Season of the witch: why young women are flocking to the an...

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/24/witch-symbol...

Season of the witch: why young women

are flocking to the ancient craft
Rapper Azealia Banks brought witchcraft back into the mainstream by tweeting Im
really a witch. But women in the US have been harnessing its power for decades as a
spiritual but not religious way to express feminist ambitions
Sady Doyle
Tuesday 24 February 2015 18.00GMT

Im really a witch, rapper Azealia Banks quipped last January, shortly before all hell
broke loose on her Twitter account.
Banks is known for her online rants. She tends to share fairly dense ideas,
spontaneously spun out in punchy lines liberally interspersed with curse words. I
dont know a person on this earth who can agree with every one of them, but her
opinions are smarter than she usually gets credit for.
Still, even by Bankss standards, the witch thing was weird. It came out in the middle
of a run about black Americans and their relationship to Christianity:
Not uncontroversial, but not wrong. Banks then suddenly took a hard left into what
seemed like either a joke, or an unexpected embrace of Harry Potter fan ction. She
went on:
Then she joked that racism might end a lot sooner if black people could make their
enemies sicken and die with a thought, and of course the rightwing publications
started sounding the klaxons.
It was the strangest thing: simply by calling herself a witch in public, Banks had
managed to evoke real fear. Rightwingers treated her as if she were actually planning
to blight crops and hex her enemies, all the while claiming that they didnt believe in
witchcraft.
Given the strength of the reaction, you would think that Banks was the rst woman to
cross over to the dark side. You would be wrong. Witchcraft and the embrace of
magical practices, like reading tarot cards has recently experienced a resurgence
of sorts among young, creative, politically engaged women.
This is largely reected in niche corners of US pop culture: 2013s American Horror
Story: Coven, in which witchcraft stood in for girl power, was the most popular
American Horror Story season ever. A popular Tumblr blog, Charmcore, purports to

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be run by three witch sisters; it gives sarcastic magical advice and praise of the
female celebrities it deems to be obvious witches. On the more serious side, teen
sensation Rookie magazine has published tarot tutorials along with more
standard-issue feminist and fashion advice, and Autostraddle, a popular left-leaning
blog for young queer women, has an in-house tarot columnist. Speaking of which,
those tarot cards are available in trendy Brooklyn knickknack shops and Urban
Outtters, as well as new age stores. And these days, no one thinks theres anything
weird about herbal medicine and other potions.

In vogue or not, Banks was continuing a heritage of womens activism that stretches
back decades by expressing her politics and invoking the fearsome power of a
witch.
To reclaim the word witch is to reclaim our right, as women, to be powerful, wrote
Starhawk, in her seminal 1979 book The Spiral Dance. To be a witch is to identify
with 9 million victims of bigotry and hatred and to take responsibility for shaping a
world in which prejudice claims no more victims.
Today, The Spiral Dance is in its third edition, and has sold over 300,000 copies. It is
many peoples rst introduction to Wicca, the earth-based spiritual movement that
was created in the 1950s and has come to be a recognized religion around the world.
It is also one of the most well known and comprehensive texts from a very particular
moment in feminist history which until recently was largely unfashionable: the
womens spirituality movement, in which women radically rewrote existing
religions, or simply made their own to be in line with the goals of womens liberation.
Ive been involved with this resurgence of interest in spirituality since the 1960s,
Starhawk told me during a phone conversation. Its like suddenly the world opened
up and people realized there wasnt just Judaism, Christianity, Islam. There was a
whole world of eastern religions and traditions. In the 1970s, with the resurgence of
the feminist movement, a lot of us began to investigate a feminist spirituality and the
goddess traditions of Europe and the Middle East.
Wicca, with its focus on a goddess (rather than a male god though it has those too)
and its relatively open approach to creating canon, was a natural t for many feminist
women interested in writing their own spiritual script. But women who werent
explicitly Wiccan were also drawn to witchy ways of processing the world: not only
did women make feminist tarot cards in the 1970s, author Alice Walker personally
endorsed one set the Motherpeace deck. Feminist psychologists such as Jean
Shinoda Bolen and Clarissa Pinkola Ests wrote books on using goddess imagery and
myths as means of understanding female subjectivity.
Its tempting to write all this o as uy woo-woo stu (a trivialization of which
Starhawk is well aware: Were no more nutty than most religions, she says, and
probably a lot less nutty than some). But the politics are there, and they hold up;
mixed in with the spells and rituals of The Spiral Dance, you will nd meditations on

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sexual violence, ecology and anarchist group building, and thoughts on how men can
overcome patriarchal conditioning in order to participate eectively in leftwing
activism.
Whats more, in the moment that Starhawk and others like her were practicing
witchcraft as a religion, non-religious women were also claiming the witch as a
symbol of their feminist ambitions. The 1970s socialist-feminist collective Witch the
letters stood for anything the leaders felt like from moment to moment, but Womens
International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell was a popular choice held theatrical
protests, starting by hexing the New York stock exchange and going on to attend a
bridal fair where they unleashed white mice into the crowd.
Their protest chants were particularly catchy: Double, bubble, war and rubble/ When
you mess with women, youll be in trouble.
It was a gimmick, but it resonated: Because Witch actions could be done with a small
group and were both fun and political, they quickly spread around the country,
writes Jo Freeman. Boston women hexed bars. DC women hexed the presidential
inauguration. Chicago women zapped everything.
I asked Starhawk why she thought the iconography of the witch had such persistence
in activist circles. After all, feminists could be going around calling themselves
harpies, or sirens. Of all the mythological images we could pick, why does this one
stick?
I think that part of the power of the word is that it refers to a kind of power that is
not legitimized by the authorities, Starhawk says. Even though not all witches are
women, and a lot of men are witches, it seems to connote womens power in
particular. And thats very scary in a patriarchal world the kind of power thats not
just coming from the hierarchical structure, but some kind of inner power. And to use
it to serve the ends that women have always stood for, like nurturing and caring for
the next generation that, I think, is a wonderfully dangerous prospect.
In each wave of feminism theres this renewed respect for the women that came
before us, says Beth Maiden, Autostraddles tarot columnist who also runs the
website littleredtarot.com. I think we like to identify with the stories of women who
were persecuted in the past wise women, witches, women who practiced that kind
of kitchen table healing that wasnt part of the patriarchal progression of medicine.
This means identifying, as women of the 1960s and 1970s did, with ancient myths
and iconography of goddesses, or with the mythological gure of the witch. But it
may also mean a renewed respect for those women: the legacy of their spirituality
movement seems to have been quietly re-incorporated back into the mainstream of
feminism.
This is part of a larger phenomenon the tendency for Gen X-ers and those who came
after them to be spiritual but not religious. Rather than converting to one set
mythology, younger people tend to pull spiritual ideas and practices from any source
that works.
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Theres something deeply appealing in the notion of being put in touch with an inner
source of power that cant be taken away. Not that this power needs to be something
nebulous and mystical: as Suzy X, one of Rookies tarot teachers and frontwoman of
witchcore punk band Shady Hawkins, says, it can be pretty damn pragmatic.
I think one of the biggest conspiracies of a male-dominated society is the
suppression of feminine intuition, in that women have been conditioned to
second-guess our own hunches, or second-guess our own abilities, all the time, she
told me. You know when you can just tell someone is creepy, right o the bat? Thats
your intuition speaking.
Embracing the witchiness deciding you can know something about your life by
looking at tarot cards and listening to your hunches, or trying to aect a situation by
focusing your will on it might be just a process by which women can come to trust
themselves.
Theres also the pull of the taboo, of being a woman who does what shes not
supposed to: It feels incredible to use all the aspects of being a woman which the
dominant culture considers to be signs of weakness, like emotional sensitivity or a
menstrual cycle, as tools when you are giving a reading or doing a spell, says Marty
Windahl, proprietor of Tarotscopes. This is really the heart of being a witch for me,
turning everything on its head. That, and making treasure of trash.
***
Since she got in trouble for it the rst time, Banks has doubled down on the witch
thing, tweeting about full moon parties, card readings and her herbal cabinet.
She may be joking, but her objectives to identify with persecuted ancestors, to
reclaim lost ways of seeing the world, to claim the ability to be powerful and scary
are part of a long tradition. Images of witchcraft call to so many women straight and
not, white and of color, religious and devoutly atheist because the task of reclaiming
the witch is a fundamentally poetic one.
The witch, that strange woman at the edge of town crazy, scary, ugly, disliked, but
maybe, just maybe, smarter than anyone else in town well, thats all of us.

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