ABSTRACT
So far in this book, we have seen witches grouped into two broad categories. In the first, they are wicked people who harm and kill their neighbours, worship the devil and engage in obscene and subversive practices obnoxious to church and state. In the second, they are innocent victims, falsely accused of these activities and persecuted by deluded or evil witch-finders. We have seen how the first category was to some extent reimagined by theorists like Michelet and Murray (see Chapter Four) so that the imagined devil-worshipping sect became instead a pagan cult: troubling in various ways – capable of promiscuity, human sacrifice and malice – but not demonic. Some creative writers picked up these ideas to produce anachronistic historical fictions that “explained” witch trials by telling stories of a Murray-esque cult: for example, John Buchan’s 1927 novel Witch Wood. But in this section, we will look at a more ambitious fictional redefinition of the witch figure as a positive social being, even a role model, a redefinition that occurred alongside Michelet and Murray’s work on the witch-cult but was not always related to it. Witches were reinvented in the twentieth century as good, in two separate ways: firstly as safe and domesticated creatures, and secondly (paradoxically) as subversives who offered resistance to dominant cultures and to persecution.
