Empires of the Imagination by Alec Worley;

Author:Alec Worley;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc.
Published: 2021-01-05T00:00:00+00:00

Priests of the Invisible: Wizards and Witches

Wizards are the clergy of fantasy, those with a hotline to whatever godly forces govern their world. Such humans are gifted with a degree of magical power enabling them to manipulate reality, a privilege usually only the reserve of the infinite and its attendant visitors from beyond.

Most familiar as the archetypal Merlin and his bearded chums, who potter about secondary world fantasy in robes and pointed hats, fictional wizards are drawn from the real-life shamans and druids of ancient cultures. Before Christianity declared open season on every wart charmer and wise woman in medieval Europe, shamanism continued as an acceptable feature of rural life. These self-ordained hierophants performed their “magic” for the benefit of the community. On their behalf, the shaman conversed with the spirits of animals and the dead, made prophecies and encouraged favorable weather for crops ... or just gave people something for their lumbago.

Although the Newtonian enlightenment put a stop to anti-witchcraft hysteria in the eighteenth century, ending 400 years of sanctioned genocide (predominately directed at women), a fragment of that cultural misogyny survives. The wizard’s female counterpart, the witch (derived from the Old English “wicca”) owes much of her diabolic reputation to religious propaganda. Typecast in the role of the child-munching ogre of fairy tale, the witches of earthbound fantasy have become a reservoir of male anxieties.

The first significant fantasy of its type, René Clair’s genteel supernatural comedy I Married a Witch (1942), based on another Thorne Smith tale, reveals the genre’s typically nervous attitude towards feminine power. Forties sex bomb Veronica Lake plays Jennifer, an ingénue witch burned at the stake by New England puritans, and released into twentieth century society when her ashes are disturbed. Fredric March plays the poor flustered sap who stands no chance against her silken charms.

But Jennifer’s powers are limited to parlor tricks, like slamming doors from a distance and sliding up the banisters like a slinky Mary Poppins. More like a bottle of expensive perfume than a human being, her character functions solely to radi-ate all the feminine charms (and how) that reduce men to intoxicated nitwits. She spends most of the film pining for her beau after accidentally downing a love potion, and lets her domineering father (Cecil Kellaway) boss her around. The film’s focal villain, Kellaway’s malicious warlock punishes his daughter with mortality by confiscating her powers. Despite Jennifer’s wizardly status, her abilities are not hers to control, and she happily trades them for domestic bliss by the end.

For witches there is no hex after marriage, echoing the folklore that states that wizards must remain celibate in order to retain their magical powers. But witches make this sacrifice for love, for that which makes them human. While aspiring to this status, self-reliant witch Gillian Holroyd (Kim Novak) casts a love spell over publisher Shep Henderson (James Stewart) in Richard Quine’s Bell, Book and Candle (1958). Believing herself bound by witch lore never to relinquish her powers and fall in love, Gillian

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