Ann Belford Ulanov - The Witch and the Clown: Two Archetypes of Human Sexuality

What is the psyche saying to us through the archetypal images of the witch and the clown? Who are these figures? Where do they appear? How do we deal with them? Why do witches turn up at all? What causes us, from childhood on, to be so fascinated by them, so eager to hear tales about them? Why does the witch persist in our imagination as a figure of archetypal dimension, more magnificent than maleficent? Why does she not retire gracefully from our central stockpile of images, now that we have come to understand that the witch-cults of the past were almost certainly the inventions of pseudo-history? How can we hold on to her as an image far more positive than negative when we think of the persecutions of women by those who believed in the monstrous fantasy of the witch-cult? Why is she not simply a quaint figure from a variously distant past, a pathetic one, even a tragic one? Why does she remain so appealing to us? Why does she still possess something that could be described as grandeur? There are many reasons.

The persistent witch of our imagination is full of secret knowledge, powerful spells, hidden ambitions, cackling revenge. What a relief she offers women trapped in dubious definitions of goodness! What permission she gives usto feel rage and envy, to accept our wishes to defeat others while triumphing ourselves! What license there is for us in her ability to turn her enemies into toads! How appealing to turn those who hurt us into slimy thingsnot to have to debate them, or out-argue them, but so effectively to silence them!

The archetypal witch arouses many reactions in us, whether she is presented in her benevolent everyday form or her threatening nightmare form, to use two traditional witch categories. We are curious about her knowledge of uncanny things. We may feel aggressive toward her, want to outsmart her, burn her in our fantasies, defeat her wily plots. We may fear her dread powers even as a mere fantasy figure, apprehensive lest she cast an evil spell on those we love. We may disapprove of her as she coldly defies all human values and lives outside human society. Yet we marvel at her too. She is a fairy-tale figure who with her white magic can bestow upon us a protean tinder box, an invisible cloak, all sorts of secret treasures. Although she often appears as a remote old crone beyond the reach of human convention, in her youthful form her seductive beauty continues to bewitch us.

The witch commands response from all ages and interests. Children have always loved to hear of her in fairy tales. They still revel in her appearances in comic-book and television versions, where she appears sometimes as a charming magician in everyday life, sometimes as a nightmarish villain. The Cat-Woman of Batman days was a combination of the witches, an ambiguous mixture of good and bad, a plotter of evil who sometimes occasioned good results. Such a figure evokes a fearful delight in young audiences.

In the womens movement one group decided to champion the witch, taking the letters of her name to identify its cause: Witchs International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell. Their manifesto supports all the witch qualities of the female that patriarchal society proscribes. It lauds aggressive women who reject playing a supportive role to men, and who eschew feminine gentility as well, screeching and bellowing their rage rather than swallowing it or masochistically directing it against themselves.

The image of the witch that survives from the centuries of the witch hunt, especially the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is a projection that can well exercise an aroused feminist. A terrifying conspiracy was foisted onto actual women in many different times and places, uniting a cunning intellectuality and a maddened animality, each more diabolic than the other, and both ascribed to pacts with the Devil. As we know, that projection was used to hound and to persecute women, to outlaw them, to torture them, to kill them. So strong was the power of the witch image to summon up all the qualities that various communities, usually religious, found hateful or alluring, that ordinary scruples were easily overridden in pursuit of the witch.

It is not insignificant that the assiduous hunt of the witch-woman reached its peak in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In a time of burgeoning intellectuality and the development of a philosophy of scientific investigation, persecutorial demonology achieved its greatest triumph. The persecutors were not simply ignoramuses and bigots who had achieved power. Among them were men like the philosopher of law Jean Bodin, whose Dmonomanie des sorciers of 1580 was a handbook for judges used in the trials of sorcerers. A hundred years later the English divine Joseph Glanvill wrote Saducismus Triumphatus, which pleased even so considerable a figure as the Cambridge Platonist Henry More with its analysis and condemnation of witchcraftso much so that More added material of his own to a later edition of the book.

For reasons that we shall hope to make clear in this book, women of unmistakable craft, whether of mind or of body or of both, are not easily tolerated. They are particularly objectionable when they seem to have access to those powers of mind that are sanctioned in only a very small number of personsexclusively male persons in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and before. When the powers are associated with subjects and positions reserved by church and society for a designated few, the affront is intolerable. Having apparently broken the sacred law intellectually, these women could be imagined to have done so in every other way as wellcould be, would be, must be. Surely they are consorts of the Devil. They must be understood to have done every foul deed that persons constrained by law or belief from doing themselves can imagine another doingand secretly wish to do themselves. Thus the fullness of the projection which resulted in witch hunts in earlier times. Thus the significance today of the question, Who and why the witch? In order to answer this question, we must focus on a symbol of forces so potent within us that they can utterly distort our perception of reality and turn us into persecutors and murderers, alive with prejudice, with sexual perversion, with blood lustat least in our imaginations.