Project Gutenberg Self-Publishing - eBooks | Read eBooks online

Best Witches of All Time

The Witch-Persecutions (by Burr, George L.)
Malleus Maleficarum (by Summers, Montague)
Votes for Women. A Play in Three Acts (by Robins, Elizabeth)
A Short History of the Salem Village Wit... (by Perley, Martin Van Buren)
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (by Baum, Lyman Frank)

In the good old days of serfdom, papal supremacy, the waning black plague, unhinged superstitions, and blood-letting, there were witches. They were women—perhaps devil worshippers or maybe just misunderstood gardeners with a penchant for herb cultivation—who were hunted, persecuted, and burned at the stake by the thousands all across Europe and America up until as late as the 18th century.

Misplaced, irrational fears tied with general misunderstanding of women and cultural transformations provided the foundation for these barbaric acts. Literature like Malleus Maleficarum by Catholic clergyman Heinrich Kramer was disseminated to the public and supported by the royal courts, further greased the ignorance machine. It offered a simple, specious logic: 1) all witches were evil and 2) all witches were women; therefore, 3) all women were evil.

As time brought evolving technology, education, and ethical standards, people began to see witch hunting for what it was: horrible. Protesters in and outside of the arts played a role in popularizing and contextualizing the changing attitudes toward witches and the superstitious beliefs in general. Among some of the first in popular culture to speak out against witch hunts include Votes for Women!, a 1902 play by Robin Elizabeth; The Crucible, a 1953 play by Arthur Miller about the Salem witch trials; and L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), which characterized good witches in a story for the first time ever.

In the fertile protest ground of the American Sixties, witches would rise again. A coven of women got together to revive the old spells. They adopted the burned witches of yore and honed their mystique into three acronyms that outlined their manifesto: Witches International Troublemaker Conspiracy from Hell, Women Inspired to Tell their Collective History, Women Interested in Toppling Consumer Holidays. They also used some more specific acronyms according to their protest such as Women incensed at Telephone Company Harassment, Women Infuriated at Taking Care of Hoodlums, and Women Indentured to Traveler's Corporate Hell.

They differed from some of their radical feminist contemporaries who protested purely against patriarchy. WITCH recognized that the plight of women was tied to even larger issues of social change needed in the United States and around the world.

Today, we might call some of the attitudes women for which they were once persecuted agency, curiosity, self-sufficiency, or independence. The first women of WITCH recognized in their own magical forebears a revolutionary courage which they outlined in their manifesto:

WITCH is an all-women Everything. It's theater, revolution, magic, terror, joy, garlic flowers, spells. It's an awareness that witches and gypsies were the original guerrillas and resistance fighters against oppression–particularly the oppression of women...Witches have always been women who dared to be: groovy, courageous, aggressive, intelligent, nonconformist, explorative, curious, independent, sexually liberated, revolutionary.

By Thad Higa