Witch: The Wild Ride from Wicked to Wicca

Cynthia R. Comacchio is an associate professor of history at Wilfrid
Laurier University. She is the author of Nations Are Built of Babies:
Saving Ontario’s Mothers and Children.

In this generously illustrated little study, Savage provides a readable
and compelling overview of the history of humanity’s fascination with
the eternally female form of the “witch.” For all its picture book
qualities, Witch is a careful synthesis derived from the studies of
Christina Larner, Marina Warner, and other scholars cited in the
bibliography. Savage’s key argument—that humanity’s preoccupation
with the myth of the witch reflects a “deeply human unease with the
dark and subversive aspects of femininity”—is familiar to
historians, but she skilfully takes readers on an informative jaunt over
the past 500 years, “from the terror of the Renaissance witch-craze to
the inspired playfulness of Wicca.”

Moreover, she shows just how closely entwined are particular images of
the witch with wider sociocultural changes, especially in regard to
gender ideals. Thus, for example, the 17th-century witch who was consort
of the devil and heretic, fit only to burn at the stake, was
“reimagined” by mid-19th-century Romantics as a feminine oracle
victimized by the oppressive forces of Church and State, then
rehabilitated by late-20th-century feminists as “sisters who had
offended the patriarchal establishment.” All of it, despite the
changes and continuities that are specific to particular historical
moments, amounts to “powerful myth-making.” Savage concludes that
the contemporary vision of Wicca, with its focus on feminine solidarity
against repression, is largely an attempt to “revive a subversive
religious movement that never existed.” It is in this sense, of
course, that the power of myth overtakes that of mere history: the
witch, like so many other symbols, is constructed out of the needs,
whims, and anxieties of the moment.

While Savage does not present any new “take” on the history of
women as it relates to the history of witches, this is a book that will
have broad reader appeal due to our continued fascination with the
topic. Its wonderful illustrations are alone worth the price.