This past Sawain eve, Dorga and I walked down Market St. on our way out of San Francisco to gather with friends to honor our ancestors. Wielding a large, heavy Spanish theater sword and some mace (in case we ran into a pack of queer-bashers), we passed numerous people wearing rubber masks and plastic capes from Kmart along with their jeans and white sneakers. This sight seemed more surreal than the Castro (Gay men's tourist-friendly shopping mall neighborhood) Halloween celebrations where queers parade in elaborate costume. Of course, we saw the usual number of "witches" in black pointed hats and carrying brooms. Once again I thought about the image western societies have of witches.

Reviews Check out this page for a look into a few movies and tv shows with portrayals of witches, including The X Files, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and The Wizard of Oz.

The Craft
Check out this review of a teeny-bopper witch movie which packs a big, woman-hatin' wallop.

As a child I responded to this portrayal of witches by developing an unusually intense fear of witches. I remember one storybook album my parents played for us which had a cackling evil witch character whose shrieking laughter would send me racing out of the room, tears starting from my eyes. My father sometimes tells me about the time they bought some beautiful hand puppets for us. They were very excited and eager to show them to me, but were surprised and disappointed by my reaction to the witch puppet. I seemed deathly afraid of it and would burst into tears if anyone played with it near me. My parents wondered what it was about this toy that caused me so much fear.

I feared the ubiquitous image of the witch - a gnarly, warty hag in black rags who has a taste for the flesh of children and can sour milk inside cows and make a man's penis fall off. The common portrayal of a witch as on OLDER woman reflects western attitudes toward older women in general. Past child-bearing years and usually having outlived their husbands, older women are considered a useless burden by a sexist society. Older women may be wiser for their years of experience, and more independent of men. This is a threat to the fragility of male egos and a threat to sexist systems. So advertisement perpetually pushes the idea that women must attempt at all costs to appear to be young, which makes the natural process of maturing a pathological experience for women in our society. Older women are often considered and portrayed as being pathetic, undesirable, annoying, ugly. The general hatred for a woman in this world increases as she grows older. She is considered an old biddy, an old maid, a hag, a bag, a dried up bitch, or a witch. During The Burning Times accusing an older woman of witchcraft essentially meant murdering her and taking her property, making certain that all property women might inherit or be left living on when her husband croaked reverted to male ownership and control.

Much of the common perception of witches today goes back to images created by men and used by the Catholic church and civil courts during the Burning Times to whip up hysteria and fear. The witch-hunting industry depended on public spectacles of the brute force of church and state to financially profit from the murders of many thousands, perhaps millions of independent women, queers, healers, teachers, land owners, widows and eccentrics. The church had gone into a slump in public interest and therefore in income, and so began its inquisitions and acquisitions by attacking wealthy landowners who would not relinquish their older Pagan ways and beliefs. The Inquisition was financed for several hundred years with the posthumous payments by the accused for their executions.

Depictions of Witches during the Burning Times
Take a look at some images from the 16th and 17th centuries.

The propaganda starts so young. People tend to hate what they fear, and to fear what they don't understand. Most people don't understand paganism or the craft. For the first two decades of my life I heard almost as little real information about the existence and philosophies of pagans and pagan history as I did about queers and our places in history, and what I did hear often took the form of insult and misinformation. When I came out to myself at the age of nineteen, I hadn't just "turned into" a dyke, I'd always been queer. This experience of revelation and "coming home" to my real self recurred as I realized that I was drawn toward paganism along some vein running deep inside me, a connection perhaps across time to my spiritual ancestors.

Why is it important for us to keep a critical eye on the messages sent via satellite about witches? Mass media not only reflect a society's values and ideas, they contribute to them. The two-fold raison d'etre of the media within capitalism is profit, and the protection of profit-making machinery and systems. How can these portrayals and the attitudes and feelings they instill in people end up affecting pagans and witches? Should we fear another Inquisition? Or are we just being assimilated (like queers and punks) into pop-culture and consumerism in a way that removes our power and strangeness, dissipates perceived threats in the minds of the couch-potatoes and 49ers fans next door and so makes a witch craze seem less likely in the near future? Should we be glad for the Glinda/Samantha/Sabrina representations that white-wash us, make us more generic and safe? Should we be satisfied that we, like the gay "community," are being perceived as a new consumer market, targeted by new age magazines and product advertisements?

Considering the ease with which a nationwide frenzy of support can be raised by mass media for just about any program of violence a government decides to wreak upon some nation or group of people, one needn't be completely paranoid to consider the possibility of another program against pagans. The yellow-ribbon wrapping, horn-honking frenzy of militaristic nationalism whipped up during the gulf war is just one recent example of the power wielded by the propaganda machinery churning out lies to the American public. A deeply entrenched set of beliefs about and emotions toward a certain group of people coupled with a general sense of unease (economic troubles) sets the stage for feverish outbreaks of violence against that group, and there's been no shortage of disparaging portrayals and blatant lies about pagans and witches over the last several centuries throughout the west. But somehow I don't think we inspire any fear in the big money CEOs and mega-moguls. Right now the main targets of government scape-goating are immigrants, and mass media companies have jumped right in to foster erroneous beliefs about the affects of the presence of immigrants in this country, supporting the dominant line on this subject. In recent years the main (and most profitable - these attacks against gays have been a big fund-raising theme) targets of the fundamentalist Christian groups have been homosexuals, diverting some of their attention away from their obsessions with their devil and witchcraft.

I guess an ideal portrayal of paganism and witchcraft would be plural and accurate, reflecting the actual myriad forms which these beliefs and practices take today. This portrayal would expose the truth about the horrible holocaust we call The Burning Times, which would put it on a par with the extermination camps and nuclear bomb use of World War II and the decimation of Native American lives and cultures. A better portrayal of paganism would make connections between modern paganism and the most ancient religious belief, the Olde Religion, the Goddess worship that predominated all over the planet for tens of thousands of years of human existence, and which it took many millennia of repeated attacks, oppression and assimilation/absorption by the new patriarchal, monotheistic religions to drive into near obscurity.

One very important aspect of an ideal portrayal of paganism would be its ability to convey a sense of the mystery in these ancient traditions. It would include the art, music, history and mythology of various pagan cultures. A link would be made to many pagans' love and respect for our mother the Earth, for her awe-inspiring power, complexity and mystery.

We can never expect this kind of representation from the tools of the dominating forces (all of the mass media in this country are owned and tightly controlled by the multi-national corporations, by the petro-chemical, nuclear energy companies, by the military/industrial complex.) So we must take these tools into our hands whenever we can, or create our own. And we are doing just that. Every year more books are published by pagan authors, films are made about the burning times, and there seems to be a proliferation of PAGAN SITES on the Web. I hope to see this communication and creativity continue.

I welcome responses, so feel free to write me at margaret@cea.edu. If you like, and if it seems appropriate, I may add contributions to this or other pages in this site, so let me know if you're be interested. Send in your portrayals/portraits of pagans and witches (written, visual, and audio) and we can build a new page on this site to help counter-balance the negative and erroneous portrayals of witches in media. I'm always interested to hear about good publications or films on these subjects, so please send along any recommendations you might have.

Excellent reading sources:

An ABC of Witchcraft by Doreen Valiente, Phoenix, 1973.

The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets by Barbara Walker, Harper and Row,1983.

When God Was A Woman by Merlin Stone (Harvest/HBJ, 1976.)

The Chalice and The Blade by Riane Eisler (Harper and Row, 1988.)

Witch Craze, A New History of European Witch Hunts by Anne Llewellyn Barstow, (HarperCollins, 1995.)

Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture by Arthur Evans (Fag Rag Books, 1978.)

To a review of The Craft.

To other media Reviews.

Back to "What do we mean, Queer Pagan Punk?"

Depictions of Witches during the Burning Times
Take a look at some images from the 16th and 17th centuries.

Back to the LIBRARY card catalogue.

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