In many many places, I have explained a “first lesson” for witches. It’s based on the first lesson my teacher taught me from the way her family approached the craft. Their witchcraft wasn’t religious. They were Pagan, but felt that the modern way of repurposing magic as religious devotion was crass. Rather than a formal meditation or moving energy or visualization, we became good animals. We learned to exist in nature, to read it, to listen to it, to speak with it, to move with it and befriend it. It’s a solid first lesson.
I’ve written once about my first Hekatean lesson. In that moment, the Goddess pushed me to ask myself why I studied and did magic. As the Goddess is ever expansive she made me dig deeper, and ask why and explore the truth and depth behind my surface understanding and face the fact that sometimes - even if true - the answer we allow ourselves is very different from the deeper actual answer. Also a solid lesson, and one which can be worthwhile at the beginning and then repeated periodically, over and again.
I’ve mentioned a few times, but rarely written of, the first lesson I gave my niece in magic - which was pretty different from but not entirely unrelated from some of the first lessons I had from my parents. A short detour to give some context though.
My niece was very spooky when she was little. Not like cutesy Disney spooky, like, this kid will grow up and do magic and probably sees spirits spooky. When she was two, for the first Halloween she could walk around and enjoy it, she dressed as Tiana, but her favorite character from the Frog Princess was the Shadow Man, because he had magic. At the end of the night she cried, not because it was scary, but because she thought the point of Halloween was to go into people’s houses and meet their family’s ghosts, and when we hadn’t done that she thought she missed the holiday. That same year, we visited a costume shop and she tormented her older brother by trying on every scary mask she could reach and then chastised him for being afraid. The next year she wanted us to use necromancy to haunt her house so she could live in a real haunted house year round. She and her friends had a werewolf club. She was all about monsters and magic as a pre-school/early elementary kid, much like I had been.
So, one day, there was a really out of character moment. We were headed out somewhere one evening. It was fall or winter so it was dark. As she got to the edge of the front porch, she stopped suddenly. It was as if she had hit a wall. You would have thought someone had lined the edge of the porch with salt or Holy Water. I turned and asked what the problem was.
“I’m scared!” she said, voice trembling.
“Of what?” I asked looking around and seeing nothing out of the ordinary.
“Of everything!” she exclaimed.
Now this was out of the ordinary. It was certainly out of character. There was no recent problem or trauma that would have caused a sudden change and so it felt kind of affected. It was as if she knew kids were supposed to be afraid of the dark and so she was very theatrically trying it out. So, the sort of thing you have to nip in the bud before it flowers into something real. Normally, if she was nervous or hesitant about something new or challenging I’d say, “aren’t you my explorer like Dora? Vamanos, we can do it.” This case needed something different.
“Are you my little witch?” I asked.
“Yes,” she answered.
“Then you can’t be afraid of the dark,” I explained, “the darkness is our friend, it gives us power.”
She nodded and stepped out from the porch and looked around as if to marvel at the night as she again exclaimed, but now, that she wasn’t afraid. She got in the car and we went about whatever we needed to do.
When I talk about the first magic I learned from my father, I usually talk about him teaching me to use fascination to help me in school the night before I started first grade. In actuality, he introduced it a few years earlier in the context of animals, for when neighborhood dogs got loose and came into the yard if my little sister and I were playing. One of the first ways to understand that kind of interaction with an animal is knowing, understanding, and controlling your own fear and theirs. Sometimes, with humans, a similar understanding of fear can be helpful.
Fear is the central focus of this post. The relationship witches have with fear, the relationship people exploring witchcraft often have with fear, and how we think about and understand fear. We could talk about fear without recourse to Agatha All Along, but it has some elements that can help us think both about successfully dealing with fear and the problem with not successfully dealing with it.
Our above story even points to an element that has made me happy in the swirl of Agatha-related media. “Primal night, give us sight.”
The idea of darkness providing sight seems like the kind of easy surface leaning into opposition that makes things seem mystical. There are much deeper, more interesting elements there when we think about it.
When I was in middle school, I was exploring who the powers beyond the gods were. One of the most primary and obvious of the primal powers was Night. It was clear that She was one of the original beings in existence and much of what exists came from her. I was obviously familiar with “In the beginning, there was darkness,” but this was long before I encountered Thelema and Nuit, or Orphism and the primacy of place it accords to Nyx within creation. Creation arising out of Night and her darkness is kind of obvious though. It’s more interesting to recall that her darkness gives birth to a daughter, Asteria, the stars. The earliest points of light are given to us by darkness. Ultimately, the Queen to whom many witches turn, Hekate, is of course the granddaughter of Night.
Witches today “draw down the moon” as an invocation of the goddess of the Moon and her shining light and presence. There are at least two cultures I’m aware of where witches long ago drew down the moon to remove its light. Witches took power in the darkness and were able to work freely with the aid of darkness. The darkness wasn’t to be feared, it was an ally from which to take power. That power in darkness, the light and sight in spaces without light is at its core a step towards understanding the sight for the unseeable, which has always been tied to understanding what and who witches are.
But, a discussion of fear isn’t just a discussion of the dark. Darkness is one of the primal fears that follow humanity, but it isn’t the only source of fear or the only source of power. The understanding of fear, and the dangers of fear overtaking us are not limited to navigating darkness or obtaining power either.
Still, “we’re white witches and live in the light,” is a line I just read at the end of a post in a large forum where someone is afraid of something watching her coven. So many things I’ve seen online today, and so many other days had me thinking about witches who are afraid and even while writing this I see more.
Fear often leads to lies. Lies can be useful in magic. Magic is often taking something untrue and making it true. Telling a story, or weaving a falsehood so convincing that reality comes to believe it, can shape the world around us in real ways. Lies can also become magic that hampers us when our words bring our little excuses and dodges into being and unintentionally trip us up. Lies devoid of magic – lies where we lie to ourselves and convince us that things are as we’d like them to be, or that we have power that we don’t, that those we dislike are villains when they aren’t, or that the world doesn’t contain the things we wish it didn’t despite them being very real – are detrimental. These are often the lies that grow from fear unchecked. These lies prevent us from knowing what is around us and navigating it, reshaping it, or even benefiting from it.
Sometimes fear looks like people insisting that they only work within the light, and that anyone who doesn’t won’t actually have power. Those who don’t fit the rules of goodness must either be too incompetent to do magic, or lacking in the power to do so. If they could do magic, or even if they can’t and attempt to do it, the universe itself will punish them by multiplying their malice. It’s a fiction that makes people feel like the good will be rewarded and the wicked will be punished despite being able to watch the world and see that this is tragically not the natural order of things.
This carries on to the insistence that no real witch would ever manipulate anyone, or do magic that impacts the will of another, or without the permission of the person on whom the magic is being worked. The opposite of this is almost true. A significant amount of magic works better without the target knowing about it. You can’t do some things without keeping it from the target. Other things might have less discernible results of the target knows. In Hoodoo, magical work is often referred to as a trick or trick laying because it’s something other parties don’t know is happening. Most magic throughout history has worked this way, and most of it has been very focused on impacting the will of others. Even in a modern context, where we might avoid certain types of goals, magic without a specific person as a target still often requires that people involved in a situation will be impacted by the magic. We’re simply not being honest with ourselves if we convince ourselves magic never can and never should impact the will of another.
What fear leads to this lie? The fear of power. In parapsychology, this is sometimes called the fear of psi. When I was introduced to the concept, I didn’t understand it at all. I couldn’t grasp how someone would unconsciously turn off their abilities or convince themselves they weren’t real because of fear. I’d grown up with magic, learning to understand and use that power seemed the best way to control it. For many people, though, the prospect of being able to impact others or create real changes is terrifying. It means they could do something harmful, whether intentionally or inadvertently, and the responsibility implied by that power becomes too much. It’s easier to say it doesn’t exist, or to claim that no one would or should us it.
This same fear can lead to the mystification of magic. If magical words and behaviors are retained because we like the aesthetic, but we don’t like the power, we’re left with mysticism at best and spicy psychology at worst. Magic is about making changes in the world. Mysticism is about bringing us closer to the divine. Spicy psychology is bad-takes on pop-psychology with occult window dressing. At least two of those three things are awesome and pair well together, but still, aren’t the same thing. If we’re afraid of power, but want to feel like magicians, redefining magic as being about our spiritual development, closeness with the divine, or reframing how we understand our lives, are all ways of avoiding that power and therefore the responsibility.
This side step can also help us avoid the fear of being challenged. If magic makes changes, will we have put up or shut up moments? Will people call us out and ask us to prove it? Magic isn’t always consistent. Magic isn’t always measurable and doesn’t always work exactly as expected because there are numerous unseen factors outside of our own work as well as within it. It’s a tough endeavor for folks who want to be show-offs. If no external results are required, no one can ever test you or call you out.
This same fear leads to lots of social behavior in the community. If any of us call out anyone else, we open ourselves up to the same call out. People promote a lot of things that probably shouldn’t be promoted. A lot of popular people quietly have suspicions about the veracity or quality of the work of other popular people, but prefer to stay quiet to avoid a show-down where everyone loses. On some level, this is good, but at the extremes it lets some bad stuff go. It also makes it harder for people to call out legitimate issues in work, because people don’t want to divide between factual elements and speculative elements. This kind of fear can play out in weird ways. Sometimes it’s promoting a book you know is bad. Sometimes it’s being afraid people will see through your lack of anything to offer so you swing hard the other direction and attack good people. Fortunately, the folks doing that out of their own fear rather than legitimate causes often run away or collapse in a huff as if they’re being bullied when people defend against their attacks.
A more insipid fear we sometimes see is rooted in fetishism and exoticism. The reminder to be respectful of other cultures and not to claim access or status in a tradition that doesn’t belong to you turns into the assertion that certain people can’t practice other traditions because they have the wrong skin color. Or it goes further to assert that the spirits or gods of other traditions are dangerous because they are more wild and aggressive and so people not from the race associated with that tradition are in danger if they approach those spirits. At that point, the attempt to be progressive and defend against appropriation just veers into the territory of straight up racism.
Go to a big enough forum and every day you’ll see multiple fears on display. They won’t wear a sign. Commenters and posters won’t say “I’m afraid.” Instead they’ll make claims and assertions that aren’t true, and which may be problematic because they help them cope with their fears.
“Tame your fears, a door appears, the time has come to go.”
Time to deliver on the promise of some Agatha.
Watching Agatha in Agatha All Along can give us a lot to think about in terms of fear and witchcraft. Above we’ve looked at how witchcraft and fear have a relationship. We’ve looked at how fear can lead to untruths, and how the world of witches today is a world often filled with fear. But we haven’t really gotten into what to do with fear or its place in witchcraft.
I think it’s rare that we have fiction that we can read or watch and take real lessons about magic and witchcraft from it, particularly in a practical sense. Being inspired to feel magical or witchy and therefore to want to work or study? Sure, fiction is great for that. It gets the juices flowing for lots of things in life, and magic is no exception. Having useful applicable magical techniques? That happens less often. Philosophical or life lessons or character traits and arcs that gives us things useful to think about in our lives, whether as magicians or general? Well, that’s a huge part of fiction.
Why Agatha and fear though? Agatha is the villain right? Well, not really. I’m a bit of a comic geek but pretty much only for DC. My knowledge of Marvel is mostly TV and movies. As far as I understand it, in the comics, Agatha is not so much a sinister villain. She’s a character that ends up in supporting roles frequently, often of the heroes. She’s also a fair bit older in appearance. People have talked about MCU going another way by making her a younger, sassy, comical villain, but is she really a villain?
In WandaVision, Agatha is an opportunist. She sees events unfolding and jumps in to take advantage of them. She doesn’t create Westview. She doesn’t cast the hex. She doesn’t make Wanda retreat into her sitcom fantasy. Wanda’s not really the villain either. Her circumstances are. They push her to that situation. The official who has Vision’s body and who wants SHIELD to take Wanda down is an antagonist, but not really a villain either. He’s doing what he thinks his job is. The critical struggle is really an internal one for Wanda, and the resolution highlights that with Monica Rambeau’s role.
In a way, Agatha begins the events of Agatha All Along as a victim. Wanda has taken her power, and the Darkhold. Wanda has left her living a TV fantasy in a community where everyone else has returned to normal. Agatha is powerless and humiliated. In a way though, Agatha has always been a victim, at least on MCU-Earth-616.
Agatha bears the weight of her reputation. She’s not just a murderer, she’s a murderer who kills other witches and steals their power. She’s so callous, she sold her infant son for power. Everything everyone knows about Agatha is a warning not to trust her. Even Teen, who rescued her, and who excitedly befriended her and expressed doubt at her villainy, it turns out, doesn’t trust her. Initially, it’s played like Teen loses his trust in Agatha when she kills Alice Wu-Gulliver, but, as Teen is revealed to be Billy and he unfolds his tale it becomes clear he’s always had suspicions. He was warned about her in the moment he first heard about her from Ralph. He likely believed she was bad and hid his distrust because he felt she could help him navigate the road - a thing he began to doubt as their journey progressed.
It doesn’t take a lot of attention though to see that Agatha is consistently hurt by this. Agatha is frequently afraid, and not just because at the moment her powers are gone. Agatha’s callous exterior is an act, built out of fear, to protect herself. It shows through relatively early on in minor ways. In the first two episodes, it can easily be dismissed as Agatha being afraid of Vidal, or of the Salem Seven, or of being powerless while she is pursued, but as the series progresses, it becomes clear that Agatha isn’t the villain she seems to be.
We get glimpses of it in the first trial. Agatha remains callous about Sharon Davis, but that might be a bit fair. Sharon was a prop for Agatha, and so Agatha only referred to her by her name from when she was a prop for Wanda - Mrs. Hart. Agatha never let Sharon become a person for her. Sharon was a stand in to avoid Vidal. She was the expendable patsy to Agatha. She wasn’t one of the witches. Given that Agatha is a few hundred years old, and her position as a powerful and semi-immortal witch likely separated her from humanity, we can kind of understand how easy it is for her to see a normal human as disposable.
Agatha is significantly less callous about the other witches. We see it mostly with Teen, who Agatha is willing to be self-sacrificing for. Teen even picks up on that early on and uses it to motivate her in the first trial. This plays into the red-herring around Teen’s identity, but we also see moments of connection which shine through with the other witches - particularly Jen, who has the most in common with Agatha.
While the first trial doesn’t give us a lot of room to see Agatha’s humanity in terms of being able to recognize some personhood in the other witches, we do have moments to see her fear. As the hallucinations begin, Agatha is jumpy. Moments occur which give hints at her past. We get a confirmation that she did likely trade away her son, as Jen claimed, but, Agatha’s response isn’t that of a callous power hungry psycho.
Earlier, in the police-procedural fantasy, the room Teen broke into was a room for Nicholas Scratch. The lonely cop with no friends or family maintained a bedroom for the infant son she never got to raise. There was a motherly yearning and a sense of loss, and Agatha’s response to the break in seems to ramp up when she realizes what room the burglar is in. When she hallucinates Nick’s cradle, she looks terrified and shocked. I don’t know about other viewers, but to me she looked as if she was thrown back into being an overwhelmed younger woman pushed into a scenario she didn’t want. The unwanted scenario definitely felt more like it was the loss of her son rather than being a mother.
Later, we see Agatha panicked and distraught when Teen is hurt and could die. We see her being motherly and caring towards him when he is recovering, even if it has a bit of her sassy Agatha tone. Just after that, she has a moment with Vidal. There is a brief and passing overture to her in that moment, and it doesn’t just seem like she’s trying to avoid being killed. It seems like there’s a lost connection and she still feels some draw to it. In fact, if Vidal were going to kill her on the road, she’d had the opportunity to and hadn’t. Vidal had already suggested she’d get more deaths from the road. She’d already made it clear that it was the Salem Seven that were coming to kill her. Agatha didn’t need to offer herself to Vidal to avoid being killed; Agatha felt emotionally vulnerable and needed comfort.
In terms of get out of jail free cards, Agatha also didn’t need to turn on the speaker and reject Vidal in front of everyone. They all already assumed Agatha would betray them and kill them. Without turning on the mic, they wouldn’t have heard the conversation. They could all read through Agatha’s tone that she was putting on a show, so they all still questioned what was going on between Agatha and Vidal and how it related to their safety. Maybe Agatha turning on the mic and playing it up to mess with Vidal was really Agatha hoping to communicate that she wasn’t looking to betray them and that they did need to be concerned about Vidal. Agatha clearly doesn’t know how to connect with others, and knows no one will trust her, so this may have seemed to be the best she could do in that situation.
Carrying into the next two episodes is where we really get to see who Agatha is. When we reach Agatha’s trial, Agatha is clearly terrified. We haven’t seen that terror in anyone else’s trial. Jen had to regain her composure, control, and sense of competency in her trial. Alice had to come to terms with her family heritage and embrace it while feeling the strength of a connection in her trial. Lilia needed to gain self acceptance in her trial. None of them were really faced with fear so much as difficulty. They all overcame their trial by feeling empowered. They were supported by the coven, but they each realized they could do the thing they were good at and did it. Agatha’s did not work that way at all. Agatha had to be saved.
Not only was Agatha’s trial different in that she wasn’t the one who overcame it, but it also gave us a lot more insight into Agatha and Agatha specifically. Lilia’s trial was similar in that regard, but Jen’s trial explored everyone and Alice’s trial still played into the group dynamics even if it was more centered on Alice than Jen’s trial was on Jen.
In Agatha’s trial we meet her mother. Her mother is bad enough that when Vidal seems ready to let Agatha be offered up to…well, to Death, she isn’t willing to let Agatha’s mother have her, or be the cause of it. Agatha’s mother explains that she should have killed Agatha the moment that Agatha had been born. This doesn’t come across like a realization that came later in life, it seems as if she anticipated Agatha being evil and wanted to kill her as a baby but wasn’t able to. Her mother explains that she was evil from the beginning.
Imagine growing up that way. Your mom wants to kill you but can’t, and she believes your evil. Now, imagine growing up that way as a witch, in what is essentially the frontier - an American colony in the 1600s. It had to be awful. It’s the sort of thing that would break most people. In a comic, it might be the basis for a villain arc, but in real life it would just be deep and harmful trauma. Every element of the episode shows us that for Agatha, this was a deep and harmful trauma.
We see more about Agatha’s execution, at the hands of her mother. Again, this would be traumatic for anyone. Being tied to a pyre to be burned alive in general would be traumatic if you escaped, but imagine you’re not a witch being accused by Puritans, you’re a witch being put to death because the other witches think you’re a dangerous evil. You’re a witch being put to death by witches because your mother thinks you’re a dangerous evil.
Later, we see Alice try to save Agatha from her mother’s possessing spirit. Agatha’s ability to absorb power from other witches kicks in and kills Alice. It is abundantly clear that Agatha could not control this. Earlier, Agatha explained to Lilia that she could only take a witch’s powers if the witch blasts her. It was explained as currency to make Lilia feel more comfortable joining Agatha, but it was addressed again before they entered the road with the whole coven. Agatha hadn’t kept this a secret, so she clearly had no plan to get blasted and steal their powers. This gives us a basis to believe that Agatha was telling the truth that she couldn’t control it.
Agatha’s inability to control her absorption of powers undermines the entire coding of Agatha is a callous psychopathic villain. Clearly, the show isn’t coding her as that, but, within the narrative that is how everyone has understood her through her life. The genesis of that persona was her execution. By absorbing their power, Agatha killed her mother and her coven. With the bond a coven should have, killing your coven would be the most heinous thing a witch could do. So that’s how Agatha was seen. Watching the scene unfold, it’s clear that Agatha did not know she would absorb the coven’s power when they blasted her. When Alice blasts her we see that she legitimately couldn’t control what was happening. So, if Agatha can’t control her absorption she really had no culpability for what happened in Salem.
Agatha was a victim. Agatha was traumatized. Agatha escaped by becoming a killer and being branded as a monster. This also led to the creation of the Salem Seven who have been Agatha’s enemies for centuries because she “murdered” their parents, but it turns out she really didn’t. What kind of life is that to be saddled with?
Agatha had to adopt the identity of the power hungry callous killer to protect herself. She needed to appear that way to keep away the enemies who would want to kill her. Fear led to taking up this persona as a shield and finding power in it.
When Agatha killed Alice we see her immediately jumping in and wanting to help. She isn’t given the opportunity to show that desire too thoroughly because Teen shuts her down and angrily tells her to stand back. The person Agatha felt the most connection to, the person who had treated her like she could be a good person, now looked at her with the same anger and horror that everyone else does. He rejected her and condemned her as a monster just like everyone else. Initially, there is a moment where you can see her reeling from that before she tries to collect herself and shield herself with the villain persona.
Once they make it outside, Agatha returns to expressing regret and trying to explain she didn’t mean to. This is a wholly different response from when Sharon Davis died. Agatha clearly cared about Alice Wu-Gulliver, or at least respected her. Agatha also cares about how Teen sees her, and even about the connection with the coven. Jen is callous and dismissive about it and Lilia has almost no response. They recognize it’s time to keep going, but Agatha, as committed to the road as she is, is halted by this moment. Then, Teen maintains his rejection of her and Agatha stops. Her face and posture shift. Her tone shifts. Agatha composes herself, puts on her mask, and makes a cutting comment, no longer to Teen but now to Billy.
Billy was wearing Teen as a mask. Not fully intentionally, but still willingly. Agatha wears her villainy as a mask. The trauma of her trial let us see the real Agatha, and she tried to explain herself while she was exposed and vulnerable. Billy, who as Teen felt like a stand in for her lost son, rejected that effort twice and so she had to protect herself. She had to regain her composure and her sense of power and and hit back at Billy. Her choice of words might have even been to remind herself that despite whatever she felt for him he wasn’t her son.
If we jump back a bit, that connection and desire for her son was highlighted during her trial. It was the voice of Nicholas Scratch calling out to her that broke her moment of being lost in her powers and allowed her to release Alice. Nothing else seemed to reach or stop Agatha there as she seemed fully out of control. Her connection with her son had the power to do so. That connection is clearly important to Agatha and is clearly one she wants. Even in Wanda vision, there seemed to be some interest or affection towards Billy, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if the sequel series had started off with the reveal that Agatha had had Billy with her the whole time. Reminding herself that Billy is Wanda’s child, not hers, really only gave her a moment to compose herself because her appeal to Billy to retain a connection with her continues.
It’s not just Billy she wants a connection to though, it’s the coven. The terror in Agatha’s face and voice were so clear when she was afraid they would leave her. Throughout the trial, once it became clear that it was her trial, Agatha’s terror was palpable. The terror didn’t seem to only be about her mother, but about being alone and abandoned. There was probably part of it that connected to her not wanting to be the one to fail at completing the road and to miss the opportunity to regain her powers. But, realistically, who is worried about that as their mother’s murderous ghost wants to trap them and torment or kill them? Agatha didn’t want to be left behind and it was clear that she was pleading not to be abandoned.
When the story resumed in the next episode, Agatha keeps up the mask of being callous about how many people she’s killed. It is almost as if she’s trying to teach Billy to steel himself against the guilt of having just casually murdered Jen and Lilia because he got worked up. She chides him about how he reacts to his power. Honestly, the show kind of failed in not giving Billy a real reaction to the murders he had just seemed to commit and it gave itself a weak out by never making him deal with them because he learns they’re alive. While most of episode six focused on how Billy Maximoff came to be William Kaplan, and how he ended up looking for Agatha, we get great insight into Agatha. Her exchange with Billy shows she still wants to be accepted by him. We get to see how and why she has constructed her villain persona and how it’s not really her. Even as she’s wearing it, concern for Billy shows through. But more than that, it becomes clear how the flippantness, and the sassiness are largely coping mechanisms and survival techniques. Agatha is powerful, but she’s also been put through the ringer and while she’s survived, she’s felt backed into a corner, and has developed both the ability and the image of someone who can take all comers so that she can feel safe in that corner.
Episode Seven was absolutely beautiful. “I loved being a witch,” was such a beautiful and powerful line. The struggle with power, with being different, with community, with self-acceptance, and ultimately weaving all the pieces of one’s life together to finally have that acceptance and find that love not just for your sometimes problematic sisters, but more importantly the love you never felt for who and what you are was such a beautiful and amazing thing to see especially in the context of a supernatural experience of witchcraft.
It was so beautiful, it might have made us miss something else. The costumes. The show runner has commented that the energy and vibe of the Maleficent costume was right for Joe Locke, but I haven’t seen much other discussion of the costumes. So let’s start with Billy.
All of the witches that were presented have been the subject of modern retcons in movies and plays. Maleficent went from a faery who had been scorned through courtly insult and possible political side-choosing, to being an innocent faery betrayed by a best-friend turned lover who had something precious taken from her in that betrayal. Billy clearly feels some resentment for his mother, as if he’s been betrayed, and he is seeking after something precious which was lost or which he feels was taken from him. The Evil Queen doesn’t typically have a backstory. She was beautiful, moved in on a grieving king, probably murdered him, took the throne, and got jealous of the beauty of his very young daughter and decided to kill her too. Snow White and the Huntsman kept the Queen pretty evil and didn’t really try to redeem her, but it showed us that her problems were based on being insecure. She was a poor girl whose home was ravaged by invaders, and using her beauty and by gaining magic she was able to go from being powerless, in poverty, and at risk of being abused to being someone who could protect herself and her brother, someone who had power, and eventually someone who ruled unquestionably. Her villainous behavior is rooted in that insecurity and the fear that she will lose her beauty and with it her power and therefore her safety. The clearest connection between Jen and the Evil Queen is probably highlighted in that she appears as the Evil Queen in disguise with the poison apple. Jen is the potion witch and so the connection to poisons is there. Jen sells scam beauty products to stay wealthy and keep a sense of power and security now that her witch power has been taken from her. Jen’s powers were taken by a man who attacked her and tricked her, and Jen has been trying to deal with that powerlessness and its inherent insecurity since then. The Evil Queen’s backstory didn’t really redeem her, and we haven’t really seen Jen depicted as evil, but Jen actually does have some of the callousness and desire for power that everyone sees in Agatha, much more so than Lilia or Alice did.
Lilia’s costume is a little less interesting. Lilia never really shows much problematic behavior. Lilia is trying to be good and help people. Lilia laments that other witches do scary and evil things and make it hard for people like her who aren’t evil. So Lilia is Glenda the Good.
Agatha is the Wicked Witch. It’s fitting for the villainous exterior. I believe Agatha even made a comment that the character had been based on her. Agatha is the only one to link herself to her costume. In Once, we learn that the Wicked Witch wasn’t originally green and she wasn’t originally Wicked. She became jealous and couldn’t control that jealousy and it overtook her. She tried to be good but couldn’t help it and gave in to who circumstance was leading her to be. She leaned into it, but she still wanted the connections and happiness that others had - like many of the bad guys in Once. I haven’t seen Wicked, but from the trailers for the movie, I take it that her appearance and her power separate Ephaba from others. She’s special, but people are afraid. The world around her decides it’s useful to use this and they turn against her and make her the villain. By the time we meet her in Wizard of Oz, maybe it’s that she’s accepted that role, or maybe it’s that someone dropped a house on her sister and stole her property. When we take all of these pieces together, she is the perfect allegory for Agatha. Rather than feeling jealousy, Agatha feels trauma and fear. Others villainize Agatha and she adopts the role of the villain to protect herself. She still seeks connections and a life, but she does it with power and with freedom that her persona grants her.
Maybe episode eight will undermine this reading of the character, but I’m doubting it because they’ve done such a good job building it and weaving those elements in realistically. Kathryn Hahn has done an amazing job acting the character and showing these complex layers in believable ways, sometimes pretty subtle and sometimes pretty visible, but always convincing.
Agatha shows us a witch’s fear in a direction very different from those people who loudly assert “No true scotsman!” or who bully people and then act like they’re being bullied, or who malign the spirits and gods of people who have different skin colors. Agatha doesn’t let fear be a weakness. Agatha doesn’t let fear create lies which take away her power. Agatha transmutes fear into empowerment. Not the kind of empowerment where we tell ourselves we have power so we don’t feel powerless and don’t feel like we have to work to alleviate our powerlessness. Agatha, quite literally, takes power from adversity, but she also turns her survival and the fear that comes with it into a way of castelating herself like a powerful fortress.
Agatha shows us that one way fear can be useful is as a tool to inspire us. Agatha doesn’t derive her power from being afraid. Agatha recognizes there are real and legitimate things of which to be afraid. She protects herself from those fears by creating an exterior that turns that fear back on others. While she does that she prepares herself. She is opportunistic. She takes dire situations and finds ways to survive them while gaining greater power from them. The fear shows her the need for this.
This can be part of the process for actual witches. We talk about witchcraft being the recourse of the powerless. Witchcraft gives the marginal a power that others don’t have. This is true, but not always true. There have been people in history who were witches or thought to be witches who did have power, or who weren’t necessarily marginalized economically or socially. They were certainly liminal, they were different, and they were questioned by those around them. So there was a marginality to them. Sometimes that comes from the nature that makes them witches. Sometimes being forced into marginal spaces and liminal experiences can be a way of deriving power. If like Agatha, fear becomes for us a map of necessity instead of a crippling blow, we can find in those margins and those spaces between spaces, roads and ways that others never see. We can learn to use that different positioning to give us edges and advantages that others might not realize are there. This is a way in which fear can become a power.
When fear becomes frightfulness applied properly, it can be power. Ruling through fear can work, but it can be tenuous. Being loved and respected instead of feared can also be tenuous - you can still end up like Alexander if enough of those who loved you lose that love and don’t have reason to fear you. Power needs both, and avoiding weakness is having the wisdom to judiciously apply various elements of and types of power in the right moments and right ways. For a witch, this can go beyond the social concepts inherent therein.
I have said in other places that faery tales are often for the non-witches. Many faerytales tell people how to avoid the uncanny, how to step through the door instead of exploring the liminal, how to not engage the other. When normal people don’t learn to avoid those things, they can be harmed. They can be damaged. They can come back different. Sometimes that difference is fatigue, or wasting sickness, or seeming distant and vacant. Sometimes that difference is being witched. There is a value to the fear of the other because it protects people who are ill equipped to navigate those spaces safely. For the witch, fear can come into play in two different ways here.
In some cultures, it is understood that because the witch is different, the witch is frightening. In most folklore, there are supernatural elements to the witch’s being. The witch is human, but there are other parts and pieces within their soul witch aren’t human. The witch is a spiritual chimera in a way. Within the spirit world, there nature has the ability to seem monstrous because it is human and not human and so it appears different, and different appearances are a warning of danger or power (this is literally what the word “monster” means, it is a “deMONSTRation” of the potential danger or power foreshadowed by the apparent difference. One way a witch might have power in the spirit world is by applying that frightfulness. For some spirits, it will be because the witch is kin-like, and has facility within the spirit world, and their being is more linked to the spirit world so spirits recognize a relationship. Sometimes, the application of power demonstrates authority for the witch. In some folklore, with some spirits, the presence of the witch conveys a frightfulness and authority and allows the witch to command them.
For real live witches today, most of us probably want different sorts of relationships with spirits than that. For anyone who has walked widely along the blurred and crooked line between the waking world and the spirit world, it will be well understood that the ability to be a frightening and commanding presence when needed is a necessary ability. To be that, we have to be in touch with our own fear. We have to be able to command our fear so it doesn’t shake us, it bolsters us, it doesn’t grip us, we hold it and weaponize it. Early in this piece, I spoke of fascination. Anne Rice wrote about vampires holding a warning to “beware” in their minds a part of their power to use glamor; it’s fiction, but there is a reality to that. While fascination often works best by drawing in, the simplest forms involve projecting out, and the lock that allows that projection needs a sense that is like fearlessness, but it can be strengthened by a sense that you could be a thing to be feared if not paid attention to, you could be feared in a way that is subtle and intriguing.
Fear can also be a part of what opens us up to experience. Fear can heighten our awareness when applied correctly. It can be a shortcut to a certain rush that opens us up to flows of energy. In the 1990s, I had a friend who talked about doing the Ars Goetia in cemeteries because that fear was required. It heightened the fear that one might naturally experience when calling on a demon. It really wasn’t a good or useful instruction. It’s kind of advocating for the fear that shuts you down or makes you vulnerable. It’s not an entirely off base suggestion though, it just has poor reasoning, or a poor application. A controlled fear can put your mind and body into a state where it’s trying to do opposing things. You’re trying to engage with something fearful, so parts of you prepare to fight, they prepare to dig deeper and move forward. On the other hand, part of you is afraid and wants to run, it wants to escape, it wants to pull things back or loosen things up depending on whichever reaction you need. You’re creating a liminality within yourself physically and psychologically. Our minds, bodies, and spirits are part of a complicated and interconnected complex. So if we’re pushing two out of three into a liminal state, it becomes easier for our spirits to connect with that liminality as well. The right application of fear, when fear becomes excitement, can help stir us up and create those tensions and that movement of force and fire that turns on our occult senses and our ability to engage occult energies.
Think through your experiences of initiations, or of challenging magic in new or different contexts, or even when you were sneaking around in the dark first experimenting formally with magic. Was that fear there on some level? Were there things that were unknown, unsure, unexpected, and was the wonder at what could be next, what could go wrong, and whether or not you were fully safe part of what was there causing the tingle to run along your spine, your hairs to stand up, your eyes to dilate and your physical senses to heighten? Was part of the experience enhanced by the small hint of fear, or maybe the fair dose of fear, that was served along with the main event?
I have recently been considering a magical adventure. Ironically, it’s not inspired at all by the witches’ road, but the Ballad makes me think about it and reminds me to plan it and has even helped me frame some thinking around it. It involves me going to a place with spirits instead of calling upon spirits, and in particular, I need spirits who are powerful enough that normal people are routinely aware of their presence, and who are wild enough that they are sometimes perceived as dangerous. In looking for places to go to find them, one nearby place that has stood out involves a path that would be frightening to me, personally. People go there, people take this path, it is likely safely navigable, but I can’t find a lot of information on it, which adds to the mystery and the fear. Certain features of the trail, which probably add to its hauntedness, are features I am not fond of, although I don’t even know how present they are.
It makes me not want to go there, but that makes me think it is probably the right place to go. The fear would heighten the experience dramatically. It would also make me vulnerable in ways that could be useful for what I want from it. Conquering the fear enough to be successful along the path would potentially also help with the goal in mind.
Like darkness, fear can be useful in many ways. Fear can take away power, it can arrest and hamper us. It can make us accept lies that shut us down or hide power from us. But fear can also be a tool. Fear can be a map that guides us. It can be a warning that inspires us. It can be a weapon in an arsenal. To quote a song that isn’t “Ballad of the Witches’ Road,” Hozier, who is clearly a faery pretending to be a human rock star, sang, “Never tame your demons, but always keep them on a leash.” We don’t have to eliminate fear. We don’t have to reject fear. Even the gods have their fears. Mythology and historical magic both show us that. Fear is important, so is courage, just like order and chaos are both necessary together to avoid either immobile stagnation or complete dispersion.
The key is that witches must explore and understand fear and make it a tool of power rather than surrendering to it and allowing it to be the cause of hiding in a state of powerlessness.
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