What Does a Witch Look Like?

She is either exceedingly beautiful or horribly ugly; bewitching in her physical graces or terrifyingly hideous. In either case, she menaces men, for her beauty both blinds and binds, and her ugliness assaults and astounds the senses. Whether he meets an ugly witch or a beautiful one, man is victimized by female power—a condition devoutly to be unwished.

The contemporary notion that the witch is hideous and old (with a jutting chin, huge moles, and a nose shaped like a scythe) is mythically revealing, but inaccurate as far as historical records go. Accused witches were as often young and sexually attractive as they were old and ugly. In fact, it was sometimes their sexual attractiveness that led them to be denounced in times when such natural occurrences as erections and wet dreams were reputed to be caused by bewitchments.

It is impossible to separate the subject of witchcraft from the subject of sex. The great handbook for the persecution of witches, Malleus Maleficarum, or The Hammer of Witches (1486), makes this abundantly clear: “All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable … wherefore for the sake of fulfilling their lust they consort even with devils.”

The Malleus Maleficarum is particularly relevant in this context because it was this book that set the seal on hundreds of years of Christian misogyny. Written by two fifteenth-century Dominican Inquisitors, Jakob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer, the Malleus repeated and gave credence to every misogynist myth ever dreamed up by man. Women cause impotence; women are weak-willed and weak-minded; women are carnal temptresses; women are unfit to rule or have professions; midwives kill babies … A modern member of the antifeminist right could find an endless number of rabble-rousing quotes in this book. Even today, a brief perusal of the Malleus should not be undertaken by those without strong stomachs. But when we remember that this book was used for centuries as a how-to book for witch-hunters, we can only despair that the printing press has as often been a tool of oppression as of liberation.

And yet, there were men witches, too—though as archetypes they are seldom depicted, either in paintings, literature, or in our fantasies. Many men were condemned to death for being witches, widowers of witches, fathers of witches. However much we know this to be true historically, the notion of the witch as male never quite sticks. In some sense, the word “witch” is synonymous in our minds with the word “woman.”

Perhaps this is because we associate woman’s creative powers with the manipulation of vast, unseen forces. Or perhaps we intuitively understand that during the long centuries when women were the semislaves of society, they were naturally drawn to witchcraft as a cure for their powerlessness, a means of manipulating a world that otherwise painfully manipulated them. In any case, we always imagine the witch as female—and the Devil as male.

Figure of the Witch

Witch-woman,

tall, slender,

Circe at her loom

or murderous Medea,

Joan at her tree,

listening to voices

in the rustling of the leaves,

like the rustling of the flames

which ignited

her deciduous life …

Witch-woman,

burning goddess,

every woman bears

within her soul

the figure of the witch,

the face of the witch,

beautiful & hideous,

hidden as the lips

of her cunt,

open as her open eyes,

which see the fire

without screaming

as she & the tree, her mother,

are joined again,

seared,

united,

married as a forest

marries air,

only by its burning,

only by its rising

in Demeter’s flaming hands,

only by its leaping

heavenward

in a single

green

flame.

Baby-Witch

Baby witch,

my daughter,

My worship of the Goddess

alone

condemns you to the fire …

I blow upon

your least fingernail

& it flares cyclamen & rose.

I suck flames from your ears.

I touch your perfect nostrils

& they, too, flame gently

like that pale rose

called “sweetheart.”

Your eyelids are tender purple

like the base of the flame

before it blues.

O child of fire,

O tiny devotee of the Goddess—

I wished for you

to be born a daughter

though we know

that daughters

cannot but be

born for burning

like the fatal

tree.