Witches and Occultists
versus Kings and Nazis
The history of magic being used against oppressive authorities and regimes could fill a series of books, so we will only be able to skim the surface and look at some of the more notable examples. It may be useful to first ask why marginalized and dispossessed people turn to magical means to resist their oppressors.
Magic has always been inherently transgressive—socially, sexually, spiritually, and ideologically—making witches, Druids, magicians, and cunning folk the bane of, and an easy target for, political and religious authoritarians. Magic in the hands of peasants subverts the rule of church and state, and witches and shamans living on the outskirts of villages occupy the borderlands between the comforts of “civilization” and raw nature. Magic is anarchic, wild, and antistructural. It is no wonder it has always terrified those in power, and easy to see why it has so often been employed by the powerless against the dominator culture.
But whether it’s the sixteenth-century Scottish witch Isobel Gowdie cursing her landlord, enslaved Africans using Vodou and Hoodoo to fuel their uprisings in Haiti and the United States, Gerald Gardner and his coven raising a cone of power to keep the Nazis from invading England, the acid-fueled Yippies exorcising and levitating the Pentagon in the late 1960s, or feminist witches staging an occupation against a nuclear power plant, magic has always been a tool of resistance.
Let us now gaze into our scrying mirror and relive some of the more intriguing instances of resistance magic through the ages.
Witches versus Kings
968, Scotland
According to George Sinclair, a group of witches were caught reciting malefic spells while roasting a wax effigy of Scottish King Duffus on a wooden spit and basting it with poisonous liquid.3 The king had fallen ill and had been unable to sleep. When the effigy was destroyed the king recovered, and the witches, as might be expected, were burned at the stake.
1558–1602, England
Queen Elizabeth I, according to Francis Young in his superb Magic as a Political Crime in Medieval and Early Modern England, was “perhaps the most magically attacked monarch … in English history.” 4 The crafting of effigies and poppets and predicting her downfall by horoscopes were the most common accusations. Catholics were often suspect because it was widely believed that masses could be held for magical purposes.
In 1568 a worker found three wax effigies in a pile of horse dung near a stable outside of London. They were covered in magical symbols and stuck with pig bristles, and one of the figurines had Elizabeth written on its forehead and a pin stuck in its breast. The queen summoned a council, including renowned magician John Dee, to study the effigies. Dee did a form of countermagic to nullify the effigy magic.
After several people were tried, convicted, and executed for magical treason, it was discovered the effigies weren’t aimed at the queen at all, but had been created by a cunning man as part of a love spell for two unrelated people. One very lucky magician and alchemist, John Prestall, who had been awaiting execution, had his death sentence overturned.
Accusations of treasonous magic, however, continued throughout the queen’s reign.
1588, England
Sir Francis Drake, long rumored to have had dealings with the devil, was alleged to have met with a coven of witches at Devil’s Point at Plymouth Sound. Together, Drake and the witches Conjured up diabolical storms that drove away the invading Spanish Armada. Even today, when the fog rolls in, some people say you can still hear the chants of the sea witches.
Although its historicity is in doubt, the story inspired another well-known tale of witches and resistance—as you will read shortly.
1590, Scotland, Halloween Night
Francis Stewart, the fifth Earl of Bothwell and a man said to have a deep interest in the occult, allegedly met with a coven of sixty witches led by highborn women in a churchyard on the coast of the North Sea.5 Their goal was to conjure a storm to sink the ship carrying the new bride of King James VI, Anne of Denmark, to Scotland using black toad venom, an oyster shell, and a piece of the king’s clothing. Three storms drove her back before she finally succeeding in meeting her husband.
Stewart was interrogated and tried for treason and conspiracy to kill the king but was acquitted, allegedly because the townspeople were afraid of him. The king eventually led an interrogation that led to the torture and murder of a number of women for witchcraft, but Stewart fled to France and then Naples, where he was said to have continued to dabble in the occult.
King James later wrote a book about witchcraft, Daemonologie, which is believed to have served as source material for Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The book also fueled later witch hunters, such as the infamous mass murderer Matthew Hopkins, who tried and executed an estimated three hundred women for witchcraft. You probably know King James better for his other book, though—that famous translation of the Bible.
Circa 1662, Scotland
Isobel Gowdie freely confessed to becoming a witch and mistress of the devil after meeting him in the guise of a tall, hairy, cold-skinned man. As well as admitting to other malefic magic, including destroying crops and shooting people with deadly elf arrows, she is thought to have taken revenge on her landlord, the Laird Hay of Lochloy and Park, and the local witch-fearing minister, Harry Forbes.
With the aid of her coven, Gowdie made a poppet (doll) out of clay and baked it in an oven to curse the laird’s children and leave his estate heirless.6
It is considered likely, but not recorded, that she was murdered for her confessions of witchcraft.
Against the Enslavers
The horrors of the slave era, in which millions of Africans were captured by Europeans and shipped to labor on plantations in the Americas, gave rise to some of the most gripping stories of magic resistance in the modern world. African magical and religious practices powered revolutions and uprisings, even as those traditions merged with European Christianity into the hybrid traditions of Vodou in Haiti and Hoodoo, Conjure, and Rootwork in the continental United States.
The life of an enslaved African in Haiti (then known as Hispaniola) was short, with most slaves dying within a few years of their arrival. According to Mambo Chita Tann in Haitian Vodou, by 1789 there were eight to ten Africans for every free man in the French-controlled western third of the island, known as Saint-Domingue.7 Some slaves managed to escape, hiding in the mountains and leading regular attacks on the white and mixed-race landowners.
Near the end of the eighteenth century, groups of slaves began meeting to coordinate an uprising. In Bwa Kayiman (Alligator Woods), a mambo (Vodou priestess) named Mayanèt and Boukman, a Jamaican former slave and houngan (Vodou priest), held a ceremony for the spirits in which they sacrificed a pig and drank its blood. Vodou, a syncretic magical tradition that mixed indigenous Taino beliefs, African religion, traces of Muslim practices, the Catholicism of the Europeans, and even elements of Freemasonry, had become the glue holding together the enslaved revolutionaries. That powerful new spiritual awakening fired their desire for freedom.
Within days, violent revolts erupted and began to spread, with slaves killing thousands of their enslavers and burning hundreds of plantations. As the uprising spread, the French, Spanish, and British—who each owned a chunk of the country—began to panic. For the next decade, squabbles and battles between the European countries resulted in the deaths of over fifty thousand French soldiers and over a hundred thousand African slaves. In 1804, after Napoleon was forced to give up his claim to the island nation, the enslaved Africans finally won. Haiti—united by Vodou, its homegrown spiritual practice—became the first independent nation in the Caribbean.
Throughout its tumultuous and often bloody history, Haitian leaders, the Vatican, and Protestants have all tried to criminalize and eradicate Vodou. All have failed. Vodou is part of life for the majority of Haitians and has spread around the world in our globalized age, as have other syncretic African American magical traditions, such as Santería, Lukumí, Ifá, Palo Mayombe, Quimbanda, Candomblé, and so on.
In North America, too, enslaved Africans who survived the horror of the Middle Passage found themselves in an alien country, cut off from their religious customs, magical practices, and their healing plants, animals, and stones. They were also indoctrinated by their captors into adopting (at least outwardly) Christianity and its rituals. Like their Haitian counterparts, they found similarities in the traditions of Christianity and incorporated them into the spiritual and magical practices they brought from Africa. The syncretic system of folk magic that emerged, variously called Hoodoo, Conjure, and Rootwork, was a mix of African polytheism, Christianity, Judaism, European folklore, Native American folkways and plant medicine, and later even Western occultism.
Enslaved Africans found a number of ways to continue magical practices, even under the brutal restrictions imposed upon them. The spiritual centers of their communities were known as praise houses, simple structures built away from prying eyes deep in plantation woods or swamps. Many slaveholders allowed the construction of praise houses to keep slaves from different plantations from mingling for worship (and slaves were rarely allowed in churches). This unknowingly gave their captives a place to not just practice their spiritual traditions but also to organize resistance. As Jason R. Young notes in Rituals of Resistance, “Every act of conjure from one slave to another represented a critical form of resistance, and … a blow against the system.” 8
In the praise houses the enslaved Africans found a place to dance the ring shout (an ecstatic, counterclockwise circular dance), sing, clap, drum, venerate their ancestors, and invite possession by African spirits. Those who died were often buried in cemeteries near the praise houses, enabling discreet ancestor communication and veneration. In these ritual spaces, the connections to their homeland, its spirits, and its magic were deepened and honored.
Those recognized with special healing or magical knowledge and abilities, often known as conjure doctors or root doctors, were accorded great power. W. E. B. Du Bois, in The Souls of Black Folk, noted that conjure doctors were “the healer of the sick, the interpreter of the Unknown, the comforter of the sorrowing, the supernatural avenger of wrong, and the one who rudely but picturesquely expressed the longing, disappointment, and resentment of a stolen and oppressed people.” 9
These powerful magical men and women, of course, were seen as a threat to the slaveholder class. Hoodoo was a constant reminder of the enslaved people’s links to Africa, hence the practice itself was considered dangerous. Because slaveholders didn’t understand it, they feared its magic (and rightfully so, as it was frequently used against them).
And it was, in fact, dangerous; Hoodoo and conjure doctors were forces behind a number of slave rebellions and uprisings.
The story of Denmark Vesey, a freed slave and founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and enslaved rebel Gullah Jack illustrates the deep power and influence of conjure magic as a driver of resistance. Vesey was planning a massive uprising known as “the rising” and hired a renowned root doctor, Gullah Jack, to help him organize. Gullah Jack had managed to bring his conjure tools with him on the Middle Passage from Africa to South Carolina and was especially feared and respected. His amulets were highly prized and were said to make their wearers invulnerable, so they were distributed to the plotters.
Vesey planned to take over the city of Charleston, raid the armory, kill the white slaveholders, liberate thousands of slaves, and escape with his rebellious comrades to Haiti. While working undercover as a preacher, he organized secret meetings and managed to get the support of thousands of slaves and freed blacks. With such numbers, and Gullah Jack’s magic, they would be unstoppable.
Before he could begin the uprising, two men snitched, and the plot was foiled. A local militia swept through the city and surrounding plantations, and Vesey, Gullah Jack, and many of the other plotters were arrested.
At the trial, which was held in secret, Gullah Jack first played the fool. But as the trial progressed, his demeanor grew darker. He began to make magical motions and gestures with his hands, which terrified many in the courtroom.
The presiding judge, when pronouncing the sentence of death, said, “Your boasted Charms have not preserved yourself, and of course could not protect others. Your Altars and your Gods have sunk together in the dust.” 10
Gullah Jack was hanged, along with Vesey and thirty-four other men, in 1822 but is now considered an inspiring resistance hero and martyr among the people of the Gullah/Geechee nation.
Hoodoo, Conjure, and Rootwork continued to be tools for healing, justice, empowerment, and resistance among enslaved Africans and their descendants through the Jim Crow era and into the present. The practices were even taken up by many white people who recognized the power and utility of the distinctly African American tradition. Many contemporary African American activists have adopted these folk magic ways to honor the struggles of their enslaved ancestors and to reject the continuing patriarchal, sexist, and racist elements commonly found in mainstream Christian churches.
If you find yourself drawn to Hoodoo, Conjure, Rootwork, and other African American folk magic, see the resources list in the appendix.
Mrs. Satan: The Revolutionary Feminist
Who Spoke to the Dead
The explosion of Spiritualism and mediumship in the mid-nineteenth century coincided with the rise of the movement for women’s rights. In that era women were discouraged from speaking publicly, as it was considered impolite and dishonorable to their husbands. The majority of Spiritualist mediums were women, however, which gave many women a voice in society for the first time. Spirits of great historical figures were being channeled through otherwise silent Victorian women, so men listened.
One of the more compelling figures in Spiritualism was Victoria Woodhull, an exemplar of early feminism and resistance to patriarchy. As a child, she believed she could communicate with her two dead siblings and her former caretaker as well as heal people magnetically (Mesmerism was all the rage in those days). Her spiritual guide was the ancient Greek orator Demosthenes, who advised her throughout her life and told her at an early age that she would be a powerful leader of her people (and the old Greek turned out to be right on the money).
Her séances and mediumistic skills were so renowned she became president of the American Association of Spiritualists in 1871.
Woodhull so impressed the millionaire Cornelius Vanderbilt with her stock tips from the other world that he made her head of a Wall Street brokerage (the first run by women). They were also rumored to be lovers—he called her “Sparrow” and she called him “Old Goat.” When asked about how he became fantastically rich, he is reported to have said, “Do as I do. Consult the spirits.” 11
Vanderbilt helped Woodhull publish a weekly newspaper—one of the first run by women—in which she advocated for women’s suffrage, socialism, free love, vegetarianism, abolition of the death penalty, free education for every child, welfare for the poor, an eight-hour workday, labor unions, legalized prostitution, and birth control, among other radical ideas. “Free love” included the then-unheard-of notion that a woman should choose whom to marry and get divorced if she desired (and this in an era when women were supposed to be pure and sexless, and male doctors were performing clitoridectomies to rid women of the “dangers” of sexual arousal). The paper also did investigative journalism into corporate crime and published the first English translation of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto.
Woodhull ran for president in 1870 as a candidate for the politically progressive (and radical even for our era) Equal Rights party, which she helped organize, with the party nominating abolitionist Frederick Douglass as her vice-presidential candidate (Douglass, alas, was wary of Spiritualism and not on board with the idea). One only has to look at the blatant racism in response to Barack Obama’s election and the misogynistic attacks on Hillary Clinton to understand how mind-bogglingly radical the idea of a female president and a black, freed-slave vice-presidential candidate was in the late nineteenth century.
Woodhull was the second woman to address Congress, where she spoke for the suffragist cause to a nearly empty House Judiciary Committee (many of the committee members showed up late or not at all). One particularly appalled representative spoke up to say, “Madam, you are not a citizen.” Nonetheless, many newspaper reports noted the historical importance of her appearance and covered her arguments respectfully. 12
Her advocacy of free love put her at odds with other suffragette leaders, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. The press ripped her apart, with cartoonists depicting her as a literal devil and earning her the nickname “Mrs. Satan.” She was referred to—not surprisingly—as a witch. Woodhull insisted on wearing pants and was told if she appeared in public wearing them, she would be summarily arrested. The ensuing notoriety threw her life into turmoil to the point where she had difficulty finding a place to rent in New York City.
Her exposé of the adulterous affairs of the respected preacher Henry Ward Beecher (shades of recent televangelist and GOP sex scandals) generated an intense backlash that got her arrested on trumped-up obscenity charges, bankrupted her, and ruined her reputation. The patriarchy had won.
She moved to England, where she spent the rest of her life as an expat, returning to the United States to again run for president in 1892. She died in 1927, but her powerful advocacy of liberalism, freedom, and social welfare was far ahead of her time—and still rings true for spiritual resisters today. She said in her speech “The Naked Truth”:
Free love means nothing more and nothing less, in kind, than free worship, freedom of the press, freedom of conscience, free trade, free thought, freedom of locomotion (without a passport system), free schools, free government, and the hundred other precious, special systems of social freedom, which the great heroes of thought have fought for, and partially secured for the world, during this last period of the world’s growth and expansion. It is all one and the same thing, it is just freedom and nothing else. 13
Occultists versus Nazis
In the summer of 1940, with France defeated, Britain’s war with the Nazis was ramping up into what became known as the Battle of Britain. The United Kingdom was on high alert against a German invasion, with sentries posted along the coasts scanning the seas and skies for the expected onslaught of aircraft and ships. The country, having just watched the Miracle at Dunkirk, was prepared for the worst.
Also preparing for the invasion, according to the story told by one of their recent initiates, Gerald Gardner, was a group of witches known as the New Forest Coven. Gardner, who is now credited as the founder of modern Wicca, told the story of a magical working that became famously known as Operation Cone of Power.
As told in his 1954 book, Witchcraft Today, the witches of the New Forest Coven gathered on midnight on Lammas Eve 1940 to perform the ritual to cloud the minds of Hitler and the Nazi High Command and prevent them from crossing the English Channel and invading England. They danced naked (skyclad) in a forest clearing in Highcliff-by-the-Sea, raising a cone of magical energy that, when it reached its peak, was directed into the mind of Hitler along with the thoughts “You cannot cross the sea” and “Not able to come.” 14
“I am not saying they stopped Hitler,” Gardner writes. “All I can say is that I saw a very interesting ceremony performed with the intention of putting a certain idea into his mind, and this was repeated several times afterwards; and though all the invasion barges were ready, the fact was that Hitler never even tried to come.” 15 He claimed the witches were replicating the spell their ancestors had used to repel Napoleon and Sir Francis Drake.
According to Gardner, the rite was so powerful that several of the older and more frail participants died of exhaustion in the ensuing days.16 Some have suggested those who died knew the ritual would kill them, but sacrificed themselves for the good of their country.
Although the veracity of the story has been questioned by some scholars, many feel that it is at least partially true. But a year earlier, another act of magical resistance targeted the Nazis. Although less famous than Gardner’s story, it was extensively documented. That working came to be called the Magical Battle of Britain and was led by the occultist Violet Firth, better known by her magical name, Dion Fortune.
In the aftermath of Britain’s declaration of war against Germany, Dion Fortune, the leader of the occult Fraternity of the Inner Light (an order that sprang from the legendary Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn), found that many of her members could no longer travel to take part in the group’s training and rituals. She began mailing out regular dispatches to her order with instructions on how to protect the country from Hitler’s invasion and support the Allied forces. According to The Magical Battle of Britain, Fortune removed the order’s rules of secrecy and opened the fraternity to anyone who wanted to join them, teaching formerly hidden techniques to create a “nucleus of trained minds” to resist Nazi Germany. 17
Letters were sent out every Wednesday with instructions for a meditation to be performed at 12:15 each Sunday, and every weekday thereafter. Subjects of these meditations included:
• Realization of the function of the Tide of Destruction in clearing the ground
• To assert the rule of law, absolute and inescapable
• The drawing down of spiritual power into the war effort
• The attack on the cloud of astral evil over Germany
Fortune’s method of resistance was to channel the will of the British people through powerful rituals, mantras, and meditations, as well as calling upon inner guides, angelic forces, and the spirits of Merlin, King Arthur, St. George, and Saint Michael. As she wrote in one of her dispatches: “Let us meditate upon angelic Presences, red-robed and armed, patrolling the length and breadth of our land. Visualise a map of Great Britain, and picture these great Presences moving as a vast shadowy form along the coasts, and backwards and forwards from north to south and east to west, keeping watch and ward so that nothing alien can move unobserved.” 18
Fortune’s group—separated in time and space, as many are today, and connected through their own postal social network—persisted in their magical resistance even as bombs rained down on London. She continued to teach and initiate members into her fraternity and died a few months after Churchill declared victory in Europe.
Hexing Hitler
In 1941, Richard W. Tupper, a young American worker at a naval factory, sent a letter to author and occultist William Seabrook, author of Witchcraft: Its Power in the World Today, inquiring about how to hex Hitler. “Some mumbo jumbo and doll magic might help pass the longer winter evenings,” Tupper wrote. “And the movement might grow to tremendous proportions and end up successfully, if Hitler learns that thousands of people are hexing him.” 19
The delighted Seabrook sent complete instructions on how to christen a doll as Hitler, sing “vicious, repetitive, singsong doggerel” incantations, and stick it with needles, nails, and pins.20 He also suggested copious consumption of alcohol (Seabrook was a notorious alcoholic).
Seabrook explained that it didn’t matter if people took it seriously. The key was to have as many people perform the ritual, and to make Hitler aware that they were doing it.
Tupper began holding weekly hexing sessions, gathering with twenty of his friends after dinner and cursing Hitler until midnight. The girls, he said, made the best witches.
The group, which included Birdseye frozen food heiress Florence Birdseye and a number of government employees, sent an invitation for Seabrook to join them at a Maryland cabin. Seabrook was never one to turn down a good party, so on a wet January evening he joined the group at a cabin in the woods to perform the curse. A LIFE magazine reporter and photographer came along to document the evening and to make sure Hitler found out about it.
Inside the cabin the scene was surreal. A dressmaker’s dummy was clothed in a Nazi uniform, its face painted with a Hitler mustache. Nearby were log seats (a nod to Haitian customs), boxes of nails, axes, rattles, and many bottles of Jamaican rum. Tom-tom drums had been borrowed from the Department of the Interior. Several of the participants dressed up in robes as the rum was passed around for an hour before the ritual began.
Finally, the dressing dummy was baptized. “You are Hitler; Hitler is you!” the group chanted. Then “Chief Hexer” Ted Caldwell, dressed in an animal-skin, intoned the ritual Seabrook had written: “The woes that come to you, let them come to him. The death that comes to you, let it come to him!” 21
The other participants then took turns hammering spikes into Hitler’s heart. The Chief Hexer then led the group in a call-and-response chant: “Hitler, you are the enemy of man and the world .… We curse you by every tear and drop of blood you have caused to flow. We curse you with the curses of all who have cursed you.” The crowd responded: “We curse you!” 22
At the ritual’s climax, the Great Death Ouanga (Haitian Creole word for a charm), the participants invoked the dark god Istan, asking him to send cats to claw out Hitler’s heart and dogs to eat it. With each repetition of the curse, they drove more nails and needles into Hitler.
Finally, Hitler was decapitated by Tupper (his honor as the party organizer) and buried by the drunk, exhausted hexers in the woods. LIFE captured the entire party and published photos and a cheeky account on February 10, 1941. Seabrook had asked the reporter to publish the detailed ritual description and photos so that readers could hold their own Hitler hexing parties at home. They didn’t need a life-sized dummy, he explained. Any small, inexpensive doll would work.
The United States joined the war less than a year later, and Hitler wasn’t dead until 1945. The Hex Hitler party was largely forgotten. I didn’t even know about it when I created the Trump binding spell in 2017, and I was shocked at the parallels when I discovered it in my research.
William Seabrook committed suicide in 1945 (as did Hitler), but I have to think somewhere he is enjoying the rise of resistance magic over seventy-five years after his unforgettable party in the Maryland woods.
Levitating the Pentagon:
Radical Magic in the Sixties and Seventies
As has been extensively chronicled, the 1960s was a decade fueled by the struggle for civil rights, the rise of feminism, revolutionary politics, radical social movements, environmentalism, youthful rebellion, and rejection of the middle-class American Dream. It was a heady time of expanded consciousness, with a counterculture dropping acid, demonstrating in the streets against the Vietnam War, blissing out to Eastern yogis, promoting free love, and embracing everything esoteric, magical, and occult. As the popular song from the musical Hair declared, it was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, and with it came a renewed interest in the mystical and spiritual dimensions of political action.
On October 21, 1967, as the legendary Summer of Love was fading into fall, a hundred thousand protesters—the largest peace demonstration of its time—descended upon Washington, DC, for a march against the Vietnam War. There was the usual rally with speakers and musicians at the Lincoln Memorial, but Jerry Rubin, one of the protest’s organizers, had pushed for more direct action: shutting down the Pentagon.
Rubin and another soon-to-be Yippie leader, Abbie Hoffman, had wanted to do something different, something that would shake up what was becoming the normal routine of marching and protesting. So after the rally ended, they, along with poet Allen Ginsberg, pediatrician Dr. Spock, the rock group the Fugs, and thirty-five thousand of the more radical protesters marched across the Arlington Memorial Bridge for a planned rendezvous at ground zero of the military-industrial complex: the Pentagon.
Their goal? To ritually exorcise the Pentagon by levitating the building three hundred feet in the air.
Hoffman had visited the Pentagon the month earlier with artist Martin Carey to determine how many people it would take to surround the massive building (twelve hundred, by their estimate). They were carrying pamphlets, which got them arrested for littering. When they were brought before a general services administrator, Hoffman requested a permit to levitate the Pentagon three hundred feet. He explained how they planned to chant the exorcism in Aramaic, after which the building would rise, turn orange, and vibrate until all evil energies were dissipated. The war would end.
After some discussion, the permit was granted—but only allowing the building to be raised ten feet. Hoffman relented, and the charges against the two were dropped.
After the protesters crossed the bridge they were met in the Pentagon parking lot by twenty-five hundred federal troops, many with guns at the ready, while riflemen stood along the roof and helicopters buzzed overhead. A few hippies placed flowers into the guards’ rifle barrels. Others attempted multiple times to breach the armed barrier and were beaten with rifle butts, arrested, and dispersed with tear gas. Rubin, Hoffman, and crew had brought along the hippie version of tear gas, a hallucinogenic purple liquid they called lysergic acid crypto ethylene (LACE), allegedly brewed by legendary acid chemist Augustus Owsley Stanley III. Whoever it contacted, Hoffman claimed, would take off their clothes, begin kissing those around them, and make love. (It was actually harmless disappearing ink from Taiwan.)
If the levitation failed, Hoffman said, “We will dye the Potomac red, burn the cherry trees, panhandle embassies, attack with water pistols, marbles, bubble gum wrappers, bazookas, girls will run naked and piss on the Pentagon walls, sorcerers, swamis, witches, voodoo, warlocks, medicine men and speed freaks will hurl their magic at the faded brown walls .… We will dance and sing and chant the mighty OM. We will fuck on the grass and beat ourselves against the doors. Everyone will scream ‘VOTE FOR ME.’ We shall raise the flag of nothingness over the Pentagon and a mighty cheer of liberation will echo through the land.” 23
As they gathered at the Pentagon, Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, and the Fugs, along with several hundred participants, began to chant and sing. Fugs member Ed Sanders had written the “exorgasm” ritual: “In the name of Zeus, in the name of Anubis … in the name of the lives of the dead soldiers in Vietnam … in the name of Sea-borne Aphrodite … in the name of Dionysus, Zagreus, Jesus, Iao Sabaoth, Yahweh the Unnamable … we call upon the Spirits to Raise the Pentagon from its Destiny and Preserve it. In the naaaaame—in all the names! Out, Demons, out!” 24
Unfortunately no one—at least no one who wasn’t tripping on 250 micrograms of LSD—saw the Pentagon rise. But the crazed surreality of the ritual was a direct response to the surreal horrors of the disastrous war in Vietnam. It became legendary and led to the formation of the prankish, guerrilla theater activist group known as the Youth International Party, or Yippies. Their later stunt—throwing handfuls of fake one-dollar bills onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange—also earned them a place in the history of creative protest.
As Jerry Rubin wrote in the Berkeley Barb: “The worst thing you can say about a demonstration is that it is boring, and one of the reasons that the peace movement has not grown into a mass movement is that the peace movement—its literature and its events—is a bore. Good theatre is needed to communicate revolutionary content.” 25
Keep his words in mind, magical activists, because they are as true now as they were then.
WITCH: Women’s International
Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell
A group of radical feminists took inspiration from the creative, shocking political theater of the Yippies. When New York Radical Women split over tactical disagreements, several of the members formed WITCH, or Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell. Their inaugural action took place on Halloween, 1968, when the members, dressed in stereotypical witch garb, marched to Wall Street to hex the financial district.
The Dow Jones average dropped sharply the next day—for which the witches were more than happy to take credit.
One of their leaflets stated, “If you are a woman and dare to look within yourself, you are a Witch. You make your own rules. You are free and beautiful. You can be invisible or evident in how you choose to make your witch-self known. You can form your own Coven of sister Witches (thirteen is a cozy number for a group) and do your own actions .… You are a Witch by saying aloud, ‘I am a Witch’ three times, and thinking about that. You are a Witch by being female, untamed, angry, joyous, and immortal.” 26
Another memorable action (or zap, as they were called) took place in February 1969 at a bridal fair at Madison Square Garden (with a sister action in San Francisco). The witches of WITCH, this time wearing black bridal veils, infiltrated the event, chanting “Here come the slaves, off to their graves.” They then let loose white mice in an attempt to cause chaos.They changed their name to match each action: Women Interested in Toppling Consumer Holidays (Mother’s Day), Women Incensed at Telephone Company Harassment (at Bell Telephone Company), Women’s Independent Taxpayers, Consumers and Homemakers, and several others. Covens sprang up in cities across the United States but largely disappeared after 1970.
In 2015 covens began to crop up again, and with the election of Donald Trump in 2016, WITCH activists, in their black cloaks and pointy hats, became an increasingly common sight at protests. A new anonymous WITCH PDX, established in 2016 in Portland, Oregon, is more broadly inclusive, embracing antiracism, antifascism, antipatriarchy, indigenous rights, gender self-determination, women’s liberation, trans liberation, anti–rape culture, reproductive rights, sex worker support, LGBTQ+ rights, environmental protection, religious freedom, immigrant rights, antiwar, anticapitalism, disability justice, privacy rights, and worker’s rights.
Despite criticism of their tactics from some feminists, and the fact that the members used witch tropes humorously, the group is considered to be a progenitor of feminist witchcraft—which we will examine below
But before we do, one other anecdote:
On Lammas Day 1971, thirty-one years after Gerald Gardner and the New Forest coven cast their spell against the Nazis, several Californian covens gathered to raise a cone of power to end the Vietnam War.
Which just goes to show: witches keep doing what witches gotta do.
Modern Feminist Witch Activists
The feminist collective WITCH (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell), in its initial form in the late 1960s, was not explicitly religious or spiritual, but it played on pop culture tropes of the wicked witch, complete with pointy black hat. It did, however, create a culturally resonant and influential connection between feminism and the rapidly growing practice of Pagan witchcraft. As British Wicca began spreading in the United States in the 1960s and ’70s, it dovetailed with the countercultural revolution and gave birth to a uniquely American form of witchcraft: the cult of the Great Goddess.
And the idea that witchcraft was inherently a feminist tradition, and the survival of a matriarchal folk religion extending into antiquity, was increasingly part of the zeitgeist.
A number of books contributed to this: Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) found a new, receptive readership, as did Robert Graves’s The White Goddess, which was rereleased in an expanded version in 1961. Feminists Mary Daly, Andrea Dworkin, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Deirdre English all began to use the figure of the historical witch as an emblem of resistance to patriarchy. Merlin Stone’s 1976 book, When God Was a Woman, used archaeological data to explore the existence of prehistoric goddess worship and ancient nature-worshiping matriarchal cultures that she believed existed before the patriarchal Abrahamic faiths destroyed them.
Feminists began embracing the (inaccurate) idea that nine million women had been murdered in the European witch hunts (the number is now believed by most scholars to be around forty thousand). According to many, the “Burning Times” was a holocaust that wiped out the remaining traces of the once-dominant matriarchal witch cult.
It was only natural that many feminists would begin to advocate for a return to the lost religion of the Great Goddess and her priestess cult of herbalists, healers, and midwives. And the burgeoning Pagan community in the United States was there to accept them.
Zsuzsanna (Z.) Budapest, a Hungarian refugee and daughter of a hereditary witch, started a women’s-only coven dubbed the Susan B. Anthony Coven #1 in California in 1971. Budapest came to call her brand of Wicca Dianic, and it was solely focused on goddesses and feminine concepts of deity—all male gods and male concepts from British Wicca were stripped from it. She initiated hundreds of women in the following decade, and the chant she wrote, “We All Come from the Goddess,” has become a classic in Pagan circles.
In 1979 Margot Adler’s Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today was published. Adler was a popular reporter on National Public Radio and a Wiccan. Her book examined the rising numbers of Neopagans and Pagan religious and spiritual practices in the United States, and received praise and glowing reviews from mainstream critics and academics alike. Its impact on the spread of Paganism was enormous.
Also in 1979, a largely unknown feminist writer, Miriam Simos, who took on the pen name Starhawk, published a best-selling book, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Religion of the Great Goddess, and a new form of feminist witchcraft exploded into the public consciousness. The book, and her several successors, linked Goddess spirituality not just with feminism but also with direct political action and a strong emphasis on social, political, antimilitarist, and environmental activism. Starhawk was a regular presence at direct actions, including the blockade of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, and says she stopped counting her arrests after two dozen.
To celebrate the book’s publication, Starhawk organized a Halloween ritual known as the Spiral Dance in San Francisco. Musicians, artists, and dancers collaborated to create poetry and music for the ritual liturgy, and each year it grew larger and more popular. In 1999, the twentieth anniversary of the ritual and the book’s publication, fifteen hundred people took part. The enormous success of the book, fueled by its practical and extraordinarily poetic rituals, also led to the establishment of hundreds of covens in the United States and Europe.
From this ritual dance emerged the Reclaiming Collective, which now boasts several dozen regional communities in the United States, Europe, and Australia. According to the organization’s website, “Reclaiming is a community of people working to unify spirit and politics. Our vision is rooted in the religion and magic of the Goddess, the Immanent Life Force. We see our work as teaching and making magic: the art of empowering ourselves and each other. In our classes, workshops, and public rituals, we train our voices, bodies, energy, intuition, and minds. We use the skills we learn to deepen our strength, both as individuals and as community, to voice our concerns about the world in which we live, and bring to birth a vision of a new culture.” 27
In 1982 Starhawk published Dreaming in the Dark, which was more explicitly political. She described magic as “the art of evoking power-from-within and using it to transform ourselves, our community, our culture, using it to resist the destruction that those who wield power-over are bringing upon the world.” 28
As the political winds shifted to the right in the 1980s with the election of Ronald Reagan and the rise of the religious right, Starhawk further expanded her activism to include other marginalized groups: African Americans, indigenous peoples, and the LGBTQ+ community. And her deepening commitment to environmentalism led to her embracing and promoting permaculture, a system of sustainable environmental and cultural design.
Another prominent Wiccan author and activist is Selena Fox, a trained counselor and psychotherapist. She helped organize the first Earth Day in 1970 and began leading public Pagan rituals in 1971 before becoming an educator, lecturer, and activist. She founded Circle Sanctuary in Wisconsin in 1983 on a two-hundred-acre nature preserve. As executive director of the Lady Liberty League, a global Pagan civil rights network, she has been a leader in advocacy for Pagan religious freedom, and was instrumental in getting approval of the pentagram as a religious symbol on US military grave markers and memorials in 2007.
Before Z. Budapest, Starhawk, Selena Fox, and other feminists embraced and remade it, witchcraft was largely a private, insular religion. Its magic was confined to small groups, and the politics of its practitioners as often skewed right as left. Now, thanks to these pioneering women and those who followed them, witchcraft and Paganism have been transformed into a progressive social force; even more progressive than they were, in some cases, embracing a more intersectional feminism than the one they knew. Indeed, few other religions or spiritual traditions (with the possible exception of Quakers or Unitarians) can claim to be as broadly inclusive, egalitarian, pluralistic, and politically engaged as modern feminist witchcraft.
3. George Sinclair, Satan’s Invisible World Discovered (Edinburgh: Thomas George Stevenson, 1871), 100–102; Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, A Historical Account of the Belief in Witchcraft in Scotland (London: Hamilton, Adams & Co., 1884), 21.
4. Francis Young, Magic as a Political Crime in Medieval and Early Modern England: A History of Sorcery and Treason (London: I. B. Tauris, 2017), 87.
5. Linda Root, “The Devil’s Halloween in the Kirkyard of North Berwick and Francis Stewart, Earl of Bothwell,” English Historical Fiction Authors (blog), October 30, 2013, https://englishhistoryauthors.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-devils-halloween-in-kirkyard-of.html.
6. Emma Wilby, The Visions of Isobel Gowdie: Magic, Witchcraft and Dark Shamanism in Seventeenth-Century Scotland (Eastbourne, East Sussex, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2010).
7. Mambo Chita Tann, Haitian Vodou: An Introduction to Haiti’s Indigenous Spiritual Tradition (Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 201), 21.
8. Jason R. Young, Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007), 130.
9. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Company, 1903), 196.
10. Joseph Cephas Carroll, Slave Insurrections in the United States, 1800-1865 (Boston, MA: Chapman & Grimes, 1938; repr., Mineola, NY: Dover, 2004), 92. Citation refers to the Dover edition.
11. Barbara Goldsmith, Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998; repr., New York: HarperPerennial, 1999), 162. Citations refer to the HarperPerennial edition.
12. Goldsmith, Other Powers, 162; Kate Havelin, Victoria Woodhull: Fearless Feminist (Minneapolis, MN: Twenty-First Century Books, 2007), 43.
13. Mary L. Shearer, “Who Is Victoria Woodhull?” Victoria Woodhull & Company, 2016, http://www.victoria-woodhull.com/whoisvw.htm.
14. Gerald B. Gardner, Witchcraft Today, with additional material by Judy Harrow, Ronald Hutton, Wren Walker, and Tara Nelson (New York: Citadel Press, 2004), 104.
15. Gardner, Witchcraft Today, 104.
16. Jack L. Bracelin, Gerald Gardner: Witch (Pentacle Enterprises, 1999), 52.
17. Dion Fortune, The Magical Battle of Britain, ed. Gareth Knight (Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, UK: Skylight Press, 2012; repr. Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire, UK: Golden Gates Press, 1993), 15.
18. Fortune, The Magical Battle of Britain, 34.
19. Charles Cooke and Russell Maloney, “Hexing Hitler,” Talk of the Town, New Yorker, January 18, 1941, 17.
20. Cooke and Maloney, “Hexing Hitler,” 17.
21. “LIFE Goes to a Hex Party: Amateur Sorcerers in Washington Try Black Magic against Hitler,” LIFE, February 10, 1941, 86.
22. “LIFE Goes to a Hex Party,” 87.
23. Abbie Hoffman, Revolution for the Hell of It: The Book That Earned Abbie Hoffman a Five-Year Prison Term at the Chicago Conspiracy Trial (New York: Dial Press, 1968; repr., New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 2005), 39.
24. Ed Sanders, Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side (Boston, MA: De Capo Press, 2011), 281.
25. David Armstrong, A Trumpet to Arms: Alternative Media in America (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1981), 120–21.
26. Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 208.
27. Reclaiming.org home page, last modified March 13, 2015, http://www.reclaiming.org.
28. Starhawk, Dreaming in the Dark: Magic, Sex & Politics (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1982), xi.