Witchcraft

On the way to Moscow I read a really interesting book called “Witchcraft,” by Pennethorne Hughes. It was quite inspiring, in that it laid out the history of witchcraft as a religion that was a bastardized form of older pagan religions. I realized after reading it that much of the landscape of The Wicker Man with Christopher Lee must have been taken from this sort of history. In that film, and in this book, it was suggested that in certain isolated pockets in Europe--in Britain especially-- Christianity had never quite penetrated, and there lurked odd folkways and traditions.

It was suggested that in certain places the folkways persisted. The practitioners of these older customs were either simple serfs and country people who continued practicing an older, classical/pagan religion, or neo-Paleolithic peoples around the British isles and in parts of Europe, who were driven back into their caves and forests by medieval invaders. This is apparently where the legends about brownies, fairies, sprites, and leprechauns come from. Fairies were essentially witches, and practiced the same religion. The religion was not a devil-worshipping one, but a pagan one, and much of it was about fertility rites, moon cults, knowledge of medicinal herbs, and spells and sacrifices to make things grow or prosper.

Eventually there were many new converts to this “religion” throughout the middle ages. Conversion was especially popular with women, cynics of Christianity, rebels, intellectuals, heretics, people who wanted free access to sex, etc. Eventually elements of devil-worshipping emerged as the new witchcraft became a parody of Christianity, and that’s when we start having instances of the converts kissing the devil’s ass, signing contracts in blood, mocking Christian rituals, and going to Sabbaths. Somehow reading about the types of people who gravitated towards witchcraft in the middle ages reminded me of the kinds of people practice witchcraft and spells nowadays, or in the hippie culture of the 1960’s.


I was struck by that hippie element when I was reading this witchcraft book and watching The Wicker Man, and it made sense to me why films and books about witches were so popular in the 1960’s. First there is that sense of nature and getting back to basics, then there is the whole woman-power thing, then there is the hippie-dippy new-age spells and magic culture. Somehow the image of Victorian fairies sitting on toadstools and Donovan with his pipe in The Pied Piper blend together in my mind, as well as women selling sachet packets at the Renaissance Faire, shops full of incense and mystic crystals, fantasy art, unicorns, rainbows, gypsy and gothic fashion, massage oils, tattoos, tarot, and everything else associated with the anguished Western person’s desire to break out, or the woman’s desire to become a powerful and sexually desired goddess.



Of course the objects and culture associated with witchcraft and fairies today is quite flaky and in bad taste, which I realize with some horror I am starting to quite enjoy. New-age culture, which I have always detested, has been growing on me lately in quite a natural way. While I was in Melbourne recently, I was squealing over all of these horrible shops containing bad pseudo-Victorian fairy art, giant Carnelian silver rings, driftwood hat-racks, and foil-stamped shiny unicorn boxes. I even bought a “fairy mirror,” and a sort of magical “fairy pendant,” and Jared bought “wizard jewelry.” There is something quite new about it for me, as it’s an area I’ve never gone into, although for many others it must seem quite clichéd. Suddenly I have fresh eyes for new-age and sentimental treasures which I would have scoffed at a month ago. And I am also inspired by fairy-unicorn environments which hold primal girl power, such as the images in Junko Mizuno's drawings.


These objects, though, are informing a narrative, as much as the flowered couch prints and vinyl faux-marble ice buckets informed the narrative of Viva. I’m starting to imagine Jared as a screen wizard in an open robe, with his new wizard jewelry, a thoroughly decadent theater or circus manager who is really the devil (much like Roman in Rosemary’s Baby, or the devil in The Virgin Witch). I think my interest in witches started originally with fairy tales, which I really love, but when I think about making a film about it, it gets quickly perverted into all of these other depressing and all too realistic characters and objects, which is how I see life after all. It’s the realism intruding always, the compromise and the shattering of the mythic replaced by the everyday.

A scene which keeps sticking with me is one in which a naked witch smears herself from her toes to her head with magical ointment, then lays down and has a drug trip which turns into a scary and erotic dream. The ointment that witches used was apparently hallucinogenic, and often caused dreams where they thought they were flying, hence the flying on a broomstick legend. I thought there could be this really erotic scene, with a beautiful black-haired naked witch covered in ointment, writhing around and dreaming wishfully about what would happen at the sabbath.