Facelift.

So, I've been maintaining an online presence since... the 90s? The early 2000s? Back then I had a livejournal, because of course I did. Eventually I moved on over to blogger, and I've had this sporadically updated slice of the blogosphere since 2011.

We're closing in on 2016, and I decided to give this place a bit of a facelift. Tidy up some information, and perhaps most importantly... change the name.

'Walk Softly Witch' was taken from a pulp novel - something about it tickled me, and I loved the cover. I actually started doing burlesque when I was heavier than I am today - this was before my breast reduction surgery, and I remember feeling that to do burlesque you had to go full pin-up. There was a period where I would pin curl my hair every other night  and I actually wore colour sometimes. It didn't last, obviously, because goth is like a stylistic version of herpes.

But that's not really who I am anymore. People evolve, or at least get better about paring back the shit that isn't truly necessary to their enjoyment of life.

So, looking back on over a decade's worth of both blogging and magic, what's the constant?

Music.

And here we are.

Another Girl

I ave spent the past two weeks on a roller coaster of social activities, including two large scale holiday staff parties - one for the company I currently work for, and the other for the one I had recently finished at. (Both at the same venue, which was kind of funny.) I drank too much at the former but was relatively well behaved at the latter, and wound up with sore feet at both.

Outside of that, I attended a craft fair, had a meeting about the upcoming Comedy of Terrors show, went to see Nightmare Before Nutcracker, and had a very intense magical evening with a friend who has not been doing so well lately. For a hermit like me, that's a lot of socialising.

I'm pleased to say that on this stormy Saturday I am doing nothing. I've had my coffee, and shortly I will clean the house and then go get a sandwich from the bakery around the corner. The house is fairly clean - aside from some dishes I've been hoping will vanish into the ether - but it definitely needs a good psychic scrubbing. As I said, some pretty heavy magical work was done earlier in the week and it's best not to assume all of that emotional discharge took care of itself any better than my dishes have.

I don't do a lot of magical work with others. Including a person in ritual is different than doing a spell on their behalf, and requires more consideration. There are people who I know and love that I think would be very difficult to work with, not because they're assholes but because I think they would have a difficult time opening up.

Magic and ritual looks goofy. Combine that with the fact that you really only get out of it what you put in and you can see why the more cynical you are going in the less effective the whole thing is gonna be. Those of us filled to the brim with sarcasm, or those who are naturally skeptical or filled with doubt are prrrrobably better off working on their own shit alone so that the presence of others does not trigger performance anxiety.

Obviously my friend was not one of those people - she's a very artistic person who is very open with her emotions, and so the evening went off better than I could have hoped. But there's still the clean-up to do, especially with all the usual emotional drain December brings. No sense living like a filthy hamster when you know it will further zap you, no?

Black Celebration

November in Vancouver is guaranteed to be two things: wet and cold. Not the nostril-hair freezing cold of most of Canada, mind you - ours is a bone-deep dampness. It's a rotting-skeleton-at-the-bottom-of-the-ocean cold. The sun sets earlier and earlier, and the city raises more lights in defiance of the primal dark.

Bleak months ahead. I find myself looking forward to it.

Earlier this week, I was on the Coru Cathubodua website. I have been a follower of The Morrigan since I was a teenager - she was my first true experience with the divine. On 'The Morrigan's Call' page, the author(s) discuss what it means to be claimed by this particular goddess, and this in particular struck me:

"It means you yourself will be reshaped, and this can also be quite terrifying. But here is what She offers in return: She makes a weapon of you."

How sharp of a knife she's made me I really can't say - sometimes I feel pretty dull - but I can certainly attest to the fact that she is a force that will not allow you to remain static, even if it hurts. I would go so far as to say that if you cannot learn to breathe through the pain, your relationship with her will probably be short lived.

I figured out that I was going to die when I was ten. For the next three years I wanted nothing more than to become a stage magician.  So I suppose it's really not shocking that I am drawn to gods of death and magic. This also seems to mean that I am prone to attraction to difficult figures.

Last winter I told my sister I had a feeling I was being drawn to another such figure. And then, to be perfectly blunt, I put off doing anything about it because I was chickenshit. I didn't want any upheaval, and I did not feel like being remolded into someone else. After a rough few years, I just wanted to grow comfortable with my life again.

But, you know. Death and magic. I'm not a witch because it's comforting. I want to know things, before it's too late.

The sky is frigid ebony. Inside my beloved apartment it is cozy and safe. The cat is curled up in front of an electric fire, while a black candle warms the air with the smell of eucalyptus and sage. The next year is now set to be stable, financially. Spiritually, I doubt it will be so. Earlier in the week we had windstorms so severe that they contributed to the collapse of part of the seawall in Stanley Park; I had gone out jogging along the seawall like a fucking genius, and although I did not see anything destroyed I did get to witness waves smashing into the rocks and more lightning than I think I've ever seen before above the city. It would have been miserable if it wasn't so exhilarating. That is how I imagine the year might go.

Boo!

I can always spot a Lokean.

I don't know if it's just because I've known several over the years and so can see the warning signs, or that there's some kind of cosmic irony at work that a god of lies attracts people who are really obvious. Either way, it remains amusing as all hell.


Anyway. Here we are, in the month of October! Looking back it seems the last time I sat down to write was, oh, August. That's about right. I was working two contracts over the summer, and then once September hit it was all AbraCadaver preparation with a week's respite to take a vacation to New Orleans.

I haven't gone on an actual vacation in like, a decade? Voodoo and her boyfriend were preforming in the Burlesque festival, and my brother-from-another-mother Pete flew in all the way from England. Actually getting to the Big Easy was anything but - my sister got held at the border and so she and I missed our flight. Then they lost her luggage. The whole thing was one fuck-up after another, with Pete meanwhile also almost missing the trip on the other side of the ocean. Ultimately we all made it, and I feel we have exactly one god both to blame and to thank. All praise to Legba. In fact, the day after we landed priority number one was buying him rum and leaving it at a shrine that just happened to be a block from the hotel.

I have to pause to say that Voodoo's boyfriend is adorable. We're standing in a tourist liquor store, and he holds up the rum and shouts to my sister, "honey, is this ALL for sacrifice or do we get to drink some, too?"

Subtle.

Anyway, New Orleans is beautiful. Too fucking hot, but beautiful. Pete, Voodoo and I took a day to just do witch!shopping and hit every single shop we could find. We actually didn't wind up buying a lot - I bought some candles at Hex and then some oils and such from this weird hole in the wall place where customer service meant eventually stopping talking about catfish fishing to ring me up. Then the woman who owned the store and the catfisher - an old black dude - got into an argument about the woman's high priestess whom I apparently looked like. But the VanVan oil was well priced and clearly hand-made. I also got to see snakes in some other hole in the wall place, and got a map from a vampire on my last day.

We of course did a ghost tour, and a tour of St. Louis #1. Turns out you can't get into the latter without a licensed tour guide anymore, which was initially annoying but wound up being worth the money since our guide was quite good. Both tours we took through French Quarter Phantoms, because Henry on Last Podcast On the Left recommended them. You get two-for-one hurricanes with a ghost tour ticket, but I am here to say they are NOT worth it. I haven't had anything so disgusting to drink since that faux Irish pub that made 'Oscar Wildes', blech.

The LaLaurie house.

We saw the infamous LaLaurie mansion, which turned out to be a few blocks from our hotel. The guide claimed some tour goers had complained of things following them home after they walked under the house's awning, so Pete and I promptly ran underneath. Spookily enough, he and Voodoo and I all slept like shit that night. Voodoo felt something run into her bed, and her TV acted up right after.  OOOOooooOOOoooo.

Pete and Voodoo.

Anyway, the tours were great, the booze was plentiful, and I only got food poisoning once. Pete and I generally stuck together in the evenings so Voodoo and Arnt could go check out the jazz - we preferred to hang out in rock bars and some scuzzy punk dive where we decided that a beer and a shot for five bucks was a good idea. (Spoiler: it was not.) We hit the absinthe bar on the last night, where we blew the last of our American money on the expensive shit. As is usual, we talked variously about bullshit and metaphysics because that's how we roll.

Pete dancing with Ariel Helvetica.

I can't say I'd ever go back, but it was a wonderful trip. I returned home to realise "oh shit we only have a few weeks until the show" and so went into full panic mode over that.

AbraCadaver itself went off quite well. The ticket sales were great, and the show itself I feel was solid - we had some issues with the sound and volunteers, but nothing is ever perfect. My solo was botched from star to finish - the sweepers forgot my chair, and then my costume malfunctioned - but sometimes when things ALL go wrong you achieve a sort of zen and you just roll with it. Apparently that attitude worked since the feedback was all positive. I'm just happy that the opening number went so well - we had a fog geyser!

I'm still sick, although having Thanksgiving weekend to sleep has helped. I'm beginning to suspect I have some sort of chest infection because it is just NOT going away, so I need to call my doctor tomorrow and set up an appointment. But for now I'm sitting here as my dinner cooks, in a house I finally had time to clean.

Ah, yes, cleaning. Leading up to AbraCadaver the house was just a fucking mess, physically and to a lesser extent energetically. I'd come home from work and do show shit, then collapse. I'm shocked the cat didn't decide to just start shitting everywhere because it was such a sty. (Not really - she's too much of a lady.)

So I've spent much of the weekend cleaning and putting proper Halloween decor up. Tonight - the New Moon - the place is going to get a good deep cleanse too, because it is the Month of Spook. You gotta do your prep, no?

I hope to blog more this month too, as I have some crap rattling around in my brain I haven't had a chance to talk through with myself. We shall see.

Mining the Vein

When you enjoy an artist of any kind, it is not uncommon that you go in search of their influences or related art.  In the process, you are exposed to more art and so your appreciation grows and your tastes broaden. My friend David calls this discovery process "mining the vein" and I had until today assumed it was something that literally everyone on the face of the planet does.

And then I discovered that two of my friends know nothing about David Bowie.

Okay, that's not fair - they know Labyrinth. But Space Oddity? Heroes? Life On Mars? Ziggy Fucking Stardust?!

Nope.

I'm not saying that everyone should love Bowie. You like what you like. But we're talking about some of the most influential and famous rock music in the western world, and the idea that these girls - who are seven years my junior - have not been exposed to it just blows my fucking hair back.

You look for shit similar to the shit that you love. In the days before the internet it was a little harder to trace influences, but you managed. Maybe your mother heard the cover and told you who sung the original, or your father laughed and corrected you when you asked if the Rolling Stones were dead. ("They just look that way." Thanks, Dad.) Or maybe you actually looked things up at the library. And then when we got the internet... Oh, goodness me. I remember terrible geocities pages listing goth bands that I could search for desperately at HMV and second-hand stores. There were lists of movies to see, books to read.

You found that vein and you mined it until you were exhausted, because those things never really dry up.

Even my magical practice comes from this impulse. Chaos magic in the pages of the Invisibles leads to Chaos Magic, which leads to a DisInfo guide which leads to the discovery of Rosaleen Norton.You just keep digging, and sure, you may not like everything you find and some of it is shit, but you just keep on going.

There's gold in them thar hills.

Questions. Answers.

So I found this YouTube based quiz on Veles' blog, but I didn't give a shit about a lot of the questions and decided to just answer the fun ones.


7. What is your favorite magical tool?

The knife. Which is sort of funny, because I almost got rid of it several years ago. See, I was scaling back on a lot of stuff before I moved briefly to Ireland, and was also at a point where a lot of the stuff I had been into when I was younger seemed sort of silly. So I had this big old blade I'd bought from the House of Knives that seemed a bit too Ren Faire - I wished I'd held on to the much smaller black handled knife I'd bought instead, that would be soooo much more authentic, man. 

But you know, I kinda love it now.


8. What is a song or type of music that gets you into a witchy mood?

There's a lot so I'll give quick examples. 
Dead Can Dance type stuff. DCD and This Mortal Coil were bands I discovered around age fourteen or fifteen (on cassette!) which was about when I also started studying witchcraft. 
Fleetwood Mac.  Does this legit need explaining?
Beside You In Time by NIN. Back when I was playing with a lot of chaos magic I had this album on repeat a lot. I figured out how to do the LBRP to this song. 
Anything that sounds like the soundtrack for a 1970s devil movie. Ghost BC, Blood Ceremony, Black Widow, Goblin... fuck even like, Donovon.

When I first learned about sigil magic, I used to make sigils before we'd go out to the goth club and then fire them on the dance floor. Music is a really important part of my practice, and indeed just my life. 


16. What was your first homemade tool for your practice?

It was an altar that was a cardboard box I painted black and then painted a silver pentagram on. I kept it in my closet and we took it outside once and then the neighbours thought we were devil worshippers. Ah, the 90s.


40. Who is a past witch that has inspired you ,famous or not?

Rosaleen Norton.
 
 
41. How do you handle rejection from a fellow witch that refuses to do a reading or spell for you?
I find this question hilarious because it makes me picture like, high-school level meltdowns. "Tiffany won't cast a spell for me! THAT BITCH!"


56. What fictional witch book/screen inspired you the most?
The first were the witches in fairy stories, and then a bit later Morgan leFay in the Arthur myths. As a teenager? Nancy Downs. It might have ended badly for poor Nancy, but that bitch was the only one of the coven working on her own. She had the drive. And of course my sister and I intend to wind up as the Aunts in Practical Magic. 

Belated Spring Cleaning

I have a friend who jokes that my apartment is haunted by a demon monk.

Let me back up - I have a friend who is a practising hedgewitch. She spent the night here once when she was blitzed out of her gourd on Absinthe (I am a good hostess with pretentious tastes) and as she lay on the couch, about to pass out, she told me she could heard some sort of chanting.

A few days later I sent her a clip of the LBRP and asked if that was what she'd heard. She said that yes, it sounded an awful lot like that although surely it was just my neighbours practising tonal singing at two in the goddamn morning.  I said uh huh, sure, and concluded that a likely explanation was a psychic echo - I'd just done the LBRP and the Rose Cross Ritual the day prior. I advanced my theory, and my friend insisted that she "wasn't psychic" and so decided that instead it was more likely that the home I've lived in for years without incident has a demon monk in the walls that I somehow never noticed.

Now, this IS a joke. But it was a joke that just happened to annoy me over time, because I pride myself on keeping a clean home. My natural paranoia coupled with a week-long case of emotional malaise, this wonderful article, and then this one as well, and I was well and truly ready to psychically carpet bomb the apartment.

Which is what I proceeded to do. Just to be on the safe side.

Apparently my paranoia.

After the smoke had cleared, the apartment definitely felt secure. But it also felt off somehow. A few days passed, and the feeling persisted so I invited my sister over, telling her to bring her cards. She obliged and with their help articulated what it was that was throwing me - the house was safe, but it was also sterile.

Like a complete dumbass, I'd bleached out all the spiritual energy of the house.

The solution was simply to re-cultivate the vibe I wanted, so it's not like it took a lot of additional work, but it was definitely  a good reminder that being over zealous can cost you. Focus too much on the potential spooks and you could wind up buggering the good shit, too.

Speaking of spooks and buggering...

The local Chapters is closing (sad) and so a bunch of the shittier books are on sale half price. That means I picked up a copy of "Fighting Malevolent Spirits: A Demonologist's Darkest Encounters" by Samantha E. Harris. I finished it today as I lounged on the couch with the cat, and hooooooooooooly balls is it terrible. The stories themselves are not particularly outrageous - it's typical Amityville/ghost show shit - but the writing is extremely poor, with words used improperly and sentences that occasionally don't make sense.

There was one story in the book, however, about a succubus/incubus - it apparently gender swapped at will - that was fucking a couple and some poor teenager. I'm certain that if it was legit it was utterly terrifying, but sadly all I could think of was Ghost, Alien or Molested?, further proving that I'm a terrible human being. Ah well, we all knew that already.

Fictional Works that Changed My Religious and Magical Beliefs.

Saw this on Veles' blog, and I figured I'd do it myself. I've been bad for writing lately, and it's a good prompt.

In the order that I remember reading them:

Grimm's Fairy Tales. I remember this old paperback because several of the stories were older versions and so did not align with the Disney movies I'd seen. Ashputtel, Mother Holle (which was also the first place I read the word 'slut'), and the Juniper Tree all nestled side by side, with witches and talking animals galore.

Greek myths in a set of encyclopedias . My sister and I are apparently unusual in that we were raised in a truly secular household - prior to my parents' divorce, I think we went to church with my Grandmother exactly once at Thanksgiving. In our bedroom we had a set of ancient encyclopedias, and I read and re-read the myths about a million times. 'God' was a vague concept; the gods were people.

Pet Semetary by Stephen King. I read this in grade four, and it crashed the concept of death into my brain. Never did get over it.

Some Fucking Book. I've been sitting here googling for twenty minutes now trying to remember what the everloving hell this book was, but no dice. I DO remember for grade eight or nine we read some book where there was a world these people went to where magical society had been divided along gender lines. The women were associated with circles and I think the earth, and the men with straight lines and fire or some shit. I remember this because as a project we had to make games based on the book and I made some bullshit card game because I was good at drawing and used this as an excuse to draw people murdering the fuck out of one another with magic. (I relied heavily on my mom's Conan comics for help.) Anyway, I remember thinking the male magicians were self righteous pricks. (I also suspect this was not the main part of the story. Seriously if anyone remembers this please tell me what the crap I was reading.)

The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger by Stephen King. This is going to be a weird one to explain, I think. This was the original cut of the novel, which I picked up secondhand at a used bookstore in downtown Abbotsford. It's not a long book, and I started reading it on the bus ride home. It was early summer, so it was hot out. My bus stop was up a side road - I would get off and walk down a fairly quiet street for a few blocks before I hit the main drag, which I would cross and then continue into the less affluent residential area where our apartment was. I got off at my stop and kept reading as I walked to the main road because I just could NOT put the fucking book down. The first Dark Tower, especially before King re-edited it to make it fit the later books better, is a tale of utterly desolate magic. It's not hopeful.

Dave McKean

Sandman by Neil Gaiman. If you can't see why then you've clearly never read any of it.


I'm going to pause here to say that a LOT of Vertigo titles were inspirational to me as a teenager, even though at the time I used to get them via single secondhand issues. I hardly ever knew what was going on, but there was Constantine fighting demons, Timothy Hunter bitching about fairies, and Jesse Custer hunting down God the Almighty. This was all pretty anarchic shit to a girl now stuck in the Bible Belt.

The Diana Tregarde Novels by Mercedes Lackey. I had some online friends who tirelessly recommended fantasy novels to me, and although I tried several of them it just never clicked. The Tregarde novels, however, were set in the real world. I look back at the pseudo-history of Wicca included in the books now and I chuckle, but at the time Diana was sort of heroine I needed to read about.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman. A friend told me to read the book - "you're in it," she said. It remains one of my all-time favourite novels, and one of my all-time favourite depictions of Thoth and Anubis.

The Invisibles by Grant Morrison. This was one Vertigo title I'd missed when it was being published. I actually found the Barbelith forums before I read the books. I blame Pete for this one. Chaos magic used to be really sexy, you guys. ...even if it was still pretty goddamn phallocentric.

 I think that everything we read becomes part of our mental compost heap, but these are certainly the titles that stick out as having had a conscious influence on me as a witch.

Women in Horror

In honour of Women in Horror Month, my sister and I sat down with Tristan Risk again to talk about female horror tropes.

The cat also tried to rub her butt on the mic.

Home as Temple/Temple as Home

"Every object in a Lodge should be a symbolic representation of the different aspects of force functioning upon the plane which is is intended to raise the consciousness of the candidate... Form, colour, movement, sound, and incense make their appeal to the gates of the physical senses, each of which is an analogue of the subtle senses..."

That quote is from Dion Fortune in her Esoteric Orders and Their Work from the chapter on The Use and Power of Ritual.  Most of the book is just Fortune acting superior, but that chapter at least has some points I agree with; I don't think anyone who has studied and practised magic for any length of time would disagree with the idea that the physical can influence the mental and spiritual. A ritual space induces a magical state of mind.

For most modern witches and magicians, our homes are our temples. City dwellers usually don't have the luxury of a back yard (or even a balcony) and if you live alone chances are you don't have a spare room you can dedicate solely to magic. While I do harbour fantasies of having an attic with a permanent ritual circles drawn on the floor, I don't mind having my living space function as magical space because I do feel that it helps integrate my occult practice with my day-to-day life. I am not a kitchen witch, but I understand the appeal of everyday magic that is not set apart as something lofty and 'other.'

The home, then, as temple: your decor becomes your symbolic representations. Form and colour set the emotional tone not just for the mundane but the spiritual as well.

This brings me back to my snarky post the other day about ugly couches. Artists, I think, often possess a magical mindset and so I am even more baffled by those who don't spare a thought for what their home looks like. One of my good friends has an apartment that has the feel of a haunted smoking room - you walk in and expect to be handed a brandy by Vincent Price. It's a magical house that cultivates a particular atmosphere.

It is atmosphere that's been on my mind lately, as a few people I know have moved or are planning to.  In an attempt to be helpful, and also simply because I love home decor, I've spent time looking at Gravity Interior (especially the studio apartment tags), and Tiny-Ass Apartment.

 Perhaps not shockingly, I decided to move the apartment around again last week. (The last time I did so was in the summer, which was long ago enough for my tastes.)

Moving the bed into the bedroom was an ordeal, made not at all easier by the fact that I decided to do it on my own. At one point I did wind up trapped against the wall, trying to figure out how to lower the bed frame before my arms gave out. In moving the bed I also discovered that my heater had been leaking and so rotted part of the headboard - it doesn't seem dangerous and so will have to wait until I have enough money to replace it. When I do I may get a new mattress as well, and if I do that I plan to downgrade from a queen to a double to get a few more inches space in that tiny room.

The living room now seems palatial to me. I gave my sister and her boyfriend my old dresser set in exchange for one of the Ikea wardrobes they had - their bedroom was being dominated by two of them and was not comfortable. I had worried it would do the same in my space, but after some fiddling with location I seem to have found a place for it where it doesn't look too much like a huge fridge. It helps that my apartment is predominately white with wood accents.

My apartment has an old fireplace that has been sealed up, and a little electric fireplace stove was placed there by the landlord. Mine broke a few months back and I never got around to asking it to be replaced, and with winter on the wane it seems silly to bother with it now. Instead I put some flameless candles I found on sale in there, although eventually I want to get some bigger ones. I also want to replace the old black bucket chair now by the mantle, but these are things that can wait.

The living room now has ample space for me to dance in, and I think I could even lay down a properly large circle. My sister says it feels 'airy' and I find myself pleased with that. "Form, colour, movement, sound, and incense make their appeal to the gates of the physical senses" after all, and for me an atmosphere of calm is essential.

As for Fortune's "symbolic representations of the different aspects of force" I considered what artwork to keep up, why I wanted it present, and where in the house it worked in harmony with other pieces.

I'm lucky in that I didn't have to buy a lot of new stuff - I bought some drapes, a floating shelf, some candles. It all came in under a hundred dollars and the reward is a space I feel comfortable both living in, and having others visit. It can function as studio, temple, sanctuary and library. There's space for new objects (a ram or goat skull someday, hopefully) but in the meantime it doesn't feel empty - everywhere I look I see something that reminds me of the life I want to lead.

As for Miss Frances, she's just happy she has her special chair.

So adorable.

And now, a moment of petty bullshit.

What the Jesus Flying Fuckery is up with visual artists who don't care about fashion or decor? Visual artists. You create beautiful things! Why don't you want beauty all around you at every moment? I know you understand colour theory, you have no excuse!

My friend Amanda says it's because nerds only interact with other nerds, and therefore have never heard a dissenting opinion regarding their questionable aesthetic choices. She may have a point. I may also just be a colossal bitch (okay, I am a colossal bitch, whatever) and I should just learn to relax and accept that for some people, being surrounded by tokens of their hobbies and interests is amazingly comforting and makes them feel at home.

Even if their couch is objectively hideous.

(This applies to both genders, incidentally. Your balls do not stop me from judging you for wearing the same gross hoodie for four days in a row, or for living in what looks to be a college dorm when you're 35.)

Beautiful Harpies

Have you ever heard a woman say that she "just doesn't get along with other women"?

Perception.

Not a wild statement at first glance, but if you truly consider it, what it's really saying is, "I'M not like other women, I'm special. I'm the Cool Girl who hangs out with the boys." This is generally considered to be a form of internalized misogyny - a poison belief that all (other) women are either too 'girly' in their interests, or are jealous, catty harpies. It's a load of shit, of course, but it is depressingly common and usually based on experiences we had in our teens and early 20s when we're still feeling out who we are and what we're interested in.

Compounding the problem is that there is social conditioning at work that sometimes dictates subject matter in conversation - there's an archaic idea that women in a group MUST talk about makeup, or babies, or cooking, or some other 'feminine' topic while the men play beer pong in the next room and talk sports and philosophy. If a woman is bored by babies and lipstick, she should not assume all the other women in the room are interested solely in these things - she should try bringing up a different topic and see what happens. Maybe one of those women who likes lipstick also likes serial killers.

I'm quite lucky in that I know many fantastic women, and I feel even luckier in that I have the pleasure of working with several. Last Friday, a group of us went out for drinks and spent a good few hours just talking. (I may have, after three glasses of sangria, suggested that women need to stop being racist and homophobic and just band together since if we have a united front we outnumber horrible old white men, buuuut... see three glasses of sangria.)

The following day I had my first Gracefully and Grandly class with Ruthe Ordare, and at the beginning of the class we made introductions. I was surprised by the fact that more than one woman was taking the class specifically to meet other women - one of our classmates is an engineer, and she said she was surrounded by men all day during the week and just needed to get away from testosterone sometimes. Obviously there wasn't much talking in a dance class since we were, you know, dancing but I was still struck at the time by how safe a space it was. Some of the exercises we did for free movement were, objectively, hilarious... but nobody was sitting there judging anybody else, and nobody was laughing or being bitchy. It was a supportive female environment.

Women - like men - can be wonderful people, or terrible. Both genders (and any and all in between or beyond) are simply people. Treating them as anything but is bound to cause problems and leave you missing out on some great experiences and opportunities for friendship.

And honestly, if you really think that every one of your own gender is a jealous, catty bitch? Well. YOU'RE probably being the cunty one and could stand to do a little self reflection. Come on, ladies. Let's not buy into this trap.

Sisters of the Moon

There's an episode of the Faculty of Horror that discusses witches in film - it's one of my favourites, and I have listened to it more than once. I had not, however, seen two of the films discussed: Rob Zombie's The Lords of Salem, and Lars von Trier's Antichrist. Earlier in the week my sister and I watched the former, while last night we finally got around to watching the latter.

(Antichrist. Holy hell.That movie probably deserves it's own post, but suffice to say that I don't believe it to be a misogynist film. I personally found it to be quite the opposite.)

Luis Ricardo Falero

There is an acquaintance of mine from work who has similar taste in films as I do, and so of course I told her I'd seen Lords and was planning on viewing Antichrist. She told me that she was curious to know what I thought of von Trier's film, and then went on to tell me that of all the sub-genres of horror she found witch movies to be the least accessible to her - she wasn't sure she 'got' them.

Now, my initial reaction was basically "what's not to get?" but that hardly seems a nuanced response, now does it? And so for the past few days I've been thinking about the figure of the witch in popular culture, and how varying contexts can inform how she is received.

The Witch as an archetypal figure has changed remarkably little over the years. Anton LaVey described the witch as female, and stated that she is "a wretched looking old crone... or an extremely sexy girl." This statement can be very easily traced back as far as the publishing of the Malleus Maleficarum in the late fifteenth century, and continues to be the dominant view even today 44 years after LaVey`s Satanic Witch was published. That's some staying power, alright. 

Witches in horror cinema are, by and large, sexual creatures. In this way they are granddaughters of the Malleus, existing to tempt man to sin and revelling in carnal lust with the Devil himself. Their sexuality is a weapon, and is often depicted as perverse. There are films where the witches are not blatantly sexual, but in these too they are aberrant women - baby killers, Satan's disciples, vindictive harpies. 

Witches, in the view passed on to us most clearly by Kramer and Sprenger, are every negative stereotype of a woman ramped up to the nth degree and given magic powers.

It's perhaps not shocking, that the figure of the witch shifted slightly whenever feminist movements began to influence the dominant culture. The 60s saw Bewitched on television, and while horror films kept up their love affair with the dark side of the occult it is interesting that Samantha and her crazy family popped up in the mainstream at the same time second-wave feminism was making an impact. (Now, Samantha was a housewife but at the same time it was undeniable that she had more power than her derpy husband.)

Third-wave feminism coincided with The Craft, Charmed, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. All of these depicted witches less as concubines of the devil and more as young women trying to come to terms with their power. The past few years, we've seen American Horror Story: Coven and Salem appearing at a time when feminist issues are once again at the forefront of the cultural discussion.The witch serves as a handy shorthand for women's power, so this isn't terribly surprising.When the womenfolk start demanding their rights, it seems that the witch will once again appear, whether her depiction is positive or no.

Leaving archetypes for a moment, it's also interesting to consider the figure of the 'modern witch' in horror cinema. Coinciding with second-wave feminism again, we had the goddess movement and the rise of neo-pagan faiths. While not as common as the 'traditional' witch, we still saw this particular enchantress pop up in a few places - George Romero's Season of the Witch is a perfect example, where a bored housewife attempts to find meaning outside of her marriage by exploring witchcraft. This doesn't turn out well for her - a theme we see again in Antichrist, come to think of it. Both the character of Joan in Romero's film and She in von Trier's are drawn to female power and then find themselves terrified of (and terrorized by) it until everything explodes and goes to shit. Neither woman escapes the patriarchal trap laid for her - She winds up dead and burnt, while Joan becomes a widow still defined by her late husband.

Our 90s modern witches fared a bit better... unless they weren't 'nice,' of course.

So. What's to 'get' about the popular image of the witch? LaVey still isn't off the mark, but looking a bit deeper over both the history of cinema and further back into real events, we can see that it's a bit more complex than that - the witch seems very much to be the fear of woman personified. This fear permeates so much of our culture that is is simultaneously suffocating and barely noticeable, and so the witch remains both a scapegoat and something that more and more we seem to want to reclaim as our own. This reclamation, I feel, is important, and one that I hope to see become wider - I sincerely hope that our next wave of pop culture witches features more women of colour, trans women, queer women. 

If we must be feared, let us be because we are powerful. If that makes us evil, then so be it - a world in which subjugation is good is hardly one worth living in. 

Strike the death knell.

Well, it's the start of a brand new year so I suppose it's time to take stock of the things we have learned. 2014 was a fine year on a personal level, but on a global one it definitely could have been a lot better - environmental, race, and gender issues dominated my newsfeeds, and not much of the news was good.

When one examines the continuing struggle for equality, one lesson stands out above others: you do not get to decide how a minority group should react. I've seen an awful lot of people react negatively to groups who are trying to achieve equality, and usually this is born out of a knee-jerk defensiveness. While this may be understandable considering that nobody wants to feel like the bad guy, it is also a destructive impulse that serves only to shut down any progress that could be made.

If you are a man, you do not get to tell me I am over-reacting to rape culture. As a Caucasian, I don't get to tell a person of colour she is overreacting to abuse by authority. As a heterosexual, I don't get to tell homosexuals to stop worrying about the legal rights of their spouses. And so on, and so forth.

If you are not in the minority group, you don't get to tell that group how to feel. You don't decide what is offensive. Doing that, or turning the conversation back around to YOU and YOUR rights, is douchebaggery on a level that in 2015 we should really not be mired in.


I'm sure everyone has their own resolutions for the new year. Get in shape, stop drinking malt liquor, learn how to wrestle a unicorn, all that shit. I think that maybe in addition to whatever personal goals we have this year, we could all benefit from promising too that we will listen - really listen - to our fellow humans and take steps to ensure that we do not through our actions (or inaction) condemn another to a life we personally would not want to live.