Seasons of the Witch
What's so witchy about pumpkins, pentagrams, and pointy hats? With a sidenote re: Satanists. Plus: was Shirley Jackson a witch? AND a witchy writing prompt derived from a story by Sofia Samatar.
Welcome back to The Cauldron, witches! (Zim zam zoom!)
Fall is upon us! The time of year when my home decor passes as “seasonal.” Apples, pumpkins, skulls, spiders, and candy abound. The streets are plastered with dead leaves and the air smells of wood smoke and rot. Soon the most enjoyable of holidays will bring us parties, costumes, and shenanigan. For those who honor Samhain, the new year begins on this night, when the boundary between the living and the dead becomes porous. So let’s have some fun, shall we?
This post explores the origins of certain witchy, Halloween-y iconography, including pumpkins, pentagrams, and pointy hats. (We’ll also learn the difference between the Church of Satan and the Satanic Temple, just for funsies.) And then it’s on to another burning question: was Shirley Jackson, author of “The Lottery” and THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE, a witch? Then we’ll wrap up with a witchy writing prompt derived from a fantastic story by Sofia Samatar.
The Gourds of Gore!
Halloween wouldn’t be complete without pumpkins hacked into ragged expressions with candles stuck in their guts. The jack-o’-lantern itself is a descendant of Stingy Jack, a figure from Irish myth, famous for tricking the devil not once but twice. When Jack died, God wouldn’t let him into heaven, and the Devil wouldn’t have him either. So Jack’s spirit was condemned to wander the earth for all time. To keep his and other wayward souls away on Samhain, when the veil between worlds grows thin, the Irish carved scary faces into turnips. Yes, turnips. And sometimes potatoes or beets. Root vegetables are so versatile!
When Irish immigrants settled in the US, they started using pumpkins instead, which some say are easier to carve. If I attempt a turnip carving, I’ll let you know how it compares…
From there, Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” forever changed the American perception of pumpkins. According to National Geographic, people just couldn’t get that jack-o-lantern-topped villain out of their heads. (Hah hah!)
National Geographic also traces the origins of Halloween costumes back to the practice of evading Samhain spirits: our outfits confuse the spectral, or trick them into thinking you’re just another ghoul on the town. Ghouls Night Out, am I right?
Pentagrams
The pentagram has been in circulation for thousands of years: pentagrams appear on tombs and seals from ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Greece, perhaps as a ward against evil. The pentagram was also a personal symbol for Pythagoras and his disciples.
In medieval Europe, the pentagram became a symbol of knightly virtue. Even Sir Gawain wore a golden pentagram on his shawl and shield. In these times, rather than symbolizing witchcraft, pentagrams served as protection against witches, plus evil spirits and demons.
On the witchy point of the pentagram, some Wiccans view it as a symbol of the Triple Goddess (maiden, mother, and crone) and the Horned God (NOT the devil). Since Wicca has had a huge influence on the development of neopaganism, non-Wiccan pagans may likewise adopt the symbol, often accompanied by crescent moons.
So why all the fuss about the devil? The pentagram is a symbol of the Church of Satan. Note: the Church of Satan (founded in 1966) and The Satanic Temple (founded in 2013) are different organizations, as the latter wearily explains on their website:
Aside from an active Twitter feed, whereon the Church of Satan posts catchy memes and commentary upon popular culture references to Satan, the Church of Satan is otherwise inactive as an organization, arguing that as individualists, it is upon the individual merits and achievements of their membership that their collective reputation should be measured. The Satanic Temple, on the other hand, is very active in public affairs. Unlike the Church of Satan, The Satanic Temple has a physical headquarters in Salem, Massachusetts, holds two virtual Temple services each week, and numerous active congregations throughout the world.
The Church of Satan does not worship a god figure, believing god to be an invention of humankind. The church’s rituals do involve magical practice, however, while the Satanic Temple is non-theistic and politically active. You’ll find temple members counter-protesting anti-abortion activists, for example. Or offering after-school care!
The particular pentagram sacred to the Church of Satan is known as the Baphomet Pentagram. Baphomet is a goat-headed god figure, horned and winged, with both male and female sexual characteristics.
Many neopagans revere Baphomet as an embodiment of binary opposites—”as above, so below.”
Pointy Hats
On Halloween night, hosts of mini witches will take to the streets in pointy hats to demand candy from grownups. But who said witches wear pointy hats? Besides, the original costume of the witch is—gasp!—nothing at all: medieval depictions of witches portray naked figures with flowing hair. You can find echos of the naked witch in contemporary sources, from THE MASTER AND MARGARITA (a wonderfully absurdist novel about Stalinism where the devil runs amuck in Moscow) to Penny Dreadful.
According to Slate:
Woodcuts from the 1600s occasionally outfitted spell-casters in common bonnets. It wasn’t until the 1710s and 1720s that children’s chapbooks in England began illustrating supernatural tales with crones in peaked hats. Fueled by the popularity of these “penny merriments,” the stereotype caught on quickly. Western European artists began to modify images of witches from the Middle Ages, lengthening the blunt tips of their caps into devilish spikes.
Eventually, even Mother Goose and La Belfana sported pointy hats. But what’s the origin of the association?
The Jewish Theory
13th century Jews were required to wear Judenhat (horned hats) to distinguish themselves from gentiles. From there, it’s just a hop, skip, and a heil Hitler to a fallacy re: Jews, Satan, and witchcraft.
Except, goes the counter argument, the Judenhat isn’t quite a witch hat, nor is it gendered as feminine; men wore Judenhat too.
The Quaker Theory
In the 1600’s, the Quakers were not very popular, especially Quaker women. As a group, they asserted their own style of dress and adopted pointy hats. Or so goes another theory regarding a religious minority.
Except not everyone agrees the Quakers even wore such hats. Slate puts it plainly: “Quakers didn’t wear pointed hats.” Ok, then.
The Alewives Theory
In medieval Europe, many women brewed their own ale and sold the surplus. (Despite the modern, masculinized profile of the average brewer, historically it was women who brewed beer, going as far back as ancient Egypt.) These women were known as alewives. “In order to catch as many eyes as possible, and to signal from a distance what they were selling, these ‘brewsters’ wore tall hats,” according to Vice.
The witch hunts in Europe coincided with economic strain, which stripped many women of land access. Many lost their ability to earn money altogether, which resulted in reduced independence. Scientific American reports:
Although the hunts targeted only some, the threat of being accused affected the behavior of most women. The persecutions contributed to the construction of a new patriarchal divide that degraded and limited women, ranking them below men. Over the course of the witch hunts, craftsmen in Germany pushed women out of guild membership, and even practicing certain trades, like selling goods in a market, put women at risk of sorcery accusations. In France, women lost the right to make their own contracts. And when they married, women and all that they owned effectively became the property of their husbands.
With a large population of laborers regarded as essential to prosperity, sexuality came to be rigorously policed. Those accused of witchcraft were often women who were believed to have sex outside of marriage or village healers and midwives, among whose many tasks was to provide contraceptives or abortifacients. As industrialization proceeded, many women were allowed back into the workforce in manufacturing centers and factories—but their husbands still received their wages.
There were (and still are) very real consequences of being perceived as a witch. Yet the loss of agency women experienced in medieval Europe doesn’t prove alewives’ hats are the ancestor of the witch hat, or that the alewives even wore pointed hats at all. It’s not like there was an alewives union where they handed out uniform hats.
In any case, as witch hunts faded and superstition waned, the image of the witch became less realistic. One thing multiple sources agree on is the effect of THE WIZARD OF OZ. The story’s debut cemented the relationship between the fantastical witch and a pointy hat. (Green skin, too. The film was the first to introduce that particular hue.) Witches were now things of fiction.
Shirley Jackson: Author… and Witch?
Speaking of fiction, many literary authorities will tell you famed author Shirley Jackson was 100% that witch. Her bio from FANNY BURNEY confirms it:
Shirley Jackson, we are reliably informed, is perhaps the only contemporary writer who is a practicing amateur witch, specializing in small-scale black magic and fortune telling with a tarot deck. Although the tarot deck has proved an inspiration for no less a figure than T. S. Eliot, a better index to Shirley Jackson’s work is that she is a successful short story writer (in The New Yorker, Mademoiselle, The American Mercury, The Yale Review, and others) and the mother of a boy and a girl, which may account for her penetrating pictures of children in The Road Through the Wall.
Jackson was an expert on black magic and witchcraft. She filled her home library with tomes on the subjects. Yet she also played up her witchiness for the sake of book promotion, while simultaneously downplaying her seriousness. LitHub reports, “Whether understood as a parlor trick or something more, Jackson’s magic was of a piece with her housewife persona: it had a thoroughly domestic cast.”
As Jackson biographer Ruth Franklin tells Electric Literature:
[…] she talks about herself as, you know, on the one hand, a housewife, and then, on the other, a writer. And then of course the other component of her personality was that she also spoke of herself as a witch. You know, as somebody who not only studied witchcraft, she also had a vast library of historical volumes related to witchcraft and to the occult. But also, as you know, she talked about herself as somebody who at times practiced witchcraft. And I see this as another kind of subversive aspect of her persona, another way in which she rebelled against the mainstream.
Privately, Jackson hated her publisher’s quips about her broomstick. She hated the portrayal of her work as hair-whitening horror, too and worried she wasn’t being taken seriously as an author. One critic called her “Virginia Werewoolf.” Meanwhile, she saw magic as tied to her writing process. From LitHub:
Witchcraft, whether she practiced it or simply studied it, was important to Jackson for what it symbolized: female strength and potency […] To call oneself a witch, then, is to claim some of that power. Everyone will be afraid of me and do what I say, reads one of the notes left by the creek in The Road Through the Wall, a note written by a victimized girl.
If Jackson considered writing itself a form of witchcraft, could that make Jackson a witch, with a pen for a wand? Yet Franklin seems hesitant to label Jackson a “real” witch:
I believe that she saw it as a way of channeling female power, as it always has traditionally been for women who feel themselves to be powerless. You know, she read it as she used to read tarot cards. I don’t believe she literally saw that as a way of telling the future, so much as simply a method of telling stories about people’s lives. And witchcraft also, you know, I think can be read mostly as a metaphor.
Nowadays, we recognize many different types and schools of witches, including Catholic witches, atheist witches, etc. Many a witch views magic as metaphorical or symbolic. This doesn’t make them any less a witch though.
If Jackson were still around to experience WitchTok, what would she think? How would she identify herself? Would she accept or reject the trend towards all things witchy? There’s no way to know. Yet I’m puzzled by the characterization of a woman who believed in channeling female power and employed tarot cards as “not really a witch.” Is this a misunderstanding of what it means to be a witch? An attempt to reassure the audience that Jackson was, to quote Logan Roy, a serious person? As if one can’t be both!
Witchy Writing Prompt!
This month’s prompt is derived from “An Account of the Land of the Witches,” a short story by Sofia Samatar. The prompt appeared on the Study Coven’s Witches Part II syllabus, which convened earlier this month. (In February, we’ll meet for Smutty Study. And guess what? There are witches on that syllaus too. Enrollment deadline is January 11, 2024.)
New reader here - I love this post! I had never heard this about Jackson before. So intriguing! Happy Halloween/Samhain!
Such a great article, thank you. That poster from The Satanic Temple is entirely wholesome and has brought a smile to my face this morning. Loved the info on Shirley Jackson and found the part about pointy hats very interesting. I hadn’t really considered witch trials as a way of disempowering women as opposed to just persecuting them.