What Greek fable tells us about fashionable witchcraft

What Greek fable tells us about fashionable witchcraft

By Joel Christensen ’01, MA’01Nov. 18, 2022

 

Joel Christensen is a professor of classical research at Brandeis. This text initially appeared in The Conversation.

Residing on the North Shore in Boston within the fall brings the attractive turning of the leaves and pumpkin patches. Additionally it is a time for folks to head to close by Salem, Massachusetts, dwelling of the 17th century infamous witch trials, and go to its popular museum.

Regardless of a troubled historical past, there are folks immediately who think about themselves witches. Typically, fashionable witches share their lore, craft and stories on TikTok and different social media platforms.

As a scholar who works on myth and poetry from historical Greece – and as a local of New England – I’ve lengthy been fascinated by the cultural conversations about witches. Witch trials within the Americas and Europe had been partly about enforcing power structures and persecuting the weak. From historical Greece by Puritan New England, witches functioned as simple targets for cultural anxieties about gender, energy and mortality.

Historic witches: gender and energy

Whereas fashionable witchcraft is inclusive of many alternative genders and identities, witches in historical fable and literature had been virtually solely ladies. Their tales had been partly about navigating gender roles and energy in a patriarchal system.

Concern about ladies’s energy was an important a part of historical anxiousness about witchcraft. This worry, furthermore, relied on conventional expectations in regards to the skills innate to an individual’s gender. As early because the creation narrative in Hesiod’s “Theogony” – a poem hailing from a poetic custom between the eighth and fifth centuries B.C. – male gods like Cronus and Zeus had been depicted with bodily power, whereas female figures were endowed with intelligence. Specifically, ladies knew in regards to the mysteries of childbirth and the best way to increase kids.

Within the fundamental framework of Greek fable, then, males had been robust and girls used intelligence and methods to deal with their violence. This gendered distinction in traits mixed with historical Greek views of our bodies and ageing. Whereas ladies had been seen to maneuver by phases of life primarily based on biology – childhood, adolescence by way of menstruation, childbearing and previous age – the ageing of males was related to their relationship to ladies, significantly in getting married and having kids.

Each Greek and Latin have a single phrase for man and husband – “aner” in Greek and “vir” in Latin. Socially and ritually, males had been basically seen as adolescents till they turned husbands and fathers.

Feminine management over replica was symbolized as a form of ability to control life and death. In historical Greece, ladies had been anticipated to bear all tasks throughout early youngster rearing. Additionally they had been those to solely tackle particular roles in mourning the useless. Suspicion, anxiousness and worry about mortality had been then placed on to ladies basically.

Highly effective ladies

This was true particularly for ladies who didn’t match into typical gendered roles just like the virtuous bride, the great mom or the useful previous maid.

Whereas historical Greek doesn’t have a phrase that immediately interprets as “witch,” it does have “pharmakis” (somebody who provides out medicine or drugs), “aoidos” (singer, enchantress) and “graus” or “graia” (previous lady). Of those names, graus might be closest to later European stereotypes: the mysterious previous lady who will not be a part of a standard household construction.

Very similar to immediately, foreignness invited suspicion within the historical world as nicely. A number of of the characters who could qualify as legendary witches had been ladies from distant lands. Medea, well-known for killing her kids when her husband, Jason, proposes marrying another person in Euripides’ play, was a girl from the east, a foreigner who didn’t adhere to the expectations for a lady’s habits in Greece.

She began her narrative as a princess who used concoctions and spells to assist Jason. Her powers elevated male virility and life.

Medea allegedly discovered her magical craft from her aunt, Circe, who reveals up in Homer’s “Odyssey.” She lived alone on an island, luring males to her cabin with seductive food and drinks to show them into animals. Odysseus defeated her with an antidote offered by the god Hermes. As soon as her magic failed, Circe believed she had no selection however to undergo Odysseus.

Witches over time

Elsewhere within the “Odyssey” there are related themes: the Sirens who sing to Odysseus are enchantresses who attempt to take management of the hero. Earlier within the epic, the viewers witnesses Helen, whose departure with the Trojan prince Paris was the reason for the Trojan Battle, add an Egyptian drug called nepenthe to the wine she provides to her husband, Menelaos, and Odysseus’ son, Telemachus. This wine was so robust, it made folks overlook in regards to the ache of shedding even a cherished one.

In every of those circumstances, ladies who observe magic threaten to exert management over males with instruments that may also be a part of a pleasurable life: songs, intercourse and households. Different myths of monstrous ladies reinforce how misogynistic stereotypes animate these beliefs. The ancient figure Lamia, for instance, was a as soon as lovely lady who stole and killed infants as a result of her kids had died.

Empousa was a vampiric creature who ate up the intercourse and blood of younger males. Even Medusa, well-known because the snake-haired Gorgon who turned males to stone, was reported in some sources to have truly been a girl so lovely that Perseus reduce her head off to show it off to his friends.

These examples are from fable. There have been many residing traditions of ladies’s therapeutic and tune cultures which were misplaced over time. Many educational authors have traced the fashionable practices of witchcraft to ancient cults and the survival of pagan traditions outdoors of mainstream Christianity. Current studies of ancient magical practices present how widespread and diversified they had been.

Whereas historical ladies had been probably topic to suspicion and slander for witchcraft, there isn’t a proof that they confronted the form of widespread persecution of witches that swept Europe and the Americas a number of centuries in the past. The later twentieth century, nevertheless, noticed renewed curiosity in witchcraft, usually in live performance with movements empowering women.

Trendy witches are crossing worldwide borders and studying from one another with out leaving their properties by creating communities on social media, like TikTok. If worry about ladies’s energy led to paranoia prior to now, exploring and embracing witchcraft has develop into a part of reclaiming ladies’s histories.