Germaine Greer: 21st century 'witches' offer a warning to us all
Wise women and witches have held us in thrall through history. This Hallowe’en, Germaine Greer explores their modern incarnation - and explains why their message spells chilling news for us all.
'Eco-feminism is probably the modern
equivalent of witchcraft in its openness to the idea of a confederacy
between humans and other animals'
In all the human societies ever studied there is to be found the figure of the
witch. What is most interesting about this is not that the human race should
have disliked and feared bad-tempered old women since the beginning of time,
but that the old women themselves should have adopted the role of witches,
and even confessed to being witches when the penalty was certain death.
Death by bludgeon, by stoning, by drowning or by being burnt alive. The
people who thought witches had occult powers were deluded; the witches who
thought they had occult powers were equally deluded. Witches do not exist;
so why have we found it necessary to invent them?
Why would the Aboriginal people of Numinbah Valley have told their children to
stay away from the scarps of the Lamington Plateau because up there lived an
old witch called Koonimbagowgunn who liked to roll huge rocks down on people
below? The clue is in her name, which means widow. When seeking a
supernatural agency to blame for unpredictable catastrophe, people hit upon
the most troubling figure in their community, the woman who outlived her
husband. In hunter-gatherer society there were probably never many such
women. One version of the Hindu goddess Kali shows her as an old woman with
black wrinkled skin and withered dugs, dancing on the beautiful body of her
immortal husband, Shiva. The Indonesian Rangda has “tangled black hair, long
fingernails, pendulous breasts”, and a “flowing tongue between terrible
fangs”. The old woman gradually turns into a ravening animal preying on the
young and vulnerable. In many societies she is suspected of digging up the
bodies of her victims and eating them.
The enchantress in Rapunzel (ALAMY)
In most pre-industrial societies, the woman who outlived her husband was in
trouble, especially if she had no surviving children. Even when she did, she
often had no claim upon those children, who may have inherited everything
her husband had to leave. Until relatively recently, a British widow could
be turned out of her home by her husband’s heirs, and left to find a living
the best way she could. One way she could survive was by setting herself up
as a wise woman, working on the credulity of her neighbours who would pay
her for spells and potions. She might charm away your warts, or tell you how
to see in a mirror the face of the man you were to marry or show you how to
make a man impotent by blowing on a knotted string. Some of her remedies
were effective; she might be able to tell you how to ease the pains of
teething or what herbs to decoct to drive worms out of young animals. She
might even give you potions of her own making. If they worked, good; if they
didn’t, and the patients died, the “witch” was in immediate danger.
The wise woman lived on a knife-edge. If the cry went up that she was
responsible for miscarriages and infertility, whether in women or cattle,
her neighbours were likely to lay violent hands upon her. The limits on her
power were obvious, but she did have power. People did seek her out, did beg
her for help and did cross her palm with silver. From being a mere wife and
mother she had become a self-governing visionary, straddling the world of
the flesh and the world of the spirit, interpreting fate, determining luck,
making things happen. Her chief instrument was imagination, her own and
other people’s. It would be imagination too that was her undoing.
A woman being 'dunked’ (ALAMY)
A woman who has lived all her life for other people, only to find herself cast off and left to fend for herself despite the infirmities of age, is bound to harbour malice. The wise woman did wish ill to others and curse them in her heart, and so she felt guilty. She did utter threats and dire predictions, which was fine as long as the disasters she predicted didn’t come to pass. If they did, her guilt intensified and, poor soul, she declared it.
The first enactments of the Christian church were not against witchcraft, but against the persecution of witches. The attribution of occult powers to anyone but God or the devil was a superstition which the church fathers were determined to eradicate. Belief in witches is rather older than monotheistic religion; despite the churchmen’s best efforts, witches continued to declare themselves – and to invite brutal retribution.
Witches, being for the most part solitary, lived with companion animals, most often cats. As late as the 19th century the sight of an old woman collecting food from the hedgerows with her cat wreathing itself around her tattered skirts was enough to send children home howling. And yet there was a whole race of saints who understood the language of birds and beasts. St Bee was fed by seabirds. St Gertrude let mice dance upon her spindle. The lions sent to kill St Thecla in the amphitheatre sat down and licked her feet. St Martha tamed a dragon and led him about on a leash made of her girdle. When a hare fleeing from the hounds of the seventh-century Prince of Powys hid under the cloak of Melangell, the prince gave her the valley for a nunnery.
The muddling together of female saints with witches comes to its apogee in the ongoing tradition of St Wealdburg, the ninth-century English missionary, the eve of whose canonisation day, May 1, is still celebrated as Walpurgisnacht, the witches’ sabbath, all over northern Europe. How an elderly veiled abbess morphed into a naked woman on a broomstick is a story worth telling; an intrinsic part of it is Wealdburg’s unnatural ability to read and write Latin. Female literacy was as frightening for the church in preliterate Europe as it is for the Taliban today. One strand in the iconography of witchcraft depicts them as bare-breasted women with pens in their left hands, surrounded by every species of nocturnal animal.
Closeness between women and other creatures has always disturbed their masters. The association is in part traditional and unavoidable, because, while men hunted and killed animals, women reared them. They treated their animals for ailments, doing their best to keep them alive and healthy. So sharp was the contrast between the attitudes of men and women towards these lesser orders of creation that women left it to men to kill the animals they reared. It was only to be expected, then, that women would reject the sociobiological explanation of evolution, and begin to investigate altruism as equal in importance to the selfishness of the gene. Eco-feminism is probably the modern equivalent of witchcraft in its openness to the idea of a confederacy between humans and other animals. This notion has been adopted in various mystical forms by the group of religions now called Wicca, but it has solid scientific grounds as well.
Patricia Crowther, an early promoter of Wicca (CHANNEL 4)
Second-wave feminists are to be found wherever animal rights are being defended. Feminists struggle to keep beached whales and dolphins alive and shepherd them back to deep water, throw themselves under the wheels of lorries taking weanling calves to slaughter in mainland Europe, blockade ships transporting Australian sheep to be butchered in the Middle East. The women who turned up at the US army base at Greenham Common on September 5 1981 called themselves “Women for Life on Earth”. They would be there for 19 years.
At the beginning of this year, the great physicist Stephen Hawking told the world that the Earth has only 1,000 years left – within a millennium, he said, global warming or nuclear holocaust will have made Earth uninhabitable and if humans are to survive, they must colonise space. You don’t have to believe in Gaia or that the Earth is female or that all life forms are holy to be struck by his dreadful insouciance. You don’t have to resort to mysticism – biology is enough to give you a clue that this callousness, this indifference to biodiversity is appalling.
Our understanding of Earth is patchy and prejudiced. We don’t know how herrings school or how birds fly in vast synchronised flocks. We no sooner figured out competition than we used it to explain everything, and then we turned out to be wrong. We don’t even understand sheep and we have lived with them and off them for thousands of years. The inter-relationships of the billions of life forms on this planet are crucial to our survival, and yet every month brings as many extinctions as would have taken a millennium before industrialisation.
We are only at the beginning of understanding the interconnectedness of everything on planet Earth. We know now that most plants depend on associated soil fungi for access to nutrients; trees will not thrive without the complex web of organisms that developed with them, of which possibly the most important are the mycorrhizae. Fell the forest, expose the soil to sun and rain and frost, and the mycorrhizae will disappear. You can’t then decide to restore the forest, because the trees are not even half the story. Without the planetary patina, the interacting, co-operating masses of DNA in so many different forms, we cannot really colonise another planet. We wouldn’t be able to make soil or grow anything. We would need the galaxy of organisms that are the growing medium of most vegetation. We would need moulds and microbes. A planet is not populated from the top down but from the bottom up, from the planetary patina to “the diapason closing full in man”, as John Dryden wrote in his A Song for St Cecilia’s Day.
Hallowe’en is the time when we celebrate the netherworld, by which is usually meant the world of the dead, the underworld. We like to frighten ourselves and each other by inventing spooky stuff – zombies, ghosts: all unconvincing, which is partly why we do it.
By being pretend-frightened of fictions, we can shrug off real threats. It might be fun to pretend to be frightened by plastic creepy-crawlies; but we should be frightened for real creepy-crawlies.
When the sharks are disappearing from the seas and the ice caps are melting, it is time to be frightened. When today’s witches try to scare you, they mean it. Be afraid. Be very afraid.