Ever since that ridiculous news story "News of the Weird" that covered pagans who blessed President Obama's inauguration this year, I've been a bit on edge in terms of how the media treats witches. On CNN today there is an article called: Calling All Witches: Cave In Need Of New Hag. I honestly can't tell if I'm just being overly sensitive, but GOODNESS.
Apparently some small town in England has a folk story about a witch who terrorized the village, blighting crops and causing all sorts of mischief. She was defeated when a cleric threw holy water on her, and was turned into stone. Since then, the town has built an amusement park and tourist trap around this myth. And apparently, part of the parcel is a full-time, live-in "witch" who lives in the cave that was supposedly the original witch's haunt.
So, okay. It's an old folk story and has value as a myth - albeit one that (as usual) portrays a woman being struck down by a representative of the patriarchal religion-in-charge. There are always going to be warty Halloween masks and Evil Witches of the West, but do we really need to have auditions for a live-in 'witch'?
I guess I'm probably drawing this out a bit further than it needs to be - 'all in good fun' and the whole bit. But it's an interesting question: how do we delineate between modern Witches, practitioners of paganism and the caricatured 'witches' of the past? Just some musings.
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