The Erotic Witch

I’ve been doing more research on witchcraft lately. The most interesting book has been The World of the Witches, by Julio Caro Baroja. He traces the figure of the witch from classical times to the present. What is interesting is, he says that the rationalist approach, which states that all witchcraft is nonsense and doesn’t exist except in the mind, is “going a bit too far.”

Some of the fascinating ideas in this book include the fact that witchcraft is about REBELLION and the SHADOW SIDE OF THINGS, and that the sympathy or harmony which exists between like things and the antipathy between unlike things is what constitutes MAGIC. Also, magic is connected to DESIRE AND WILL, and a magician can only attack the IRRATIONAL part of an individual.

Other ideas in the book:

LOVE, for the witch, is a consuming passion.

Magic is an answer to the DESPAIR men and women feel at living in a world beyond their control.

There is always an element of SHAM and FRUSTRATED DESIRE that underlies magic.

EROTIC APPETITES pave the way for magical processes.

Witchcraft is one of the most ANTOSICIAL ACTIVITIES.

The devil gets hold of people, and makes them TIRED OF LIFE, or TEMPTS THEM, or CORRUPTS THEM.

The witch elicits reactions of both TERROR and MOCKERY in people.

Another book I read was What you always Wanted To Know About Sex in Witchcraft, *but were afraid to ask, written by Hastur. With a black and white porn photo on every page, the book attempts to describe the reality of sex practices in covens, between sex magic partners, and throughout history. The book contains very little information, and is mostly an attempt to titillate the novice reader and sexual voyeur. (The photo above is the tamest photo I could find from this book).

I also read Anton Lavey’s book The Compleat Witch: Or, What to do when Virtue Fails, which is a treatise on how women can use their innate witchy powers to snare a man. It’s mostly a case of special pleading for classic sex appeal, as he urges women to throw away their pantyhose in favor of stockings, and to wear three-inch spike heels and dresses that look like the drawings of women in cartoons in men’s magazines. He even extols the virtues of slightly stained undergarments, which are supposed to conjure up the lure of the forbidden.

Much of the book is about trying to appear as the opposite type of the man you are trying to seduce, and he compares people to numbers on a clock with dominant types on the top of the clock, submissive on the bottom, thinking types on the right and feeling types on the left. The logic here is very thin, but the book is amusing as a piece of history. It seems that in the early 70s there were simply too many witches, so the book was written to help certain witches to elevate themselves above others, which in this case amounts to pure and simple desirability and seductive power.

It seems that many of the books written to help witches are about helping females to increase their desirability, and that this concept has been around for a long time. The Greek witches were mostly match-makers and makers of perfumes, aphrodisiacs, cosmetics and love potions, and many medieval witches were prostitutes. One of the main functions of witches throughout history has been to assist in love matches for others, and to secure the men they personally desired for themselves. There has always been an erotic element to the witch, mixed with an element of fear.

The renewed interest in the 60s and 70s with witch novels and movies I think can be attributed to a new interest in uncovering everything female. This meant her body, her soul, her desires, her primal powers, her anatomy. Because of a sudden and meteoric loosening of censorship laws, the female became territory to be openly explored, and men lost no time doing exactly this. There was also a renewal of interest in all things pagan and non-western, and a desire to go back to earlier social structures, which included matriarchy and goddess worship. But with the rise of pornography and its relegation to a specialty underground audience, this interest in woman as a special creature died on a cultural level and was never revived. But you can still see it very strongly in texts and films from that period.

“Black magic” is and always has been about the erotic, and about the primal fear of women. This concept of witchcraft and magic is now seen as hopelessly archaic, as modern witches make sweet-smelling potions out of olive oil, anise, nutmeg, and cinnamon, and try to make everyone feel good about themselves with hippy-dippy self-help spells. Its value as a religion notwithstanding, there is always, as Baroja noted, a tragic element attached to these gestures, the desperate attempt to find a solution to the dreariness of living and frustrated desire through the use of magic and spells.

This is the element about witches and witchcraft that I find most interesting: the way that it becomes a last resort when reality fails to provide the necessary hope, and when simple delusions no longer work. The subject as material for a film is difficult, but if treated properly it can be a powerful examination of social ritual and desire.