This essay first appeared in Enchanted Living Magazine's Vintage Witch issue in autumn 2022. The ladies addressed include Anne Boleyn, La Voisin, Tituba, Marie Laveau, and the Bell Witch.

 

You can read it on the EL website in two parts,

here (part 1) and here (part 2).​

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When I was in high school, I had pointy features and big teeth and black vintage clothes. I read research books for fun, and some of them were about witchcraft.

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I was not popular. My classmates hummed the theme music for the Wicked Witch of the West as I walked past. They mumbled nasty words in the halls. And one day when I was riding my bike through a new neighborhood, somebody sent a small blond-haired boy out to the front yard to yell “Witch! Witch!” so loudly that his little feet levitated off the porch slab.

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I was startled—and proud. Somehow, in that moment, I knew I would survive the teen years.

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Call a woman a witch these days and you’re giving her a compliment. A witch is in touch with something that defies categories; she sees possibilities that others do not. She has powers. She’s rarely malevolent—in fact, she may be a perfectly nice person. She may be you.

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We need witches. From time to time they have been banished, but history still seeks them out. The Biblical king Saul, for example, once found himself in a pickle, needing his God’s advice about fighting the Philistines. In desperation, he sought out the elusive Witch of Endor—who was worried about using her powers after Saul himself had outlawed all witchcraft. But with his special permission, she raised the spirit of the dead prophet Samuel, who gave Saul some good news (he would trounce the Philistines) and bad (Saul had offended God by getting help from a witch, and now he was doomed). A classic double bind: Saul won the battle but died the next day.

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People have always gone to witches when they needed help, condemned witches when things didn’t go their way. In the Middle Ages, the same woman who delivered your child without pain or gave you a love charm could be the one you blamed for blight among your cows the next month, with unhappy results for the witch. Anyone considered especially ugly or beautiful or smart or good with herbs or just unusual was at risk.

 

The accusation that stuck was usually that the witch used her supernatural powers to hurt other people. The real problem was usually uneasiness over the fact that this “different” person was actually managing to survive, possibly even thrive. “Well,” I imagine the zealots huffing, “if she doesn’t need us, we’ll prove we don’t need her.” And poof! She was a witch.

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There is power in endurance. Accused witches linger around us in history books and folklore that preserves their legends. They are our teachers—and our cautionary tales.

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If I am a witch (I admit nothing yet), I am in mostly good company. Some of history’s accused—and occasionally convicted—witches are my heroines. They were creative, resourceful, independent, and even kind in times when those qualities were not greatly encouraged.

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Enchantresses, I’m looking at you. Let’s invite a few of the accused to meet us at the corner of Tudor and Tennessee and reveal the powers that brought them both high and low. We might even start something … Let’s call it, for now, a club.

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Anne Boleyn

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The Tudors continued the medieval tradition of fingering inconvenient women as witches. And nobody found ladies more inconvenient (after having first of all found them alluring) than Henry VIII.

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We know that Anne was a temptress, using the king’s lust to win favor and power for herself and her ambitious family. Was that so wrong? When he spotted the twenty-five-year-old beauty among his first wife’s ladies in 1526, Henry was twenty years older than she was, and he was famous for using and discarding women. He’d done it with her older sister, so he must have thought this would be another wham-bam-thank-you-with-a-castle situation. But Anne was ambitious too. She wanteda crown just as much as her family wanted it for her. Why shouldn’t she set herself a challenge?

 

There was nothing Anne could not make into an asset. Some accounts say she had an extra pinky finger on one hand or the other, plus a large mole on her neck, which is why she made the wearing of very long sleeves and neck ruffs fashionable. Because extra fingers and large moles could be signs of—you got it, witchcraft. Strategically, Anne flirted—but she made Henry wait. In fact, she drove him so mad with longing that in order to win her, he divorced his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, and founded a new religion with himself at its head. The Church of England disbanded England’s abbeys and took the wealth to itself and its king; now fabulously rich, Henry officially married Anne in January 1533 and went on his way rejoicing.

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For a few months, anyway. In September, Anne gave birth to their daughter, the future Queen Elizabeth I. Henry was not amused. Seven years into the relationship, a big part of Anne’s charm had been the promise of a son … Well, he could still hope.

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Three miscarriages later, though, Henry was tired of waiting and tired of Anne; he was ready to elevate his new lady love, Jane Seymour. But he could not start a new religion every time he wanted to be rid of a wife, and even under the C of E, he had to give a good reason.

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When Henry divorced Catherine, he’d said that the marriage displeased God because she’d been married to his brother before him. With Anne, he varied the theme and claimed that she’d lain with her own brother and other men, which meant that she’d committed treason by cheating on the king. For good measure, he also fell back on an old strategy: That’s right, call the woman a witch. She must have been one to enchant him so deeply—it was sortilege, or spell casting, that had done him in. Plus which, the brother. Now, that was nasty.

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Anne was arrested, and so were a slew of men who confessed (with or without torture) to having been her lovers and having conspired to kill Henry, and her fate was sealed. When told she was condemned to die, she reportedly encircled her neck with her hands and declared, “I heard say the executioner was very good, and I have a little neck.” She then laughed, causing her jailor to write, “She has much joy in death.”

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Maybe, maybe not. One thing about Anne—while she was alive, she lived.

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Please continue to read on the Enchanted Living website. You will find this piece in two parts, here (part 1) and here (part 2).​