Witches

Saturday morning.  Five o’clock.  Outside thunder rolls through the valley where I live and lightening flickers beyond the draped windows.  A morning meant for staying in bed and letting the weather have its way with the world, but how can I sleep when the storm has filled my thoughts with witches–hags of the Halloween variety; evil queens of the Disney sort; and the witches of Oz, both good and bad.  The climatic light show this morning seems especially suited to the royally wicked stepmother of Snow White.  In Disney’s 1937 animated movie, crashing thunder and flashing lightening power her violent transformation from sorceress to hag.  Later, the raging storm returns to stage-craft her dramatic demise at the end.  The weather was not this woman’s friend.

Time was her enemy as well.  Though unnamed and invisible, time plays no less a part in this story than the huntsman or the prince.  It is time the queen wants to control when she plots to eliminate the competition. How ironic that to accomplish the death of Snow White, she transforms herself into the one thing she is desperately trying to avoid becoming–an old woman.  Reaching into her own past and out of Snow White’s future, the queen takes on the form of a crone and offers the poisoned apple to the princess.  You can almost hear her thinking as the girl bites into the sweet but deadly fruit, I once looked like you.  Live long enough and one day you will look like me.

Can it really be her status of unequaled beauty the stepmother is trying to protect or is it the power that comes with beauty?  Witches are only sometimes about looks, but they are always about power.  A witch may be gorgeous like Glinda.  Or she may have green skin and warts, but what they all have in common is power–over the elements; over their minions; and, most frightening of all, over us.  MGM’s Wicked Witch of the West was unlovely and unloved, but she reveled in the fear she saw on the face of her victims.  No magic mirrors hung on the walls of her castle, but soldiers and winged monkeys waited on her every command.  On the death of her sister, the Witch of the West was all about consolidating power and annexing Munchkinland. 

Macbeth and Banquo encounter three witches.

So what draws us to these practitioners of all things magical?  Why have they haunted literature and the arts since ancient times? Witches and wizards still abound in our movies, television and books.  When we feel helpless, the power of witchcraft appeals to us most.  Being able to solve our problems with the flick of a wand or the twitch of a nose is an enviable skill, until we remember that witches quite often come to a bad end.  The evil queen and the Wicked Witch of the West were both unseated by apparently powerless girls.  But girls with time on their side.  Snow White and Dorothy survive the loss of their familiar lives by facing their futures one moment at a time, one step at a time, until they wake up to new beginnings.  At the end of their respective stories, the princess and the girl from Kansas look on their familiar landscapes with new perspectives.  They are now survivors and survival confers a special kind of power.  Once you have faced a night in the forest, whatever the day brings is never quite so scary again.