mix who admitted later he had been bribed to make accusations.

Salazar was assigned investigate at the local level and offer amnesty to those who surrendered voluntarily. After eight months on the road, Salazar reported back to the Inquisitor General in Madrid: “I have not found a single proof, not even the slightest indication, from which to infer that an act of witchcraft has actually taken place.”ⁱⁱ The campaign against witches was the very thing that bred them.

Salazar attacked the question as no other witch-hunter ever did, before or after. By cross-checked individual confessions, he uncovered fatal contradictions. He had nine sets of witches taken individually to their alleged meeting places and questioned about details of their activities. Answers were inconsistent. Twenty-two jars of magic powders and ointments were examined by doctors and apothecaries as well as tested on animals. All were harmless. Through logic, Salazar thoroughly debunked testimony originating in dreams: if witnesses could not distinguish what they dreamt from what they did, how could judges? There was no objective test to assess their credibility nor external evidence to support charges against them. “It is not very helpful to keep asserting that the Devil is capable of doing this or that,” Salazar concluded. “The real question is: are we to believe that witchcraft occurred in a given situation simply because of what witches claim?”ⁱⁱⁱ

Salazar distilled 11,200 pages of notes from his investigations into six reports for the Supreme Council of the Inquisition. Despite bitter and mendacious opposition from the other two Logroño inquisitors, the Council sided with Salazar. In 1614, it issued new instructions that henceforth forbad the execution of witches. Historian Charles Henry Lea described Salazar’s work as “the turning point in history of Spanish witchcraft.”^iv

Salazar served as a tribunal judge three more times. His intervention prevented mass burnings by secular authorities at Vizcaya in 1618 by getting 289 witchcraft cases transferred to the Inquisition which suspended them all. He became prosecutor of the Supreme Council in 1628 and a full member three years later before dying in 1636.

Alas, the Inquisition’s decision not to burn witches did not mean that witches ceased to be killed. Governments executed; neighbors lynched; individuals murdered. For example, more than 300 witches were hanged in Catalonia between 1616 and 1619 before the Inquisition wrested control from the secular authorities. Deeply seated popular beliefs about witchcraft persisted, especially in northern Spain. The Inquisitors turned passive and stopped interfering in witch persecutions.

Salazar’s reports were forgotten, buried in the Inquisition’s archives until discovered by Lea almost three centuries later. Had they been published and circulated across Europe the way de Lancre’s demonology and similar books did, they would have been another voice for reason to argue against the blood-drenched madness of the Early Modern Witch-Hunt.

Nevertheless, the lifesaving wisdom and courage of Alonso de Salazar Frías are still worthy of honor. To paraphrase Sigrid Undset, “A good deed shall stand, though all the mountains crash in ruin.”

Endnotes:

ⁱWilliam Monter, Frontiers of Heresy: The Spanish Inquisition from the Basque Lands to Sicily, p. 262 quoting Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition of Spain. 4 Vols. New York, 1906-1907. IV, p. 206. Lea, first and most comprehensive historian of the Spanish Inquisition, was not an admirer of the Catholic Church.

ⁱⁱGustav Henningsen, Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: Western Tradition. IV, p. 994.

ⁱⁱⁱ Ibid. p. 995.

^ivquoted in Henningsen, The Witch’s Advocate: Basque Witchcraft and the Spanish Inquisition, p. 387.

Sources:

Julio Carlo Baroja, The World of the Witches. Trans. O.N.V Glendinning. (Chicago, 1965)

The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition. Ed. Richard M. Golden. (Santa Barbara CA, 2006)

Gustav Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate: Basque Witchcraft and the Spanish Inquisition. (Reno, 1980)

Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision. (London, 1997)

William Monter, Ritual, Myth & Magic in Early Modern Europe. (Athens, OH, 1983)

______, Frontiers of Heresy: The Spanish Inquisition from the Basque Lands to Sicily. (Cambridge, 1990)

About Sandra Miesel  29 Articles

Sandra Miesel is an American medievalist and writer. She is the author of hundreds of articles on history and art, among other subjects, and has written several books, including The Da Vinci Hoax: Exposing the Errors in The Da Vinci Code, which she co-authored with Carl E. Olson, and is co-editor with Paul E. Kerry of Light Beyond All Shadow: Religious Experience in Tolkien's Work (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011).

ONTARIO

Witches sweep through downtown Blind River as part of Witches Dance (6 photos)

The fifth annual event brought nearly 30 participants and an array of vendors to downtown Blind River

By: Kris Svela

Saturday marked the fifth annual Witches Dance in downtown Blind River.

Kris Svela for ElliotLakeToday

About 28 witches made a clean sweep of Blind River’s core business area descending on the downtown twice and setting a spell on the large crowd who came to watch.

Saturday’s event marked the fifth year the Witches Dance has been held and was augmented by an array of vendors who set up shop along the sidewalk under partially sunny skies.

There were the traditional Halloween decorations along the street and games eagerly played by children.

Organizer Kristy Blanchet said the original Witches Dance was set up by her and two friends after seeing a similar event on YouTube and has grown with more witches and more spectators taking part each year.

“We saw this on YouTube and we said this looks kind of interesting do you think we could do this,” Blanchet said of the original idea to stage it in their hometown. “Now I have a big mouth and they said if you organize it, we’ll help you.”

They started out with nine witches and now have 28 witches. The organizers are hoping to expand with more witches next year.

Members are not part of any dance class and “it’s just for fun,” according to Blanchet who was dressed as the lone good witch.

Those who want to take part must attend the regular practices.

“We practice in the elements and all we ask you to do is bring your broom.”

The practices are held in open areas by the river, at a local school and at the firehall where they can be safely held.

Blanchet said she has already been approached by two men wanting to take part next year and hopes more will join in a Warlock Dance.

Dancing witches take over Blind River

Christian D'Avino
CTVNewsNorthernOntario.ca 

Videojournalist
Published Oct. 16, 2021 

SAULT STE. MARIE -

A group of witches in Blind River have brewed up a new concoction for residents, with an eye on getting them moving and grooving.

The annual "Witches Dance" has returned for its fifth year in the town, with this year's event coinciding alongside its fall fair.

"It really started off a YouTube video, where we found a group of dancing women in Germany," said Kristy Blanchet, organizer. "I turned to the girls and they said they thought we could do this."

Only nine witches joined in the dance through its first year, which saw them dance down the sidewalk of Woodward Avenue, the towns main street.

"Everybody was like, what's going on, and then we were like, okay lets go down the street with a stop sign, we stopped traffic and then it kind of escalated after that," said Shari Gosselin, who has taken part in the event every year.

The witches dance was one of the few events not to get cancelled by COVID-19 last year.

It's also grown tremendously since it first began, according to Blanchet.

"This year I asked the town council to close down the main street," she said. "We were able to set up games, crafts, vendors, everything has really turned out great."

Blanchet said roughly thirty witches took part in the event this year, but is looking for more in the future.

The witch isn't dead: New book explores witchcraft's rebellious history -- and modern transformation

Published 31st October 2021

Credit: Courtesy of TASCHEN

The witch isn't dead: New book explores witchcraft's rebellious history -- and modern transformation

Written by Marianna Cerini, CNN

Look up "witches" and you might see any of a number of depictions: ugly old ladies and young, sensual temptresses; antiheroes and aspiring role models; evil creatures mixing deadly potions and righteous sorceresses helping girls find their way (a la Glinda the Good Witch in "The Wizard of Oz").

A new title from Taschen's Library of Esoterica aims to explore this wealth of complex identities in a visually vibrant volume that isn't so much a book as it is a spellbinding tribute to a figure and a practice that are as old as time.

'Last Night in Soho' costume designer on creating Edgar Wright's frightful fashion flick
"Witchcraft" offers a deep dive into the many facets of a centuries-old tradition in the Western world, weaving more than 400 classic and contemporary artworks with essays and interviews by what editor Jessica Hundley describes as "a diverse coven of writers, scholars and modern-day practitioners, each embracing the practice in their own individual ways."

In "Witches' Sabbath," artist Jacques de Gheyn II depicts the sabbath with a pen-and-ink drawing of a swirling cauldron. Credit: Courtesy of TASCHEN

"I wanted to present witchcraft through symbolism and art but also fresh, personal perspectives," Hundley explained in a phone interview. "So much of the esoteric is often shrouded in secrecy and weighed down by stigma. With 'Witchcraft,' we worked collaboratively on introducing the subject in a way that felt inclusive and less intimidating."

Clocking in at 500-plus pages, the compendium spans the history of witchcraft and the representation of witches in literature and fairy tales; the tools of the craft and the rituals that have long been part of it. There are also sections dedicated to fashion, creative media and the witch in films and pop culture.

A history of feminine energy and rebellion

While the word "witch" has its etymological roots (wicce) in Old English, the lineage of the 'Western witch' can be traced back to Greek mythology and the earliest folk traditions of Egypt, northern Europe and the Celts.

Each culture represented the mystical figure differently, yet some of her traits recurred across geographically widespread countries: a witch was a powerful goddess, often associated with home and love, but also death and magic. Above all, she was a signifier of complex femininity.

William Holbrook Beard, "Lightning Struck a Flock of Witches," United States, Date Unknown. Beard depicts a fantastical view of stormbound witches in flight -- the coven sent reeling from a flash of close lightning.

 Credit: Gene Young/Smithsonian American Art Museum/Courtesy of TASCHEN

"The iconography of the witch, while shifting over the centuries, has always revolved around the idea of feminine power, and reflected society's changing attitudes towards it," said the book's co-editor, Pam Grossman, in a phone interview.

In the 11th century, as male-centered Christianity spread across Europe, perceptions of femininity changed.

So-called witches (often any woman who strayed from the prescriptions of monotheistic religion) began to be considered outliers within their communities, feared and isolated for their supposed connection with the devil.

By the 14th century, the collective imagination had recast witches into heretical outcasts. For the next three centuries, witch hunts and executions -- including the Salem trials of 1692 -- would sweep both the Old and New Worlds.

In Kiki Smith's work "Pyre Woman Kneeling," a bronze female figure tops a pyre. The statue commemorates women who were burned for witchcraft. 

Credit: Martin Argyroglo/Courtesy of TASCHEN

"The image of the witch that's been crystallized in our minds -- that of a diabolical, frightening woman -- was born out of this exact period," said Grossman, who is also a writer, curator and teacher of magical practice. "The advent of the printing press, in particular, really helped popularize it. What she really was, of course, was even scarier: a threatening woman."

Indeed, what emerges from "Witchcraft" is that witches and their practice have long been a metaphor for women who want authority over their own lives (the coven, essentially a female-run community, is part of this metaphor, too). Browsing the book, which features works by names as diverse as Auguste Rodin, Paul Klee and Kiki Smith, it's hard not to notice how so many of them represented witches as fierce, powerful creatures even as they were being shunned by society.

Whether aging hags or hypersexual young beauties, they're the embodiment of a rebellious spirit that "wants to subvert the status quo," Grossman said.

A resurgence of witches

In the 18th and early 19th century, as the persecution of witches ended (at least in the Western world) and witchcraft started to be recognized as the last vestige of pagan worship, the magical figure was recast once again. This time, she was made into a fantastical subject as well as a symbol of female rage, independence, freedom and feminism.
Behind the latter "rebranding" was the suffragette movement, which used the archetype of the witch as the persecuted "other," an example of patriarchal oppression.
Witchcraft gained popularity again in the 1960s as second-wave feminism saw witches and their covens as expressions of feminine power and matriarchy (on the activism side, there was even a group of women who, in 1968, founded an organization called W.I.T.C.H).

The Boston-based group, W.I.T.C.H Boston, gather September 19, 2017, on Boston Common for a rally opposing the end of the DACA program.

 Credit: Lauren Lancaster/Courtesy of TASCHEN

The practice made another comeback during the 1990s, following the Anita Hill hearings and the rise of third-wave feminism; and then again in the wake of Donald Trump's 2016 election and the #MeToo movement.

Over the past four years, the practice has gone mainstream, spurring articles, podcasts and Instagram accounts.

"I think that for a lot of women and, increasingly, queer and nonbinary people, the witch has come to represent an alternative to institutional power, as well as a way to tap into their spirituality in a way that isn't mediated by someone else," Grossman said.

"Witchcraft is a means by which you can feel like you have some agency in the world. And because so much of it is about creating your own rituals, it allows individuals from different backgrounds to take part in it on their own terms."

Anthony "Bones" Johnson, "Lilith," England/Ibiza 2018. In his last series, Anthony "Bones" Johnson painted scenes that honor the alchemical forces of nature and the power of women. 

Credit: Courtesy of TASCHEN

The witchy narrative has evolved on screen, too, and "Witchcraft" dedicates its last pages to that.
From the scary Wicked Witch of the West in "The Wizard of Oz" to the beautiful Samantha of "Bewitched" and the tenacious Sabrina of the "Chilling Adventures of Sabrina" (which couldn't be more far removed from the original show starring Melissa Joan Hart), the witch has shifted from villain to protagonist, and from someone you would be afraid of to someone you might aspire to be.

Women have been overlooked in the history of alcohol. This author set out to change that
"Whether they instill fear, seduce, use violence or act for the greater good, the way visual arts portray witches is always reflective of the cultural moment they're part of,'' Hundley said. What has remained unchanged through the centuries, she noted, is that the very nature of the witch is to contain all of these archetypes within her at all times.

"The witch is in a state of constant evolution," she said. "She's a shapeshifter."

"Witchcraft" is available in Europe now and will be released next month in the US.

Add to queue: Empowering witches

READ: "The Once and Future Witches" (2020)
Witchcraft and activism are woven together in this Gothic fantasy novel by Alix E. Harrow, set in an alternate America where witches once existed but no longer do The year is 1893, and the estranged Eastwood sisters -- James Juniper, Agnes Amaranth and Beatrice Belladonna -- join the suffragists of New Salem while beginning to awaken their own magic, transforming the women's movement into the witches' movement.

BROWSE: "Major Arcana: Portraits of Witches in America" (2020)
Frances F. Denny's photographic project "Major Arcana: Witches in America" is an ambitious visual document of the modern face of witchcraft. Denny spent three years meeting and photographing a diverse group of witches around the US, capturing the various ways "witch-ness" expresses itself.

WATCH: "Motherland: Fort Salem" (2020)
Witches become superheroes in this action-packed series, currently in its second season. Three young sorceresses conscripted into the US Army -- Raelle Collar, Abigail Bellweather and Tally Craven -- use their supernatural tactics and spells to defend the country against a terrorist organization known as the Spree, a witch resistance group.

LISTEN: "Between the Worlds" (2018-present)

Host Amanda Yates Garcia discusses tarot, psychology, mythology, pop culture, witchcraft, magic, art and history alongside a series of special guests, in a podcast that aims to explore the many expressions of the practice.

WATCH: "American Horror Story: Coven" (2013)
Set in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, the third season of the FX horror anthology series "American Horror Story" centers on a coven of witches descended from the survivors of the Salem trials as they fight for survival against the outside world. The show deals with femininity and race, as well as issues around modern feminist theories and practice.

Top image: Titled "Ritual," this 2019 work by photographer Psyché Ophiuchus shows a ceremonial circle taking place in Fairy Glen on the Isle of Skye at dusk.

‘Joyously subversive sex goddesses’: the artists who gave witches a spellbinding makeover

Not one you’ll see this Halloween … a highly symbolically decorated witch by Oh, featured in the book Witchcraft. Photograph: © Vic Oh


Thousands of women were slain after being accused of witchcraft. Don’t they deserve more than the evil cackling hag stereotype? A powerful new book blows away the satanic baby-eating myths

Jonathan Jones
Wed 27 Oct 2021 13.34 BST

We all know what a witch looks like. A gnarled old face full of warts with teeth missing and bright green skin. Then there’s the long black coat, the tall black hat and let’s not forget the sizable crooked nose, sniffing the fumes rising from a bubbling cauldron in a room festooned with cobwebs.

But that’s not what witches look like at all, or at least not according a hefty new art book being published in time for Halloween. In this compendium of witchy women, from Renaissance paintings to modern Wicca, the caricature of the evil hag is turned upside down. Witchcraft, the latest volume in Taschen’s Library of Esoterica, finds evidence from artists as diverse as Auguste Rodin and Kiki Smith for its revisionist view that witches are typically young, glamorous practitioners of highly sexualised magick. The cover painting, by Victorian artist JW Waterhouse, depicts the ancient enchantress Circe in pale, red-lipped pre-Raphaelite ecstasy – and the fun just keeps coming. The witches here are powerful feminist sex goddesses whose rites and incantations are joyously subversive.

There’s nothing respectably academic about Witchcraft. One of its editors is herself a witch and it includes photographs of 1960s and 70s Wiccans – practitioners of modern pagan magick. Consecration of Wine, Stewart Farrar’s misty monochrome 1971 photograph, portrays his wife, Janet, bare-breasted, filling a raised chalice in a modern ritual “meant to invoke the sacred union of male and female – the alchemical wedding”. Another photo shows a group known as the “Farrar coven” lying on their backs to form a pentagram in a British back garden in 1981.

Pyre Woman Kneeling by Kiki Smith commemorates women who were burned for witchcraft. Photograph: Martin Argyroglo/La Monnaie de Paris

Witchcraft’s thesis is completely convincing. In scouring the history of art to back up their modern-pagan perspective, the editors point to something remarkable. Artists over the centuries have created images of the witch far removed from the cackling stereotype established by witch trials and remembered in popular culture today without any respect for the women (and some men) who were killed in these mockeries of justice.

A work by Kiki Smith tries to show reverence to the victims of the witch-hunters. Her sculpture of a naked witch kneels on an unlit pyre, spreading her arms in triumph: a woman resurrected from this history of misogyny. Typically – at the height of the “witch craze”, which lasted from around 1570 to 1660 – people accused of witchcraft were older women who lived in poverty at the margins of rural communities. Better-off neighbours feared their supposed magical vengeance. Investigators such as England’s infamous Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins, believed the witches met at a midnight sabbath and ate babies, exchanged animal familiars or “imps”, and had sex with Satan.

This stereotype was just as unrelated to reality as medieval Europe’s murderous caricature of Jewish people. Yet leafing through this book, you quickly see that even as elderly rural women were being demonised and burned alive, Renaissance artists saw witchcraft in a very different way. They associated it with desire, enchantment and female power.

One spread in the volume features Satisfaction – a 1984 painting by Shimon Okshteyn of a triumphant post-coital “modern siren” as the caption has it – exulting in presumably witchy erotic power. It is juxtaposed with a 15th-century German painting by an unknown artist of a naked woman performing a spell in her room. A man appears at the door, spying on the nude witch. He’s in big trouble, you can’t help feeling. He’s going to get a magical punishment simply for seeing this witch dancing at her private rituals. But warts, ugly nose, a familiar? No, this is one of the most sensual nudes in early Renaissance art.

The Four Witches by Albrecht Dürer, 1497. 

Photograph: © National Gallery of Art, Rosenwald Collection

That stress on the allure and attraction of witches is even more explicit in the work of the great German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer. In 1497, Dürer made The Four Witches, an engraving that depicts fleshy nudes dancing in a round. They are delineated with a boldness he learned on a trip across the Alps to Venice. There he encountered not just the city’s sex workers who also worked as artist’s models, but the new classically influenced Italian art with its cult of the human body. But Dürer’s own desires make him anxious. Even as he draws these women naked – as if picturing respectable Nuremberg frauen with their clothes off – he seems to sense they are witches. At the back of the room, an open door reveals the devil, his fanged mouth hanging open as he watches his minions from a cellar that has become a portal of hell.

Even when he does portray an aged witch riding backwards on a goat, an image much more closely connected to the witch-hunt stereotype, Dürer gives her a retinue of Renaissance cupids to complicate things. He is not really interested in persecuting old peasants but in exploring the artistic and moral tensions between his love of the flesh and his fear of sin.

A painting by his pupil Hans Baldung Grien gives two witches an even more gracious youth and beauty. They pose glamorously, more like models than agents of the macabre. Another great German 16th-century artist, Lucas Cranach, was most paradoxical of all. He painted fetishistically gloved or bonily nude women as charismatic beings of sexualised power – while, as a magistrate, he would have been personally involved in executing “witches”. In the sado-masochist fantasy world of his art, he desires everything that in real life he persecuted.

If artists could enjoy the witch as much as this – while women accused of witchcraft were being burned for the threat they were thought to pose to Christian society – itis little wonder art became ever more enchanted by the subject once the persecution ceased. By the 18th century, burning witches seemed like cruel superstitious nonsense. Instead, they became fuel for fantasy. Erotic drawings by Rodin and his kinky Belgian contemporary Félicien Rops imagine other uses for broomsticks than flying. In a Rodin sketch from about 1890, a witch faces us with her naked legs apart, rubbing her broom against her body with pleasure. Rops, too, depicts a young witch with a broomstick between her legs while she reads from her spell book wearing only her stockings.

Boston WITCH by Lauren Lancaster, 2017. WITCH was a 1960s anti-war group resurrected in 2016 to protest against US immigration practices. Photograph: Lauren Lancaster
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In modern art by women, however, the witch has been reclaimed as a figure of power and freedom. Francesca Woodman poses eerily in a ruinous room in Providence, Rhode Island, almost floating, weaving the air with her arms, as if performing a spell. She seems to be conjuring up the inhabitants of this haunted house. Maybe she’s summoning the victims of New England’s bygone witch-hunts. Betye Saar’s installation Window of Ancient Sirens uses mirrors and fire to invoke her demon sisters. Her art openly embraces African and Caribbean magical traditions to animate objects and re-enchant modern life.

The cover of Witchcraft, featuring JW Waterhouse’s Circe Invidiosa. Photograph: Taschen

Even the stereotype of the evil black-clad old witch is transformed by feminist art. Members of the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (WITCH) – originally founded by anti-war protesters in 1968 and recreated in 2016 – hide their identities under their pointy hats in a photograph by Lauren Lancaster.

But the fun of Witchcraft is its enthusiastic embrace of every side of its subject, from the sublime to the silly. You don’t have to buy a stuffed goat, set up an altar in your garage and invite the neighbours to a swinging sabbath to agree that witches get a rough ride three centuries after the European witch-hunt ended. At Halloween, most of the monsters we delight in have no connection to reality. Vampires, ghosts and Frankenstein’s monster are creatures of the imagination. But tens of thousands of real human beings were put to death in the name of the witch stereotype that is touted around for fun at this time of year. And that could well be the most horrifying thing about Halloween.

The Library of Esoterica: Witchcraft, edited by Jessica Hundley and Pam Grossman, is published by Taschen on 31 October (£30).

TASCHEN IS AN ART BOOK PUBLISHER

 

Cassava witches’ broom disease takes flight in South America

Cassava witches’ broom disease is quickly spreading across Northeastern South America, threatening a critical food staple for millions of people in Brazil and the continent

The Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture

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Cassava leaf stalks are analyzed in the laboratory

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Credit: Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT / E.Ramirez

Alliance researchers and partners, including Embrapa, Brazil’s largest agricultural research organization, launched a rapid response plan to slow the spread and mitigate potentially devastating consequences for food security and livelihoods.

In 2023, cassava farmers in remote French Guiana watched in shock as their crops withered. They pulled dilapidated stems from the ground. Instead of unearthing massive root bunches, which are cornerstones of diets across South America, they found nothing larger than carrots. Researchers identified the problem as cassava witches’ broom disease, provoked by a little-understood fungus, after analyzing results from a 2024 expedition to French Guiana. It was the first report of the disease in the Americas.

Around the same time, cassava witches’ broom disease was also observed in neighboring Brazil. In 2025, the first two confirmed reports in Latin America’s largest country, in March and May, were at least 1,000 km apart.

Scientists at the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT (The Alliance) and the Brazilian Agricultural Research Organization (Embrapa) launched a rapid-response plan in June 2025 to mitigate the spread of disease to formalize collaboration efforts that began early in the year. The immediate concern is to slow or contain the spread of witches’ broom and avoid a continental food-security disaster.

“We are facing an emergency,” said Paulo Melo, a researcher at Embrapa’s International Relations Office, during a strategizing meeting at the Alliance’s Americas headquarters in Colombia.

“Cassava is an everyday food in Brazil. If producers, particularly many women and Indigenous communities, don’t have cassava roots, they won’t have anything to eat or anything to make money from.”

Northeastern Brazil is one of the world’s largest consumers of cassava. Brazil, by far, is Latin America’s largest cassava producer. CWBD, as cassava witches’ broom disease is known for its English initials, has plant infection rates as high as 90% in Southeast Asia, where the Alliance first identified the fungal pathogen as the cause of the disease in 2023. Early reports point to staggeringly high cassava mortality in Brazil and French Guiana.

Cassava is a critical source of calories, carbohydrates, vitamins and micronutrients. Easy to grow under even the harshest conditions, its roots and the flour developed from them play an outsized role in diets. Cassava is central to the food security of about 800 million people globally, particularly smallholder farmers. Many African countries consume more cassava per capita than even Brazil. So far, CWBD has not been reported in Africa.

CWBD’s spread in Brazil is additionally concerning because the Amazon is cassava’s center of origin, meaning it was first domesticated there and is home to the plant’s greatest natural biodiversity, including at least 98 wild relatives. Because the disease is new to South America, scientists believe there is little natural resistance to it.

While a separate line of research is needed, CWBD likely jumped from a yet unknown host in Southeast Asia to cacao, avocado and cassava, raising the concern that it could jump back from cassava to cacao in South America, which is also cacao’s center of origin. Alliance researchers expect to understand cacao’s susceptibility to the fungus that causes witches’ broom, Ceratobasidium theobromae.

Science for prevention

With CWBD flying across South America, the race is on to understand the extent of the threat. The Alliance-Embrapa collaboration has several immediate actions aimed at containing witches’ broom. Ultimately, researchers hope to find a way to treat CWBD, or understand the natural resistance that some cassava varieties have to the pathogen and transfer those characteristics into new breeding lines.

There is currently no treatment for CWBD. The only way to eradicate it is by collecting all infected plants in an area and burning them. But because some infected plant stems remain viable for planting – ones that don’t show outward signs of infection – transmission is believed to be strongly linked to trade in cassava stakes, which are the primary material for cassava propagation.

“Embrapa’s main concern now is stopping witches’ broom so it does not put the lives and livelihoods of millions of people at risk,” said Jane Simoni, at Embrapa’s International Relations Office.

“This work is about South-South collaboration and fighting hunger and poverty. This problem is aimed directly at the most vulnerable people in very poor regions of Latin America.”

Immediate priorities are to map the distribution and severity of CWBD in northeastern Brazil. For this, scientists will need to implement a standardized set of molecular tools first developed for Southeast Asia, that can be used for in-field detection of C. theobromae. Alliance researchers aim to deploy this technology in the region and provide Embrapa’s large network of experts with detection tools.

Scientists also want to map cassava diversity and urgently collect wild cassava relatives and cassava landraces – the varieties farmers have selected and cultivated over generations. But the key is for researchers to get to the plants before they are infected.

Brazil maintains large collections of both cassava varieties and wild relatives. But Embrapa’s Melo said new collection expeditions should be launched soon. Part of the Alliance-Embrapa collaboration would include bringing new material to the Alliance’s gene bank in Colombia, Future Seeds, which has almost 6,000 cassava accessions (plant samples) from 28 countries, including 1,557 from Brazil.

The accessions must be kept alive and replicated in vitro, a delicate task. Plant samples must be quickly transported to suitable facilities to ensure they stay alive.

Future Seeds researchers distribute several new varieties of cassava every year but breeding new varieties is time-consuming. Past analyses by the Alliance identified sources of resistance to brown streak disease in cassava, a major threat in Africa. Brown streak disease research is part of ongoing Alliance research.

“It’s hard to understate the importance of the cassava germplasm collections,” said Jonathan Newby, the leader of the Alliance’s cassava research team.

“These form the genetic backbone for breeding new varieties and finding and understanding natural resistance to disease. It’s critical that material facing threats from witches’ broom is collected, screened for disease, and quickly transported to in vitro storage facilities for research.”

Out of about 300 cassava varieties they tested, the Alliance’s cassava breeders have found multiple varieties that display resistance to witches’ broom in Southeast Asia. Cassava in Future Seeds and other gene banks may also prove to have some level of resistance. While the pathogen is new to South America, it is unlikely that many plants have natural resistance, but scientists hope some natural resistance exists.

“This all takes time and resources,” said Embrapa’s Simoni. “You can’t do an experiment this week and have the results next week. That’s not how it works. We’re working to quickly bring together as many international experts as possible to confront this challenge together. We also need to ensure Africa is prepared, as the impact of witches’ broom there could be profound. We have to act now. This is science for prevention.”

The witches’ broom work builds on decades of collaboration between the Alliance and Embrapa, which recently entered a new phase focused on further strengthening ties between the organizations.

“The Alliance and Embrapa expect to make significant contributions not only to witches’ broom response and research but on other mutual interests, including food security, climate action and food system transformation,” said Maya Rajasekharan, the Alliance’s Managing Director for the Americas.

A fastidious fungus

Alliance scientists and partners are at the forefront of CWBD’s troubling rise in recent years. In addition to identifying C. theobromae as the cause of witches’ broom in Southeast Asia (which was previously thought to be a bacterial or viral infection), researchers also grew the fungus in laboratory conditions, a first-time feat that took researchers two months. This allows researchers to better understand how the fungus functions, test it under controlled conditions on cassava plants, potentially devise treatment methods, and breed CWBD-resistant varieties.

“It’s from a family called ‘fastidious fungi’ and it lives up to its name,” said Wilmer Cuellar, who leads the Alliance’s Crop Protection Team.

“It’s hard to identify, very difficult to isolate, and scientists needed decades to associate it with witches’ broom.”

Once Cuellar’s lab sequenced C. theobromae, they discovered it had been infecting cassava in Southeast Asia since at least the 2000s, and cacao since the 1960s. The incidence of witches’ broom disease appears cyclical and often flares up after long rainy seasons. The region is currently facing another major outbreak that started in 2022 in at least a half-dozen countries that produce cassava for starch, a multibillion-dollar business critical to smallholder farmers there.

Cuellar is concerned C. theobromae may behave differently in the Amazon. Humid conditions are far more constant there than in Southeast Asia, potentially creating an environment where the fungus could thrive and quickly spread. While predicting where CWBD will arrive next, it could potentially continue its path through South America’s northern Atlantic countries, including Colombia, which has its largest growing areas in the country’s north.

“The terrain is totally different in South America and the fungus will likely fly,” Cuellar said. “We’re already seeing it spread rapidly with more severe symptoms. This is a big problem.”

For access to the full package of multimedia and press materials, click here.

Cassava Witches' Broom Disease [VIDEO] | 



Cassava witches' broom under the microscope


Credit

Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT




Detail of a cassava plant affected by Witches' Broom Disease



 

Comparing a healthy (Right) and diseased (Left) cassava plant

Researcher Alejandra Gil in the laboratory diagnosing cassava sample

Scientist Wilmer Cuellar scans cassava plants for signs of witches' broom disease.
Credit

Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT / E.Ramirez