Real magic can never be made by offering up someone else’s liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back. The true witches know that.
Witchcraft is the recourse of the dispossessed, the powerless, the hungry and the abused. It gives heart and tongue to stones and trees. It wears the rough skin of beasts. It turns on a civilization that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
…the last thing you wanted a witch to do was get bored and start making her own amusements, because witches sometimes had famously erratic ideas about what was amusing.
The laws of courtesy are so inconvenient: do not set fire to this chevalier, do not encase that baroness in a block of ice… How are we supposed to get through the day?
When we write witches into our stories, that is what we’re writing about: power. When we write witches, we are writing about our expectations of women, and what we hope—and fear—they would do if they had access to power. Fictional witches act as ciphers that help us understand something that seems at once mysterious and brilliant and sinister: a woman’s ultimate, unlimited potential… realized.
Hear what Valerius said to Rufinus: You do not know that woman is the Chimaera, but it is good that you should know it; for that monster was of three forms; its face was that of a radiant and noble lion, it had the filthy belly of a goat, and it was armed with the virulent tail of a viper. And he means that a woman is beautiful to look upon, contaminating to the touch, and deadly to keep.
The archetype of the witch is long overdue for celebration. Daughters, mothers, queens, virgins, wives, et al. derive meaning from their relation to another person. Witches, on the other hand, have power on their own terms. They have agency. They create. They praise. They commune with nature/ Spirit/God/dess/Choose-your-own-semantics, freely, and free of any mediator. But most importantly: they make things happen. The best definition of magic I’ve been able to come up with is “symbolic action with intent” — “action" being the operative word. Witches are midwives to metamorphosis. They are magical women, and they, quite literally, change the world.
words;
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Laini Taylor, Lips Touch: Three Times
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Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
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The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle
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W.B. Yeats
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Peter Grey, Apocalyptic Witchcraft
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Terry Pratchett, Legends 1
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Morrigan, The Last Court
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Sarah Gailey, Why We Write About Witches
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Heinrich Kramer, Malleus Maleficarum
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Charles, G. Leland, Aradia, Gospel of the Witches
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Terry Pratchett, Wintersmith
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Terry Pratchett, Wintersmith
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Pamela J. Grossman, The Year of the Witch
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William Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale
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William Shakespeare, Henry V