MAXIMUM HAG FACTOR!!!

(COLLECTING THE REST OF THE BEST ON WITCHES, MAGIC, AND THE MONSTROUS FEMININE)

nb: some new stuff here, some previously posted material, formerly accessible to paid subscribers only, and some excerpts from published material. let's do this thing!

1. SHOVE YR HEALING CRYSTALS UP YR ARSE:

sorry, rude. you seem nice, and yes, i'm sure your crystals are lovely. but i did want to begin today's “thing” by clarifying what i think witchcraft and magic are and what they are not. specifically, it feels really important to stress that practitioners had/ have a belief in magic. their/ our persecutors and colonisers had/ have a belief (or a pretence to a belief) in witchcraft. i'll unpack this very slightly: magic (like fire) is, amongst other things, a process. better, it is a system of processes geared towards manipulating energy and elements to achieve a desired effect. it is, therefore, natural, accessible and abundant; it is non-hierarchical and open to everyone. magic is of and for the folk, the commons, without and beyond ownership. we don't all have the same natural aptitude for making fire (i recently tested this – turns out i have the manual dexterity of a handcuffed crab), but the ability – the potential – to make fire is freely available to me. witchcraft is different: it it privatised, concentrated within the individual – the “witch” – as a special category person. it implies a hierarchy, an expert knowledge, a setting apart. this subtle wee distinction, i'm going to argue, is our scenic gateway to a whole world of pain.

i'll deal with the obvious agonies first: magic is like antifa (no really), in that it is a decentralised affiliation of loosely networked methodologies. magic is like the symbionese liberation army: “a body of dissimilar bodies”, various, cooperative, hybrid. being so, magic is hard to identify, prohibit, and police. witchcraft is embodied in the person of the witch: an identifiable example and enemy; a symbolic and eminently prosecutable scapegoat. the figure of the witch thus becomes a receptacle for all the effects and embodiments; all the ideas (orthodoxies) and practices (orthopraxies) that oppose and revolt the dominant power. by over-identifying a tradition of thought and practice with the bodies of selected believers, our persecutors can create the (racialised and gendered) body as a locus of obsessive rhetoric and propaganda; can recruit the bodies of believers into their arsenal, in fact, by subjecting them to fevered scrutiny. renaissance demonologists and judges examined the body parts of those accused of witchcraft as a means of ascertaining guilt. any blemish or irregularity substantiated claims of sorcery. the fall-out from this persecutory strategy is untold: it made (mostly) women, and old, black, poor, disabled or disfigured women in particular, carriers of a collective shame surrounding the body. it allowed society to create as abject and to accordingly cast out obtruding or disruptive bodies; to institute and further the vicious imaginative binary between body and spirit that haunts us to this day.

yay, the renaissance! [insert capacious eye-roll here]. and believe me, we're going to cycle back to this hot, misogynist nonsense shortly, but first i want to address some slightly more subtle forms of violence that accrete around the notion of witchcraft and the vexed figure of the witch:

because the idea of witchcraft is embodied to such an uncanny extent, it is relatively easy to distil and to trope; to reduce a complex set of practices to a thumbnail sketch, the better to (mis)represent believers as unusually barbaric or credulous; occasions for ridicule and moral disapprobation. such wilful misreadings offer abundant opportunities to vilify and mock believers and to withhold safety, rights and liberties to them on that basis. as my homie angela bourke points out in the burning of bridget cleary (1994), english (and loyalist) presses reported the murder by immolation of bridget cleary by her husband michael in 1895 as a superstitious outrage fostered by a “savage” belief in “witchcraft”. such a construction of rural ireland was a key rhetotical and representational strategy – in the papers and in the house of commons – in the denial of ireland's right to a measure of political self-determination through home rule. yes, fuck you very much. we did and do not, to be clear, believe in “witchcraft”, the vernacular tradition implicated in the burning of bridget cleary, and which still survives in a much attenuated and customary form today, can be more properly identified as fairy belief – more of which anon.

i also want to briefly think about what happened to magic during the antiquarian revival of the 1800s (where magical beliefs were collected, mediated, and repurposed as charming curiosities and/ or totems of national culture – homeland, my homeland, i'm looking at you – by outside educated elites such as, i dunno, say, yeats or lady gregory) and the explosion of wicca in england during the 1900s where different forms of folk magic from cultures devastated by imperialism were appropriated and borrowed from; absorbed into and homogenised by (predominantly middle-class) “witches” to suit their own understanding and conception of these complex sets of practices. as a for instance, can i offer you some (self-aggrandising apex posh twit) gerald gardener and his (almost certainly made up) new forest coven? also, the infinitely more lovely, but still largely mistaken, margaret murray and her then wildly popular witch-cult hypothesis? okay, then: in essence murray argued – in her books witch-cult in western europe (1921) and then in the god of witches (1931) that the witches persecuted in european history were in fact followers of 'a definite [pagan] religion with beliefs, rituals, and organization as highly developed as that of any cult in the end'. murray believed that said cult revolved around the worship of a horned god of fertility, whom christian persecutors identified with the devil. riffing off murray, gardener minted his new forest coven bullshit in 1939 when he claims to have been initiated into a survival of this cult. why, you might reasonably be wondering, does this high silliness get me so hot under the collar? i'll tell you:

i actually really love margaret murray, who (to my mind anyway) was in error in this one thing, but in good faith. her theory attempted a kind of fantastic imaginative restitution, creating an alternative woman-centred story for western religion and spiritual practice. the problem, though, is that it simply isn't true, and to hold it as such diminishes the vast weight and granular particularity of historical violence. witch persecution wasn't the fraught and dynamic battle between two incommensurable value systems. it was a long slow process of top-down attrition; the steady grinding of racist, classist, vilely misogynistic logics against the lives and abjected bodies of the commons. religion was the legitimating instrument of this torture, it wasn't the cause. and boy, do i ever have mad beef with upper and middle-class mediators attempting to consolidate and claim our rich and various panoply of folk beliefs for their own. this, in essence, is what gardener did. that's the logical end of murray's theory: a species of cultural theft the better to secure his (and his small coterie of practitoners') exceptionality. witch as specialist, as “special”, as initiate into carefully guarded mysteries. magic as elitist body of knowledge. fuck that.

although apparently not. this image of the witch, of the coven (privatised, ego-invested, powerful), is that which survives into popular culture. and it's kind of having a moment right now. in poetry too. which makes me a bit queasy. i've tried to write a bit about this, thinking about class with and against different “witch” variations. here are a few excerpts from white/ other (2022):

[…]

[…]

you're very welcome! now let me finish telling you why you can feck off with your crystals: because as well as being a process, magic is a tradition of thought and resistance. a way to map meaning onto reality; an idiomatic and imaginative universe that runs counter to the aims of suppression and power, that encodes and transmits knowledge vital to our safety; how we – the variously marginal – negotiate the world. magic is a mnemonic of community (duh). and if i say that magic is a metaphor (and vice versa), that's not to make any kind of claim against its seriousness or efficacy. it is to say that we reach and resort to both when we need something unavailable in and to the literal world. it can be a form of language or gesture that allows us to imagine an otherwise, a form of projection beyond our present conditions. what's a metaphor really but a mini spell? in which conjunctions and collisions of unlike things – new images and phrases – are needed to create new thoughts, revitalising language and (potentially at least) creating hitherto unimagined forms of social relation. metaphor and magic go to the creation of a future we can strategise from, and eventually inhabit.

this, i think, is a useful alternative way to think about magic and ritual; about the various beliefs and practices that get lumped together under the heading of “superstition”. again, angela bourke is really sharp on this, and you'll have to forgive me if i quote a big chewy chunk of her, also from the burning of bridget cleary:

“superstition” is a problematic word: beliefs and practices can appear bizarrely irrational when the system of which they were once part has begun to disintegrate. fairy tradition, in this respect, has something in common with money, for both are systems through which a variety of transactions can be negotiated, but only for as long as people believe in the system – literally, give it credit – or at least assent to its use. calling something “superstition” means declaring the currency to which it belongs worthless. used among equals, the word expresses tolerance for illogical foibles; given a racist or sectarian edge, however, it can mark an unwillingness to consider those to whom it is applied as fully human.

so yeah, something to note here: both money and magic (also language) are abstract values in a sensible medium. figments: the power any of these things have is the power we apply to them, and the power we assent to. meaning that magic isn't some special category of thing; that it's not a more or less intelligent (or backward) way of relating to and negotiating the world than any of these other systems. meaning also, that anyone who sneers at a belief in magic while claiming that “market forces” have any rational basis in observable reality is a snooty eejit. just saying.

but that's somewhat beside the point. at least it is tangential to the point. i'm talking about magic as a guerrilla recourse for those without power in moments of extremis. in which context, even a “curse” can be a militant expression of solidarity and community care. to illustrate this thesis, let me give you a couple of examples of domestic folk magic in ireland that enjoyed a popular resurgence during and after an drochshaol/ gorta mór and the land wars that followed:

1. blacksmiths and their anvils! so, the blacksmith's association with magic is not unique to ireland, and stems at least in part from their ability to turn raw materials into essential tools and weaponry, which afforded them special status within their community. what i think is cool is that the blacksmith's method of casting spells or curses centres around the instrument of their trade: the anvil. why i like this, and one of the reasons i think the tradition of blacksmith's curses survive, is because to possess an anvil, to have learned this particular trade gave labouring men a highly unusual dgree of self-determination and social mobility. everyone needed the blacksmith, and the blacksmith was not beholden to anyone; they pick up their tools and move on, your community might well die. while any set form of forms for such spells have been lost to time, it is known that they must turn the anvil thuatha (anti-clockwise) while speaking the proscribed incantation. ireland's national folklore commission (nfc) records variations of this spell practiced during the land wars against such hated enemies as baliffs and emergency men: to trun the “horn” of the anvil towards the east, pronouncing your curse. alternately (and the nfc talk about this spell as credited with successfully thwarting an eviction) for the group casting the spell to gather at the forge around the anvil and pray; instead of cursing the enemy they channel their anger into blows, walking round the anvil and striking it.
   
   

   2. women and their piseogs! piesog, often anglicised (especially in america) as the pejorative “pish-rogue”, is an old irish word that does a lot of work, in that it can be used to designate something as superstitious, but can also refer to the ritual instruments by/ through which superstitions were enacted. most commonly used to refer to varieties of curse/ cursed objects, as separate and distinct from ortha, which is prayer, liturgy, or charm. the most common form of piseog was to bury either eggs, meat, animal intestines, or even straw dolls in the field of the intended victim. as these materials rot away, so the luck/ health/ fortune of the person being targeted also deteriorates. women were especially noted and feared for casting these particular curses, and i want to flag up a couple of things about that: firstly, that as with the blacksmith's anvil, it was often the instrument of poor women's livelihood and independence (eggs, feathers, hens) that formed the basis of their piesog. second (and we're going to be coming back to this later) that their magic is connected to the (abject) body through the mechanisms of senescence and decay. other things to say briefly about women's cursing: that women let their hair down when cursing. and in ireland it was only beggar women who traditionally wore their hair loose. keening women also let their hair down, invoking and mimicking their supernatural counterpart, the bean sídhe. this is especially interesting to me because widow's curses were thought to be the most powerful, and it is these curses that were especially common during the land wars. what provokes me is this triangulation of rage, grief, and indigence, and how it forms the basis of a powerful fear of older women.

   
   

   3. the 'fire of stones' curse, which is a curse we know was practised (in ulster – go team!) until the 1950s, and it is a curse that can be practised by anyone, specifically against landlords, usurping tenants (often emergency men), and the pain of eviction: before leaving the home from which you were evicted, the ex-tenants would block up the hearth with stones and utter an incantation along the lines of “until these fires burn, will newcomers do any good”.

there are so many others – millers' curses, or examples of women's querns being used in much the same way as the blacksmith's anvil are top faves – but i wanted to keep this brief to demonstrate just a few key points: that magic and the instruments of magic are daily and domestic and not beyond the capacity or reach of ordinary people; that magic and the instruments of magic are community situated tools and practices (see, the men striking the blacksmith's anvil), focal points for solidarity and expressions of common outrage or care, and finally, that magic and the instruments of magic offered an occasion to subvert normative laws, forms, and power relations, especially for poor, older women. its talismans are material fragments of resistance.

keep that in mind, and do enjoy my own improvised poem/ curse that I worked for a neighbour who is being evicted. i'm not making any claims here, but i will say that it has been months now and she is still here:

nb: i didn’t have a real, full-size anvil, but i do have the paperweight in the shape of one that i found at a car-boot sale years ago. i had hen feathers (let me tell you more about the sassy character of the henwife, later on), and part of my house used to be an old forge. ordinarily, i don’t like to go in there (it’s intensely creepy, with a very specific male energy), but for the purposes of this ritual (turning the anvil, casting feathers in the flame until they burn blue) i made an exception.

piesog/ superstition

for caroline, against eviction

turn the anvil, all black, horns toward the door. the anvil, satire on a bull's back. turn millstones. at midnight. clockwise on the landlord. with the fervour of the people. with the valour of the tribe. all the hot translucent losses we can't mourn. free me, from the narrowness of names. was coming home, under the misremembered moon, to eat the sparrow-sundered morning up. to block the hearth with stones. to spite a machine idea of the world. biddy is ecstatic black, a tiresome daisy, many amulets from one eye. henwife. biddy is an effigy of hens. a method of hens. to tear their claggy thatch to straw. an elegy of hens, and turn the anvil. eclipse my stock of woe. burn them down, in the theatre of their feelings, in a field of new wheat. i have buried eggs and meat. have wiped the shine from the silver – outrageous variations – on my – or scratch their name in earth. the unconditional twig. snap! where a name is a neck, upside of air. smoke to twist. across some negligent heavenly. under the moon, revising their entitlements. the miseries they wish on you: a soulmate in a headlock, the boozy runt and his fist walking you into cupboard doors. this, their world. turn the anvil, spread the anvil like an altar – citadel of stables. go hen-feathered through communion, the new day coming up thoroughly rainbowed. by find. by dubh. by brecc – ortha, strike the anvil. blacksmiths, millers & women. a trinity of biddies. iron, bread, and blood. from this the world is made, by this their curse returns.

2. HAGS, CRONES, AND “HORRIBLE OLD WOMEN”:

now that i've given an overview about what i think magic is (and isn't), i want to move on to the main thrust of what i'll laughing call “my thesis” about the way in which folk magic (of any kind) and its practitioners came to be identified with and persecuted under the image of the witch, a figure that constellates (racist, misogynistic, ageist, and ableist) representational strategies with their roots in classical antiquity. fun times! i did want to say before we get stuck in that i'm focussed mainly on the uk and ireland, with a little attention paid to northern europe more broadly. the situation was obviously radically different elsewhere, but about those cultures and histories i am overwhelmingly unqualified to speak. okay? that caveat out of the way, let's enjoy some old butch women, cutting off penises and living their best lives!

or not. i do want to start this section with the trope of dismemberment, though, and i want to start with a particular morbid fantasy of castration originating in 1486 with pervy little weirdo heinrich kramer, helpfully set down for us in the paranoid and floridly misogynist text the malleus maleficarum (“the hammer of witches”), a supposed guide for exposing and eradicating witchcraft; a handbook for inquisitors within the catholic church (oh, the shame). heinrich himself was named inquisitor for southern germany around 1474 and involved with witch trials there for about two years. however (and this will be our last up side), during a trial at innsbruck as head of an inquisitorial commission in 1485, the bishop of brixen, having developed a severe distaste for kramer's shenanigans, suspended him and let the women he had arrested go free. notably freed was helena scheuberin, a wealthy and independent woman unafraid to speak her mind, whose signal “crime” appeared to be refusing to attend kramer's sermons and encouraging others to do the same. there's a record of her actually disrupting one of his sermons, proclaiming that she considered him to be an evil man and in league with the devil. you go, helena!

as you can imagine, all this was very humiliating for kramer, so it's easy to picture him seising on pope innocent viii's bull (in every sense) summis desiderantes in 1484 as an occasion to pen his come-back opus. for those outside the orbit of the know, summis desiderantes explicitly acknowledges the existence of witches and empowers the inquisition to prosecute witches and sorcerers. it essentially reaffirmed and restored jurisdiction to kramer and his whole twisted tribe. ugh. tiny digression, but summis desiderantes emerged at a time the catholic church was increasingly concerned with the idea of heresy, experiencing as it was a good deal of proto-reformation ferment. i really want to flag this up, because during the first thirteen hundred years of the christian era the church wasn't very interested in “witchcraft” at all. but from round about the 13^th century you've got a proliferation of different dissenting traditions cropping up, and the church begins to want to consolidate and strengthen its dominion. this created a perfect storm for the likes of kramer to burst onto the scene and begin ruining people's lives with gleeful abandon. how the book operates is to muddy the water between heretical religious belief and practice with elements of folklore. the malleus includes the bull as an introduction, and drew huge legitimating power from it. it was a mandate to persecute the church's enemies. but also, with that weight of authority behind it, the enemies of any tin-pot inquisitor who rocked up in your village.

but what was actually in this bonkers book? well, witches were accused of weather magic and infanticide (just like the hags of the ancient roman world – more of that anon) but also of making men's sex organs disappear. worse, collecting disembodied penises in a nest/ bird box and feeding them oats. to quote:

[Witches] can take away the male organ [by] concealing it with some glamour [… and what] shall we think about those witches who somehow take members in large numbers — twenty or thirty — and shut them up together in a birds’ nest or some box, where they move about like living members, eating oats or other feed?

we think you're insane, heinrich, that's what we think. and it would be laughable, if the consequences for women hadn't been so dire. we might reasonably ask ourselves how ideas like this were ever able to gain traction in the first place, and to answer that we might look to the profound anxieties surrounding women and women's role in the world during the long middle-ages. i find myself thinking especially of the beguines, lay religious women who chose to live semi-monastic lives without men (save for priests and confessors). i'm thinking also about women mystics, who had been legitimated through partnership with the church and a focus on asceticism, humility, abstinence, isolation and physical suffering, but whose forms of affective piety walked, throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, an increasingly fine line between orthodoxy and heresy. i am thinking somewhat about the wycliffite or “lollard” heresies, although these protestant groups were also savagely misogynistic, which is born out by the demands of their female members being dropped as soon as a measure of power was achieved, and through the vicious and targeted desecration of images of female saints during the reformation. i am mostly thinking about the wild popularity of female saints and the different folk traditions that grew up around them; also, the popularity/ veneration of the virgin mary, and of course the incredible wealth of images relating to female strength and divinity within the established church.

here are some lovely illustrative images, firstly this beauty, an oldy but a goody, of the virgin mary punching satan in the face – meek and mild the 13^th century mother of christ was not! this is from de brailse hours, and in addition to being on my fave t-shirt, you can go and visit it at the british library:

equally special, can i draw your attention to this montage of christ's side wound, and its (deliberate) big vagina energy, please?

you're so welcome! but here comes the misery, i'm afraid. this is rood screen at binham priory in norfolk where the figures of female catholic saints have been whitewashed and written over with lettering from cranmer's new translation of the bible into english. the one note of hope is that with time, the women's faces have begun to peep through once again.

okay, take a minute to process, and... what i think is really interesting and germane is how popular old heinrich's text became during the renaissance. it's interesting for two reasons: you have a catholic text being used as a misogynist weapon by a number of protestant states (turns out the bros hated women more than they hated each other. humm. wonder why that sounds familiar). equally fascinating (to me at least) during this time you have renaissance persecutors diving back into classical antiquity for a representational model of witchcraft as a propaganda tool. given that the renaissance was all about the “rebirth” of interest in classical greek and roman art, literature and philosophy, this feels really significant. ladies and gents and everyone outside and in between, i give you the first and foremost classical hag: erictho!

here's an excerpt from my previously published essay on her (with some funky new additions). you can read the rest of the orginal here:

in the epic roman poem, bellum civile (civil war) lucan writes of an infamous thessalian witch by the name of erictho. she isn't the first roman witch, but she is the first century's preeminent “hag”, and around her constellate a number of interconnected and equally unpleasant ideas, ideas that will become central to the western's world's notion of the “witch” or “horrida mulier” (horrible woman). ideas, moreover, that will echo and emerge with disastrous persistence for so many women throughout the ages. ideas that survive into our present political moment.

quick recap: civil war takes as its theme the conflict between the roman emperor, julius caesar, and the figurehead of the republican cause, pompey. erictho first appears in book six, consulted by sextus, the son of pompey, who is desperate to learn which side will emerge victorious in the coming battle of pharsalus. here is the reader's first glimpse of this renowned sorcerer:

the blasphemer’s face
is gaunt and loathsome with decay: unknown to cloudless sky
and terrifying, by stygian pallor it is tainted,
matted with uncombed hair.

awesome. thanks. there's a lot going on in this pejorative description that is really worth unpacking. firstly, throughout civil war, thessaly in northern greece is characterised as a peripheral “elsewhere”, an extreme and unruly wasteland of negative civility. it was purported home to a race of witches who spent their time (and not-inconsiderable powers) working erotic spells, hexing the weather, interfering with the course of “nature” by causing rivers to flow backwards, mountains to collapse, and by drawing down the moon (larks). the text implies a porous symbiotic relationship between these witches and the land on/in which they lived; this land is said to produce magically potent flora and fauna. even the rocks of thessaly carried a charge/ taint. if it was the witches who absorbed their power from/ through the land, or if a portion of their magic discharged itself into the surrounding environment is never entirely clear, but what is plainly legible is the (over) identification of thessaly's native inhabitants with their unruly, “wild” and potentially dangerous home, producing what we might recognise today as a highly racialised ecology.

if all of this is sounding vaguely familiar, then yes, correct, welcome on board this air lingus flight to edmund spenser's hateful hymn to protestant ascendancy: the faerie queene (1590). spenser creates a feral “elsewhere” out of ireland in the same way that lucan does out of thessaly – albeit spenser's text operates through the far-from-subtle allegory of “faerie land”. again, as the literally ten of people who have read vulgar errors/ feral subjects (2023) will know, my least favourite poem of all time constructs ireland in such a way so as to serve as a foil for english protestant “virtues”; to justify the occupation of irish land, and to excuse the brutalising treatment of a native irish-speaking populace by successive generations of english planters. in lucan, thessaly – and northern greece in general – serve as a foil to roman virtues, although it's worth pointing out, to slightly different ends: while lucan emphasises the corruption, decline and decay of greece at every turn, and contrasts this powerfully to the marshal strength and endurance of rome, such comparisons are intended more as a warning to his first roman audience about where internal strife, political ambition, and popular unrest might lead.

but now that i've introduced the grim spectre of edmund spenser, we will be circling back to him, because i want to talk a little more about the characterisation of erictho, and how this is similar/ relevant to later middle english and early modern projects with xenophobia, classism, and misogyny at their hearts. so: while for lucan, all thessalian women are “witches” – dangerously expert practitioners of magic, related in the text to the “barbarous” and negatively racialised figures of the persian magicians – erictho is figured as being extreme even by their standards. while thessaly is already an “elsewhere” or “edge” for the roman world, erictho's home is at the edge of the edge: in a cemetery, in a tomb. she holds converse with the dead, and courts the favour of underworld deities, as opposed to seeking dispensations from the upper gods like a model roman citizen. what's really important, i think, is that erictho does not merely defy roman social norms and moral conventions, but that she inverts them (she is often described as a perverse mirror-image of the cumaen sibyl). such an inversion renders erictho not merely disgusting (that is concretely, physically loathsome), but abject. as rina arya notes in the absolute banger abjection and representation: an exploration of abjection in the visual arts, film and literature (2014), while the abject attaches itself to objects and others, it is an amorphous state that 'has only one quality of the object – that of being opposed to i'.

erictho provokes and revolts that roman “i” on a number of levels: firstly, she is ugly and unkempt in a way that signals her disregard for the niceties of dress and grooming. and here comes my first wee add in: remember we were speaking earlier about keening and cursing women in ireland letting down their hair, identifying women of any class with their indigent and beggarly sisters? well, yeah, that thing i just said: erictho constellates rage, grief, and outsider status in a similar way through the symbolic figure of dishevelment. because [i return you to our regularly scheduled text] secondly, she is old, and ancient rome shares something with our contemporary scene in that it was a hetero-patriarchal culture that tended to value women mostly as sources of sexual and reproductive labour. as a post-erotic, post-reproductive body – a body that has outlived its usefulness – her degree of agency is disturbing, her very survival potentially obscene. related to this post-reproductive aspect of hagdom, erictho is specifically anti-fertile: she is barren, with absolutely no interest at all in procreative sex or the “sacred” structure/ organising principle of the roman family. further (and this, to me, is the most interesting aspect of her abjection), erictho exists in perpetual funestatus. this translates as having been polluted or disgraced, and it refers to a state of mourning, characterised by dishevelment of dress, symbolic of having been soiled by contact with the dead. something an elite (thus ideal) roman matriarch would avoid at any cost (see?). it isn't merely that death itself stains erictho, but that her contact with the dead is a profound marker of low social status.

and i have been wondering: does erictho haunt graveyards, gibbets and battlefields, not merely the better for plundering corpses towards her macabre hexerei, but because she is, in fact, in a state of protracted and recalcitrant grief; driven feral by exorbitant and distorting loss? reaching? maybe, but i'm reminded [add in again] of the particular efficacy of widow's curses. at another tangent, i find i am also thinking about the precarious social position of widows during the renaissance, and how destabilising that time could be in terms of both vulnerability (being thrown on the mercy of the parish, or forced to remarry – poor women) or opportunity (for a degree of autonomy) for wealthier women.

[back in the room] in every way, erictho is associated with the dead. in civil war, she becomes a walking reminder of man's material origins and ultimate end. so much so, that lucan has her physically embody death: her very breath turns the air to poison. in erictho, even natural bodily processes are corrupted or suspended; her troubling social aspects are incorporated into a repertoire of ill affects. she is one of the earliest examples of the “hag” figure being used to convert the dangerous qualities of old, post-reproductive, (hetero) sexually disinterested women into a florid symptomatology and a grotesque visual language. and i'd like to check back in with our witch finders here: both with heinrich, who had his witches' evil take the form of violating the structural integrity of the (male) body, and with later generations of inquisitors for whom the bodies of witches were themselves violative mixtures of natural and unnatural parts, and whose imperfect bodies were so often recruited against them as “evidence” of their crimes.

which brings me neatly back to spenser, and the faerie queene's monstrous women. specifically, on this occasion, errour. if erictho can be said to embody erin harrington's notion of the 'abject barren' (2018), then errour enciphers precisely the reverse, what we might call the “abject fertile”, or – to quote the late, great, barbara creed, writing in her book of the same title – 'the monstrous feminine' (1993). creed argues that the feminine is fabricated as monstrous through abject associations with our sexual and bodily functions (duh). in the case of erictho, her womb is a dusty trench, a grave. in the case of errour, it is a site of outlandish fecundity; excessively spawning both “children” and ideas. she is described as an ‘vgly monster’ who is ‘halfe like a serpent’, most ‘lothsome, filthie, foule, and full of vile disdaine’. a hideous hybrid mother, suckling a brood of ill-formed ‘sundry shapes’ from her ‘poisonous dugs’. yeah, thanks. on one level, she serves as a rather ham-fisted metaphor for the catholic church in ireland, its insidious spread and the proliferation of its teachings. on the other, spenser seeks to portray the female catholic body itself as an “unnatural” locus of feral excess. that we “breed like rabbits and multiply like vermin” (ian paisley, circa 1969) is a trope as old as time; a staple of the animalising/ mostrifying language that seeks to identify us with the killable “swarm” or “infestation”, in spenser's nauseating allegory it serves the very specific purpose of inculcating disgust for native bodies the better to guard against that most colonial of fears, one incredibly key to socially policing any garrison town: miscegenation.

in different directions, erictho and errour demonstrate the pedigree and longevity of this tendency to use the female body as a scrim for a variety of (racist/ xenophobic, misogynist, classist) ideas connected to the horrible or monstrous o/Other. to me, civil war, is the most striking example of this particular model, but i think there are others. horace, for example, creates the “hags” canidia, sagana, veia, and folia in 30 bce. these are repulsively/ “inappropriately” masculine older women who, in horace's fifth epode, kidnap a boy with the intention of burying him up to his neck in order to torture him with food just out of his reach. they believe that hunger will cause his liver to grow – and it's the liver they want for the purposes of a powerful erotic potion [note infanticide and lust entwined as in ol' heinrich]. while certainly grotesque, these witch figures are intended to be the objects of ridicule. through them, horace twists and parodies greek witch conventions of lasciviousness and magical dexterity by applying these qualities to old butch women. which, yeah, always hilarious.

so yeah, the rites of canidia et al inform portrayals of witches throughout the middle ages and the early modern. in shakespeare's macbeth (1623), for a big, famous example. but i also recently came across an anonymous broadsheet from about 1616 that treated of frances carr, countess of somerset's alleged murder of sir thomas overbury, which satirises her as 'canidia'. the poem, 'a satyre entituled the witch', is notable in that it conceptually links a real, living (and powerful, and sexually self-determined) woman to a monstrous fictional hag. in jest, obvs. but the hatred feels real. and the idea of witchcraft was still taken seriously enough in the 1600s that – slight tangent, but not really – during a trial that would determine carr’s annulment of marriage to the 3^rd earl of essex, one of the judges genuinely suggested he travel to poland (why poland, i've no idea) to have his dick “unwitched” so that he might be able to perform sexually with her, thus mitigating the need for an annulment at all.

yeah, that again. and there is a metric fuck-ton to say about the fear of castration/ impotence and the way this fear plays out in the pathological fantasies of texts such as the malleus maleficarum (1486) and the dæmonologie of king james i (1597) but for now i cannot stop thinking about the metaphorical function of the “hag”; how she serves the same purpose as the animal at the centre of dehumanising animal comparisons. i bang on about this a lot, but it bears repeating: for the pejorative to be effective there needs first to be a consensus as to the worthless or abject nature of the animal. the broadside must transform the youthful frances carr into a frightful old woman in order to render her “safe” for ridicule. or horace transforms the young, sexually provocative witches of greek epic tradition into ghastly “hags” in order to render them objects of both horror and laughter. then there's erictho. were she in her “prime”, she might still have held some claim on/ to the human community, but being old and ugly, she is cast against “nature”, removed from the remit of moral concern, hollowed out as a receptacle for all the ideas and affects roman culture deemed unacceptable to look at or think about. since the first century bce there is a strong (surviving) representational strand that refuses to accept older, post-reproductive women as meaningfully human. k and i have started making a list of contemporary horror films where hideous hags are the “baddies” or used simply as jump-scares, where the ageing female body is not merely the site but the central source of abjection. there are a lot. and i'm going to be coming back to those in a big way. but for now i'll end with a suggestive passage from lucan, which offers (i think) a space for reading queerly into erictho, so that this outcast and abject “hag” becomes an avatar of old-ass female power:

her tread has burned up seeds of fertile grain
and her breath alone has turned fresh air deadly.
she doesn’t pray to gods above, or call on powers
for aid with suppliant song, or know the ways
to offer entrails and receive auspicious omens.
she loves to light altars with funereal flames
and burn incense she’s snatched from blazing pyres.
at the merest hint of her praying voice, the gods grant her
any outrage, afraid to hear her second song.

enjoy that? no? awesome! just one more note on magic-practitioner-as witch and witch-as-hag, then we'll move on. specifically, i want to talk about the “divine hag” or cailleach (from the old irish meaning veiled one). she is a folk staple of some prominence in ireland, and she's been with us since the pre-christian era, but she crops up first in literature around the eighth century, where she appears as the first-person narrator in the irish poem the lament of the old woman, as “digdi” or “digde”. she also appears in the hunt of slieve cuilinn as “milucra”, and in the tale of glas gaibhnenn, as “biróg”. while pre-christian irish myth cycles abound with hags of wicked, monstrous and abject cast, the cailleach is a more nuanced figure. she is associated with winter, with the wilderness and with its animal inhabitants. in particular, she is associated with the raven (often seen as the manifestation of destructive female agency), yet she can be both hostile and helpful to human life, she is eloquent and powerful; she has – more to the point – considerability. one of the things that interests me about the lament of the old woman is that as the narrator describes her sad and bitter decent into old age (and the increasing marginality that comes with it), so too the poem and the verse traditions of which it is part, have withered and faded, transformed from their pre-christian power into something pale and attenuated. the cailleach of the lament is a mortal, a christian, a consort of kings; her status is reduced both within the poem and meta-textually outside of it. it's a banging poem (at one point the speaker compares herself and other old women to onion skins!) but my interest in it is that it serves as a synecdoche for the fate of ageing, post-reproductive women in an increasingly christianised, patriarchal, capitalistic world. the cailleach becomes the “hag”, the “witch” as customary rights that protected poor (and widowed) women are stripped back, as the practices by which she made her living (washing the dead, serving as folk doctor, keening) are outlawed; as animals are reduced to livestock, farming becomes “husbandry” (the province of men) and the oral knowledge of healing is systemised and appropriated into herbals and encyclopaedias.

this is a story about what happened to poor women. and it is a story about what made women poor. this is one of the reasons i have mad beef with middle and upper class women “reclaiming” the notion of the witch as their own. for myself, “witch” is not an identity category or a life-style choice, it's the same kind of nexus of historical violence as “queer”, and you absolutely don't get to use it unless and until you've been on the receiving end of its logics. to open your mouth and bring “witch” into the room is a significant act; it summons the weight and echo of generational violence, misery, neglect. don't fuck around with it.

although – my queer kinfolk – do, absolutely, fuck around with it. here's my perimenopausal birthday cake (thanks, mam):

which is to say, that while individual women definitely do age, the concept of the witch is ever-green. you're not so much eternally youthful, as you were born old, beyond age, a terrifying and persisting power, inexhaustible, mighty... which is also to say that i dress and look like a skater boy from the mid-nineties.

okay, that's all you're getting today, but i did want to link to my other pieces on the abject feminine, which previously lived behind a paywall. part one, here. part two, here, and also to this, which is a little dated now, but still contains some potentially useful thoughts on ferality, transformation and... well... hares.