You know, I’m just not into witch vibes in the same way that y’all are into witch vibes (a subject that I’m approaching in a forthcoming manifesto). But I’m really into German painting, so this is a little for you and a little for me and whatever I’m obligated, right?

Hans Baldung Grien, “The Weather Witches,” 1523

you had me at All The Words You Just Said

todf:

Lots of wacky on-the-street kinda action: “WITCH — Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell!” Still from The Weird World of Weird.

Speaking of witches, oh my God, I love W.I.T.C.H.

(via garconniere)

ourcatastrophe:

garconniere:

killyourinspiration:

It’s actually pretty offensive when people on tumblr/the blogosphere in general are obsessed with being all ~*~witchy~*~ and dressing “witchy” and stuff like that.  Didn’t it ever occur to you that there are, um, actual people who still practice witchcraft?  And that, um, people have been burned at the stake for being (accused of being) witches?

Witches aren’t just in some ~*~exotic~*~ far away place either.  You’ve probably met people who are Wiccans.  Can we just cut out the fashion trend?  If you want to look like a goth, just say you want to look like a goth.

i’ve been wondering about this myself… the difference between goth vs. witches, witches as ~*~fashion inspiration~*~, and people who actually practice witchcraft/wicca as a religion/faith… now that it’s around halloween it’s even more present. it’s one thing to appreciate alison scarpulla and francesca woodman photographs, but it’s another to tag anything witch themed/black lipstick/black cats as “witchy vibes” simply as disposable aesthetics without really knowing anything about witchcraft or Wiccans. i don’t know much about wicca myself and would be really curious to know what people think about this.

one aspect i’d be curious to look into is the parallel of feminists to witches, because it seems like a lot of riot grrl inspired/young feminists who grew up watching the craft are into this idea. perhaps some people want to look witchy to kind of fuck with that negative stereotype and reclaim it? not sure.

...that said, i just read the nudist nuns of goat island not to mention the fact that religion and i in general haven’t gotten along in… decades.

this is not an issue of cultural appropriation, sorry.  mostly because there is no evidence that there was any link between the witch-hunts and followers of a nature-based religion.  the theory that they were is known as the witch-cult hypothesis and has been pretty thoroughly discredited; not even sympathetic feminist historians give it credibility these days.  while many accused witches adhered to certain folk beliefs that were counter to hegemonic Christian dogma, so did virtually everybody else at the time.  obviously many people feel a resonance between the figure of the witch and their spirituality, and therefore a special attachment to the idea of the witch, and that’s fine.  but people need to understand that “witches” were not a discrete group within society facing persecution, sometimes catching misidentified non-witches up in their misfortune; rather, it was a label with no real referent that could be hung on anybody at any time — while primarily, of course, targeting women, especially poor women and older women. 

in any case, there is no real historical continuity between pre-Christian European religious traditions and Wicca.  the term “Wicca” was invented in the late 60s and Wiccan religious practices are typically a grab-bag of disparate spiritual elements from long-dead European religions.  provided you’re not appropriating something you shouldn’t I think this is basically fine, syncretism is a feature of many religious practices and the newness of a religion doesn’t make it less valid.  but taking inspiration from something is not the same as having a historical connection or right of ownership to it.  also, Wiccans are not oppressed; or, rather, not specifically oppressed, no more oppressed than other non-Christians (or, I suppose, people who don’t follow a hegemonic religion in non-Christan regions).  being Wiccan is like being a punk or a vegan; you might be marginalised, narrow-minded people might be dickheads to you, but there aren’t actually vast power structures dedicated to your subordination or eradication. 

there is, on the other hand, historical continuity between the european witch-hunts and the process of colonisation.  it was extremely easy for colonisers to transfer rhetoric around the evil of witches to the evil of local religious practices, and to transfer the judicial structures and codes around witch-hunting to suppress local resistance (for example, the Spanish and Portugese Inquisition had strong presences in the South American colonies).  silvia federici has written extensively on this.  maybe this is a long bow to draw but I am kind of skeeved out by a bunch of primarily white people getting angry about the imagined appropriation of a white European religious tradition while being completely ignorant about the very real effect of the European witch-hunts on Indigenous people (who actually experience cultural appropriation, often from self-proclaimed Pagans or witches). 

to summarise: wiccans and similar have no special claim to ownership over the figure of the witch.  as far as I’m concerned any woman and any colonised person has the right to use witch imagery or whatever.  doesn’t matter if you don’t have “witchy” beliefs or practices.  most people murdered as witches didn’t either. 

This is so good. A few more points:

Wicca is, as you said, syncretic by nature and syncretism is not necessarily appropriation. Stuff like Central American Catholicism, Voodoo, the Native American church, and a lot of African-American/Pan-African churches are syncretic without being appropriative. Mostly this happens because those religions were forged by colonized people from combinations of their indigenous religions (which had been either appropriated or wiped out) and colonizing religions which they had either adopted or been forced into recognizing, or which had hegemonically strangled their own religions and saturated their culture. These syncretic religions also often emerge after diasporas and colonization when large diverse groups of people merge their cultural systems together as a form of self-preservation. There is a name for this! I don’t know what it is.

Wicca is kind of like these things. It’s true that indigenous European religions were appropriated into meaninglessness, erased, or destroyed by Christianity for centuries. It’s true that this was very deeply linked to colonization and oppression of ethnic groups in Europe. It is also true that Wicca is syncretic in that it incorporated components of lots of cultures that had been wiped out by colonial forces. However, this wasn’t an act of cultural survival. It wasn’t an act of resistance, simply because the people adopted the practices weren’t reacting to oppression, they were just doing a thing that they liked and believed in. That’s neat and respectable, but as ourcatastrophe said—it does not an oppressed group make.

You can argue that Wicca itself is appropriative, though I’m really not interested in opening the can of worms that is discussing whether or not white Americans with Irish origin “own” indigenous European cultures. That’s not really constructive or relevant. However, remember how appropriation works: hegemony co-opts from oppressed group, recontextualizes until cultural significance disappears. By this definition, Central American indigenous incorporation of Catholicism can’t be appropriation, because Catholicism was the colonizing force. (I might argue that the fetishization of Catholicism that’s rl cool on tumblr right now is appropriative! but also, I secretly identify as Catholic, so.) By this definition of appropriation, though, it’s kind of hard to argue that real appropriation is happening when tumblr ladies call themselves witches. Not only because of the power dynamic between Wiccans and non-Wiccan White American Ladies (hint: not really that marked!) but because “witch” and “Wiccan” are in no way synonymous.

And, actually? To equate those two things kind of offends me. As ourcatastrophe said: Witch wasn’t a thing as much as it was a space where colonizers put colonized people in order to justify killing them. Wicca is a contemporary mostly-American organization of people who share practices and philosophies.

The reason that tumblr ladies are so into witchiness (okay, well, there’s witchiness and then there’s wearing creepers, but I digress) is as a reclaimation of a term which historically has been used against them. It’s kind of like “slut,” except way more interesting and complex. Because that’s the other thing about witch: it’s about colonization, but it’s also obviously about gender. That’s why tumblr ladies are into witchiness: because they want to become that marginal monstrous-feminine thing that has been more or less destined for us to become. Because it’s interesting from a gender perspective, but also because it’s fun. Witch is an oppressor’s term. Ladies is stealing it back. Bagofshit writes about this a bunch (or, anyway, writes queer theories of Hocus Pocus, which is pretty much the same thing).

One final layer of appropriation in the Wicca debate: Wicca itself is fairly self-contained in its syncretism, but neopaganism in general very, very often does appropriate from Native American, East Asian, South Asian, and African religions. This has historical basis in a lot of things: the general new-aged mysticism movements starting in the 1960s unfolded parallel to organized neopagan movements, for one. There was also a large movement of second-wave feminists who explored global/ancient spiritualities in order to find places where women had been “worshipped,” and as such ended up spending a lot of excruciating time talking about primordial goddesses and mother earths and projecting their constructions of femininities on things they didn’t know anything about but saw naked ladies in so they assumed were empowering.