“You taught me language, and my profit on’t/Is I know how to curse.” Caliban, The Tempest
There’s this Frank Sinatra song called Witchcraft. Have you heard it? It’s one of the 4,999 songs saved on my Spotify: a seemingly never-ending digital chasm of sonnets and soliloquies. A sly tune. A real New York mythology. Perhaps then, it was by luck, or sheer coincidence that it came on shuffle this morning on the bus. A black-and-white filmic commute: thirty-five(ish) strangers and myself witnessed a ritual of sorts. An incantation on the 422. Between the bodies of the standing passengers sat a woman with rollers in her hair, squinting into a compact mirror, applying thick black liner to her waterline. She was dressed for a meeting. It was what Pagila refers to when she says that femaleness is a sequence of circular returns beginning and ending at the same point, “….[a] woman’s centrality gives her a stability of identity. She does not have to become but only to be.” Some form of habitual presentation of the self: the shifting of one’s shape. A domesticated witch: a tedious practice, a liminal ritual for passengers of all ages to gawk at.
People watched. I watched. Not once did the woman look about herself, only touching her lips with a liner the shade of blood. Men, both young and old observed, as if the carefully learnt practice of makeup was a private affair they should not be seeing. The ‘getting ready’ as an intimate pastiche: to look beautiful perhaps only dulled by the act of watching it happen. The magician with no secrets. The ‘morning ritual’ sublimely amalgamated with the terror of the morning commute, a private-turned-public appendage. I was a woman on the 422 watching men watch a woman. Sinatra whispered in one ear “… it’s witchcraft, wicked witchcraft!” whilst Pagila cooed in the other “…[her] centrality is a great obstacle to man, whose quest for identity she blocks.”
Whose quest for identity she blocks. It’s witchcraft.
I thought of Roald Dahl’s Witches: the beautiful woman-turned-hag. I thought of spineless (digital) sexism à la One Wipe And It’s All Over, and, Take Her Swimming On The First Date. We are both expected to be and praised as shapeshifters, and yet it is the idea of the shapeshifting that causes agitation and faux desire for the natural. The foreign body in the blow-up doll. The witch.
When ‘bitch’ won’t suffice to belittle a woman, ‘witch’ adds a supernatural element of which there can be no common male equivalent. The witch is a saturated image, in lieu of Sollee. She is tangible history, myth and semiotics. She is both wicked and desired. She is maimed, romanticised and feared. Her history, as Federici puts it, is “primarily a history of women.”
Thanks to the incessant popularity of attention-span-shortening apps the witch is perhaps no longer a figure to be feared, but a symbol of commodity, sucked up into the maelstrom of fast-fashion aestheticism. She is Witch-Tok. She is Temu bulk-bought ‘witchy’ T-shirts [polyester]. She is a printed travel coffee mug that says “We Are The Granddaughters Of The Witches You Couldn’t Burn.” She is mass-produced pop-culture tarot cards and “love spells” bought on Etsy. She is Whimsygoth, and she is spending her hard earned cash on Amazon carts of moon and star iconography. She is me, at fifteen, putting hexes on crushes who didn’t like me back. ‘Please make his hair fall out. Also, I would really like it if he texted me back’. The “Modern Witch” is the neurosis of manifestation with perhaps a very real, almost childlike need to be different. Individual. Powerful, brimming with mystique. A subtle cringe. The idea of reclamation is only weakened by commodification. “Witchcraft”, in this sense, is something one must purchase in order to be. We do not fear the witch because a lot of us identify with her through this consumerist narrative. We do not fear the witch because we have cut her down into bite-sized twenty second videos.
But she does still exist, between the synapses of beauty and fear.
The law of conversion energy is a natural law many understand. Energy, as it exists, cannot be created or destroyed, but transferred, changed, willed into one form or another. If energy can only be transferred, not destroyed, and fear is what breeds hate according to Averröes, then it can be argued that we never truly stopped fearing the witch. I will argue that this fear, rather, ruminates between women and disguises itself as hatred. Transferred energy, from one extreme into the other. What is unknown about women is at first feared, and then hated.
Wolf, back in the 1990s revolutionised us with the words we had on the tip of our tongues but couldn’t spell out for ourselves: “…[women] are taught to see other women as competition, based on physical and sexual appeal.” Was it not Abigail who was bound to obsess over the destruction of her female counterparts? The “witch” of a woman who is hated is most commonly the woman with power. And, the more power a woman has, the more hated she is for having that power. The thing with power and beauty is that they are often running in opposition to one another: one may find that as she gains power, the standard for a ‘successful woman’s’ beauty has changed right before her eyes. Stories of PhD graduates receiving breast implants as rewards for their studies and air hostesses losing their jobs due to age and physical appearance are two of a macrocosm. When the witch is feared, she is accused and killed. When the “Modern” witch is feared, she is stamped out by something more impervious: a shallow death, a daydream of a death.
It goes a little something like this:
It begins with a trial. A conversation, if you’d like. An allegation usually brought forth by elusive evidence only. No need for palpable conviction. Not all accusations will be believed, and yet a large majority will go under anyway. This is followed by a thorough poking and prodding of the body to look for ‘evidence’. Are there any moles? Is this a normal, healthy body? Is the skin firm with good elasticity? How does the woman react to this scrutiny? It was usually here when the confession slipped out, a colloquial but maddening ‘I am guilty, sinful, deranged and evil’. And then? By majority agreement, the body comes under the torture, the horror, the immaculate-near-death of unconsciousness: a heaven-sent slumber. Finally, the pain will end. At last, one can rejoice in the freedom of being born again: pummeled a million times by unseen instruments at the hands of the men who made us. No special training is required for this execution, it can be performed by any registered practitioner.
This is not a burning at the stake, but the domestic and process for undergoing liposuction. Or breast-enhancement. Or, really, most kinds of cosmetically elected surgeries. This is not a self-infliction accusation either, but one that is learned from hatred. To be beautiful is to suffer and to have power is to be a witch, and the only suffering that “stamps out” the witch is a rebirth into the ground, from which a new woman emerges. Nobody wants to look like, or be a “witch” in this sense, in the same way that in the 1960s nobody wanted to be a “feminist”—considering the visual stereotype of a masculine and unfeminine woman. The market invents a witch… an overhanging image of the “hag,” an older, fatter and undesired woman who ‘Could Be You Too Unless You Do Something About It Now!’ There is lots of money to be made from the imaginary witch.
The modern day burning at the stake has more to do with choices and thoughts about the body than any other: it is those choices that cause agitation, hatred and something like confusion: it is exactly what the woman on the bus this morning was subject to. Everybody wants the girl until they see her skin shed.
We are living in not only a Surgical Age, but a time in which the choices about our bodies are in the hands of others. This runs deeper than the cultural, unspoken push for a beauty that is surgically constructed to stamp out the flaws – the witches mole – it runs right into the original waters of all men and women, Pagila’s “umbilical which leashes [us all].” Here, perhaps the fear and hatred boil down into another: control emerging from the broth. The ability to accuse women – or anybody else – in order to benefit a political campaign, personal and social status is a witch hunt. It is about control. Control that masks fear and hatred and love. Federici says “the body is a battlefield where social relations are inscribed,” that the persecution of the witch is nothing but a reflection of deep-rooted misogyny and fear of women’s autonomy. Our autonomy is our power. Both cosmetic surgery and laws against our bodies seek to dissolve this autonomy: conceal its unbridled joy in a doggy shock-collar.
Why would we want to be witches when our only two options seem to be a celebrated commodity or a hated power?
Because, despite all of this noise: the witch is still a shapeshifter. She is non-conforming woman in her power, unbound by digitalism and the Iron Maiden. She is both moon and menses: an etymology of measurement, the month by which we count a cyclic rebirth. She is sitting with rollers in her hair on the 422. She is my mother; emerging from her closet a candle-lit, comfy witch free from her work heels and email inbox. She is the shared moles between my sister and I. She is the microcosm that mirrors the macrocosm. She is my friend, syncing her bleeding with mine. She is hidden in books and celluloid stories and grocery stores. She checks her mailbox. She waters her plants. She, at once, is a magical woman.
When I told my first big-girl boyfriend I was a witch, he asked “why?”
I thought about it. There was a lot I could say. Maybe that I had grown up with it? Raised by a woman who taught me feminine strength. A small town with witchy bazaars and an ennui almost as dry as the drought that it made you sit for hours in the only bookstore reading the horoscope compatibilities between you and the crushes you had at age of fourteen. Because I had gone through puberty with girls who believed in the radical possibilities of the hex and the intricate collecting of crystals; lining them up on the window sill and placing them in your bra (when you are old enough to fill it out). I had experienced a myriad of incredibly intense female friendships bound together by twine and sage, promise and hatred. Diary entries that started with “there is magic….I know it.”
“Why are you a witch?”
“Because I believe in feminine magic.”
There’s an excellent scene in Bell, Book and Candle (1958) where a small coven of NYC-dwelling witches take refuge in an underground bar. One of them says “…I sit in the subway sometimes. On buses, or the movies, and I look at the people next to me and I think …What would you say if I told you I was a witch?”
