We have all waited through every other plain month of the year, every other lame holiday, for the best, most exciting, spookiest time of year: Halloween. With Halloween comes all of its spooky symbols and nerds who stop you at a costume party to ask you if you would be interested to know the pagan roots of Halloween… and by nerds I mean me. Specifically, I am fascinated and intrigued by witches, a staple of Halloween decorations and costumes which has deep historical roots in colonial America. I am less interested in what witches mean to Halloween as I am in what they mean to feminism, because witches are the original bad b*tches.
Centuries ago, witches were people, mostly women, who practiced witchcraft, used magic spells, and called upon spirits to make change. Early Christians in Europe perceived witches as evil beings, leading to witches becoming a staple of Halloween symbols. When hysteria surrounding witches died down in Europe, it skyrocketed in colonial America with the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. When young girls in the village of Salem began having violent fits, outbursts, and screaming, a local doctor diagnosed as having been bewitched. The women who were blamed for bewitching the girls include Tituba, the Carribean slave of the family of one of the “sick” girls, homeless beggar Sarah Good, and poor, elderly Sarah Osborn. The next several months saw several persecutions of dozens of accused women and even the execution of several of them. Eventually, the fervor of the trials subsided and by 1967, the Massachusetts General Court “deemed the trials unlawful.”
The Salem Witch Trials symbolized an attack on women rooted in hate and misogyny, and these feelings about the trials, and this attack on women, has not ceased. Today, we are obviously not hanging women in gallows or setting them on fire as they are tied to a stake. Still, the way the trials treated women, especially the most vulnerable women, is similar to the way that we as a society treat women today. The first women who were accused in Salem were POC, enslaved, poor, elderly, and homeless. Because of this, feminists over time have banded around the image of witches because they symbolize the way we feel about our situation today: people are afraid of our power, we are under attack, especially those of us who lie in vulnerable intersections. Witches give women an organic muse for us to acknowledge or circumstances and find power. Starhawk, a famous anarchist, ecofeminist witch says, “The word ‘witch’ carries so many negative connotations that people wonder why we use it at all. Yet to reclaim the word witch is to reclaim our right, as women, to be powerful; as men, to know the feminine within as divine.”
Today, more than ever, women believe we are under attack: we have a President who openly admitted to sexually assaulting women, a Supreme Court Judge has been appointed despite a highly credible accusation of sexual assault made against him, and in general, violence against women has become an intensely normalized aspect of our culture. Women are not sitting by and letting it happen; we are coming together in huge marches all across the country, sporting signs that read, “We are the granddaughters of the witches you could not burn,” and we are rebooting and reviving media centered around female witches like Sabrina The Teenage Witch and Charmed. Sady Doyle, in her article, “Monsters, men and magic: why feminists turned to witchcraft to oppose Trump,” she says, “There is a fire on the horizon. You can see it burning, out on the edges of the world. The violence we have survived can be our guide to what needs to change. The fire that burned the witches can be the fire that lights our way. Our power is waiting for us, out in forbidden spaces, beyond the world of men. Step forward and claim it. Step forward into the boundless and female dark.” We are shouting off of rooftops that we are strong and we will fight, broomsticks in hand.