The Witch, an Authentic Look at Witchcraft From the Recesses of the Neurotic Puritan Mind

Here are some of my thoughts on The Witch, the incredibly popular occult thriller that has captured the imaginations of so many lately. 

(warning  spoilers)

In my opinion, the movie was a top notch psychological thriller and a "must see" if you prefer that type of film.

The film is grey and dark both in imagery and in atmosphere. The subject matter being what it is, I found the director's choices in regards to cinematography and color palette to be flawless. Naturally, with nearly everything on screen being capable of carrying a symbolic meaning, it seems quite clear that the bleakness and darkness of the film is rooted in the oppressive, soul-crushing, joyless nature of Puritanism that practically oozes from screen from its very beginning.

Having said that, allow me to state that this movie is not, despite the fanfare it is receiving among many Witches and Pagans, a Pro-Witchcraft movie.

"The Witch" is not an Anti-Witchcraft movie either.

In regards to Witchcraft, "The Witch" is neither an apologetic nor a polemic film.

Instead, the story underlying The Witch it is a tale told both through the lens of the Christian Puritan mindset and extant Witchcraft folklore. It is a story that hews closely to its source material which is exactly what makes it very much worth seeing. Therefore it is important to keep in mind that "The Witch" is a story told from the perspective of those who would have believed in Witchcraft at the time. 

If one wants to see what Puritans thought of Witches and Witchcraft, the "The Witch" is the movie to watch.

Witchcraft in, "The Witch" is dark and terrible and by "dark and terrible," I mean unremittingly evil by any rational definition of the term. 

The first encounter the puritan family, around whom the tale is built, has with a witch involves the theft of their infant son who is, in turn, slaughtered and used as an ingredient for a flying ointment (again, true to the folklore of using baby-fat in flying ointments). This first unflinchingly brutal act on the part of the witches in the film is symbolic of their nature. These witches are horrifically dark and, one could argue, barely human any longer...at least not in any way the viewer could understand. What they do, they do for their own inscrutable motivations. 

There is nothing to be found in these witches that one could see as sympathetic. The film, thankfully, does not attempt to peer into their psychology because in so doing, the witches would perhaps become relatable and this would fly directly in the face of the subject matter as told from the film's Puritan perspective.

If these witches, as cruel and calculating as they are in the film, started out as innocent as Thomasin (the film's primary protagonist), which one could I believe safely assume to be the case, then they are not only dreadful, they are tragic.

There is no "romantic darkness" to be found here, no misunderstanding, no sympathetic villains. One may argue that in this bleak spiritual landscape there are no "good" and no "bad" guys. This would not be true. The innocents struck down by witches, Thomasin's entire family, for a total of six victims, are the "good guys" even if the culture from which they come, and the beliefs they hold are noxious to us. They are still victims of a fate they did nothing to deserve. This is especially true of the children, even the creepy twins, who are themselves highly unsympathetic characters.

True malevolent Darkness (pathological selfishness, cruelty, libertine freedom at the expense of the well-being of others, etc.) only seems romantic when the Light ("the good") is defined as oppressive, moralizing, repressive ugliness as it is in this film. There is no joy, no laughter, no happiness, no love in the Light in this film. There is bleakness and debasement.

Unfortunately for Thomasin she is, because she dwells in a universe wherein Puritan Christian assumptions of spiritual truth are clearly implied (as is obvious in the storytelling and events of the film), doomed. She escapes from under the boot heel of her Puritan culture and its God only to find herself forced to choose a new master if she would retain her freedom. 

This new master, who is both directly and indirectly responsible for the brutal deaths of her entire family, does not grant Thomasin freedom out of  love for her or respect for her agency, but instead grants her agency so she can in turn serve as a tool of his own rebellion. He is no more noble a figure than the oppressive and joyless taskmaster God of the Puritans....save he seems as such to Thomasin who, at her lowest and most vulnerable, signs his offered pact.


As any occultists knows, should one fail to approach a power of questionable character as anything but its equal or superior, and instead approach as a servant, things are bound to end badly. Thomasin is not the equal of the Devil, and so her fate is to serve him as his creature. She will become the very thing that stole away and slaughtered her infant brother in the earlier portion of the film. In a Puritan universe, this young woman can never be truly free.


Yes, the protagonist's outlook is that grim from within the Puritan paradigm from which this darksome tale is woven. 

The Devil, in this tale, is no Prometheus, no Lucifer the Lightbringer, bringing illumination even at great personal sacrifice. He is the Satan that is the Enemy of God and man, who waits as a hungry lion to pounce upon believers. This is the Devil/Satan of "The Witch," as the Puritans would have believed him to be in accordance with the truths they believed expressed in their Bible.

The Devil, in this film as he is rooted in Puritan assumptions, is a malevolent force....even if he is only a slightly less odious figure, possibly, than the conception of God the Puritans worship. That's entirely arguable. One may attempt to, wrangle something of value out of "The Witch's" Devil, to make him somehow a liberator, or, gods forbid, a representative of older Pagan sensibilities, but this seems, in my opinion, to be projecting one's own hopes/preferences/biases onto a character and story that implies no such thing. If one swaps paradigms, seeing the movie's antagonists through the lens of modern Pagan Witchcraft (Wiccan, Trad, or other) wherein the underlying Puritan belief structure if lost or invalidated, the story loses all internal consistency.

In all instances when I refer to "darkness" or "light" in reference to this film, it is from within the paradigm of a dualistic Christian moral universe as presupposed by The Witch and not as these concepts are understood from within various Pagan faiths in general or from within Witchcraft, of any kind, specifically. 

This movie is interesting, disturbing, and even fascinating (for the student of folklore) look at the manner in which 17th Century Christians saw the world outside of that which fell directly under the influence of Christendom....this of course includes the wild places of the world....as being under the dominion of the adversary of their God.

Antinomianism in Modern Pagan Witchcraft Part 1 (The Witch's Antinomian Aesthetic)

“Never the spirit was born;

the spirit shall cease to be never;
Never was time it was not;
End and Beginning are dreams!
Birth-less and deathless and
changeless remaineth the spirit forever.
Death hath not touched it all,
dead though the house of it seems!”
- Sir Edwin Arnold


A lot of Pagans love the darkly mysterious paraphernalia, imagery and settings of what I'll call the "Witch's Antinomian Aesthetic." (just Witch's Aesthetic from here on in) Who isn't drawn to that which represents mystery, antiquity, substance, and power? Animal bones or horns on the altar, half-melted candles on authentic appearing human skulls (imagery that represent mortality and the world of spirits), shadowy décor as often as not bathed in the smoke of burning incense, old leather-bound grimoires, fearful (to non-witches anyway) images of gods like Hekate, Cernunnos, Morrigan, colors such as black and red (death and blood, shadows and passion/power), ravens (Pagans seem to love ravens about as much as we love wolves), the moon (naturally), and night in general are part and parcel of the Witch's Aesthetic.

I admit it, I love this stuff. Sure, it can be kitschy if overdone, but I love the aesthetic and find it more compelling than other potential aesthetic sensibilities. For me, as an issue of personal taste, the Witch's Aesthetic is simply more appealing than, for example, a New Age aesthetic with its bright, sunny, rainbow-kissed sensibility. However, because I have great respect for the power of symbol and metaphor, especially in a psycho-spiritual/magickal context, I don't casually embrace the Witch's Aesthetic in either my life or my practice. In my experience, to surround one's self with symbols not invested with purpose is to diminish their potency should one choose to eventually use them with purpose. In other words, anything of the Witch's Aesthetic that is on my altar or in my personal space is always placed there with a full awareness of its purpose and meaning. Even I feel it looks "cool" and witchy, those qualities are far and away of less importance than the deep meaning of the object(s) in question.

It cannot come as a surprise that the Witch's Aesthetic embraces a "darker" sensibility when one considers the fact that witchcraft is essentially an antinomian path. There is an inherent rebellious spirit within the essence of witchcraft, even if that rebellion is, for many, unspoken, unrealized and largely unfocused. To be a witch is to firstly, embrace and reclaim terms (witch and witchcraft) that have, historically speaking, been defined as that which is inherently malevolent. Secondly, to be a witch is to, by varying degrees, stand outside of Western culture and the normative spiritual and religious dynamics of that culture and to be, at least internally, perpetually "other" outside of the Pagan/Witchcraft community.

Whether consciously or unconsciously, the Witch's Aesthetic embraces what I would term "Sacred Darkness." Sacred Darkness is the holy ground where much of what is fundamental, sacred, and powerful in the human experience has been relegated . Within this Sacred Darkness are all of those things our ever-increasingly post-Christian society still, as a matter of course, rejects due to effect of the stranglehold moral dualism has had on the Western psyche for nearly 2000 years. Christianity, as practiced by the masses (ie. exoterically), is a moralistic, solar faith. All that is sinful, according to exoteric Christianity, has been relegated to the shadows. Much of that which is most powerful in the human experience, that which can be overwhelming, transformative, and dangerous, such as, for example, the natural process of death, has been made to seem an aberration not of this world. Death itself has been sealed away into the Sacred Darkness, demonized and turned into the work of The Enemy to be defeated once and for all when Jesus returns in glory to judge the living and the dead.

Can it be any surprise that death, darkness and the seemingly macabre play a role in the Witch's Aesthetic?

That which is culturally repressed will eventually find voice and the Witch's Aesthetic provides one such voice to a greater or lesser extent. To a greater extent when the aesthetic is consciously adopted to knowingly express/reflect the repressed realities in the context of one's spiritual path and to a lesser extent when one is merely the unconscious voice of Western Society's collective neurosis.

To consciously choose one's aesthetic and approach is to be empowered and powerful, while to serve as the unwitting voice of the damaged Western Psyche is to be disempowered no matter how "Darkly Powerful" one believes one appears. To be unconscious is, in my opinion, to reflect a kind of angst ridden spiritual adolescence, a rebel without a cause, or as it has been termed, "Dark Fluffy."

To be continued....