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    Witches
    Witches
    Witches
    Ebook279 pages2 hours

    Witches

    By Erica Jong and Jos. A. Smith

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    About this ebook

    The New York Times–bestselling author of Fear of Flying celebrates witches in a gorgeously illustrated brew of witchcraft lore, potions, secrets, and myth.
     
    With a mix of genuine fascination, passionate enthusiasm, and keen feminist insight, Erica Jong wades through a bog of myths, misinformation, historical hysteria, and contemporary Halloween costumes to offer a generous exploration and celebration of witches.
     
    From their origins as descendants of ancient goddesses to contemporary practitioners of the craft, the evolution of the concept of “witch” has been as changeable as the centuries themselves. From evil crone to sexual seductress, they are the embodiment of both light and dark, fertility and death, divinity and paganism, baleful curses and healing cures. They have been scapegoated as the object of men’s worst fears and embraced as heroines of female empowerment. As muses, they have influenced popular culture from Shakespeare and Yeats to Anne Sexton and Ken Russell. With reverence and a hint of mischief, Jong reveals witches’ rites, rituals, and magical recipes, including authentic spells and incantations.
     
    “A steaming cauldron of beautifully illustrated prose, poetry, love potions and flying lotions” (Glamour) from the renowned author of Fanny, Witches is “nothing less than a complete transformation of our concept of witches . . . accomplishe[d] with panache in this sumptuously and provocatively illustrated book" (Publishers Weekly).
     
    This ebook features an illustrated biography of Erica Jong, including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection.
     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateAug 29, 2017
    ISBN9781504046886
    Witches
    Author

    Erica Jong

    <p>Erica Jong is an award-winning poet, novelist, and essayist best known for her eight bestselling novels, including the international bestseller <em>Fear of Flying</em>. She is also the author of seven award-winning collections of poetry.</p>

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      Book preview

      Witches - Erica Jong

      The Witch

      You know her.

      She beckons you with one crooked finger. In the other hand she holds a poisoned apple. From the bottom of the pool of nightmares, from the back of the inhabited closet where the mothballs breathe and the dust dances, from behind the wall she walked through (opposite your childhood bed), from inside the gingerbread house she built with her recipes and spells, she warns you of that fairy-tale world which interconnects with ours in secret, unexpected places.

      You may, unwittingly, fall in.

      She is the witch.

      You know her, yet you do not know her. She has been with you always, yet she eludes you. She is your mother, your sister, your inmost self. You love her and fear her. You hate her, but are drawn to her.

      What can I tell you about her?

      She is more beautiful (and uglier) than you dream. She is a chimera, yet she is real. She loves you, yet her love has festered into hexes. She hates you, yet she will not hurt you—as long as she can enslave you forever.

      She controls love, death, fertility, and the weather—but she will not share her power with you for less than the pledge of your life.

      She is the witch.

      You wish you were she.

      Except when the time comes for burning.

      How did the witch come to take on these attributes? Was she really a poisoner, a healer, a maker of love philters, or merely a deranged old woman muttering to her jasper-eyed cat?

      Did she create the danger you feel, or did frightened men, seeking to embody their sense of danger, invent the witch?

      What is the witch’s heritage?

      Her great, great, great, great, great, great ancestress is Ishtar-Diana-Demeter. Her father is man. Her midwife, his fears. Her torturer, his fears. Her executioner, his fears. Her malignant power, his fears. Her healing power, her own.

      Let us shine the light on her for a while. Let us make her stay. Before we know it, she will slip off into the darkness again. But for the moment, she is here with us, beckoning.

      Her presence makes us shiver a little—as if an invisible refrigerator had opened nearby. Under her cloak—which is blue as the night sky—an owl screeches. A bat flaps out from under her conical hat. But let us invite her in anyway. Maybe she will give us a love philter, or the recipe for flying ointment, or maybe even a pair of love poppets, guaranteed to work forever. Maybe she will make our wishes come true before we burn her.

      Or maybe we won’t have to burn her this time at all.

      Some Light on the Subject of Witchcraft

      Witch, witchcraft, witchery, witched, bewitched. The very words reek of mystery and magic. Our libraries and bookstores overflow with books on the subject. Adolescents thumb through them, looking for a spell to undo the discontent they will probably outgrow. The poor, the disenfranchised, the chronically unlucky, the ignorant, the helpless, the hapless light candles and chant ancient syllables they do not understand. Poets and novelists are attracted to witchcraft because their daily work consists of tapping an invisible source whose workings are often mysterious to them (thus they wish they could propitiate the muse through some dependable means). The rationalist scoffs, secure in his superiority to all those who claim that intellect is not enough to take us through this life. (But is he really so secure? Doesn’t he too wish there were some magic he could believe in?)

      We are all drawn to witchcraft—we all wish for a craft of wishing—yet few of us know what it is. Even the authorities do not agree, and most of the people who hope to practice witchcraft haven’t the remotest idea what the word means. Well then, some illumination on the subject of witchcraft—before we plunge into the fertile, teeming darkness.

      The Word Witchcraft

      The word witchcraft in its most ordinary, popular connotation refers to the use of supernatural forces to bend the world to one’s will. In our society, witchcraft is commonly used as a synonym for sorcery, when it is not used as a metaphor connoting someone’s emotional power over us. But the Oxford English Dictionary tells us that witchcraft comes from the Old English word wiccecraeft (also spelled wiccecraefte, wicchecrafte, wichecraft—as well as wesch-craft and wicche craft) and that it literally means the craft—in the sense of art or skill—of a witch (the latter being wicca or wicce or wiccian in Old English).

      Who is this old witch with her ancient craft? The noun witch may derive from the old Teutonic verb wik, meaning to bend, or it may derive from the Indo-European root weik, which refers to religion and magic. (There has been considerable controversy about the true etymology of the word witch.)

      In either case, it seems fair to say that the witch is one who uses magic to bend things according to her desires. No wonder we all wish to be witches! How, then, did this rather simple concept come to be so loaded with emotional connotations? In a sense, the whole history of our culture with its religious experiences lies behind the word witch. To understand the word witch is to understand anthropology, history, the history of religion, the history of the relations between the sexes, to understand, above all, the unconscious of the human being. For though there are as many theories of witchcraft as there are scholars in the British Museum library, underlying all of them is a comprehension of the image-making faculties of the human brain, its yearning for myth and magic, its need to denounce what it does not understand, its transformation of common yearnings into images and archetypes, its metamorphosis of desires into demons, wishes—in short—into witches.

      Apparently, the notion that the word witch is related to the Old English witan, to know, constitutes false etymology. Modern witches have claimed the connection between witan and witch as a basis for calling modern witchcraft the Craft of the Wise, but witch seems to have different roots than wise and wisdom. Those modern witches who call their religious organization the Church of Wicca have merely gone back to the Old English word for witch in the hopes of purifying it of the negative connotations that are the result of generations of persecution.

      Let the doors to your prejudices swing open. In order to understand witches we must put aside our automatic beliefs that the deity is male; that the moon is sinister, while the sun is friendly; that the female principle is dark, unruly, anarchic, while the male is orderly, rational, wise. We must strip away, in short, all the preconceptions our culture has heaped upon our bowed heads. We must understand that most of the major religions in the world today (Moslem, Jewish, Christian) function, in one sense, as apologias for a patriarchal world view, that this is not the only possible world view, that it is neither absolute nor immutable, that human beings have worshiped gods and goddesses in many forms—tree, animal, human (female as well as male, androgynous as well as genderless), and that the way we characterize the deity is less important than that we do acknowledge a divine spirit both within and without ourselves.

      From Mother Goddess to Witch

      Few of us realize the extent to which our notions of the deity are informed by patriarchal assumptions. We claim that God is raceless and genderless, yet we visualize God as white and male to such a degree that the very notion of a black, female God is enough to raise guffaws in response to a hardy, perennial joke. Most of us have never been taught that the concept of God as male is relatively new to human history and may not necessarily represent progress. Five thousand years ago in ancient Babylonia, our ancestors worshiped the supreme deity as the Queen of Heaven, and it took several millennia of warfare, oppression, genocide, holocaust, idol-smashing, book-burning, and deliberate rewriting of myths and legends for the father-god, Jahweh (and His son, Jesus) to be finally enthroned in our minds and imaginations.

      Yet the battle was never completely won. In our myths and in our dreams, in the archetypes we invent and the fantasies we fear, the Mother Goddess still holds sway. She cannot be eradicated as long as man (and woman, too) is born of woman. If the sad day ever dawns when we all become clones or test-tube babies, perhaps the Mother Goddess will lose her awesome power; but so long as every human being remembers that she or he is born out of a woman’s womb, the myths and legends of the Mother Goddess will infiltrate our poetry, our works of art, and even our religious yearnings.

      It has been a long decline from the Babylonian Queen of Heaven to the withered figure of the old witch,

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