Words and Worlds

by Alison Lurie

  The “myth of the Burning Times,” Purkiss concludes, “is not politically helpful” because it portrays women as helpless victims, both in the past and in the present. This may be so in the long run, but it is also true that almost all political and religious myths, not excepting the one that is most popular in Europe and America today, include many stories of saints and martyrs who have died for a cause.

  Diane Purkiss is also critical of the feminist myth of early European—and also contemporary—witches as midwives, herbalists, and healers, “gentle, maternal, close to the earth.” She rejects this myth first because it is too “close to the conservative and even reactionary ‘Heritage’ culture of thatched cottages, country churches, and spinsters on bicycles.” It is anti-urban and patriarchal, forcing women into traditional, relatively powerless roles. (It also clearly excludes the successful lawyer, doctor, or college lecturer who lives in a high-rise flat and is too busy writing books like The Witch in History to cook or garden. The end result is “to reify associations between women and the primitive, the uncivilized, the instinctual.” In some cases this may be true, but there are many feminists who believe that women have always been the more civilized sex—reading books and playing musical instruments and embroidering tapestries while the men in the family were away fighting stupid wars.

  Diane Purkiss’s analysis of the contemporary witchcraft movement, like her analysis of their myths, though generally critical, is occasionally and almost reluctantly admiring. She points out that witchcraft is not a thing of the past, but exists here and there in modern England and America in many different forms. Purkiss does not attempt to classify these forms, but Shelley Rabinovitch, in her contribution to James R. Lewis’s Magical Religion and Modern Witchcraft, has done so most capably. Rabinovitch distinguishes three main types: Religionist, Goddess Celebrants, and Ecopagans, though she notes that many individual groups combine aspects of more than one type.

  American and British “religionist witches” usually describe themselves as Wiccans: they are often “concerned with legitimization of their belief systems as a bona fide religion.” They are the most hierarchical of the three groups, and the most dependent on ritual objects and ceremonies, such as the burning of incense and the consecration of the elements of water and salt; they focus on what Rabinovitch calls “power-over.” Members of these groups tend to come from the ceremonial branches of Christian and other faiths. Religionist groups often include men, and the leaders of many are men—as in some I have visited in England and Ireland. Today, Wicca is recognized as a legitimate faith in parts of America; the State Prison in Auburn, New York, for instance, allows a Wiccan priestess equipped with a ceremonial broom to meet with inmates regularly for ceremonies.

  God/dess Celebrants, Rabinovitch says, are extremely eclectic: they include Radical Faeries (all-male), radical feminists (all-female), and Dianic (coed, but mainly female) groups. They tend to be more loosely organized, lack formalized leadership, and favor poetic do-it-yourself rituals. Their main goal is “to free the participants, and through them society at large, from patriarchal restraints and assumptions.” They focus on what Rabinovitch calls “power-from-within” and may also practice alone, like Shirley Jackson.

  Ecopagans, though they may worship a god/goddess and celebrate the usual pagan holidays (the four solstices, May Day, Beltane, Halloween, etc.), are seriously concerned with social and environmental issues. Rabinovitch speaks of them as focusing on “power-with,” and they often cooperate with organizations like Greenpeace, the Quakers, and animal rights activists. Tompkins County, New York, where I live, contains at least two such assemblies.

  It is clear that for Diane Purkiss only Ecopagan witches are really admirable, and even they could improve. She praises the groups who took part in the antinuclear protests at Greenham Common, helped to halt road building projects through ancient forests, and challenged English laws against New Age travelers—laws which she sees as designed to keep “the undeserving poor” in the cities, leaving the countryside as a refuge for the upper and middle classes. But she also complains that “witches emerge only rarely from Pagan activities to make common cause with other women” in campaigns for equal pay or reproductive rights. In my experience this is not always so: often witches working on such issues deliberately conceal their identity so as not to compromise the campaign and cause bad publicity. At a rally for Planned Parenthood not long ago, I noticed several women in jeans and T-shirts whom I had last seen at a Winter Solstice rite in robes decorated with astrological symbols.

  Some of Diane Purkiss’s charges against modern witchcraft suggest a Marxist viewpoint. Witches, she says, do not recognize how deeply they are involved in “capitalism and consumerism.” They buy unnecessarily expensive equipment for Wiccan rites, which is manufactured and sold through catalogs that list, among other items, “genuine black heavy cast-iron traditional three-legged cauldrons,” when in fact one’s own largest well-used cooking pot would probably be at least as powerful. Moreover, many of their magic spells are “actually narcissistic rites of self-contemplation.” Rituals are valued as bringing psychic health; the emphasis is on changing oneself rather than altering the world, and “the self constructed is the familiar self of late capitalism.”

  In spite of her many criticisms, Diane Purkiss ends her survey of contemporary witchcraft and its myths with the suggestion that feminist historians might learn something from modern witches, and a self-critical and rather odd postmodern vision of what might be the consequences:

  A feminist history which sought to draw on the strengths of this movement rather than simply pointing to its weaknesses might be exciting… . It might be speculative, unreliable, often wrong, sometimes ridiculous, politically very useful, … and absolutely scandalous in the academy.

  The remainder of The Witch in History is less speculative. Purkiss suggests that in any era, historians define witches as “the Other.” Whatever a witch is, the historian is not. Witches are poor, uneducated, and female; the historian is well-off, well-educated, and male. Witches are credulous, prejudiced, and primitive; the historian is skeptical, open-minded, and civilized. It is quite true that this formulation works for Robin Briggs—but, except for her gender, it seems equally to apply to Diane Purkiss.

  More interestingly, Purkiss suggests that women in early modern Europe also saw the witch as “the Other.” The witch was “a kind of anti-housewife,” who destroyed and blighted rather than created and nourished, and wished ill rather than good to her family. A good housewife was skilled in what can seem a sort of white magic; she turned milk into butter, wool into yarn and cloth, inedible animal and vegetable matter into tasty and nourishing meals, and squalling infants into well-behaved, hardworking children. This was the front on which the witch attacked, and her black magic was blamed when butter did not come, yarn tangled, milk went sour, and babies and children sickened and died. Purkiss suggests that the witch “acts as a metaphor for the experience of watching a child’s illness and being able to do nothing as it suffers, an agonizingly common experience for early modern families.”

  Occasionally Purkiss, like Briggs, proposes that the psychological mechanism of projection was at work in some witchcraft cases: that the witch was accused of doing what the mother unconsciously wanted to do in moments of exasperation. This seems possible; after all, what housewife hasn’t sometimes wanted to set a burnt supper before a grumpy husband? She also remarks that “stories of child bewitchment express and manage mothers’ fears that their children will not love them or will reject them” and “reveal deeper fears of children themselves… .” In early modern Europe, children who behaved very badly could be said to be bewitched or possessed, thus relieving their parents of guilt—a ploy that has also been used occasionally by fundamentalists in contemporary America.

  Purkiss suggests that the witch also disrupted the boundaries between the home and the world, entering her neighbor’s house when not inv
ited, refusing to return borrowed tools, and sometimes leaving unwanted and dangerous objects like knives and hammers in magically dangerous places, such as “near the threshold or in bedstraw.” At other times, the witch was seen as wanting to invade the home and take over the role of the victim as housewife or mother.

  Though the witch trials ended in the early eighteenth century, Purkiss says, faith in the existence of witches did not. “Nineteenth- and twentieth-century folklorists record numerous stories and beliefs … which exactly parallel the tropes, narratives, and ideas” found in the classic trial depositions. This remains true: not so long ago I heard a friend who was seriously ill ask that a certain acquaintance not be admitted to her house. “I always feel worse after she’s been here,” my friend said, only partly joking, “and I think those wheat-germ cookies she brought last time made me sick. I’m sure she’s a witch, really.”

  Like my friend, Diane Purkiss seems at times to believe in the supernatural. She criticizes Reginald Scot’s famous skeptical treatise, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, saying that it “begins the long process of recuperating women’s supernatural power as hysteria and madness,” though she adds in a footnote that Scot also explained witchcraft as everyday trickery. For Scot, real witchcraft was impossible because God would not allow it; he could not possibly “be made obedient and servile to obey and perform the will and commandment of a malicious old witch.” But in Purkiss’s opinion, even modern analyses of witch stories have a fatal drawback: “They cannot admit the possibility that the supernatural might actually exist.”

  Like many poststructuralist writers, Diane Purkiss is much involved with ideas about what is called “the body.” Somewhat confusingly she proposes that the witch (who, for her, is always female) represents “a very specific fantasy about the female body… . [She] is a fantasy-image of the huge, controlling, scattered, polluted, leaky … maternal body of the Imaginary.” This female body, even if formless and shapeless, may be (as others have suggested) a metaphor for the house. One familiar example of this equivalence is the magic house made of bread or gingerbread in “Hansel and Gretel,” which according to Purkiss, “embodies and represents” the witch’s magical power. Like many other commentators, she remarks that the witch is the bad mother who wishes to eat children rather than feed them. In modern versions, she points out, the house is often made of candy and cake instead of bread, and the lost children are no longer eating from need, but gorge themselves on food which would normally be rationed by caring parents… . The witch becomes the modern idea of a “bad mother,” a greedy consumer who sacrifices children to her own needs and fails to discipline their oral cravings so that they become as monstrously greedy as she is.

  Purkiss also discusses the witch’s familiar, which she sees as a kind of demon child, suckled by the witch with blood rather than milk. As she says, this identification made sense in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when breastfeeding was more dangerous than it is today, not only because of the possibility of infections but because if a woman’s diet was poor, feeding a child could weaken her seriously. (Even today many nursing mothers develop cavities if they don’t get enough calcium—as I and several of my friends did.) Some familiars were affectionate and helpful; others were difficult or unreliable. “Joan Upney’s familiars proved … unsatisfactory: her mole pined away and died, and her replacement toads kept abandoning her for other people”—exactly like real children, who tend to marry and move away.

  Purkiss, like Robin Briggs, notes that the identity of witch was usually imposed from without rather than chosen, and most people refused it at first. Even after legal accusation arid torture, many died protesting their innocence. A few, however, accepted the role of witch sooner, sometimes even without being accused. Apart from the danger of a trial, this role had certain advantages. Claiming to be a witch or a cunning woman could change your social status and give you the sort of power few poor peasants had. The same process of choice can be observed in nineteenth-century spiritualist circles, where lower-middle-class women who successfully claimed to communicate with the spirit world could not only evade the Victorian rules for proper self-effacing, homebound female behavior, but might achieve unexpected fame and fortune, as Verena Tarrant does—though only for a while—in Henry James’s The Bostonians.

  PEOPLE

  Archie’s Gifts

  A. R. Ammons, known to most people who ever met him as Archie, was an apparently simple, but in fact complicated and sometimes difficult, person and poet. He could be friendly and interested in people, especially his students; he could also be cool, detached, and at times unfriendly and uninterested in anyone. To hear him talk about writers whose work he liked was often exciting and even inspiring; but he could be cruel and dismissive of those he did not admire. He could be generous, again especially to his students, but he could also on occasion be resentful and even vengeful, refusing to allow certain poets to be invited to teach or even read at Cornell. But we do not ask that a great writer should be a consistently good man; that is not why we value him.

  The outward simplicity and modesty of Archie’s verse disguised both great ambition and an ambitious and complex seriousness. Even his earliest poems celebrated the minute and glorious details of the natural world, and also, incidentally, his own gifts of patient observation and dazzling representation. In “Bees Stopped,” for instance, he calls attention to some of the small things that “people never see” but that the poet himself looks at closely enough to rejoice in:

  Bees stopped on the rock

  and rubbed their headparts and wings

  rested then flew on:

  ants ran over the whitish greenish reddish

  plants that grow flat on rocks

  and people never see

  because nothing should grow on rocks:

  I looked out over the lake

  and beyond to the hills and trees

  and nothing was moving

  so I looked closely along the lakeside

  under the old leaves of rushes

  and around clumps of dry grass

  and life was everywhere

  so I went on sometimes whistling

  Many readers of this poem, the next time they were outdoors, will have looked more carefully at the life that is everywhere around them, and really seen (perhaps for the first time) bees resting and rubbing their wings, and the plants that grow flat on rocks—I know I did. And then, like Archie, they went on whistling—and by implication, rejoicing.

  Even Archie’s shortest poems often contain significant messages, in astonishingly condensed form.

  The reeds give

  way to the

  the wind and give

  the wind away

  Here he reminds us to look carefully at how reeds move before a wind, and how by this movement they reveal the invisible presence of the wind. But, as most readers know, in classical mythology it was reeds out of which Pan made his pipes, the traditional instrument of the poet. The reeds in this poem “give way to the wind”—that is, they are weaker than it is. But they can also reveal its presence, and they can give it a voice.

  Moreover, the very existence of this brief verse reminds us that Archie, though now, alas, invisible to all who loved and admired him—is still present. His poems, in yet another sense of the phrase “give away,” are his gift of himself to us.

  Barbara Epstein

  The day we met, Barbara Zimmerman, as she was then, was sitting in the Radcliffe College cafeteria in Agassiz Hall with a cup of black coffee. She was also chain smoking, as she was to do, fatally, for the rest of her life. She was slight and pale and pretty, with soft brown untidy hair and a sudden wide bright smile. Her black turtleneck jersey and stack of books not on any assigned list instantly marked her out as what would presently be called a beatnik. Almost at once I was amazed by her low-key but scarily observant comments on these books, and on some o
f the other girls sitting nearby, with their tight perms and twinsets, matching lipstick and nail polish, and matching minds. She was a freshman, only sixteen years old, and her nickname at the time was Bubsey, so how did she know so much? It was a question many people were to ask over the next sixty years.

  Barbara’s quiet, often almost invisible brilliance was all the more striking because she had started life with real disadvantages. She had a scholarship to Radcliffe, but she could not afford to stay in a dorm; instead she commuted to college from her parents’ small row house in Brighton. Barbara also been born without a left hand, and she once told me that her parents thought at first that they would have to put her in an institution. After she turned out to be extremely intelligent, their highest hope was that she might become a teacher of other disabled children. All her life, her way of dealing with her disability was to act as if it did not exist, and everyone who knew and admired her followed her lead. They opened doors for her and carried bags of groceries or books, without saying anything or asking if they could help. I also had been a damaged child, and we once agreed that our problems were not, as some people seemed to assume, a melodramatic tragedy, but “just a great big lifelong drag.”

  After graduating from Radcliffe with honors, Barbara moved to New York, just as I and many of our friends did. But opportunities for young women who couldn’t type or file and had no family connections were rare. It took her nearly a year to find a full-time job, and only unusual courage and determination kept her looking. This courage was visible again at the end of her life when, exhausted, and knowing how ill she was, she continued working until two weeks before her death and came to the American Academy to accept a lifetime award for Service to the Arts (shared with Robert Silvers).