by Yvonne Owens

Taking up the term, identity, entitlement or honorific of Witch is, for some, an edgy prospect—certainly in the current ideological climate. It’s been an ambivalent designation since about halfway through the first millennium and the spread of Early Christianity. But to take on the name is actually to reclaim a venerable European lineage of magical practitioners and healers in which women were reverenced, making it a function of Pagan Pride, with an additional edge of ancient Eco-Feminism. This is the meaning behind Starhawk’s naming of her Reclaiming Tradition. It is a subtle act of rebellion against the persecution of earth religions worldwide, of women and other marginalized Others during the Burning Times, the methods and negative values of the Inquisition. For me, it is to champion the Earth Herself, the animals and the sacred life force. 

The Anglo Saxon terms, wicce-cræeft and wicca–cræeft are nouns, feminine and masculine respectively, meaning “Witchcraft” or “magic art.” So the term is well rooted in Northwest European sacred tradition. Beyond that, wicce-cræeft or witchcraft (‘Wise Craft,” or “Craft of the Wise”), as a practice, belongs firmly to the lineages of Eurasian animism or pantheism. Shape-shifting shamanic methodologies are also present in witchcraft due to commonalities around the Proto-Indo-European root word, “wic,” meaning “to bend or shape.” The sacred traditions also share other salient features, like animal familiars and avatars. Wicce-cræeft or Witchcraft as an earth-centred sacred system actually goes back to at least the Ice Ace and indigenous Eurasian traditions of natural religiosity or reverence patterns. 

The term came into use as a very specific clarion call to action during the Goddess Movement and Women’s Movements accompanying Second Wave Feminism from around the mid-1970s, inspiring the Green Movement and the formation of the Green Party, Women’s History reclamation, Women’s Art History and much else that we now take for granted–too much for granted in some cases. There are also those who live in the woods, never read a book on the subject nor consulted with anyone else about it, who are solo practitioners, who call themselves Witch. Generally they tend to be quite crotchety (I know a few), and aren’t really the collectivist 13^th House sort, but are still acknowledged as witches. It’s an extremely adaptable term. Basically, anyone who feels the call is entitled to call themselves “Witch” if the handle suits and they resonate with the archetype. For my part, I called myself Witch and self-initiated in 1978, launching myself into a life-long program of study and deep  exploration. Since then I’ve been initiated into various traditions by others, one of which has considered me a Priestess in good standing for the past thirty seven years (ATC, initiated in Index, Washington, in 1987), to the extent that I was asked to provide a letter of recommendation for the elevation of the Canadian chapter’s new Arch-Priestess, Lady Mary Malinski, after Michele Favarger retired. (Unlike 13^th House, ATC is hierarchical in the British Gardnarian/Alexandrian mould.) 

There is no conflict there, because 13^th House membership doesn’t prevent you from belonging to other circles, Traditions, communities, explorations or expressions. The only requirement for initiation into 13^th House Mystery School Tradition of Witchcraft and Shamanism is that the White Cord self-dedicant complete a year-and-a-day of introspection and study that includes the Tree of Life initiatory journey. Each Black Cord initiating Priestess, Priest or Priestx is entitled and empowered to mentor and lead this process by their own lights, according to their own skills, style, affinities, and valuing of what’s important to the self-realization process in their view. This way, each initiating Black Cord Elder is empowered to work in accordance with their strengths and most joyful expression.

THE IDEA OF THE “WITCH” HAS ALWAYS BEEN POLITICIZED

Technically, though ever growing in number, we still qualify as a marginalized group. We are still considered a primitive and exotic sub-culture by some—something like the specially otherized echelon the Welsh Celts have occupied in Britain ever since the Norman invasion in 1266. (Fig. 1). English suspicion of women wearing the Welsh national costume has continued into contemporary times. As recently as 2013, a group of seven Welsh women in traditional garb were denied entry into Harrods in London. One member of the group, Gaynor Newton, described how, “The doorman just told us ‘you can’t come in dressed like that’ and promptly asked us to leave.”

We were gobsmacked. This was not some half-baked sleazy fancy dress. We had long black dresses, white pinnies, capes, shawls and hats. We are all staunch Welsh people and this was our way to celebrate our [national] day. There were other people in saris, burkas and African national dresses and they looked fantastic too. We looked equally as good but were not allowed in like the others….

Gaynor Newton

Marginalized groups have never not been political. Witches have been politicized since the Roman imperial forces sought to drive them out of the forests and into the sea along with the Druids of Anglesey Isle (“Holy Isle”). The Celtic warrior queen of the Iceni, Boudica, practiced witchcraft against her Roman oppressors in around 60 C.E., and the warrior queen, Al-Kahina, called The Berber Boudica, was accused of witchcraft by her defeated enemies in North Africa in the 7^th century.  St. Augustine genderized and politicized witchcraft for Christendom with his and the other Church Fathers’ Canon Episcopi in the 4th century and the ideological watchdogs of the Church, the Dominicans, sought to wipe out the witches and other “heretics” in the 500 year long Inquisition. Their focus on women as witches culminated with the 300 year long “Burning Times,” with over 80% of its victims being women and girls, a femicidal campaign they carried with them into the New World along with smallpox and other diseases.

Ursula Southeil (c. 1487 – 1561), popularly known as Mother Shipton, was a soothsayer, prophetess and witch according to English lore. She is said to have transformed a king and his men to stone after they failed her test, as recounted by William Camden in his poem of 1610. The New Forest witches “raised a mist” to confound the Spanish Armada and turn them back from attacking English shores in the 16^th century, and the tremendously successful English queen, Elizabeth I, was accused of witchcraft by her enemies, with the Pope launching a failed assassination plot against her on that account. Witches like the Irish Biddy Early acted powerfully, magically, against the greedy landlords pushing peasant farmers off their lands and out of their homes, spell-casting against the seizure of the commons and the “enclosures” of traditional lands by elites. And all the women, and only those women, who stood to inherit land and assets in their own names were hung or drowned as witches in Salem, Massachusetts, by Cotton Mather and other self-appointed witch finders. 

In the Middle Ages, witches became synonymous with ale wives in England. Medieval alewives were edged out of the art and craft of brewing by means of accusations of witchcraft. The medieval Church weighed in and politically aligned itself with male usurpers of the age old craft, propagandizing against alewives as highly successful professional women by equating them with witches. (Fig. 3)  Judith M. Bennett, in her book, Ale, beer, and brewsters in England: women’s work in a changing world, 1300-1600, describes how the Church condemned these professional women: “They saw these early female entrepreneurs as temptresses who used their wiles to get pious men drunk and spend money. The Church also saw alehouses as playgrounds for the devil, where the cardinal sins of gluttony and lust ruled supreme.” As Bennett notes, one of the most iconic images of feminine evil in the Middle Ages was that of the alewife, styled as a witch, suffering in hell. The Church taught that alewives would be the only people left in hell after Christ freed all the damned. “Enacted in plays, drawn on the walls of parish churches, and carved into wood, it was a fate that medieval people imagined with resentful glee.” Addison Nugent, in his article, “For Centuries, Alewives Dominated the Brewing Industry: The Church and anti-witch propaganda may have contributed to beer-making becoming a boys’ club,’” describes how: “Beer has been an essential aspect of human existence for at least 4,000 years—and women have always played a central role in its production. But as beer gradually moved from a cottage industry into a money-making one, women were phased out through a process of demonization and character assassination.”  

Professional alewives had several means of identifying themselves and promoting their businesses; they wore tall hats to stand out on crowded streets and, to signify that their homes or taverns sold ale, they would place broomsticks—a symbol of domestic trade—outside of the door. “Cats often scurried around the brewsters’ bubbling cauldrons, killing the mice that liked to feast on the grains used for ale. If all of this sounds familiar, it’s because this is all iconography that we now associate with Witches…One such example exists in a 17th-century woodcut of a popular alewife, Mother Louise, who was well- known in her time for making excellent beer.”(Fig. 4) Writers besides Nugent have noticed how the conflation of witches with ale wives seems to have coloured how we picture witches today: “Up until the 1500s, brewing was primarily women’s work – that is, until a smear campaign accused women brewers of being witches.

Much of the iconography we associate with witches today, from the pointy hat to the broom, may have emerged from their connection to female brewers. They wore the tall, pointy hats so that their customers could see them in the crowded marketplace. They transported their brew in cauldrons. And those who sold their beer out of stores had cats not as demon familiars, but to keep mice away from the grain. Some argue that iconography we associate with witches, from the pointy hat to the cauldron, originated from women working as master brewers.”

Welsh women were also commonly suspected of witchcraft due to the similarity of their indigenous national garb to that of medieval alewives.

In the Malleus Maleficarum (“Hammer of the Witches,” 1486), the Church-sponsored witch hunting handbook that’s still in print, Heinrich Kramer conflated Jews and witches, accusing them of the same heresies and crimes of blood-libel, subjecting them to the same punishments and persecutions. (Fig. 6) Church propaganda, woodcut manuscript illustrations and broadsheets depicted Jews and witches wearing the same pointed “witches’ hat” and black garb. (Fig. 7) 

^{Witchcraft: a white-faced witch meeting a black-faced witch with a great beast. Woodcut, 1720.}

In perhaps the most notorious witch trial of the 17^th century, the legendary Pendle Witches (also known as the Lancashire Witches) were brought to trial for practicing witchcraft. One died while held in custody, but the remaining eleven stood trial. One was tried and found guilty in the city of York and the other ten were tried in Lancaster. Only one was found not guilty. The trial was documented in a contemporaneous official publication, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, written by the clerk of the court, Thomas Potts. The accused all hailed from one or the other of two local families, both of them headed by women in their 80s. (Fig. 8)

Anti-witchcraft laws were taken off the British law books in 1951, whereupon witches started to emerge publicly again. Traditions were launched in the U.K. by Gerald Gardner and Doreen Valiente, and Alex and Maxine Sanders. Witches like Starhawk, Charlene Spretnack, Marija Gimbutas, Z Budapest and Donna Neave were key to the formation of The Green Party and Green Movement, Eco-Feminism, Second Wave Feminism, The Goddess Movement and The Women’s Movement. We have always been an ideologically marginalized group in Christian society, so we have never NOT been political. We tended to be on the side of the oppressed because we were, ourselves, oppressed.

NOTES:
 Joseph Bosworth, “wicce-cræeft,” in An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Online, edited by Thomas Northcote Toller, Christ Sean, and Ondřej Tichy (Prague: Faculty of Arts, Charles University, 2014). https://bosworthtoller.com/35499.
  “Harrods unimpressed by women in Welsh costume on St David’s Day,” BBC Wales (March 5, 2013). https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-21659852
 Chris Cousens, “Harrods apologises over St David’s day dress ‘confusion,’” Wales Online (March 5, 2013). https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/local-news/harrods-apologises-over-st-davids-2493704
 Carol F. Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman (New York, NY: WW Norton, 1998).
 Judith M. Bennett, Ale, beer, and brewsters in England: women’s work in a changing world, 1300-1600 (Oxford University Press, 1996).
Addison Nugent, ‘For Centuries, Alewives Dominated the Brewing Industry: The Church and anti- witch propaganda may have contributed to beer-making becoming a boys’ club,’ in Atlas Obscura, August 17, 2018.
 ‘Women used to dominate the beer industry – until the witch accusations started pouring in,’ in The Conversation, March 2021.
 Tamar Herzig, ‘Flies, Heretics, and the Gendering of Witchcraft’. In Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 5, no. 1 (2010): 51–80.
 Thomas Potts and Arthur RD Stuttard, The Wonderful Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster (Carnegie Publishing, 2003).