Pleasure has always been policed, in some way or another, in cultures across the world. That’s because pleasure is, in a way, a source of resistance.

In her book Vagina, Naomi Wolf argues that women have a special relationship with pleasure in that, when we have the right kind of it, we are feisty, powerful, and strong, and when we don’t, we can lose our will to stand up for ourselves. The way our pelvic nerves translate pleasure from our sexual experiences to our brains boosts the hormones that make us strong and connected and dampen our vulnerability to depression and lethargy.

Wolf argues that dopamine in particular is “the ultimate feminist chemical. If a woman has optimal levels of dopamine, she is difficult to direct against herself. She is hard to drive to self-destruction, to manipulate and control.” On the other hand, when dopamine is too low, which is a known effect of sexual violence, women tend to get depressed, stop fighting back, and become easier to subjugate.

Wolf argues, then, that there is a physiological reason why women have been suppressed for so many generations: the powers that be knew, probably from experience, that if you damage the vagina, essentially, you damage the brain. Mess with our dopamine flow and we’ll stop fighting back. Rape has always gone along with pillaging not (only) because colonizers are assholes, but because when you can quickly and easily shut down half the population, you cut your colonizing hours in half. They didn’t need a scientific study to prove what they could see with their own eyes: rape a woman and she’ll stop resisting.

There’s good news here, too, though, from Wolf’s perspective. The unique vagina-brain connection might also make people with vaginas more powerful. Wolf writes:

I don’t like any kind of feminism that sets one gender above another, so I do not mean this in any way as a value judgment. Neither gender is “better.” But one gender is theoretically able to get more of a certain kind of dopamine and opioid/endorphin activation during sex, which has a very specific effect on the brain and even the personality. We cannot escape what this math implies for female sexuality, in its unmediated, un-messed-up state: nature constructed a profound difference between the sexes, which places women in, potentially, a position of greater biochemical empowerment.

Great sex, Wolf explains, boosts women’s dopamine, endorphins, opioids, and testosterone. It makes us more willing to take creative risks, to give fewer fucks about what other people think of us. It makes us want to take over the world. And have more sex.

Wolf goes on, “So the fear that patriarchy always had—that if you let women have sex and know how to like it, it will make them both increasingly libidinous and increasingly ungovernable—is actually biologically true!” From this perspective, it makes sense that suppressing and policing female sexuality has always been an aspect of patriarchal society. Knowing our sexual bodies and being unafraid to use them might have made us so full of spunk and fire that our subjugation wouldn’t have been possible.

The patriarchal fear of female pleasure was perhaps most salient during the centuries of witch-hunting when mostly women were tortured (often sexually) and killed in brutal ways. The first trials started in the 14th century and hit a fever pitch in the 16th and 17th centuries. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English put the killings in perspective when they write in their book Witches, Midwives, and Nurses:

One writer has estimated the number of executions on an average of 600 a year for certain German cities—or two a day, ‘leaving out Sundays.’ Nine hundred witches were destroyed in a single year in the Wertzberg area, and 1000 were put to death in a day. In the Bishopric of Trier, in 1585, two villages were left with only one female inhabitant each.

Men were sometimes accused of witchcraft too, but the authors point out that “women made up some 85 percent of those executed.” It’s always been so interesting to me that when we hear the phrase “witch hunt” in our cultural lexicon, it’s usually coming from a white man feeling persecuted after he got caught abusing his power. Why don’t we talk more about the witch hunt era as what it was: a large scale, wide-reaching historical campaign of terror against women?

There’s no evidence witchcraft as a specific religion ever really existed, though as a young teen who would light candles and try to cast spells while blasting the angsty strains of Alanis Morissette, I still can’t help but yearn for a ritualistic practice that literally gave women power. Magic wasn’t really what was being hunted, though: it was any form of power that could belong to a woman, especially if it related to her reproductive abilities.

Before the witch hunts, women were bakers, ale-makers, schoolteachers, doctors, and surgeons. Gynecology was a mostly female profession, with c-sections being performed almost exclusively by women in the 14th century, until male-only universities started popping up to certify men and push the midwives and lay healers out of a job.

The lay healers were mostly women who would provide counsel and a few herbs while, by the 1800s, men were getting certified to perform superstitious rituals like bloodletting and treating leprosy with “a broth made of the flesh of a black snake caught in a dry land among stones.” As Ehrenreich and English point out, a patient would be likelier to die by the hands of a certified male doctor’s bravura than with the “undoubtedly safer” gentle attentions of a female lay healer.

Women were especially targeted if they had any medical knowledge about reproduction or contraception. In her book Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici argues that the witch hunts were a necessary strategy to transition from feudalism into the capitalist era. Women’s bodies were needed to create more laborers for the new economy, so reproduction had to be carefully monitored.

“The criminalization of women’s control over procreation is a phenomenon whose importance cannot be overemphasized,” Federici writes, “both from the viewpoint of its effects on women and its consequences for the capitalist organization of work.”

If Wolf’s argument that targeting women sexually is an age-old strategy of war, the witch hunts make no exception. “In community after community,” Wolf writes, “the women identified by inquisitors or by their fellow villagers as ‘witches’ were often those who were seen as too sexual, or too free. And forms of torture were focused on their sexuality,” such as with devices placed in the vagina or with vaginal mutilation.

When women were shamed for their sexuality and even tortured at their genital source, the theory goes, they would indeed be willing to step back and relinquish their rights. It is interesting, however, that this subjugation and control of women in the service of capitalism took almost 400 years. We obviously haven’t been that easy to subjugate.  

Echoes of this sexual suppression and torture continue on today in communities where girl’s clitorises are cut out or burned, ostensibly for religious reasons. Clitoridectomies are hardly an invention of some other land, however, lest we think we Westerners are somehow more civilized. In 1858, the English doctor Isaac Baker Brown introduced the practice that, Wolf explains, made him “famous and sought after for his ‘cure,’ which took argumentative, fiery girls, and, after he had excised their clitorises, returned them to their families in a state of docility, meekness, and obedience.” Even Western doctors, it seems, understood that damaging a girl’s clitoris would somehow amputate her will to rebel.

Then, of course, there’s our old buddy Sigmund Freud. The (in)famous founder of psychoanalysis has a hidden story that is, in my reading, about his betrayal of womankind. In the last decades of the 19th century, Freud and his contemporaries were greatly interested in hysteria—which was, basically, a catch-all term for women’s psychological problems vaguely associated with the uterus (hystera in Greek).

In his earnest attempt to understand this common affliction, Freud sat down with women and listened to them. Jean-Martin Charcot and Joseph Breuer, Freud’s contemporaries, were similarly focused on the problem. In her book Trauma and Recovery, Judith Herman points out that “For a brief decade men of science listened to women with a devotion and a respect unparalleled before or since.

All this listening bore fruit for Freud, at least at first. He discovered that women suffering from hysteria pretty much always had a history of childhood sexual abuse. Freud wrote a triumphant paper called The Aetiology of Hysteria clearly explaining the root of the problem. Instead of being lauded for his discovery, however, he was met with the academic version of an uncomfortable silence. “Hysteria was so common among women,” Herman explains,

that if his patient’s stories were true, and if his theory were correct, he would be forced to conclude that what he called ‘perverted acts against children’ were endemic, not only among the proletariat of Paris, where he had first studied hysteria, but also among the respectable bourgeois families of Vienna, where he had established his practice.

That meant that sexual abuse was a systemic issue, a problem of violence against girl children that defied class. Freud’s society was not ready to consider such an earth-shattering possibility, so his theory was rejected. In order to maintain his prestigious position in society, he recanted. Herman goes on,

By the first decade of the twentieth century, without ever offering any clinical documentation of false complaints, Freud had concluded that his hysterical patients’ accounts of childhood sexual abuse were untrue: ‘I was at last obliged to recognize that these scenes of seduction has never taken place, and that they were only fantasies which my patients had made up.’

Betrayal! Freud’s psychoanalysis went on to create a theory of neurosis that did not match women’s actual experience of reality. He insisted that women lie often and that their fantasies were the source of their problems. He came up with the concept of penis envy, that old canard that little girls hate their mothers forever for not giving them a penis. Not to mention his insulting (and evidence-free) idea that women who can’t achieve orgasms from penetration alone are somehow immature, a concept that caused sexual insecurity and an epidemic of sexually frustrated women that still persists to this day.

Women have inherited quite a history of sexual shame, terror, and torture from our ancestral grandmothers, even if we have no history of it in our own lives. It’s no wonder feeling sexual pleasure is so fraught in our time—not only have we not always felt the right to experience pleasure in the ways that work for us (thanks Freud!), but we have echoes of intergenerational trauma from a history of being tortured, murdered, and violated, at worst, and silenced, at best.

For these reasons and more, feeling pleasure isn’t just a little thing we should try to make more time for in our busy lives because it’s fun. It’s a radical act of resistance against a history of suppression and pain. Taking pleasure, whether by enjoying great sex, going dancing, eating good food, or simply having a hot cup of tea on a cool day, is an act of self-determination and choice. Our pleasure is a tool of resistance against our own oppression and suppression. Our pleasure matters.

Perhaps you heard the scuttlebutt about a dubious product on offer from Sephora: a “witchcraft starter kit” that included fragrance oils, tarot cards, a white sage bundle and a quartz crystal. Responding to widespread criticism across social media, mostly from millennial/Gen Z witches who found the box distasteful for a variety of reasons, Sephora and Pinrose (the kit’s creator) decided to cancel the release.

The outrage ran the gamut from ecological concern (white sage is very trendy and there is concern it is being over harvested) to spiritual dismay (with real witches annoyed at the shallow commercialism that co-opts their religion), from consumer activism (why buy a $42 kit from Sephora when so many artisans and small shops sell ritual supplies on Etsy or in brick and mortar shops?) to cultural appropriation (didn’t we learn that using white sage is basically a practice stolen from Native American traditions back in the 1980s New Age days?), and also had a tinge of eye-rolling ennui (this Instagram witchcraft craze is getting out of hand). And of course, there are real problems in the world that real witches could be focusing their magic on, instead of getting incensed about, well, incense.

The current rebirth of witchcraft has made its beliefs and practices more socially acceptable, even desirable, as a facet of one’s feminist identity (and has allowed for its commercialization). Almost twenty years ago, a similar product made it into the marketplace, the “Teen Witch Starter Kit” (created by the author of the book Teen Witch, Silver Ravenwolf, whose earlier book To Ride a Silver Broomstick had been a bestseller among newbie Wiccans in the late 1990s). At that time, the main objection from the witchcraft community was also the product’s crass commercial vibe. However, instead of Instagram-driven enthusiasm, it was met with objection, bordering on insurrection, from the non-witch public.The kit’s being targeted at teens ruffled a lot of feathers, and there was a response from the evangelical Christian community aimed at boycotting the product.

One key reason for the public outrage was that a bonafide Satanic Panic took hold in the United States around this time, mostly driven by the rise of the Moral Majority and the popular notion that secularism was ruining America. The Satanic Panic, which stretched roughly from the mid-1980s through 2000, had all the hallmarks of the witch hunts of Salem Village: hysterical and political in equal measure. The renewed interest in witchcraft appears to have all the ingredients for another Satanic Panic—teenage girls expressing independence, an appreciation for non-Christian ideologies, a slew of occult stories in film and TV, and a right-wing government. Could another Satanic Panic be looming? And this time around, what would it look like?

The occult media that flourished throughout the 1970s almost disappeared in the 1980s, partly due to the growing influence that extreme Christian groups exerted on the media landscape. Instead, the media treatment of occult storylines focused on documentary, not narrative storytelling. Even programing that relied on rumor, hearsay and poor research became associated with news and truth. The primetime specials by Geraldo Rivera (Satan’s Underground and a sequel) were hugely popular, and daytime talk show host Oprah Winfrey also devoted several episodes to the Satanic Panic.

One disturbing outgrowth of the Satanic Panic was the growing belief in the phenomenon of Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA), in which children and adults were physically and sometimes sexually abused in occult ritual contexts. Rumors of SRA were allowed to proliferate due to flawed psychological treatment practices that had become popular but that have since been discredited, such as hypnosis and recovered memory. The descriptions of these crimes were all eerily similar, and all bore a marked resemblance to horror films from the 1960s and 1970s, in particular Rosemary’s Baby. Details like candles, knives, people standing in a circle (either nude or wearing ritual robes), chanting or singing, consumption of wine or blood: all these could be traced to various occult movies or books. Young children who could possibly have seen such media were fed suggestive questions or stories from a therapist or other authority figure, and become convinced they had suffered abuse. One famous, sensational book about one such SRA victim, Michelle Remembers, was instrumental in spreading awareness of SRA, but years later was thoroughly debunked.

The current rebirth of witchcraft has made its beliefs and practices more socially acceptable, even desirable, as a facet of one’s feminist identity (and has allowed for its commercialization).
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In 1985, the FBI convened a task force to instruct law enforcement on investigating occult crimes. In 1987, the notorious McMartin pre-school case in California produced disturbing media stories about children being ritually abused by daycare workers. But overall, there was a hyper-awareness of the behavior of teenagers. Typical teenage behavior such as listening to heavy metal music (which was full of occult imagery), recreational drug use, rebelling against authority, and wearing black clothing were all considered possible signs of occult involvement. This led ultimately to a great many bogus “occult experts” with mail order degrees and virtually no academic or professional training offering their “services” to law enforcement.

After a few years, and many hours of investigation, Kenneth Lanning, the head of the task force, concluded that there was no evidentiary basis for the stories of children being kidnapped for ritual sacrifice by devil worshipping cults. But many people believed these nefarious crimes were real, and widespread, and talk-show media did its best to fan the flames. Criminal cases like the so-called Matomoros Cult Murders in Mexico in 1989 (where an American college student was murdered during spring break), and the 1993 murder of three young boys in West Memphis, Arkansas, said to be orchestrated by a satan-worshipping teenage “ringleader”and his two friends (later to become known as the West Memphis Three) are only two examples of occurrences that allowed fear-mongering talk show media to spread rumors, panic and suspicion.

And in the midst of this maelstrom of rumor and fear, The Craft, a movie about teenage girls whose lives are amplified and emboldened by witchcraft stormed the zeitgeist and led to an explosion of interest in Wicca, not to mention a revival of Goth fashion. The pagan internet was in its infancy but grew quickly once the networking site The Witches’ Voice was introduced in 1997. Silver Ravenwolf’s book Teen Witch came out in 1998 (as did the movie Practical Magic), the Teen Witch Kit in 1999 (as did The Blair Witch Project). Parents were still concerned about their daughters’ interest in witchcraft, but the internet allowed increasingly independent teens to order books and supplies discreetly, and join chatrooms and newsgroups to discuss witchcraft. And then, the first Harry Potter book came out in 1997, with the next three being released a year apart. Even though Evangelical Christian groups raised concerns about the books’ subject matter, and some communities banned and even burned the books, fearing indoctrination into witchcraft, the series became so popular that millions of kids were tossing aside their video games for books. Kids reading for pleasure. So evil.

Of course, if you’ve ever tried to stop a teenage girl from doing something she’s forbidden to do, you know it’s a fool’s errand. As the main consumers of popular media, young people command the marketplace of ideas in undeniably powerful ways. The 1990s wave of girl power witchcraft, however, seems downright quaint next to today’s surge of social media-fuelled witchcraft, pulling celebrity influencers, witchy podcasters and reboots of witchy TV and movies along with it, like bright spots of silk thread caught in a tumbleweed, ribbons in Baba Yaga’s spiky hair.

I’m old enough to recall the witchcraft waves of previous generations: the explosion of neo-pagan witchcraft among young adults in the 1980s, following a mostly woman-led interest in goddess worship and feminist witchcraft. Men entered the movement in droves in the 1980s, and the Dianic covens of the 1970s seemed to dissipate slowly (these days, holding public rituals for “women only” is controversial, to say the least). In graduate school and beyond, I studied the modern occult revival and the first wave of popular-culture fueled witchcraft in America in the 1960s via Great Britain (which was more widespread than earlier waves of occultism after WWI, which also originated in the UK), and, specifically, the teen witchcraft craze of the late 1990s. But more recently, we saw a flurry of teen witches seeking their “Supreme” after watching the decadent, gruesome season of American Horror Story: Coven which debuted on FX in 2013.

Witchy media is on fire right now. The current season of American Horror Story: Apocalypse, features a Coven crossover with most of the original witches returning to do battle with some very well-dressed warlocks (this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a witch war). 2016’s arthouse smash The Love Witch portrays a 1970s-era sexy witch in a modern day setting, who uses spells to seduce men. The remake of Dario Argento’s 1987 cult classic Suspiria is a glossy, bloody, gorgeously-designed tale of a secret witch society within a posh dance academy run by devil-worshipping matriarchs. The reboot of Charmed cast three Latinx actresses in the roles previously played by Shannen Doherty, Alyssa Milano and Holly Marie Combs (the series was itself inspired by The Craft). The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (which premiered October 26 on Netflix), about a sixteen year old girl who is half witch, half mortal, will surely attract more young adherents to witchcraft, which the show portrays as a lifestyle full of romance, social intrigue, evil and ever-present danger. (You know, kind of like living in America right now, minus the romance.) And a new film entitled Satanic Panic, forthcoming from recently-revived horror mag Fangoria’s production company, portrays a Satanic cult that tries to sacrifice a young (and presumably virginal) pizza delivery gal in a not-so-subtle twist on a common gonzo porn trope, and a weird reference to the recent Pizzagate conspiracy.

What all of these current films and shows have in common is a shift towards a kind of “dark” witchcraft, one that does not shy away from linking witchcraft with demons, the occult, or even bold expressions of Satan worship. And while that may be great for box office receipts and streaming services, it’s very likely that the proliferation of portrayals of evil witches will once again lead extreme Christian groups to react in predictable (and perhaps unpredictable) ways. The Pizzagate debacle shows what can happen when unchecked rumor, misogyny and violent extremism are allowed to run wild. There is no doubt that the portrayals of Hillary Clinton as a witch during the presidential campaign (even Bernie Sanders supporters tried to hold a “Bern the Witch” event) helped to foment the crazy rumors of a satanic child sex ring based in the basement of a pizza parlor in Washington, DC. The fact that the building had no basement did not stop a man from entering the business with an assault weapon, seeking, apparently, to rescue kidnapped children and mete out vigilante justice. Recent events bear out the very real threat of violence to people of many ethnic and religious groups, and to journalists, and the domestic terrorism resulting from the self-radicalization taking place among Trump supporters.

It’s very likely that the proliferation of portrayals of evil witches will once again lead extreme Christian groups to react in predictable (and perhaps unpredictable) ways.
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As a long-practicing witch and a scholar who studies media portrayals of witchcraft, I see the current witchy zeitgeist, which often posits witchcraft as an aesthetic, or an interesting approach to self-care, as both helpful and hindering to women’s empowerment right now. I’d love to see a deeper engagement, a better understanding of the history and culture of modern witchcraft, amidst all the witchy fashion, DIY décor, and weekend spellcraft. But even more than that, I worry that the many years of effort modern witches have spent offering disclaimers about their spiritual practices, ensuring our friends, lovers, neighbors and the mass media that we don’t worship the devil, may have all been for naught.

Given the present situation in our country, I feel some trepidation about the current trends towards glamorizing and valorizing any and all things witchy and demonic. It’s not because I don’t absolutely love Suspiria or Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, because I do; it’s because I fear the atmosphere of ignorance, anger, and bigotry that has been emboldened by our president, and the growing number of Americans who see conspiracy theories as facts and journalism as “fake news.” If the imagined world of Harry Potter, with its spellcraft and coming of age angst, could move religious extremists to ban and burn books, what will they have to say about Sabrina’s murder, satanic worship, cannibalism, hot gay sex and infanticide?

As all around us we witness the dismantling of democracy, the proliferation of propaganda, the swell of militia groups, the spread of violent vigilantism, and the unmistakable drumbeat of a burgeoning police state, it’s not all that far-fetched to expect that one day soon some form of mass hysteria might break out. Yeah, I hate that word too: the Greek root hyster means “the womb” and our framing of hysteria presupposes that it’s unique to women. What we once called hysteria has also been called shell shock (a condition affecting men in the first world war), and later known as post-traumatic stress disorder. The symptoms are numerous and vary widely from one individual to the next. It has been suggested by numerous historical scholars that the symptoms displayed by several of the young girls in Salem Village during the time of the witchcraft accusations there were symptoms arising from hysteria. In more recent years, feminist scholars have debated that the hysterical symptoms on display were not signs of witchcraft, or even of witchcraft dabbling, but in fact were signs of trauma, possibly brought on by sexual abuse.

If the imagined world of Harry Potter could move religious extremists to ban and burn books, what will they have to say about Sabrina’s murder, satanic worship, cannibalism, hot gay sex and infanticide?
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No doubt many of us are feeling a little on edge lately. For many months now, in the wake of Trump’s election victory, women across the country have addressed their collective ennui, stress, and rage through increasingly radical forms of self-care, including witchcraft. Okay, in many cases that “witchcraft” was a sort of code for occult-tinged activities like smudging with sage wands, meditating with crystals, reading tarot cards, and setting up personal altars. The recent witchery trend usually stops short of encouraging women to join an actual coven, but popular media has been abuzz with spells and divination. There are determined witches and compatriots of all genders all over the country hexing the president and his sycophants on a monthly basis, drawing on the power of the new moon. Witchcraft as a declaration of identity and power has been a growing cultural wave for several years now.

But the narrative seems to be shifting. The wholesale gaslighting of female survivors, the sight and sound of the POTUS mocking Christine Blasey Ford and calling her accusations a “hoax” perpetrated by Democrats, the characterization of protesters as “an angry mob,” all of this signifies a full-out war on women, perpetrated by people devoid of empathy, logic or even the most basic sense of decorum. Women and people of color were among the targeted Democrats of the “MAGA-Bomber” who tried to make it look like his pipe bombs were all mailed by Debbie Wasserman Schultz: an attempt to make it look like a Jewish woman perpetrated these assassination attempts.  It seems increasingly likely that women who profess any sort of connection to witchcraft or the occult these days (in other words, any woman seeking empowerment) may well find herself the target of right-wing bullies. It seems ridiculous to think that way, but who among us has not felt like we’re losing our grip on sanity lately?

Wicca has as one of its central tenets: “Harm none, and do what ye will.” Despite vaunted claims of power and supernatural ability, witchy women have never been able to escape the gallows, the pyre, or the dunking stools built by men. Our magic is more subtle and secret than that, and it has had to be, for our own protection; whether it means gathering abortifacient herbs by the light of the moon, or crafting profane signs to carry in the streets, or meeting at the crossroads to plan safe houses for vulnerable immigrants. And if the current state of things continues to erode, I think the empowerment many women have sought from witchcraft may take on new, more serious context. We may not be able to sour milk or wither cornfields (or erections) at the wave of our hands: but we have the power of our strident voices, the strength of our hungry bodies, the passion of our weary hearts. Witches know the magic of the change of seasons, the subtle shift in energies of the moon, the ocean, the trees, the radio waves. We seek knowledge to ply our arts, devouring books and podcasts, and we have stamina, fed with righteous anger, our bones bearing centuries of oppressed sisterhoods. We may not be able to control the weather, but we know which way the wind is blowing.

The sleepovers I attended as a little kid all followed a similar pattern: We would have dinner, retreat to the family room to watch whatever movies had been rented for us, consume enormous amounts of soft drinks, and then, riding that sugar high, stay up into the wee hours of the morning giggling over anything and everything. This routine continued until shortly before we hit puberty, at which point our sleepovers took a darker turn. As soon as the rest of the family was in bed, we would abandon the family room and whatever embarrassingly babyish movie had been provided for our entertainment and instead make a beeline for the basement. There, in the chill darkness lit by a single dangling lightbulb, we would try to do magic.

Our forays into the dark arts never went further than the most standard of supernatural party tricks: daring each other to do Bloody Mary, asking the ouija boards about our futures, taking turns levitating each other using the old light as a feather, stiff as a board game. Sometimes we tried to cast spells or make voodoo dolls of our frenemies; one girl had an older sister who was Wiccan, and we would pore over her books and notes whenever we got the chance. We lit pink candles and chanted the names of boys we liked, hoping to magically persuade them to like us back. Altogether it was all pretty harmless, although at the time those sleepovers hit that perfect sweet spot between thrilling and terrifying.

I realize now that my friends and I weren’t alone in our attempts to practice witchcraft. In fact, most of the women I’ve talked to have had similar experiences — in some senses, it almost feels like a girlhood rite of passage. Certainly the tradition has a rich history. To pick a very famous example, consider the story of Betty Parris and Abigail Williams, whose accusations of witchcraft sparked the Salem Witch Trials. Ten-year-old Betty and her older cousin Abigail would meet up with other young girls in Salem to practice what they called “little sorceries.”
Most of their activities centered around divining who their future husbands would be, because for a 17th century girl, the greatest indicator of how your life would play out was who you married and what social status you achieved through that marriage. To find this out, the girls used a form of ovomancy, or egg magic, called a “Venus glass,” which worked by dripping the white of an egg into a glass of water. By watching the shape the egg white took, the girls hoped to find clues about their futures.

While fortune-telling might seem to be at odds with the conservative form of Christianity practiced by the Puritans, the truth is that folk magic or, as they called it, “white magic,” was frequently (if secretly) practiced by women in early American Puritan communities. In fact, when Betty and Abigail began to experience strange fits and other signs of bewitchment — signs which appeared, interestingly enough, shortly after they’d been playing at sorcery — one of the first remedies tried was a bit of folk magic called a witch’s cake. This cake — which was suggested by the girls’ neighbor Mary Sibley — was made of rye flour mixed with urine from the afflicted girls. The cake was then fed to a dog with the hope that the dog’s behavior would somehow reveal the identity of the person bewitching the girls.

Although the intentions behind the witch cake were noble, when Betty’s father, the Reverend Samuel Parris, found out about it, he took to his pulpit to denounce Mary Sibley, calling the witch’s cake “diabolical.” Mary Sibley immediately confessed and repented; had she not, she would likely have been among those convicted and killed for witchcraft. From this story and the story of Betty and Abigail and their friends practicing divination, we can conclude two things: firstly, that charms and spells and other types of folk magic were commonly used even in strict Puritan communities, and secondly, that no matter how “white” the magic was, the women who performed it were always suspected of evil.

In the 300 years that have elapsed since the Salem Witch Trials, our preoccupation with witches hasn’t waned, although thankfully it has grown less deadly. We’re just as fascinated by witches as our ancestors — perhaps even more so. Certainly the past few years have seen a resurgence of witchesin pop culture.

These days, the terms witch or witchy cover a broad spectrum of things — it might mean someone who practices witchcraft (who may or may not align with a particular pagan or neopagan religion), but then again it might not. In some ways, 2016’s version of “witchy” might seem to refer to more of an Instagrammable aesthetic choice than anything else — wearing dark lipstick and crystal pendants, growing cute kitchen herb gardens, and arranging household altars of dried flowers and animal skulls. It’s tempting to write these things off as being merely superficial affectations, but to do so would be a grave underestimation. Beneath all that glossy packaging hums the same idea that has tantalized girls for millennia: the fact that to be a witch is to be a woman with power in a world where women are often otherwise powerless.

To be a witch is to be a woman with power in a world where women are often otherwise powerless.
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On some level, all of the contemporary trappings of witchiness tap into that desire to feel powerful. Black or dark purple lipstick might currently be in vogue, but on some level they subvert traditional feminine beauty standards and the ability to subvert or reject the status quo often confers a sense of power. To grow your own kitchen herbs and have some knowledge of herb lore are powerful in the sense that the ability to provide for yourself — even on a small scale — is a type of power. And, of course, the idea that setting out a particular arrangement of objects in a particular way with the intent of influencing real-life events is a type of power.

According to Ayşe Tuzlak, who has a PhD in religion and specializes in gender and ritual in the ancient world, it was women’s inability to obtain power through established means and their subsequent attempts to access it through other channels that informed western ideas of what it meant to be a witch:

“European Christian women in late antiquity and the Middle Ages were generally barred access to institutional power, and thus women who expressed their religiosity in unapproved ways, or in ways that were ‘too feminine’ by the standards of the culture, were branded as witches or heretics. The institutions of that time and place had certain assumptions about appropriate behavior for men and women, and what was considered real Christianity and what was not. Thus the people who had a vested interest in those institutions began to pay neurotically close attention to anything that looked ‘too feminine,’ and expanded the significance of feminine symbols — like the broom, an ordinary domestic tool — to include dangerous associations, for example flying at night to secret meetings. Because if a woman looked like she was seizing spiritual power that wasn’t hers by right, then everything “feminine” about her because suspect and morally charged.”

Witch is a highly gendered term, and like most such terms, its masculine counterparts — terms like wizard, warlock, sorcerer, or mage — do not quite mean exactly the same thing. This is not to say that witches are never men, or that men have never been killed for practicing witchcraft, but rather that the vast bulk of those accused of being witches have been women.

Witch is a highly gendered term.
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Tuzlak explains that just as the term slut — a term so gendered that people will often say man-slut if they are using it to refer to a man — says more about how a woman is viewed than it does about her sexual history, so too does the historical use of witch tell us more about how well a woman fit into contemporary gender roles than it does about her actual use of magic:

“I tend to see ‘witch’ as a social category imposed upon a woman who doesn’t fit acceptable religious categories. Which is why I usually put words like ‘witchcraft’ in scare-quotes; for me the word ‘witch’ is kind of like the word ‘slut,’ in that it’s a way to mark a woman as unacceptable and Other, rather than an objective measure of her religion or her sexual behavior. Just as you can’t tell how much sex a woman actually has by how often she’s called a slut, so also you can’t really tell anything about a woman’s religion based on whether a priest or a neighbor calls her a witch. And some women who have lots of sex or heretical opinions might pass under the radar because they can perform social acceptability in other ways.”

Given all of that, what exactly does witch mean? The term walks that tricky knife’s edge of a slur that has been reclaimed by some of the people it might be used against. How do we figure out how to balance the fact that witch is both an accusation that has been historically deadly to women, and also an identity that many find empowering? For Tuzlak, the answer lies in understanding the place the witch has traditionally occupied in cultural hierarchies:

“I tend to understand things in terms of power structures and insider/outsider status with regard to institutions. So, to use our own culture as an example, if someone offers me drugs in a carpeted office, neatly groomed, wearing a white lab coat, with a name tag that says Dr. Something on it, then I will probably assume that that person has my best interests at heart and that the drugs he or she is giving me are going to help me (even though none of those things are necessarily true). If someone wearing a hoodie offers me drugs in an alleyway out of a baggie, I will likely assume that the drugs are ‘just for fun,’ and that the person is dangerous and not especially committed to my well-being (though none of those things might be true either). There are lots of shades of grey between these two extremes of licit and illicit, too — the friend of a friend who can get you weed, the naturopath who advertises in the back of a new age magazine, your auntie who’s just really good at helping pregnant women with their morning sickness, the not-quite-legal-but-never-really-busted dispensary, the friend who’s not taking Lyrica any more and gives you the rest of her scrip when you’re hard up.

“Assuming we’re talking about ‘real’ witches here (i.e., not just someone who’s accused of witchcraft by an inquisition, but a local wise woman or healer), I see the witch’s work as falling on a similar spectrum. She is clearly not offering the ‘official’ help that a physician or priest would, which brings with it a lot of risks, but which also allows someone to work outside a system that doesn’t necessarily offer her what she needs. I think the ‘witch’ in this sense is a crucial contribution to the social health of a culture, especially a culture that is under the heel of powerful institutions that do not take women or other marginalized groups seriously.”

And yet it’s hard not to notice that as much as the idea of the witch subverts traditional gender roles, it also, in some ways, upholds them. This is especially apparent in our modern take on the witch, especially when it comes to the Neopagan movement, a set of modern pagan religions of which Wicca is the most well-known. Many practices and beliefs in various sects of Neopaganism can be very rigid and cis-normative in their treatment of gender, and this, of course, has the unfortunate consequence of perpetuating gender stereotypes. As Tuzlak puts it:

“The image of the ‘witch’ can be both liberating and oppressive to women, very often at the same time. The history of modern witchcraft makes gendered language very hard to escape. Keep in mind that most of the primary branches of Neopagan practice were shaped by men, which means that Gardnerian/Alexandrian/Crowleyan constructions of masculinity and femininity arise out of very conservative views on gender, in line with the assumptions of 19th-century English esotericists and the medieval/early modern texts they were working with. As a result, a lot of introductory magic textbooks talk in a very uncritical way about the ‘masculine’ sun and the ‘feminine’ moon, ‘masculine’ fire and ‘feminine’ water, and so on. That said, Gardnerian and Alexandrian branches aren’t all there is, and there were smart, badass, complicated women like Helena Blavatsky, Dion Fortune, and Doreen Valienteinvolved even in the earliest stages of modern witchcraft, and in the past few decades there has been a move to make Neopaganism more intersectional and queer.”

It’s not hard to understand why witches and witchcraft continue to hold sway over women — especially young women on the cusp of adulthood who are faced with a world that refuses to take them seriously except as sexual objects. Not only has witchcraft historically offered women power that they might not otherwise be able to access, but witches offer girls and women an alternative role model to the ubiquitous young, beautiful Disney princess. A witch can be any age; a witch does not need to be conventionally attractive; a witch does not wait for a prince charming, nor does she rely on anyone but herself. Given that, the witch’s appeal is easy to appreciate. Tuzlak theorizes that young women’s attraction to witchcraft goes beyond even that and taps into our deep-seated need for ritual:

“Both boys and girls can be badly wounded by traditional Christian or Anglo-American gender roles, especially if they’re queer or trans or otherwise ill-fitting to those roles, and girls are going to suffer more acutely if the family is more reactionary in its politics. Magic is an unofficial shortcut to a feeling of spiritual power and belonging when legitimate methods have been closed off to you, and that happens to girls more often and more traumatically than boys in our culture. But I think that magic appeals to a lot of people who feel like they’re out of place in their local religious or social landscape. I don’t think Christian rituals (at least in many white/mainline/evangelical/Protestant churches — Christianity is very diverse and I do not like generalizing) serve young people very well, and I don’t think they serve young girls well in particular, which is another reason why young people find ways to fulfil their ritual needs elsewhere. There are so few formal, public rituals that recognize and affirm girls.”

It’s impossible to say where witchcraft will go from here or what “witchy” will look like a century or two from now. What seems certain is that as long as our society remains invested in hierarchical power structures that function by excluding certain groups of people, then those outsiders will continue to look for other things that fulfill their needs. And so long as the tradition of the witch exists, those who struggle to find legitimacy in traditional power structures will almost certainly be drawn to witchcraft — whatever that word or practice might mean to them. Because as much as we might try to define what a witch is or what she does, the truth is that the term is much broader than any one definition can contain. Or perhaps it is easier to simply say that a witch is someone who, when faced with a brick wall, learns to dig a tunnel. A witch is a survivor and witchcraft is a means of survival in a world that does not always value your life.