Some Legendary Witches

Baba Yaga

She is a Slavic ogress who voyages across the skies with Death, her companion. Sometimes she travels in a flying cauldron, sometimes in a mortar, with a pestle as a rudder, steering through the clouds. In her wake boil tempests, hurricanes, tornadoes. She steals children, and if they are particularly unlucky, she eats them.

Her home is a hut perched atop a giant chicken claw that hops continually, causing her house to twirl in the air. The picket fence around this curious dwelling is crowned with the skulls of children.

Parents warn their unruly progeny that she will come to take them if they don’t behave. She is thus a kind of Slavic bogey-person, but it is also rumored that she controls inspiration and creativity—not unlike the White Goddess.

Morgan LeFay

The Arthurian enchantress (sister of King Arthur, mistress and pupil of Merlin, the wizard) probably has her roots in the figure of Morgan, the Celtic goddess. Christianity reduced her to a nymph or fairy (fée), and her magic became ever darker and more sinister as the Christian era progressed (or regressed, as the case may be).

In the Arthurian legends, she is a sorceress, a healer, a good fairy, and an evil enchantress. Both old and young, both bird and woman, she and her maidens bear the fallen body of Arthur away over the waves in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. But other versions of the legends show her as a mischief-making temptress, a witch, the attempted seducer of Lancelot, the revealer of Guinevere’s adultery, and a frustrated fairy-enchantress who is desperate to hold captive a mortal man.

Morgan LeFay (who is Fata Morgana in Italian, and Morgain La Fee in French) is a perfect archetype of the witch as a debased version of the Mother Goddess—the female creative principle deteriorated into evil enchantress. Baba Yaga exemplifies the same devolution—but with quite a different (and more horrific) set of images.

Robin Hood

Since Sir Walter Scott we have hardly thought of him as a witch, but the older legends make it clear that Robin Hood was a puckish fellow, a sort of king of the green-coated fairies (in the antique, not modern, sense of the word), and that he had all the fairy powers.

His arrows were elf-bolts, his merry companions were twelve in number, like a coven and its officer (making a total of thirteen). The Maiden of the coven was—of course!—Maid Marian, and all this companionable crew roamed the magic woods amongst the magic trees.

In Robin Hood and his merry men (and maid) we have a legendary witch’s coven. Antiestablishment (they rob from the rich to give to the poor), anticlerical (the woods are their church, the sky their steeple), these green-coated revelers seem remnants of an earlier race of magicians, who practiced their clever arts before the Christians came.

Besides Merlin, Robin Hood is our most important legendary male witch.

Merlin

Although Merlin is more properly a wizard than a witch, the myriad legends about him incorporate many of the mythical elements of our beliefs about witches.

Son of an incubus and a mortal mother, Merlin was half-sprite, half-human. One of his principal powers was the power to shift shapes; he could appear as a stag, a greyhound, a maiden, or a dwarf. Unlike the majority of legendary witches, Merlin put his sorcery at the disposal of his king, serving Arthur at once as magician, counselor, and entertainer. Robin Hood stood against established authority, but Merlin became the king’s guardian.

Merlin’s fall came as a result of a woman—the fairy Vivien, or the Lady of the Lake. Though she did not initially possess magic as potent as his, she had guile enough to coax him to teach his magic to her. Then she used it to imprison him.

The story goes that she and Merlin were taking a lover’s stroll through the forest of Broceliande when they came upon a flowering thorn tree. No sooner did Merlin lie down under the blossoms and put his head upon his beloved’s lap than she took advantage of his slumber to practice upon him all the enchantments he himself had taught her. She cast a magic circle around him nine times, causing an impregnable tower to rise around him. Vivien could visit him at will in his tower, but he was her prisoner. When Arthur sent Sir Gawain to the rescue, Vivien transformed the knight into an ugly dwarf.

Though there are many permutations of the Merlin legend—written by authors as diverse as Geoffrey of Monmouth, Spenser, Ariosto, and Tennyson—certain unchanging elements of the legend begin to make sense psychologically only in the light of what we now know about the figure of the witch.

First, though Merlin is the greatest magician the world has ever known, he can be brought low by the wiles of a woman. (Man is no match for woman’s witchcraft, that is: her sexuality.) Second, woman’s great desire is to imprison man—while she herself flies free. (Vivien’s imprisonment of Merlin expresses the timeless male fear of being used as a sexual plaything by a woman.) Third, women witches are capricious creatures who deceive by their unpredictability, whereas men witches often use their powers for good. (Merlin is a great sorcerer, whose code is honor and service to the king, but Vivien, the fairy-woman, can outwit him because fairies are, by nature, amoral and dishonorable.)

The myth of Merlin and Vivien also has much in common with the myth of Odysseus and Circe, but it has powerful differences, too. A lovely enchantress, who has the strength to imprison and transform men, chooses to practice her magic upon the bravest and most potent hero in her domain. This hero, who has proved invincible in all other endeavors, succumbs to the female’s bewitchments. But ironically enough, it is Odysseus, a mortal, who defeats the witch, Circe, while Merlin, with all his supernatural powers, is lost forever because he has been seduced into entrusting a woman with his magical knowledge.

What a tale of female witchery and treachery! If Merlin represents the male witch and Vivien the female, their story makes it plain that female witchery is always more potent than male. Perhaps this is because it is fueled by female sexuality—before which man (at least in myths he creates) stands helpless.