All of Them Witches

Charlotte

Deborah

Suzanne

Deidre

Samantha

Rowan

Man: She's different from the others.

Narrator: Double, double toil and trouble,

fire burn and cauldron bubble,

filet of a fenny snake, in the cauldron boil and bake.

Where did you learn about witches?

Are you a good witch or a bad witch?

Who me?

I'm not a witch at all.

Well, is that the witch?

Witch.

Tell me, what do you do with witches?

All: Burn them!

Narrator: Witches have been known to put fear

in the hearts of men.

I'm not here to frighten you.

...and devour little children.

Witches of England... you're a disgrace!

We kill our husbands, too.

Where did you all come up with these ideas?

Lisa: If they're really witches,

why don't they use their powers to escape?

That sounds like witch talk to me.

I kept trying to tell you.

Narrator: The story is a lot more complicated.

Witches aren't real, you guys.

Occulus reparo.

Let me hear you scream like a witch.

Narrator: We're real, and we walk among you.

There's a pretty big spectrum of what a witch can be.

Wife, queen, daughter, mistress.

Grossman: She can be young and sexy,

but then she will seduce you to sin.

Dorsey: You've got this image of the witch as the crone,

wrinkly face.

Rose: I don't have to have a witch's hat.

You know, I do have cauldrons. I have many of them.

Yates Garcia: I do my daily things.

I clean up after my cats. I hate washing the dishes.

Rose: I have to drop my kids off at school in the morning

and I, like, attend parent-teacher meetings.

I'm part of my community in all these different ways.

This is me.

Yates Garcia: A witch is someone who stands on her own

and who's powerful.

Who wouldn't want to be one?

Dorsey: People respond to it with a joke or, you know,

"I know another word that rhymes with witch,

but it begins with a 'B.'"

Luna: "Are you gonna put a spell on me?"

Or, "Are you gonna hex me if we break up?"

And it's like, "Maybe."

Velasquez: Am I at home lighting candles and burning stuff

so my crush will fall in love with me?

100.

Grossman: Witches represent both our fears

and our fantasies about feminine power.

Anybody that deviates from this perfect,

maternal, beatific, obedient woman

can be reframed as a winch.

Narrator: Our journey has been long,

and the truth will surprise you.

I was brought up practicing witchcraft.

My mother is a witch.

She was resisting very patriarchal culture and society

in the '50s.

She was finding her power more and more when I was young,

and so I was very influenced by that.

When I was 13 or, I think, the first menstruation,

I had a coming-of-age ceremony

where all the women from the coven came together,

and it was called the Rite of Roses.

A coven is just a group of friends

who practice witchcraft together.

We sit in a circle and say,

all the women in your family line

back as far as you can remember.

I am Amanda, daughter of Lucinda,

daughter of Patricia,

daughter of Lila, daughter of Mariana.

And then say, "Daughter of she,"

meaning going back to the beginning of time.

You dip the rose in the water,

and your mother brushes it on your cheeks,

and then you take a walk in the moonlight and do some chanting.

It's really about coming into your power,

your beauty, your authority, your eroticism,

and connecting with the other women of your community.

Narrator: The pentacle may not be what you think.

It represents harmony with the elements,

a sign of magic and paganism.

Ward: Witchcraft is a form of paganism,

and paganism, basically, in its very ancient origins

had two particular aspects, or forms, of worship.

One is nature and the other is the divine feminine.

Grossman: Paganism essentially says

we all have access to divinity

and that we don't need a mediator.

It doesn't have one central text

or one church or temple that you have to join.

We can just communicate with the spirit world ourselves

because the spirit world is everywhere.

For most witches, we relate to the gods,

the goddesses, the divine, more like forces of nature.

There are so many goddesses in witchcraft --

Medea, Circe,

Melusina, Pythia,

and then you have Hecate, who is a goddess

that has taken many different forms

in many different cultures -- a goddess of childbirth,

a protector of women, goddess of the moon.

One of the reasons why witches of today love her

is because she's a goddess of magic.

She finds power in the shadows.

Even in the dark, she lights the way.

Her symbol is the key.

She is the guardian of the threshold,

the liminal spaces between the worlds.

Grossman: The figure of the witch in literature

and in oral stories

was derived from goddesses and fairies

and all of these other mythological beings

who had immense power and who were feminine

and who were lauded just as much as the male

or more masculine gods and figures, too.

But as politics evolved, as, frankly,

men gained more and more power in society

and in culture-making overall,

these goddesses, these fairies, these priestesses

seem to lose status in their society.

Yates Garcia: When the Holy Roman empire took over

and Christianity started to dominate all of Europe,

Hecate was turned into a demon,

a demonic figure, a goddess of hell.

She was turned into a hag, a crone, an old woman,

as if that's the worst thing that could happen to you,

as if that in itself is horrifying.

Ward: Witchcraft for most of human history

has been antithetical to Christianity,

often seen as allied to some kind of demonic power,

and so the church hierarchy saw it as a threat

to their position and power.

Grossman: The church popularized the notion

that anybody who was not Christian

was going to hell,

that you were on the path of sin,

that you were diabolical,

and, yes, that can be people who we might consider to be pagan.

It's Jewish people, it's Indigenous people,

it's people who are practicing the religions of Africa.

It's anybody that has not been converted yet.

The other piece of the witch's story is around medicine

and specifically around reproductive care.

Yates Garcia: Giving birth, you had midwives --

this group of women who learned

about plants and medicine and healing,

from the common cold to a heartbreak.

Narrator: Europe sees a new age in medical science

from the 1400s to the 1700s,

but only men are allowed into their universities.

Midwives are eyed with mistrust,

and we are about to be hunted.

Grossman: In ancient Greece and ancient Rome,

there were also always figures, often women,

who you would go to and you could procure

some kind of herbal or botanical magic from them,

and this is what I consider to be a service magician.

These people sometimes were respected,

sometimes were considered a bit dangerous,

but it's kind of the precursor to chemistry,

to the field of medicine.

Yates Garcia: The word witch means person of knowledge,

means wise one,

but then over time, that word transformed

into something that was an insult.

Grossman: At the end of the 15th century,

we see the advent of the printing press,

and one of the most popular things

for these presses to print

are what we call witch-hunting manuals.

One of the most famous books that comes out is called

the "Malleus Maleficarum," or the "Witches Hammer."

This book is written by Jacob Sprenger

and a religious zealot named Heinrich Kramer.

Kramer is involved in a witch trial,

which he loses against a group of women.

And he then writes this book,

the "Hammer of Witches."

Narrator: The "Malleus Maleficarum"

weaponizes the printed manuscript against witches...

...and therefore against women.

You're promiscuous and that's evil,

and you're wicked, so you're a witch.