"Build a Bridge Out of Her!": On What It Means to be Called "Witch."

"Who were the witches? Heretics or healers, members of a psychedelic cult, worshipers of pagan gods, or merely women who were not afraid to fly?" -- Erica Jong

LivingSocial: Books is Facebook's best application for bibliophiles. It keeps for you a list of what you have read and what you want to read, and suggests things you might like based on how you've rated books in your collection. And today, LivingSocial: Books told me I might like Erica Jong's Witches. "Like" turned out to be an understatement. I work in the college library, so today after work was done, I hustled up to the "stacks" on the 3rd floor and found it. Then I took myself to the coffee shop, bought a frappe, and opened it to read. I was hooked from the first line.

Beautifully illustrated by Joseph A. Smith, Witches is both a factual history of religion and myth and a collection of fanciful, humorous, (and often brutally honest) poetry and prose dealing with the Witch in all her reincarnations, from the honored Mother of All Things to the haggard, warty crone of Disney movies to the 21-st Century neo-pagan with her organic food and hybrid car, and everything, above, below, beyond or in between.

"What is the witch's heritage?" Asks Jong. Her great, great, great, great, great ancestress is Ishtar-Diana-Demeter. Her father is man. Her midwife, his fears. Her torturer, his fears. Her executioner, his fears. Her malignant power, his fears. Her healing power, her own."

And now I shall tell a story. When I was a teenager, my favorite movie was Practical Magic. Even today I can quote it. I had no concept of ever becoming what is these days called "witch"; I was just a girl in love with the idea of magic. Isn't everyone? We have Harry Potter and "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny. We like the idea of carpets that have been bewitched to fly, of lamps that spew forth genies to cater to our hearts' desires. The idea of magic is so entrenched in our everyday lives we hardly even notice it anymore. The idea of cats having nine lives? Magic. Believing that if we express our wishes fervently enough to a certain deity, the universe will somehow tip its natural balance into our favor and grant us better health, more money, fairer weather or better employment? Magic. The concept of Transfiguration (whereby bread and wine become the actual body and blood of Christ as you partake of them)? Totally magic. And I'm not saying magic is a bad thing -- simply that we classify it according to what serves us best. If it can give us wealth and riches and longevity and renown, or conversely if it can curse us, cause our hair to fall out, blight crops and bring plagues, it is called magic -- depending upon whether we want to bless or blame it. If it is benevolent and parental and can grant us eternal life, it is called faith, or, on the flip side of the coin, when it takes away life or "causes" an earthquake or "allows" a flood, it is called "God's will." Similarly, we have split the concept of what it means to be called Witch: there was a time when the ones now called witches were simply adherents to the ancient concept of the divinity of the female as the giver of life, or simply herbalists, healers or midwives. We don't think that way anymore. Now Witch has a negative connotation: it brings forth images of pointy hats and green skin and snakes and toads and evil cackling over cauldrons bubbling with some nasty brew.

I could give you a lesson about why this is so. I could play the beleaguered feminist and spout lines condemning patriarchy and the forcible introduction of a male-dominated religion into a society that honored and appreciated women as a means of political control, a way of assuring that the rich stayed rich and the poor stayed poor. (These days we call that "social policy".) But I won't. I will get back to the story. (If you've stayed with me this far, buy yourself a reward.)

One night, I took Practical Magic to a sleepover at my grandmother's house to watch with my cousins. She took one look at the title and declared, "Though shalt not suffer a witch to live." I was indignant and annoyed. As with most things found in the Christian Bible, I considered this to be ignorant and unfairly judgmental on principle. I wasn't even aware, back then, of the complex history of Witch as a term or of the Bible as a game of Telephone played with the written word: a document translated over and over and over and over again until what it originally said was barely intelligible. I wasn't aware of the time in history during which the Bible was written, or what the people in that time thought or believed or acted upon. To me, it was just a matter of basic fairness: don't condemn something unless you have first studied that thing, unless you have learned all you can about it, unless you have dug down to the marrow in its bones and fairly considered all sides of it. Don't buy into something because you found it in a book or saw it on TV or heard it on the radio, or because your mother bought it, and her mother bought it, and her mother's mother bought it. That very quickly becomes the blind leading the blind leading the blind, and pretty soon everybody drowns in the ditch.

I also didn't know, at that time in my life, that I was already starting to become one of Jong's women who were "not afraid to fly." I was operating on what was and has always been a matter of common sense to me. One of my biggest failures both then and now lies in my tendency to automatically assume that what makes sense to me also makes sense to everyone else. (That being said, don't feel bad if you have no idea what I'm talking about. Sometimes even I don't know what I'm talking about.) What I did know was this: that I chafed at the bonds of Christianity. That something about it felt wrong to me; that I found most of its principles to be either confusing, contradictory, fundamentally unfair, and sometimes even stupid (such as the idea that a woman who is raped must marry her rapist, that braids are forbidden, and that menstruation and childbirth make a woman ritually and spiritually unclean.) I knew I had a problem praying to a God who would supposedly forgive my mother for beating me, spitting in my face and locking me outside in the rain faster than he would forgive me for dishonoring her, who wouldn't have as much of a problem with the people in my life who closed their eyes to my pain and stopped their ears to my voice as he would with me for the things I did in my misguided attempts to make that voice heard. I knew that I hated the idea of fearing God, and of acknowledging shame I didn't think I should have to feel for every little mistake I made. As Jong says:

"Witchcraft was -- and is -- a joyous, ecstatic religion in which the gods and goddesses are better served by merriment than by moaning."

What I hated about Christianity, then, was the moaning. Often I wanted to leap up from my pew in South Liberty Church of Christ and run screaming out the door. I could not, would not, close all the doors and windows to my brain and trap one notion of God inside like an over-curious cat. I wanted to learn. I needed to know things. I needed a faith that would allow me to hold my head up high, a faith that did not encourage me to repent as much as it encouraged me to think, a faith that pulled me out of my lonely little corner and told me it was alright to dance. But first I closed myself in a box of my own making and became a Baptist zealot who drew a clear line between Heaven and Hell and forced those around me to choose a side. I lived in a world of moral absolutes. When I grew out of that, I put Christianity on like a dress that didn't fit and wore it because I thought I must. I chose Episcopalianism because of its vast difference from anything else I'd tried, but in the end it was the same for me: the dress was still the wrong size. I still felt stifled. I know people for whom that particular dress fits very well, and I encourage those people to wear it. Of course, I will also encourage those very same people to take it off if they find they no longer like it. I am an equal opportunity spiritualist: I won't put a cage around you if you don't put a fence around me. For that reason, I call myself "spiritually eclectic," preferring not to take on the assumptions that come with the title of Wiccan or Pagan or Christian, or even Witch -- though I find that I kind of like Witch, and if pressed to definitively classify myself, will say it.

Witch: from the Teutonic "wic," meaning "to bend." OR from the Indo-European root "weik," a reference to religion and magic. (Paraphrased from Jong's Witches.) The word is either of these or both of these or neither of these; no one knows for sure. But I am both strong enough to bend and a believer of the "religion of magic" (Defining magic how you will; a spade is a spade unless it's a duck,) so Witch it is, and proud to say it.

"She is the witch. You know her, yet you do not know her. She has been with you always, yet she eludes you. She is your mother, your sister, your innermost self. You love her and fear her. You hate her, but are drawn to her. She is the witch. You wish you were she. Except when the time comes for burning."