Muddled Mythologies

If we can understand, then, that in dealing with witchcraft we are dealing with a variety of different phenomena from different religious traditions, that these phenomena have been overlaid with myth, with wish, with poetry, with dreaming, then it will become clear why there is so much confusion on the subject of witchcraft, and so many warring theories and theorists.

This book aims to be a poet’s and artist’s evocation of witches rather than an historical treatise about them. For the reader whose appetite is whetted, a bibliography is provided. The would-be student of witchcraft will soon find how complex the topic is and how much has been written about it—by scholars, sensationalists, poets, priests, and utter charlatans. We do not mean to make light of the seriousness of the accusation of witchcraft (which in many instances was little more than an excuse for murder), but what interests us most is how deeply the figure of the witch has penetrated our communal unconscious, how the paraphernalia of witchcraft pervades our art, our literature, our history, our myth, our humor, how the witch has come to be seen both as scapegoat and savior, a figure of fun and a figure of menace, a model for women and a cautionary antimodel: the burning lady who keeps all the other ladies from succumbing to their own inner fires.

Smoke

Smoke, it is all smoke

in the throat of eternity.…

For centuries, the air was full of witches

Whistling up chimneys

on their spiky brooms

cackling or singing more sweetly than Circe,

as they flew over rooftops

blessing & cursing their kind.

We banished & burned them

making them smoke

in the throat of god;

we declared ourselves “enlightened.”

“The dark age of horrors is past,”

said my mother to me in 1952,

seven years after our people went up in smoke,

leaving a few teeth, a pile of bones.

The smoke curls and beckons.

It is blue & lavender

& green as the undersea world.

It will take us, too.

O let us not go sheepishly

clinging to our nakedness.

But let us go like witches sucked heavenward

by the Goddess’ powerful breath

& whistling, whistling, whistling

on our beautiful brooms.