Section:GDN 12 PaGe:4 Edition Date:190808 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 7/8/2019 17:13 cYanmaGentaYellowblac

• The Guardian
  4 Thursday 8 August 2019
  Women

They hex the

president, meet in

WhatsApp covens

and feature in

TV reboots. In the

US, radicalised

women are

fi nding strength

in the ancient

pagan arts, says

Sady Doyle

spiritual text. Either way, The Spiral

Dance sold vastly more copies than

your average book on feminism, and

had a far greater impact. There is no

way to know how many women

stumbled across sentences such as,

“Women are not encouraged to

explore their own strengths and

realisations; they are taught to

submit to male authority, to identify

masculine perceptions as their

spiritual ideals, to deny their bodies

and sexuality, to fi t a male mould”,

and emerged radicalised on the other

end, but I do know one who did. The

Spiral Dance was the book my friends

and I moved on to when The Wicca

Spellbook lost its allure, making it,

by my count, the fi rst book of

feminist theory that I ever owned.

When the witch emerged as a

contemporary fi gure of resistance, it

was hard to tell where she came from;

Hollywood iconography, feminist

history, the coming of age of the

Craft generation or just the optics

of the 2016 election, in which a

chats “covens”. Trump developed a

penchant for tweeting the phrase

“WITCH HUNT” in caps whenever

he felt persecuted, which the

conservative political cartoonist A F

Branco dramatised exactly the

wrong way around, with the

Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer

and Nancy Pelosi depicted as gun-

toting witches on the hunt for a

helpless mortal man.

Pop culture exhumed every witch

it could fi nd: in 2018 alone, there

were high-profi le reboots of Charmed,

Sabrina the Teenage Witch (Sabrina

worships the devil now; it is very

confusing), and Dario Argento’s

Suspiria. In the fi nal days of her

2016 campaign, Trump’s opponent,

Hillary Clinton – the fi rst female

Democratic nominee – had been

accused of participating in ritual

sex magic and attending a “witch’s

church” with her female friends.

By early 2019, right wing religious

groups were accusing Democratic

congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-

Cortez of belonging to “a coven of

witches that casts spells on Trump

24 hours a day”.

In a way, this was tradition. The

witch has always been the feminist

monster of choice. In 1968, the group

WITCH descended upon Wall Street

in black pointy hats and cloaks,

semi-seriously intending to hex it.

They also released hundreds of live

mice into Madison Square Garden

during a bridal fair. Marriage was a

recurring target of ire; the leafl et

announcing the action chummily

invited women everywhere to

“confront the whoremakers”.

“Witches have always been women

who dared to be: groovy, courageous,

found that witchcraft resonated on a

much deeper level. The San Francisco

Bay area – the centre of boomer

youth culture in the US – saw an

explosion of neo-pagan traditions,

including the witches’ coven that

initiated Miriam Simos, or, as she

soon came to be known, Starhawk.

Starhawk’s 1979 book The Spiral

Dance quickly became the premier

text for self-taught witches. As seen

through Starhawk’s anarchist,

ecofeminist lens, witchcraft was not

just a way to acquire magical powers,

but was a deeply political act. “The

word witch carries so many negative

connotations that people wonder why

we use it at all,” she wrote. “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.” Some trashed The Spiral

Dance for being a new age self-help

manual disguised as a radical

manifesto; others complained that it

smeared its far-left feminist agenda

all over what was supposed to be a

Why feminists have

turned to witchcraft

to fi ght Trump

‘T his is the

time for getting scary,” the writer

Andi Zeisler told Elle magazine on

the eve of the 2017 Women’s March.

“We need to go full witch.”

At the dawn of the Trump

administration, witches were

suddenly everywhere in the US.

Neo-pagans used blogs and social

media to circulate popular rituals for

hexing Brock Turner (who served

less than three months in jail after

he was convicted of sexual assualt),

the supreme court justice Brett

Kavanaugh (accused of sexual

assault , which he denies), and

Donald Trump himself. T he Trump

curse was enacted by thousands of

people, including the singer Lana

Del Rey. “ I’m a witch and I’m

hunting you ,” declared Lindy West

in the New York Times; Jess

Zimmerman and Jaya Saxena wrote

a self-help book, Basic Witches , in

which they explained: “ If you speak

when you’re told to be quiet, take

pride when you’re told to feel

shame, love what and who you love

whether or not others approve,

you’re practi sing witchcraft.” Half

the women I know called their group

aggressive, intelligent, nonconformist,

explorative, curious, independent,

sexually liberated, revolutionary,”

read the manifesto. “You are a w itch

by being female, untamed, angry,

joyous and immortal.”

All that, and you didn’t even have

to eat a baby. “Because WITCH actions

could be done with a small group

and were both fun and political, they

quickly spread around the country.

Boston women hexed bars.

[Washington] DC women hexed the

pres idential inauguration. Chicago

women zapped everything,” Jo

Freeman wrote in her reckoning of

the movement. The subversive idea

that powered both the witch-hunts

and the 1990s wave of teen witches –

the idea that, by gathering together

and hatching plots, women might

obtain heretofore unthinkable power

• has also fuelled much feminist
  organising throughout history. Men
  were right to be worried. Feminists
  weren’t literally going to steal their
  dicks and hide them in trees, as
  medieval witches were said to do, but
  that did turn out to be a surprisingly
  apt metaphor for their work.
  And, although the WITCHes
  were joking, the witches weren’t.
  Witchcraft and occultism really were
  heavily associated with a certain
  kind of mid- 20th-century cool. The
  Beatles put Aleister Crowley on the
  cover of S gt Pepper ; David Bowie
  studied ceremonial magic and
  Kabbalah ; Led Zeppelin incorporated
  tarot cards into their album artwork ;
  Stevie Nicks sang about ancient
  Welsh fairy-brides and posed with a
  seemingly endless array of scrying
  crystals. Most people’s interest was
  merely aesthetic (and still is) but some

Likened to

witches:

Alexandria

Ocasio-Cortez

and Hillary

Clinton

Members of

WITCH putting

a hex on Wall

Street in 1968

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