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Witches flying and riding goats to Sabbat
Faust's Vision, 1878 (oil on canvas) by Falero, Luis Riccardo (1851-96)

The Daughters of Lilith: Witches, Sexuality, and Power

By John Reppionon

Hag-Ridden by Adam’s First Wife

Hag – meaning a wizened and aged women, most commonly used now in a derogatory, even misogynistic way – is actually a shortened version of the Old English word “hægtesse”, literally meaning “witch”. The Old Hag, or the Night Hag, is a well documented component of the phenomenon now known as sleep paralysis. During these episodes – which usually occur either as deep sleep or wakefulness are being approached – the sleeper finds themselves apparently awake and aware of their surroundings, but unable to move, or speak. A sense of terrible menace and threat is often perceived by the sleeper, and sometimes their oppressor shows themselves in the form of a malevolent Hag. These evil spirits, which bring terrible dreams, are known in German and Slavic folklore as “mara” or “mare”, and so the Night Hag becomes the nightmare. The mare were thought to ride horses through the hours of darkness, leaving the creatures tired and sweating in the morning, and humans too could find themselves much depleted after a visit from the Night Hag; a night of being “hag-ridden”.

Found in several ancient Hebrew language texts, the word “lilith” is commonly translated as “night monster” or “night hag”. The medieval text Alphabetum Siracidis, Othijoth ben Sira – a compilation of Aramaic and Hebrew folk-tales – is the earliest surviving written account giving Lilith as the name of the first woman in the Garden of Eden. The story of Adam’s first wife is much older than that however, written of (or at least alluded to) in The Book of Genesis, which is now thought to have been written circa 600 BCE.

Genesis 1:27

So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.

Yet many have noted that the creation of Eve does not appear until

Genesis 2:22

Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.

In Alphabetum Siracidis it is written that God formed Lilith, the first woman, out of the self same clay as Adam himself.

After God created Adam, who was alone, He said, “It is not good for man to be alone.” He then created a woman for Adam, from the earth, as He had created Adam himself, and called her Lilith. Adam and Lilith immediately began to fight. She said, “I will not lie below,” and he said, “I will not lie beneath you, but only on top. For you are fit only to be in the bottom position, while I am to be the superior one.” Lilith responded, “We are equal to each other inasmuch as we were both created from the earth.” But they would not listen to one another.

Lilith was created equal to Adam and wanted to be treated as such, with especial emphasis given to her sexuality – she did not want to be dominated (as she saw it), but to take the dominant role herself. Now, it is worth mentioning that while Alphabetum Siracidis is believed to have been widely accepted by the Jewish mystics of medieval Germany, there is an argument that it is a work of satire; topics such as flatulence, incest, and masturbation being dealt with satirically elsewhere in the volume.

The Babylonian Talmud (“Talmud Bavli”) consists of documents compiled between the 3rd and 5th centuries (the Tamuld being the central text of Rabbinic Judaism). There are three references to Lilith in the Babylonian Talmud on three separate Tractates, the third of which reads as follows:

Tractate Shabbath 151b

R. Hanina said: One may not sleep in a house alone, and whoever sleeps in a house alone is seized by Lilith.

This passage has been interpreted as evidence of Lilith’s transfiguration into a succubus (which has become an important part of the folklore surrounding her, after her exit from Eden). A succubus is a female demon who visits men at night, appearing in their dreams, to have sex with them. The name succubus is derived from Late Latin succub(āre) “to lie beneath” (sub- “under” + cubāre “to lie in bed”. Religious and folkloric tradition holds that repeated sexual contact with a succubus may result in the deterioration of health, mental state, or even death. According to The Encyclopedia of Witches, Witchcraft & Wicca by Rosmary Ellen Guiley:

There are accounts of men being forced to perform cunnilingus on succubi, whose vaginas dripped urine, dung and other vile juices and smells.

Unlike the 15th century witches, for whom consorting and mating with demons was a choice deliberately made – a part of their bargain with the Arch Fiend to gain their powers – for a man of the time, having sex with a succubus was (according to Rosemary Ellen Guiley, at least) “most likely not his fault”. Men are not to blame, they cannot help themselves. They are powerless in the face of Lilith, the first woman; not only is she a magical, sexual, older woman, she also a divorcee who wants to go on top, and maybe even have oral sex performed upon her! She is a supposedly abhorrent, yet somehow still irresistible, sexually predatory witch, and this is an archetype which it seems to me was once much much more widely acknowledged than it is today.

Away, Away, You Ugly Witch

Alison Gross that lives in yon tower
The ugliest witch in the North Country
Has trysted me one day up to her bower
And many a fair speech she made to me

She stroked my head and she combed my hair
She set me down softly on her knee
Saying if you will be my lover so true
So many good things I would give to you

Away, away, you ugly witch
Go far away and let me be
I never will be your lover so true
And wish I were out of your company

Published in 1860, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads is a compendium of lyrics of three-hundred and five traditional ballads with notes and analysis by their collector, Francis James Child. The lyrics contained within the volume have come to be known as The Child Ballads, and are often referred to by the number under which they were catalogued. “Alison Gross” is Child Ballad #35, copied from an 1806 collection compiled by Robert Jamieson, entitled Popular Ballads and Songs: From Tradition, Manuscripts, and Scarce Editions. Jamieson in turn transcribed the lyrics “from the recitation of Mrs. Brown“. The lyrics as quoted above are actually from 1970s Electric Folk quintet Steeleye Span’s version of the song, which featured on their 1973 album Parcel of Rogues.

The narrative of Alison Gross runs like this: a witch, who we are repeatedly informed that the narrator considers to be “the ugliest witch in the North Country“, offers all sorts of wonderful gifts if he will become her lover. The narrator refuses all inducements so, in a fury, the spurned sorceress turns him into a wyrm (a dragon, essentially), and binds him to a tree. The young man’s sister visits him, and combs his hair (a hairy wyrm, evidently) but he remains trapped and transformed. One day a troop of fairies passes by, led by the Queen of the Fae. After she strokes the dragon three times he is transformed back into his human form and is free of his bonds.

The part of this tale that fascinates me is not the narrator’s plight nor his eventual deliverance from his magical bondage thanks to a passing Fairy Queen, rather it is the echo of Lilith’s mythology contained within.

Methinks Thou Dost Protest Too Much

The ballad of “Alison Gross” very much puts me in mind of the Clarke Ashton Smith story “Mother of Toads”, published in Weird Tales magazine in July 1938. People often like to suggest that Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s work has certain sexual undercurrents, and indeed there is a lot of very effective, weird stuff to do with the interbreeding of humans and non, or pre, humans in work such as The Shadow Over Innsmouth. This however, seems to have more to do with Lovecraft’s horror of “the other”; his racism, and belief that “mixing” would lead to “weakened” genetic stock and even devolution. I don’t think HPL was deliberately trying to use his work allegorically to push those points of view, but neither do I believe that he would have been shocked to learn that people could infer his beliefs through his fiction. I do however think that Lovecraft’s fellow Weird Fiction author and contemporary, Clarke Ashton Smith, may have been surprised to learn how easy it is to deduce from some of his writing that he had a strong attraction to and fascination for large, curvaceous ladies – Big Beautiful Women in the language of the internet – which he nevertheless felt compelled to deny, perhaps even to himself.

In Smith’s “The Door to Saturn“, published in Strange Tales in 1932, talks about an alien humanoid Queen grown to mammoth size “on food prepared from a special fungus” who is the only fertile female of the colony. Two human men, trapped on Saturn, are “selected as the fathers of the next generation and were to be married forthwith to the tribal mother”. Of course the duo flee without performing their marital duties, and admittedly there is the caveat that the Queen Bhlemphroim does eat her husbands after sex, but nevertheless it all feels much closer to a sci-fi sexual fantasy than anything Lovecraft ever wrote, to me. Not convinced? Well then, let’s return to “Mother of Toads”, shall we? Here’s how the story opens:

“Why must you always hurry away, my little one?”

The voice of Mere Antoinette, the witch, was an amorous croaking. She ogled Pierre, the apothecary’s young apprentice, with eyes full-orbed and unblinking as those of a toad. The folds beneath her chin swelled like the throat of some great batrachian. Her huge breasts, pale as frog-bellies, bulged from her torn gown as she leaned toward him.

The story (which, be warned, I am going to give away the plot of here) tells of Pierre the young apothecary’s apprentice who has been sent to the witch Mere Antoinette’s hut on the marshes to deliver some message or magical ingredient. Locally we are told the witch is known as La Mere des Crapauds – the Mother of Toads – because of the unnatural concentrations of the creatures which seem to gather around her, and act as her familiars. The apothecary knows that the witch is attracted to his young assistant and warns him that, sooner or later, she will have her way with him:

“Some night, my lad, you will remain with her,” he had said. “Be careful, or the big toad will crush you.”

Mere Antoinette says that the boy should stay the night in the hut – the fog is thick and he may lose his way otherwise. Determined not to do so, the apprentice does however accept a cup of mulled wine to warm him against the journey ahead. Of course, the wine is drugged and all too soon…

The soiled skirt she had worn lay at her feet, and she stood naked as Lilith, the first witch. The lumpish limbs and body had grown voluptuous; the pale, thick-lipped mouth enticed him with a promise of ampler kisses than other mouths could yield. The pits of her short round arms, the concave of her ponderously drooping breasts, the heavy creases and swollen rondures of flanks and thighs, all were fraught with luxurious allurement.

The apprentice awakes on the couch with the naked witch asleep on top of him, pinning him down. For an instant he sees her not as a human, but a gigantic toad. Repulsed, he makes his escape and tries to head back towards his village but the freezing mist and an increasing amount of toads – first on the path, eventually leaping in a great wave against his face and body – conspire to drive him back towards the witch’s hut. Upon his return Mere Antoinette, clearly expecting him, offers the apprentice another cup of wine which he refuses, saying that he has seen her true form.

“You are a big toad. I saw you in your true shape this morning. I’d rather drown in the marsh-waters than sleep with you again.”

So off he goes back into the marshes. Again the fog, again the toads, only this time he is driven not back to the hut but into the putrid waters of the bog where the surging batrachians drive him under to drown. It is at tale’s end that I think we get the most telling sentences:

For a moment, ere oblivion came, his fingers found among them the outlines of a monstrous form that was somehow toadlike… but large and heavy as a fat woman. At the last, it seemed to him that two enormous breasts were crushed closely down upon his face.

Now that is definitely not the kind of climax Lovecraft would ever have written!

My intention here is not so much to expose Clarke Ashton Smith as an admirer of the larger lady in denial (although I do think that’s pretty clear), rather it is to examine “Mother of Toads”, and Mere Antoinette, as a fine modern example of the sexually predatory witch. It is a story you have quite possibly never read before (if not, you can read it at www.eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/143/mother-of-toads), yet it is a very familiar one.

Beware the Wolves

While the short story may not be Smith’s finest work by a long chalk, it has the simplicity, structure, and narrative of a classic folk or fairy tale. At its most basic level “Mother of Toads” is a gender-flipped “Little Red Riding Hood” distilled down into its original form, wherein the cunning wolf eats the foolish little girl at the end. The earliest printed version of “Little Red Riding Hood” was recorded by Charles Perrault in his Histoires et contes du temps passé, avec des moralités in 1697. In the book he gives the following moral explanation as to the tale’s meaning:

From this story one learns that children, especially young lasses, pretty, courteous and well-bred, do very wrong to listen to strangers, And it is not an unheard thing if the Wolf is thereby provided with his dinner. I say Wolf, for all wolves are not of the same sort; there is one kind with an amenable disposition – neither noisy, nor hateful, nor angry, but tame, obliging and gentle, following the young maids in the streets, even into their homes. Alas! Who does not know that these gentle wolves are of all such creatures the most dangerous!

Angela Carter, in her award winning fairy and folk tale inspired 1979 collection The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, sums it up even more succinctly: “the worst wolves are hairy on the inside“. This is meant both literally – because werewolves are abroad in Carter’s more visceral and sensual interpretations of Perrault’s tales – and figuratively, as the Frenchman intended. There are people whose lusts and appetites make them more cunning and more dangerous to others than any mere beast of the forest.

The fact that a young boy is the virginal character in distress in “Mother of Toads” as opposed to the traditional young maiden may seem strange to us, but it is likewise in “Alison Gross” which pre-dates Smith’s tale by one century, and almost certainly more. Most of us are by now aware of the sexual analysis of tales such as “Little Red Riding Hood” which have been interpreted variously as being about puberty, sexual awakening, and the loss of virginity either consensually (usually through naivety), via trickery (usually via magic), or else by force (often via the metaphor of being consumed). In the vast majority of these stories, the moral warnings are directed primarily, if not explicitly, at girls and young women. Yes, there is “Hansel and Gretal” wherein a young girl and a young boy are captured and almost eaten by an ugly old witch, but this tale is now believed by many scholars to be more literal than most. Originating during or shortly after the 14th century European Great Famine, this story of children abandoned in the wilderness by parents who could not feed them, and of “the other” desperate enough to devour them, might just have meant exactly what it seemed. Then again, the literal interpretation of “Little Red Riding Hood” – “watch out for wolves, or they’ll eat you” – would doubtless have also been clear and sound advice when the tale was first being told.

So, girls and young women must fear “the wolves” in all their fairy and folk tale guises, lest they lose themselves one way or another to these beasts. What then do boys and young men have to fear? Witches. Witches and fairies.

 

The Queen O’ Fairies She Caught Me

“Tam Lin” is Child Ballad #39 and is possibly one of the best known with musical versions having been recorded by many bands and artists, especially during the 1970s heyday of folk rock. The narrative runs like this: Tam Lin is said to be an elvish spirit known to inhabit woods of Carterhaugh near the confluence of the Yarrow Water and the Ettrick Water in the Scottish Borders. All young maidens are warned not to venture into the wood because if they do Tam Lin will take their virginity. A maiden called Janet ignores these warnings and goes into the wood dressed in green. Sure enough Tam Lin appears, Janet’s maidenhood is lost, and she falls pregnant pretty much instantly. Nine months later she returns to the wood to seek out Tam Lin once more. He tells her that he is not an elf at all but a mortal man who has fallen under the spell of the Queen of the Fairies.

And pleasant is the fairy land,
But, an eerie tale to tell,
Ay at the end of seven years,
We pay a tiend to hell,
I am sae fair and fu o flesh,
I’m feard it be mysel.

The “tiend” (“tithe”) must be paid by Faerie to Hell (two otherworldly realms which, evidently, share boarders) every seven years. The idea mortals who have strayed into Fairie are used as currency in these matters is also mentioned in the 15th century romance of Thomas the Rhymer. Tam Lin says that that very night, which just happens to be Halloween, he must take part in the Fairy Rade (Ride) – a procession through the skies which will end in the Faerie realm. He asks Janet to save him from his fate by pulling him from his horse – a milk white mare, among all the other brown and black horses of the fae – at midnight. He will be transformed into all manner of creatures in her arms in an effort to make her let go, but she must hold fast until he is turned into a burning coal/red hot piece of iron. At this point Janet must throw Tam Lin into a well where the water will cool him and return him to his human form. All this goes just as Tam Lin said and Janet covers the naked knight with a green mantle, hiding him from the view of the angry Fairy Queen who curses her for taking her bonniest knight. There is nothing in the ballad beyond the line quoted above to suggest that Tam Lin was actually in danger or being handed over to Hell, and the reaction of the Queen does nothing to suggest that this was her plan.

“But had I kend, Tam Lin,” said she,
“What now this night I see,
I wad hae taen out thy twa grey een,
And put in twa een o tree.”

Literally “Had I known what I know now this night, I’d have torn your eyes out”. Is this the same Queen of the Fae who freed the young man from the witch Alison Gross’ enchantment? No longer the benevolent deliverer here but instead the jealous lover. Does this mean that Tam Lin was lying? Has he merely used Janet as a means to escape his relationship with the Fairy Queen. He describes himself (to Janet) as Janet’s true love, and the father of her bairn, but there’s no mention of all the other maidens he deflowered in the wood previously, nor any explanation as to why that was going on if it wasn’t part the fairy enchantment (which there seems to be no evidence of).

What’s the moral here? And what is the moral of “Alison Gross”, and of “Mother of Toads”? I think it is all about entanglement. Girls and young women are being warned that men are worse than wild beasts, apt to do or say anything to get what they want (which is pretty much just sex). Boys and young men however, are being warned to take care who they sleep with, lest they become entangled with the “wrong sort of woman”. What is the unifying factor between Alison Gross, Mere Antoinette, and the Queen of the Fae? They are, like Lilith before them, powerful women – infinitely more powerful than the men they lust after – and all are incredibly dangerous to cross. The apothecary’s assistant is killed outright for his rejection of Mere Antoinette, and both Tam Lin and the narrator of “Alison Gross” find themselves bound to/by these magical women. Also note that when Tam Lin and the narrator of “Alison Gross” are freed from their magical bondage it is another woman who does so. The literal “other woman”.

All Witchcraft Comes from Carnal Lust, which is in Women Insatiable

[According to the old proverbs t]here are three things that are never satisfied, yea, a fourth thing which says not, It is enough; that is, the mouth of the womb. Wherefore for the sake of fulfilling their lusts they consort even with devils. More such reasons could be brought forward, but to the understanding it is sufficiently clear that it is no matter for wonder that there are more women than men found infected with the heresy of witchcraft. And in consequence of this, it is better called the heresy of witches than of wizards, since the name is taken from the more powerful party. And blessed be the Highest Who has so far preserved the male sex from so great a crime: for since He was willing to be born and to suffer for us, therefore He has granted to men the privilege.

This is a passage taken from Part I, Question VI from the 1487 text Malleus Maleficarum (“Hammer of Witches“) written by the Catholic clergyman Heinrich Kramer. The book became a manual for the persecution of alleged witches, elevating witchcraft to the same criminal status as heresy and prescribing inquisition and torture to extract confessions from those accused. Under the sub-heading “What sort of Women are found to be above all Others Superstitious and Witches“, in the same section we get the following words from Kramer:

[W]hat sort of women more than others are found to be superstitious and infected with witchcraft; it must be said, as was shown in the preceding inquiry, that three general vices appear to have special dominion over wicked women, namely, infidelity, ambition, and lust. Therefore they are more than others inclined towards witchcraft, who more than others are given to these vices.

Lust. Well, as the good clergyman has already explained, they can hardly be blamed for that given that the “mouth of the womb” is never satisfied. Women, the view of the moment seems to have been, were inherently lustful creatures, and it doesn’t take a genius to work out that this notion almost certainly stems from the fact that women have multiple orgasms. “Thank the Lord Almighty that men only do it once and then turn over and fall asleep“, to paraphrase (though barely) Heinrich Kramer himself.

At the time Malleus Maleficarum was penned, those Europeans fortunate enough to survive infancy, and childhood, stood a decent chance of living into their fifties, perhaps even their sixties. The idea that women reach their sexual peak around thirty-five is a long established (yet admittedly now somewhat contentious) one in the 21st century, while the average age of menopause was given by Aristotle in the mid 3rd century BCE as forty (and today menopause before forty is considered medically “early”, post fifty-five “late”). According to The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, which collects data pertaining to three-hundred and five witch-trials which took place between 1590 and 1662 (representing roughly ten percent of the total in Scotland during that period) 85% of those accused were women, and of those 75% were between the ages of thirty and sixty. Malleus Maleficarum was still very much the witch-hunter’s bible at the time of these Scottish trials, and in terms of the gender and ages of the accused, the survey offers a fascinating window on the bigger picture of the European witch-trials (although there were, admittedly, exceptions such as Iceland and Finland where male witches outnumbered female). Witches – or at least the women they called witches – who were tried, tortured and murdered across Europe between the 15th and 17th centuries, were largely “older” women; women in the third phase of their life. No longer maidens, mothers since their teenage years, and now en route to being crones. They were women with enough life experience to know what they wanted; what they liked and disliked, what they would and would not stand for. Perhaps that goes some way towards explaining why Kramer listed infidelity as the first of the three principle vices which led a woman to witchcraft. On the other hand perhaps infidelity (or suspected infidelity) merely led to accusations of witchery, or equally that accusations of such helped to bolster the charge of witchcraft.

Ambition. This seems the most telling of the supposed vices, doesn’t it? Women who want more, who dream of bigger and better things, and set themselves goals to obtain such.

Wise Women and Foolish Men

What I have put together here is by no means an original thread, of course. Tens of thousands of people have written on this subject more eloquently and thoroughly than me. Yet, what I find fascinating is how clear and simple it all is; how easy it is to draw a straight line from a seemingly daft and harmless old folk ballad about an ugly old witch who wants a kiss, back to through the time when witches were ducked and drowned in lakes, all the way back to Biblical creation and womankind’s supposed beginnings. But the line doesn’t stop in 1860 with the Child Ballads, not in 1932 with Clark Ashton Smith’s adult fairy tale, nor in 1973 with Steeleye Span, the line extends into the present, and on into the future.

Witches have always been women who dared to be: groovy, courageous, aggressive, intelligent, nonconformist, explorative, curious, independent, sexually liberated, revolutionary. (This possibly explains why nine million of them have been burned.) Witches were the first Friendly Heads and Dealers, the first birth-control practitioners and abortionists, the first alchemists (turn dross into gold and you devalue the whole idea of money!). They bowed to no man, being the living remnants of the oldest culture of all—one in which men and women were equal sharers in a truly cooperative society, before the death-dealing sexual, economic, and spiritual repression of the Imperialist Phallic Society took over and began to destroy nature and human society.

This is the opening paragraph from the W.I.T.C.H. manifesto, as written and published in 1968. W.I.T.C.H. – Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell – was the name of several related but independent feminist groups active in the American 60s women’s liberation movement, the first of which formed in New York. On Halloween 1968 members of New York W.I.T.C.H. marched on Wall Street, dressed all in black with pointed hats and capes, and placed a “hex” on the financial district. While W.I.T.C.H. did use the language and iconography of actual witchcraft, they often did so playfully and ironically; they were a political group first and foremost. The image of the witch, the idea that women wielded powers men did and could not, the chanting of “Nine Million Women, Burned as Witches” (a figure first put forward by the first-wave American feminist Matilda Joslyn Gage a hundred years earlier), the naming of their groups as covens, and allusions to Dr. Margaret Murray’s Witch-Cult hypothesis in their literature all added to W.I.T.C.H.’s dangerous and edgy image. Unquestionably W.I.T.C.H. forged a key connection between feminism and modern witchcraft for many, and the organisation is often seen as a precursor Dianic Wicca – the feminist oriented branch of neopaganism which originated in the USA in the 1970s.

In November 2016 in Portland, Oregon, USA, Witches International Troublemaker Conspiracy from Hell were officially formed. This new branch of W.I.T.C.H. takes its inspiration from their 60s acronym-sakes but this is very much a 21st century version of what has gone before with their own manifesto.

For centuries, the dominant culture has persecuted anyone who dares to be different. The gentle healers, the midwives, the queers, the loners, the wise elders, the pagans, the foreigners, the wild women. Dissent is threatening to the status quo, especially when it’s shrouded in unfamiliar customs and the mysterious sacred feminine. Those who seek to oppress and suppress us have always called us ‘witches’ to silence us. now, we step out of the shadows, embracing this word and all it stands for.

A witch is a fearsome creature, inspiring terror and awe, channelling a primal, visceral energy in the name of peace, progress, justice and harmony. A witch is a conduit for transformation. A witch taps into the power within and harnesses the power without in service of a better world.

A single witch is a dangerous outlier. A coven is a force to be reckoned with. An international circle of witches is unstoppable.

The new W.I.T.C.H. are anonymous; they wear black hoods which cover their faces, dress in long black robes, and wear pointed hats, taking the uniform of the black bloc protestor to an occult extreme. They use social media to spread their message and, like their fore-mothers, encourage others to form their own covens and join them in their cause.

In this age of Pussy Grabbing Presidents, Men’s Right’s Activists, Dick Pic DMers, “Alt-Right” Neo-Nazis, and rape threatening internet trolls, W.I.T.C.H. are the “wrong sort of women”. Indeed, to use President Trump’s own term, they are “Nasty Women”. Every insult and accusation that was ever levelled at Lilith, Alison Gross, and Mere Antoinette has and will be directed tenfold against them: they are ugly, desperate, pathetic, man-hating, they are hags, crones, witches. The absolute fear of those who level those accusations is if anything more obvious than ever before. These are strong women, women who know what they want, and who are prepared to take whatever steps are necessary to get it. They look imposing and deliberately so; this is the macho, fascist Fight Club mentality gender-flipped:

We are everywhere. We are your sisters, your neighbors, your teachers, your bartenders, your mechanics, your check-out clerks, your drivers and your nurses.

On February the 24th 2017, rituals “To Bind Donald Trump and All Those Who Abet Him” took place across the America at the stroke of midnight. These spells are now performed at the same hour on every waning crescent moon, and will be until Trump is removed from office. Everyone is invited to take part (there’s even a Facebook page www.facebook.com/bindtrump). Some compared the initial event to the 1967 exorcism and levitation of the Pentagon (an absurdist ritual/happening led by the countercultural Yippies), but to me it seemed to have more in common with the Bricket Wood Coven “Cone of Power” ritual of Lammas Eve 1940, enacted to protect the shores of England from Nazi invasion. President Trump is, as we all know, very fond of banding the phrase “witch-hunt” around, but in truth it is the witches themselves doing the hunting. To quote Kramer “[I]t is better called the heresy of witches than of wizards, since the name is taken from the more powerful party”. Welcome to the new era of the witch.

References

The original draft of this piece was first published on John Reppion’s Patreon page in February, 2017.

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