To be fair, I love the movie Hocus Pocus. And I have. For years.
But every time I watch it, I become increasingly more uncomfortable with a problem too many people overlook:
The movie’s insulting portrayal of witches.
If you know nothing about Wicca, that sentence probably looks fairly odd. I mean, aren’t all witches evil? Don’t witches worship Satan? Isn’t witchcraft about summoning Satan in the forest at night and offering him either virgins or children on an altar?
Oh, please.
Let’s get out of the Middle Ages. It’s the 21st century now.
While I don’t have a PhD in witchcraft, I do have a PhD in English, and I’m a novelist who will only write books if I can include magic in them. And as a result of those two things, I’ve done a sh*t ton of research on the origin of the belief that witches worship Satan.
So let’s bust some stupid myths.
The average person believes basically the same thing that shows up in the medieval play Dr. Faustus by Christopher Marlowe. As a British literature classic, it’s a play I’ve taught many times. The premise is that an elderly professor sells his soul to Satan and pursues witchcraft in order to become immensely powerful. Dr. Faustus spouts off lines about sacrificing newborn babies on altars to Satan.
Ridiculous.
Of course, the Christians of the late Middle Ages very much touted that such things were real, and they burned, drowned, and hanged perhaps as many as 200,000 people under such charges. They were mostly women, although men were also sometimes accused. (See Patti Wigington for a brief overview on LearnReligions.com.)
What did black magic actually look like in the Middle Ages?
Men.
And they weren’t witches, they were ceremonial magicians.
Better yet, real black magic requires you to be Christian first.
I can imagine the sound of tires screeching to a halt inside your brain. You’re probably thinking, “Wait, what? Did you just say that a practitioner of black magic had to be a man who was Christian?”
Yep.
For one of the novels I’ve written, which is coming out in January, I read the entirety of The Book of Black Magic, which was written by the famous occultist Arthur E. Waite, the man who co-created the most famous tarot deck of all time: the Rider-Waite-Smith deck.
As a scholar of the occult, Waite collected copies of all the famous medieval grimoires and retranslated them into English, given some of the previous English translations were quite poor. The grimoires had been in French and Latin.
In his book, he provides a scholarly — and sometimes scathing — critique of the methods discussed, occasionally mocking the absurdity of certain aspects. If you can wade through Waite’s older English, given the book was originally published in the early 1900s, it’s actually a hilarious read.
One thing that Waite pokes fun at is the fact that the ceremonial magician is required to go to mass, ask forgiveness for his sins, and take the Eucharist (communion) before casting a spell.
And what are these spells, precisely?
The spells summon demons and force them to do your bidding. In short, you’re required to use the names of God (Yahweh, Elohim, etc) to control demons. So you can’t practice medieval black magic if you don’t believe in God.
And what will these demons do for you?
Teach you Latin or Greek. Teach you geometry. Give you a college education for free. You might be tempted to laugh, but remember that in the Middle Ages, knowledge was power.
There are other things, too. Creepy things like having the demon go fetch a hot woman for you to have sex with. (The amount of consent varies by grimoire, apparently, so some sound rapey.) They also have hokey things, like having the demon teleport you or turn you invisible. And then there’s the classic order to make the demon find a lost treasure for you so you can be instantly rich.
Nowhere in any of these grimoires does it say to kill children, the myth alluded to in Hocus Pocus.
The origin of this myth is addressed by Waite himself, who points out that the word “kid” refers to a baby goat. You’re supposed to kill a kid to make parchment out of its dried skin. After all, drying animal skins is an old technique for making paper, and in this case, you’re told to make fresh paper to draw your magical sigils on.
The Plot Twist
So how did we jump from men who are ceremonial magicians summoning demons to teach them Greek to ugly women who hate children and sacrifice them to Satan (or, in the case of Hocus Pocus, suck out their lifeforce)? Well, the answer to that is very complex if we consider over four thousand years of witch-hunting, but the tl;dr version isn’t surprising:
Sexism and classism.
During the most famous era of witch-hunting, from the 1400s to the 1600s, the victims were not only primary women but also mostly poor women and widows. But why?
Firstly, women were not allowed to live alone without a man, so women who did so anyway were persecuted. Surviving records show that the women were usually accused of being too aggressive. Without wealth and nobility to protect themselves, they were easy targets and became scapegoated for things like floods or droughts.
Secondly, women the world over have had standing orders to have babies, love babies, and single-handedly take care of babies for millennia now. Any woman who doesn’t love babies and children — like the three Sanderson sisters — is ruled to be The Worst f*cking Evil.
If women want to be single, never marry, and never have kids, then they’re the Sanderson sisters: demented, twisted, and worshipping Satan.
I really wish this was mere hyperbole, but one look at the Christian Right, and you can see it’s really not. In the U.S., an all-out war is being raged to own women’s bodies and control when and how they reproduce, including agendas to ban birth control.
Historically, the people we call witches merely worshipped aspects of nature and the changing of the seasons. They grew herbs and made medicines out of them. They were called root-workers.
As worshippers of ancient Pagan pantheons, they did not believe in Satan. In fact, they didn’t even know who the Jews and Christians were yet. The concept of a fallen angel of Yahweh’s or a creature named Satan was unknown to them.
When the Christians came and force-converted everyone, those among the colonized peoples who still followed their old deities were persecuted and sometimes executed. And what better charge to justify their murder than to claim they worship Satan? It took little effort to cross the charge of Satan worship with the activity of making herbal medicine. In this way, all witches became broadly known the world over as evil Satan worshippers.
This concept takes up a full scene in Hocus Pocus, with the Sanderson sisters mistaking a man in a Satan costume for the real thing and calling him master. It also shows up in the 1991 movie Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and dozens of other films, reinforcing medieval Christian propaganda and accusing people of worshipping an entity they don’t even believe exists.
It fulfills the cultural work of condemning all religions not Christianity, and it also continues the work of trying to erase, through accusations of wrongdoing and evil, the original ethnic religion of millions of people across continental Europe, Scandinavia, the UK, and Ireland.
And we’re still paying the hate forward centuries later.
But the reality is quite different. Even the men who supposedly summoned demons during the Middle Ages did so using the name of Yahweh and then reportedly used said demons to . . . teach them Greek and geometry or do obviously impossible things like teleport them. Whoa. So scary.
What is Wicca?
Thousands of books have been published about this, mostly for people who want to learn Wicca, although there have been some scholarly works. But I will try to condense this into something bite-sized.
Created in the 1950s by a British folklorist named Gerald Gardner, Wicca is a modern adaption of an ancient Pagan religion. According to Gardner, he joined a witch’s coven in England, and they taught him their Pagan ways: worshipping nature, celebrating the changing of the seasons, and calling upon both a god and a goddess for healthy crops and livestock. Whoa. So scary.
Although Gardner had taken an oath of secrecy, he shared this spiritual practice with the world. In his modern adaption of the ancient ways, the practitioner makes an altar that represents the four elements — fire, water, earth, and air — and celebrates ancient Celtic holidays, which include the two solstices and two equinoxes. The altars are, therefore, usually decorated with seasonal décor, such as flowers in the spring, fresh foods in the summer, gourds in the fall, and mistletoe in the winter. Whoa. So scary.
The Wiccan is free to call upon any number of ancient Pagan deities, such as the gods and goddess of the Celts, or the practitioner can view the deities as symbolic — archetypes instead of actual entities.
Most, but not all, Wiccans follow the Threefold Law, which states that anything you do, good or evil, will return to you three times over. For that reason, the practitioner is counseled to do good.
And, no, Wiccans don’t believe in Satan. Or God. Or Jesus. They aren’t Christian, so they don’t believe in Christian cosmology.
Stop promoting the political agenda of a bunch of dead Christians from 500 years ago. Try to respect, if you are a U.S. citizen, that this country is supposed to have freedom of religion. And for god’s sake, stop demonizing elderly widows and women who simply don’t want children. Our world population is 8.1 billion people as of 2023. We’re not in danger of dying out as a race.
Citation:
Waite, Arthur E. The Book of Black Magic. Weiser Books, 2004.
Note: Cross-posted from Medium.com
