Happy October, everybody! The Halloween season is upon us, and you know what that means: the fall fest spirit and ~spooky~ vibes have arrived. In light of October’s kickoff, I wanted to take an iconic figure that we’re all familiar with and dive into her hocus pocus history—the queen of Halloween herself, the witch.
(As a quick warning, we’re going back a long way in history, and, while personally, I’m going to defend the witch as being a dynamic and powerful figure now, she’s definitely the product of a deeply problematic past. Therefore, if you feel like sticking around, strap on your seat belts and let’s begin.)
Do me a favor and imagine a witch right now. If you’ve got a scrap sheet nearby, maybe even draw her out.
(Here is my sketchy contribution. Please enjoy it.)
Have you got her? I’m going to take a guess and say your witch has a pretty standard look going on: big hat, pointy nose, scratchy hair, maybe even a cauldron, cat or broom? Does that sound about right?
The witch is one of those figures where everybody seems to agree on how she looks, but here for Halloween, I want to unpack from where we got this image. Essentially, when we look at an image, what makes a witch who she is and why?
It all starts in the late 1400s. You might think that the witch image came around by accident—like random ideas and aesthetics colliding through history—but the witch was actually a very deliberate creation. During the early modern period, she was put together by institutional powers as a way of controlling Jewish populations and so-called “deviant women” across Western Europe.
Basically, think of it like an early smear campaign launched by church officials and community leaders.
Officials commissioned caricatures to be drawn up with exaggerated chins, hair and noses, took the wide-brimmed, pointed caps typical to Jewish men of the period and distorted them into the tall witch hats we know today. By making witches a dark symbol and deliberately characterizing them with inflated Jewish characteristics, they could vilify the “outsider” community by association.
At the same time, women who stepped out of societal norms were painted up as witches as a way to discourage any kind of deviancy. The iconic broomstick was intended as a metaphor for relations with the Devil (use your imagination; I’m not going to explain that one any extra), and coven dances were portrayed as an infernal event, meant to stigmatize the innocent female community and fellowship.
The ideas of eating babies, poisoning neighbors or killing animals were passed around in an effort to attribute natural tragedies to the activities of local midwives and healers as a final nail in the coffin for the early modern women of medicine.
The black cat we associate so closely with the witch was brought around as the most popular choice of familiar lore, or a witch’s way of communication with the devil through a possessed animal.
Over time, the two separate images of the “evil Jew” and the “wild animal woman” were combined into a single representation that became our modern witch. Illustrations from the early modern period mark an era bent on controlling aberrants and foreigners.
The image we’ve inherited now carries the weight of that history, and while it may be mostly lost or unknown to our culture now, the witch still definitely impacts those original communities.
How many women in positions of power will be “witch-coded” by the media? I’m looking at politicians all the way from Margaret Thatcher to Hillary Clinton.
By that same token, how many villains in popular entertainment will end up “Jewish-coded” out of cultural instinct? Think about the Smurfs for one second and get back to me or Snow White or even Tangled—tell me Mother Gothel isn’t the only non-Aryan-looking character in there.
We walk a balance here. If we were to go back and censor every problematic image or essence we ever inherited, then we’d likely end up with very little culture left. Are there some who would argue for that? There definitely are, and I’m happy to listen to them, but in my opinion, I think the important step we can take now is to appropriate images responsibly, acknowledging their past while embracing their power, and use that energy to shape our new sensibilities.
The witch these days can be a really cool symbol of bucking social norms and embracing independence, but it’s impossible for us to appreciate that symbol without first recognizing the pain that was endured for us to get here.
(More witchy doodles—because I got carried away.)