Culture
Page 10
Street Roots • Oct. 27-Nov. 2, 2Ui I
obsessed queen of Snow White and the wicked stepmother in
Cinderella, witches were the baddies of the Grimms’ Fairy
Tales and still dominate childhood stories today.
The Pre-Raphaelite muse
Known for depicting female beauty and mystery, the pre-
Raphaelltes changed discussion of witches by depicting them
as priestesses or prophets. Catherine Spooner said: “Sexy
witches emerge in painting, classical witches like Medea (by
Frederick Sandys) from Greek mythology and presenting them
as really powerfulattractive women and femme fatales.”
1960s: ‘Bewitched’ and Wicca
The emergence of second-wave feminism coincided with the
emergence of Wicca. Drawing on ancient paganism, Wiccans
worshipped either the Moon Goddess or the Horned God of
Fertility. The most popular depletion of witchcraft at the time
was “Bewitched,” about nose-twitching Samantha, who was
battling between the dual roles of perfect housewife and witch.
1960s: You may remove your shoes!
Stereotypical depictions of witches began to receive backlash,
and Roald Dahl’s witches - who appeared to be normal
women but removed their shoes, wigs and faces to reveal
IL L U S T R A T IO N B Y A M Y E V A N S OF TIG ER T E A
BY ANTONIA CHARLESWORTH
C O N T R IB U T IN G W R IT E R
ast year, online retailer Amazon was
forced to pull a range of hyper-
sexualized Halloween costumes for
girls as young as age 4 from its online
marketplace - an extreme example of the
increasing sexualization of Halloween.
A fearsome, hook-nosed, broomstick
riding hag happily still offers respite, but
for every scary witch costume, there is an
array of sexy enchantress costumes
available too.
Far from originating in student
Halloween bar crawls, the sexualized witch
can be identified as early as 1486 when
Heinrich Kramer, a German Catholic
clergyman, wrote “Malleus Maleficarum,” a
handbook for witch hunters.
The handbook explained that witchcraft
is a woman’s crime because woman is
“more carnal than man, as is clear from her
many carnal abominations ... witchcraft
came from carnal lust, which is in women
insatiable.”
The charges levied against these
insatiable women included making men’s
genitals disappear or stealing them,
keeping them in nests or boxes and feeding
them oats and corn. This, wrote Kramer
before providing detailed methods to catch
the temptresses, was a matter of common
report. Far from being written off as the
god-fearing, woman-hating crackpot he
clearly was, Kramer gained a bit of a
following.
An estimated 40,000 to 60,000 people
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were executed during the witch trials of the
early modern period. Of course, they
weren’t all women - only around 85
percent.
Execution by burning - evoking hellfire
and flames of passion - was deemed
appropriate punishment for such crimes. In
Europe, it was the preferred way to kill a
witch because it was more painful. The
confessions that led up to it were often
elicited through sexually humiliating
torture techniques, such as in Italy, where
accused women were forced to sit on red-
hot stools, preventing them from
performing sexual acts with the devil.
“The image of the burning witch is very
symbolic, particularly for people at that
time who would have believed in hell and
eternal flames,” said Catherine Spooner, a
professor at Lancaster University in
England and an expert on witches. “It’s
representing that in a very physical and
literal way, and it retains its power now.”
It’s easy to see why modern feminism
claimed witches as its martyrs. Matilda
Joslyn Gage, a writer involved in the
suffrage movement, published a book in
1893 that claimed witches were pagan
priestesses worshipping the Great
Goddess. In 1973, second-wave feminists
Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English
put forward in a pamphlet the idea that the
persecuted women were traditional healers
and midwives.
“The witch became very important for
feminists from the ’60s and ’70s, right up
See WITCHES, page 11