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There is something slightly ridiculous about being told you worship the devil when you don't actually believe in him.
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And yet, historically, that has been one of the most persistent accusations made against witches.
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It wasn't enough to suggest that witches could perform magic, curse crops, sour milk, or cause illnesses.
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Somewhere along the way, the witch acquired a boss.
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Behind the spells, the familiars, and the midnight gatherings stood Satan, apparently overseeing the whole operation.
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The witch became his servant.
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She made a pact with him, attended his Sabbath, received supernatural powers from him, and, according to some particularly imaginative demonologists, engaged in activities with him that I'm not entirely convinced we need to discuss before the theme music.
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Except there is a rather substantial problem with all of this.
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The devil belongs to Christianity.
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Witchcraft doesn't.
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At least not inherently.
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If we want to understand how Satan and the witch became almost inseparable in Western popular culture, we have to look at something much bigger than horror films.
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Because for centuries, people weren't frightened that witches might worship the devil because witches told them they did.
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They were frightened because other people told them witches did.
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Once that story became established, popular culture inherited it.
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Sometimes deliberately, sometimes without really questioning where it came from, and sometimes with Jack Nicholson turning up in a small Rhode Island town and seducing Cher, Susan Surandon, and Michelle Pfeiffer.
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Which, admittedly, is one way of making an entrance.
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The podcast where we pull apart the witches we see in film and television and ask where those pointy hats, bubbling cauldrons, pentagrams, broomsticks, and occasionally suspiciously attractive devils actually come from.
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My name is Millie Hardy Ashton, and today we are talking about perhaps one of the most damaging ideas ever attached to witchcraft, devil worship.
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As always, there will be spoilers for the films and television programs we discuss, particularly The Witches of Eastwick and Supernatural, with a return visit to The Witch along the way.
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This episode follows rather neatly from our last one because we've already talked about the pentagram and the extraordinary cultural journey that symbol has taken.
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A symbol that I personally wear and understand primarily in terms of protection has become, on screen, practically shorthand for something satanic is happening here.
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But that misunderstanding didn't develop in isolation.
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It exists because Western culture spent centuries constructing a much larger story in which witchcraft itself belonged to Satan.
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So this week we're going to look at when the witch stopped being someone accused of harmful magic and became an agent of the devil.
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How much of the satanic witch actually comes from historical witchcraft, how much comes from Christian demonology, and why film and television still find the devil so incredibly difficult to separate from the witch.
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One of the most important things to understand about historical accusations of witchcraft is that they changed.
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There was never one single, universally accepted definition of a witch stretching unchanged from the ancient world through the medieval period and into Salem.
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Ideas about harmful magic existed long before Christianity, and we have already encountered figures like Circe, whose magical abilities belonged to completely different religious and cultural frameworks.
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The ancient world contained magical practitioners, curses, protective spells, divination, spirits, gods, and supernatural beings, but none of those things required the Christian devil.
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You cannot really accuse Circe of being a Satanist without creating a fairly significant chronological problem.
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Even within Christianity, ideas about Satan developed and changed.
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Early Christian authorities could condemn magic, divination, and older religious practices without necessarily imagining every person accused of magic as part of an organized satanic conspiracy.
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Over the medieval and early modern periods, however, several previously distinct ideas began to converge.
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Magic became increasingly entangled with heresy, demons, and ultimately witchcraft, until the witch was no longer simply imagined as somebody capable of causing supernatural harm.
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She could be understood as somebody who had actively rejected God and entered into a relationship with his enemy.
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Historians often make an important distinction here between maleficium, meaning harmful magic, and diabolism, the idea that witchcraft involves some form of relationship or pact with the devil.
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That difference might sound academic, but it completely changes the nature of the alleged crime.
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If someone believed her neighbor had cursed their cow after an argument, the accusation was initially about harm.
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Once demonology entered the picture, however, the dead cow could become evidence of something much larger.
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The magic was possibly because the witch had supposedly entered into an agreement with Satan.
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At that point, the witch was no longer merely a dangerous neighbor.
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She had become a religious enemy.
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In previous episodes, we encountered Heinrich Kramer and the Mallius Malificarum, and unfortunately, he has wandered back into the room because the demonological witch is absolutely central to his understanding of witchcraft.
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The Malleus, published in 1486, helped promote an intensely theological interpretation in which witches were not merely people performing harmful magic, but individuals whose supposed abilities were connected to demons, apostasy, and a rejection of Christianity.
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Kramer was not alone.
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Across demonological literature, authorities constructed increasingly elaborate accounts of what witches supposedly did.
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They were said to renounce Christianity, make pacts with demons, attend witches' sabbats, engage sexually with supernatural beings, desecrate Christian rituals, and offer themselves to Satan.
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The important word in that paragraph is supposedly.
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We have to be extremely careful about the evidence left behind by historical witch persecutions, because much of what survives was written by the people accusing witches, interrogating them, prosecuting them, or theorizing about them.
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Confessions could be produced under enormous psychological and physical pressure, and depending on the place and period, torture.
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Interrogators could ask questions shaped by what they already expected witches to confess.
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That creates a serious historical problem.
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If an interrogator already believes that witches meet the devil as secret gatherings and then repeatedly questions an accused person about meeting the devil at a secret gathering, a confession containing precisely that story cannot automatically be treated as independent evidence that such gatherings were taking place.
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Sometimes what we are seeing is the machinery of persecution teaching its victims the story they were expected to tell.
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Once that story becomes culturally established, almost everything associated with witchcraft could be absorbed into it.
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A witch's mark became the devil's mark, a familiar spirit became a demon, a gathering became a Sabbath.
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Sexuality became evidence of corruption, magic became evidence of Satan.
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And by the time cinema arrived, centuries of Western culture had already done most of the character development for us.
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George Miller's 1987 film The Witches of Eastwick, adapted from John Updegg's novel, makes the relationship between witchcraft and the devil almost wonderfully literal.
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Alexandra, Jane, and Suki, played by Cher, Susan Sarandon, and Michelle Pfeiffer, are three women living in the small town of Eastwick.
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They are friends.
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They are dissatisfied with aspects of their lives, and one evening they begin describing their ideal man.
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And then Daryl Van Horn arrives.
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Jack Nicholson plays Daryl with precisely the amount of restraint you would expect Jack Nicholson to bring to playing what is essentially the devil, which is to say, absolutely none whatsoever.
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Daryl is vulgar, magnetic, manipulative, sexually aggressive, and disruptive from almost the moment he appears.
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As his relationships with the three women develop, their own supernatural abilities begin to emerge more strongly.
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And this is where the Witches of Eastwick becomes particularly interesting for us.
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The film doesn't simply place witches and the devil within the same story for the sake of it.
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It places female magical awakening alongside male diabolical influence.
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Alexandra, Jane, and Suki discover power, but Darrell behaves as though that power ultimately belongs to him.
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That reproduces an extraordinarily old idea.
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The witch might appear powerful, but traditional demonology frequently insists that her power has actually been granted by somebody else.
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She cannot simply possess magic for herself.
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Satan has to provide it.
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Historically, this would become deeply gendered.
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Demonologists such as Kramer drew upon broader misogynistic assumptions about women's supposed intellectual, moral, and sexual weaknesses to argue that women were particularly vulnerable to demonic temptation.
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Female sexuality could be presented as dangerous precisely because it was imagined as something that the devil would exploit.
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When Darrell arrives among three women and begins encouraging desires and abilities that polite society has restrained, he therefore steps into a very old narrative position.
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He is the tempter, while the women appear to be the tempted.
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Except the witches of Eastwick don't just leave it there.
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Eventually, the women realize that Darrell's apparent liberation is actually another form of control.
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They turn their magic against him, creating a wax figure through which they torment and ultimately defeat him.
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Most importantly, their power does not disappear when Darrell does.
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The women retain their magic.
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The devil loses control of it.
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That makes the film much more interesting than a straightforward story about witches receiving supernatural abilities from Satan.
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It begins within that familiar cultural framework and then gradually starts dismantling it.
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Darrow may believe he created these women as witches, but the ending suggests their power was never really his to own, and that it was there all along.
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Other screen witches remain much more firmly inside the satanic tradition.
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Rosemary's baby, for example, gives us a coven whose witchcraft and Satanism are explicitly intertwined, while the witch, which we have already encountered this season, reconstructs witchcraft through the theological imagination of 17th-century Puritan New England.
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Black Philip isn't simply a spooky goat who happens to have excellent screen presence, he is Satan.
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When he finally offers Thomason the possibility of living deliciously, the film gives physical form to precisely the bargain Christian authorities once feared witches had made.
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But the witch is doing something more sophisticated than simply announcing that witches worship Satan.
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It constructs its horror form within the worldview of its characters.
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Thomason lives in a society that already believes the devil is real, that he can physically tempt human beings, that magic can come from him, and that women are particularly vulnerable to sin.
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The film takes those fears and makes them literally true.
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When we watch Thomason enter the woods and eventually rise alongside the other witches, we are watching the nightmare imagined by her own religious culture.
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Modern audiences barely need that visual language explained to us.
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The goat, the woods, the naked witches, the blood, and the devil all fit together because centuries of Western culture have taught us the grammar of the satanic witch.
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And then inevitably we come back to supernatural.
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If you've listened to this podcast for more than about 10 minutes, you've probably realized that supernatural is going to keep wandering into episodes whenever I can reasonably justify it.
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Fortunately, a programme containing witches, demons, angels, Lucifer, Hell with two L's, and 15 seasons of increasingly complicated theology gives me quite a lot of opportunities.
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Early Supernatural often treats witchcraft as dangerous and strongly connected with demonic forces.
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Witches use hexbags, summon demons, make bargains, and generally appear in the Winchester's lives because somebody somewhere has made an extremely poor decision.
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Then the series gives us Rowena McLeod, played by Ruth Connell, and Rowena complicates everything.
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She is dangerous, she is manipulative, she is frequently selfish and perfectly capable of killing people when it suits her.
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She is also extraordinarily powerful, intelligent, funny, and as the series progresses, increasingly sympathetic.
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Most importantly, for our purposes, her identity as a witch cannot be reduced to being somebody's satanic servant.
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Rowena certainly has relationship with demons.
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Giving birth to Crowley rather guarantees that hell is going to turn up at the occasional family gathering.
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But she isn't powerful because she worships the devil.
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Rowena is powerful because she is a witch.
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Over time, supernatural allows witchcraft to become considerably broader than some of its earliest episodes suggested.
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Magic can be harmful, but it can also be protective.
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It can be learned, weaponized, and used against supernatural evil.
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A witch can fight demons just as easily as summon them.
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Once a witch can stand against hell, rather than automatically belonging to it, one of popular culture's oldest assumptions begins to crack.
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So where does that leave us when we try to separate fact, fiction, and folklore?
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The factual answer is slightly more complicated than saying witches do not worship Satan, because contemporary witchcraft is enormously diverse.
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There are people who identify as both witches and Satanists, just as there are witches whose practices intersect with various forms of paganism, Christianity, atheism, occultism, and other spiritual or philosophical traditions.
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Human belief rarely organizes itself into the neat boxes that popular culture would prefer.
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What is fictional is the idea that Satanism is an inherent or defining feature of witchcraft.
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There is no single universal witch religion and therefore no universal witch theology.
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Some witches are Wiccan, but witchcraft and wicca are not synonymous.
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Some witches work with gods, like I do, or other spiritual beings, while others do not believe in literal deities at all.
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Some understand magic spiritually, while others understand what they do psychologically, symbolically, culturally, or through combinations of those approaches.
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The folklore sits somewhere in the enormous cultural mythology that developed around the satanic witch.
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Stories of witches gathering at Sabbaths, flying to secret meetings, making diabolical pacts and interacting with demons became recognizable traditions in their own right.
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Whether those events actually happened is a very different historical question from whether people believed that they happened.
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Because beliefs have consequences regardless of whether the thing being believed is true.
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There are always three sides to every story.
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Those beliefs shaped interrogations, they influenced prosecutions, they informed theological writing, they helped construct the stereotype of the witch.
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Eventually, they gave cinema one of its favorite villains.
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So the presence of an individual witch who also worships Satan is perfectly possible.
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The claim that devil worship defines witchcraft is not.
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That assumption tells us far more about the religious framework historically imposed upon witches than it tells us about witchcraft itself.
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This is probably one of those episodes where I should make my own position particularly clear.
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I am a practicing witch, and I do not worship Satan.
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I haven't secretly pledged myself to him, I haven't signed anything in blood, and there isn't a demon hiding behind the curtains waiting patiently for me to finish recording.
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Crucially, Satan simply isn't part of my personal religious framework.
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My own witchcraft involves things like protection, intention, nature, divination, lunar cycles, and ritual.
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That is my practice, and I would never present it as a definition of everybody else's because contemporary witchcraft simply doesn't work like that.
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Another witch could practice in a completely different way and still use exactly the same word to describe themselves.
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This is where conversations about Satan can become particularly frustrating.
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Because if somebody tells me that my witchcraft must involve the devil because their religion teaches that magic comes from the devil, they aren't actually describing my belief system.
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They're interpreting it through theirs.
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That difference is incredibly important.
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I have lost quote unquote friends because their religion told them I must worship the devil, and they were gone before I could show them I do not.
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Historically, it could be fatal.
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Today it can still produce stigma, suspicion, and understanding, particularly when fictional images of witchcraft are much more familiar to the general public than the lives of actual contemporary witches.
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Someone can look at a pentagram, a tarot deck, a ritual, or even the word witch, and see Satan because centuries of culture have taught them to make that definition.
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The witch herself might be talking about something entirely different, which brings us rather neatly to this week's hidden hex.
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The strangest thing about the devil-worshipping witch is that historically the stereotype doesn't actually require witches to believe in Satan.
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It only requires everyone else to believe they do.
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That is this week's hidden hex.
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The satanic witch is constructed from the outside.
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Imagine the logic of a historical witch prosecution.
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Someone can insist that they are not a witch and authorities can decide that they are.
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They can insist that they have never made a pact with the devil, and authorities can decide that they have.
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They can deny worshiping Satan, and that denial itself can be treated as deception.
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The accused person loses control over the definition of their own beliefs.
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Remarkably, traces of that logic still survive.
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A modern witch can say, I don't worship Satan, and occasionally someone will respond with some variation of, well, you do really, you just don't know it.
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It has happened to me if you listen to the previous episode in the middle of a high street.
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At that point, there isn't actually a conversation taking place.
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One person has decided that their theological interpretation of somebody else's identity is more authoritative than that person's own record of what they believe.
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Film and television have helped preserve that assumption because Satan is incredibly useful narratively.
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He gives magic an immediate source and an immediate price.
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If a story tells us that somebody has made a deal with the devil, we understand the danger without requiring 20 minutes of magical exposition.
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But that storytelling shortcut carries centuries of cultural baggage.
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Every time witchcraft automatically becomes satanic on screen, the story risks quietly repeating an argument once made by demonologists.
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Magic cannot simply belong to the witch.
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Someone else must have given it to her.
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Somewhere behind her, therefore, must stand the devil.
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That is what makes the witches of Eastwick so interesting.
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Darrell thinks exactly like that.
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He assumes the women's power belonged to him because he awakened it, encouraged it, and positioned himself at the center of their transformation.
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Then they discover that they don't need him.
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The devil turns out not to be the source of the witch.
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He's just a man who thought he owned her.
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When we put all of this together, the satanic witch becomes one of the clearest examples of the central idea we keep returning to throughout hexposition.
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Screen witches don't appear from nowhere.
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They arrive carrying history.
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The witch who signs the devil's book, attends the Sabbath, acquires a demonic familiar, or receives supernatural power in exchange for her soul existed in Western cultural imagination long before cinema.
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Film inherited those images, horror defined them, television repeated them, and eventually audiences became so familiar with the language of satanic witchcraft that filmmakers barely needed to explain it.
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A goat can enter the frame and we become suspicious.
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A pentagram appears and the soundtrack changes.
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A group of women gathered.
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In the woods at night, and centuries of cultural association begin doing the storytelling before anybody has said a word, because gods forbid a woman can have hobbies.
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There is an important addendum to that goat, though, because the image has a history that reaches back further than modern horror.
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Early Christian writers and missionaries encountered Celtic peoples who worshipped horned or antlered gods, most famously the figure we now know as Senunus.
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He is genuinely depicted with the antlers of a stag, not the horns of a goat, and he was not simply a Celtic version of the Christian devil.
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But as Christianity spread, older gods were often reinterpreted through Christian demonology.
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The horned deity could be recast as demonic, and the people who worshipped him could be accused of worshiping Satan.
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In my own practice, I believe in the horned god, who is the consort of the goddess, and he is simply a symbol of nature, and he has the antlers of a deer, not the horns of a goat.
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That is widely understood as one of the roots of the later visual association between the devil, goats, and witchcraft.
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The distinction between stag antlers and goat horns was not necessarily important to people determined to condemn an older religion.
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What mattered was the presence of horns.
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A complex indigenous deity could be flattened into a Christian symbol of evil, and from there the horned figure could become attached to stories about witches, sabbaths, and satanic worship very neatly.
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So when the witch gives us black Philip, the goat is not just a random spooky animal.
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He is part of a much older visual tradition, one shaped by the Christian reinterpretation of pre-Christian horned gods.
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The film is drawing on centuries of accumulated imagery, even though the historical figures that helped inspire the imagery were not interchangeable with Satan and were not necessarily goat-like at all.
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Yet contemporary film and television have also increasingly allowed witches to own their magic.
00:24:01.200 --> 00:24:04.319
Alexandra, Jane, and Suki can reject Daryl.
00:24:04.720 --> 00:24:08.960
Rowena can wield magic against demons rather than serving them.
00:24:09.200 --> 00:24:15.680
Witches can exist inside magical systems where Satan simply has nothing to do with their abilities.
00:24:15.920 --> 00:24:19.759
That doesn't mean the devil-worshipping witch needs to disappear from fiction.
00:24:20.000 --> 00:24:24.640
She belongs to horror, folklore, and an enormous tradition of Western storytelling.
00:24:24.720 --> 00:24:27.359
And sometimes she makes for fantastic television.
00:24:27.599 --> 00:24:32.880
But the problem comes when one fictional tradition is mistaken for a universal truth.
00:24:33.519 --> 00:24:36.480
Witches don't need Satan in order to exist.
00:24:36.720 --> 00:24:40.880
Historically, it was often the people who feared witches who did.
00:24:49.680 --> 00:24:51.519
So what have we learned?
00:24:51.839 --> 00:24:56.640
The association between witches and Satan isn't an inevitable part of witchcraft.
00:24:56.799 --> 00:25:09.119
It emerged from particular historical and religious circumstances as ideas about harmful magic became increasingly entangled with Christian demonology, heresy, and fears about diabolical conspiracy.
00:25:09.440 --> 00:25:12.640
That transformation changed the cultural meaning of the witch.
00:25:12.880 --> 00:25:24.160
Someone suspected of performing harmful magic could become something much more frightening to Christian authorities, an enemy of God who had willingly allied themselves with Satan.
00:25:24.640 --> 00:25:27.839
Centuries later, Cinema inherited that mythology.
00:25:28.079 --> 00:25:36.880
The Witches of Eastwick gives us the devil, standing directly alongside female magical awakening, but ultimately allows its witches to reject his control.
00:25:37.119 --> 00:25:51.359
The witch reconstructs the satanic witch through the fears of 17th-century Puritan Christianity, while supernatural, particularly through Ruena, shows how modern television can begin separating witchcraft from automatic allegiance to hell.
00:25:51.599 --> 00:26:01.680
Perhaps the most important thing to remember is that when somebody tells us what witches believe without actually asking witches, we should probably start asking whose story we were really hearing.
00:26:01.920 --> 00:26:06.319
Because sometimes the history of witchcraft isn't actually the history of witches.
00:26:06.480 --> 00:26:10.559
It's the history of what other people were frightened witches might be doing.
00:26:10.799 --> 00:26:13.519
And those are not the same thing.
00:26:14.880 --> 00:26:21.359
Next time we're leaving Hell with two L's behind and heading somewhere considerably greener: the woods.
00:26:21.519 --> 00:26:23.200
Fairy tales send witches there.
00:26:23.359 --> 00:26:24.720
Horror films hide them there.
00:26:24.880 --> 00:26:33.440
Folklore fills forests with spirits, monsters, dangerous women, and things that sensible protagonists really should not be following after sunset.
00:26:33.680 --> 00:26:46.799
Even when the witch herself isn't visible, sometimes all a film needs is a crooked tree, a misty path, and a cottage that absolutely wasn't there five minutes ago for us to know whose territory we have entered.
00:26:47.039 --> 00:26:47.920
But why?
00:26:48.160 --> 00:26:50.240
Why does the witch belong in the woods?
00:26:50.400 --> 00:26:57.759
What happens when the forest isn't merely somewhere she lives, but part of the reason we recognise her as a witch in the first place?
00:26:58.079 --> 00:27:06.960
And why, after centuries of being told that women alone in the woods are dangerous, have so many witches decided that actually the woods sound rather lovely?
00:27:07.359 --> 00:27:10.720
That's next time on Hexposition, which is on screen.
00:27:10.960 --> 00:27:23.359
Until then, question the stereotype, check the folklore, and if an extraordinarily charismatic stranger called Daryl Van Horn suddenly buys the largest house in town, maybe don't invite him round for tea.
00:27:23.680 --> 00:27:26.559
This has been a Familiar Footsteps production.
00:27:39.119 --> 00:27:40.480
Love and light.
00:00:00.160 --> 00:00:06.320
There is something slightly ridiculous about being told you worship the devil when you don't actually believe in him.
00:00:06.480 --> 00:00:12.000
And yet, historically, that has been one of the most persistent accusations made against witches.
00:00:12.240 --> 00:00:18.320
It wasn't enough to suggest that witches could perform magic, curse crops, sour milk, or cause illnesses.
00:00:18.559 --> 00:00:21.519
Somewhere along the way, the witch acquired a boss.
00:00:21.760 --> 00:00:29.039
Behind the spells, the familiars, and the midnight gatherings stood Satan, apparently overseeing the whole operation.
00:00:29.760 --> 00:00:31.600
The witch became his servant.
00:00:31.760 --> 00:00:46.719
She made a pact with him, attended his Sabbath, received supernatural powers from him, and, according to some particularly imaginative demonologists, engaged in activities with him that I'm not entirely convinced we need to discuss before the theme music.
00:00:47.119 --> 00:00:50.560
Except there is a rather substantial problem with all of this.
00:00:50.880 --> 00:00:52.960
The devil belongs to Christianity.
00:00:53.119 --> 00:00:54.799
Witchcraft doesn't.
00:00:55.039 --> 00:00:56.880
At least not inherently.
00:00:57.119 --> 00:01:05.840
If we want to understand how Satan and the witch became almost inseparable in Western popular culture, we have to look at something much bigger than horror films.
00:01:06.159 --> 00:01:12.319
Because for centuries, people weren't frightened that witches might worship the devil because witches told them they did.
00:01:12.560 --> 00:01:16.400
They were frightened because other people told them witches did.
00:01:16.879 --> 00:01:21.040
Once that story became established, popular culture inherited it.
00:01:21.200 --> 00:01:33.840
Sometimes deliberately, sometimes without really questioning where it came from, and sometimes with Jack Nicholson turning up in a small Rhode Island town and seducing Cher, Susan Surandon, and Michelle Pfeiffer.
00:01:35.280 --> 00:01:39.280
Which, admittedly, is one way of making an entrance.
00:02:01.120 --> 00:02:13.039
The podcast where we pull apart the witches we see in film and television and ask where those pointy hats, bubbling cauldrons, pentagrams, broomsticks, and occasionally suspiciously attractive devils actually come from.
00:02:13.280 --> 00:02:22.080
My name is Millie Hardy Ashton, and today we are talking about perhaps one of the most damaging ideas ever attached to witchcraft, devil worship.
00:02:22.400 --> 00:02:32.879
As always, there will be spoilers for the films and television programs we discuss, particularly The Witches of Eastwick and Supernatural, with a return visit to The Witch along the way.
00:02:33.599 --> 00:02:41.759
This episode follows rather neatly from our last one because we've already talked about the pentagram and the extraordinary cultural journey that symbol has taken.
00:02:41.919 --> 00:02:50.639
A symbol that I personally wear and understand primarily in terms of protection has become, on screen, practically shorthand for something satanic is happening here.
00:02:50.800 --> 00:02:54.000
But that misunderstanding didn't develop in isolation.
00:02:54.319 --> 00:03:02.400
It exists because Western culture spent centuries constructing a much larger story in which witchcraft itself belonged to Satan.
00:03:02.639 --> 00:03:09.840
So this week we're going to look at when the witch stopped being someone accused of harmful magic and became an agent of the devil.
00:03:10.080 --> 00:03:22.240
How much of the satanic witch actually comes from historical witchcraft, how much comes from Christian demonology, and why film and television still find the devil so incredibly difficult to separate from the witch.
00:03:30.960 --> 00:03:37.520
One of the most important things to understand about historical accusations of witchcraft is that they changed.
00:03:37.680 --> 00:03:47.120
There was never one single, universally accepted definition of a witch stretching unchanged from the ancient world through the medieval period and into Salem.
00:03:47.360 --> 00:03:59.039
Ideas about harmful magic existed long before Christianity, and we have already encountered figures like Circe, whose magical abilities belonged to completely different religious and cultural frameworks.
00:03:59.280 --> 00:04:10.400
The ancient world contained magical practitioners, curses, protective spells, divination, spirits, gods, and supernatural beings, but none of those things required the Christian devil.
00:04:10.719 --> 00:04:17.040
You cannot really accuse Circe of being a Satanist without creating a fairly significant chronological problem.
00:04:17.439 --> 00:04:21.279
Even within Christianity, ideas about Satan developed and changed.
00:04:21.519 --> 00:04:33.920
Early Christian authorities could condemn magic, divination, and older religious practices without necessarily imagining every person accused of magic as part of an organized satanic conspiracy.
00:04:34.160 --> 00:04:41.839
Over the medieval and early modern periods, however, several previously distinct ideas began to converge.
00:04:42.079 --> 00:04:53.600
Magic became increasingly entangled with heresy, demons, and ultimately witchcraft, until the witch was no longer simply imagined as somebody capable of causing supernatural harm.
00:04:53.839 --> 00:05:01.120
She could be understood as somebody who had actively rejected God and entered into a relationship with his enemy.
00:05:02.000 --> 00:05:13.839
Historians often make an important distinction here between maleficium, meaning harmful magic, and diabolism, the idea that witchcraft involves some form of relationship or pact with the devil.
00:05:14.079 --> 00:05:20.079
That difference might sound academic, but it completely changes the nature of the alleged crime.
00:05:20.319 --> 00:05:26.800
If someone believed her neighbor had cursed their cow after an argument, the accusation was initially about harm.
00:05:27.040 --> 00:05:33.199
Once demonology entered the picture, however, the dead cow could become evidence of something much larger.
00:05:33.519 --> 00:05:39.120
The magic was possibly because the witch had supposedly entered into an agreement with Satan.
00:05:39.519 --> 00:05:42.720
At that point, the witch was no longer merely a dangerous neighbor.
00:05:43.040 --> 00:05:45.120
She had become a religious enemy.
00:05:45.360 --> 00:05:58.399
In previous episodes, we encountered Heinrich Kramer and the Mallius Malificarum, and unfortunately, he has wandered back into the room because the demonological witch is absolutely central to his understanding of witchcraft.
00:05:58.560 --> 00:06:16.160
The Malleus, published in 1486, helped promote an intensely theological interpretation in which witches were not merely people performing harmful magic, but individuals whose supposed abilities were connected to demons, apostasy, and a rejection of Christianity.
00:06:16.480 --> 00:06:17.759
Kramer was not alone.
00:06:17.920 --> 00:06:25.199
Across demonological literature, authorities constructed increasingly elaborate accounts of what witches supposedly did.
00:06:25.360 --> 00:06:37.120
They were said to renounce Christianity, make pacts with demons, attend witches' sabbats, engage sexually with supernatural beings, desecrate Christian rituals, and offer themselves to Satan.
00:06:37.439 --> 00:06:41.040
The important word in that paragraph is supposedly.
00:06:41.199 --> 00:06:54.319
We have to be extremely careful about the evidence left behind by historical witch persecutions, because much of what survives was written by the people accusing witches, interrogating them, prosecuting them, or theorizing about them.
00:06:54.560 --> 00:07:01.920
Confessions could be produced under enormous psychological and physical pressure, and depending on the place and period, torture.
00:07:02.480 --> 00:07:07.680
Interrogators could ask questions shaped by what they already expected witches to confess.
00:07:08.000 --> 00:07:10.639
That creates a serious historical problem.
00:07:10.959 --> 00:07:28.319
If an interrogator already believes that witches meet the devil as secret gatherings and then repeatedly questions an accused person about meeting the devil at a secret gathering, a confession containing precisely that story cannot automatically be treated as independent evidence that such gatherings were taking place.
00:07:28.480 --> 00:07:35.279
Sometimes what we are seeing is the machinery of persecution teaching its victims the story they were expected to tell.
00:07:35.519 --> 00:07:42.399
Once that story becomes culturally established, almost everything associated with witchcraft could be absorbed into it.
00:07:42.639 --> 00:07:49.680
A witch's mark became the devil's mark, a familiar spirit became a demon, a gathering became a Sabbath.
00:07:50.240 --> 00:07:56.000
Sexuality became evidence of corruption, magic became evidence of Satan.
00:07:56.240 --> 00:08:03.360
And by the time cinema arrived, centuries of Western culture had already done most of the character development for us.
00:08:12.639 --> 00:08:22.800
George Miller's 1987 film The Witches of Eastwick, adapted from John Updegg's novel, makes the relationship between witchcraft and the devil almost wonderfully literal.
00:08:23.120 --> 00:08:31.839
Alexandra, Jane, and Suki, played by Cher, Susan Sarandon, and Michelle Pfeiffer, are three women living in the small town of Eastwick.
00:08:32.000 --> 00:08:32.799
They are friends.
00:08:32.960 --> 00:08:38.720
They are dissatisfied with aspects of their lives, and one evening they begin describing their ideal man.
00:08:38.960 --> 00:08:41.679
And then Daryl Van Horn arrives.
00:08:42.000 --> 00:08:52.879
Jack Nicholson plays Daryl with precisely the amount of restraint you would expect Jack Nicholson to bring to playing what is essentially the devil, which is to say, absolutely none whatsoever.
00:08:53.200 --> 00:09:00.559
Daryl is vulgar, magnetic, manipulative, sexually aggressive, and disruptive from almost the moment he appears.
00:09:00.879 --> 00:09:06.799
As his relationships with the three women develop, their own supernatural abilities begin to emerge more strongly.
00:09:06.960 --> 00:09:11.360
And this is where the Witches of Eastwick becomes particularly interesting for us.
00:09:11.600 --> 00:09:16.159
The film doesn't simply place witches and the devil within the same story for the sake of it.
00:09:16.399 --> 00:09:21.360
It places female magical awakening alongside male diabolical influence.
00:09:21.759 --> 00:09:28.320
Alexandra, Jane, and Suki discover power, but Darrell behaves as though that power ultimately belongs to him.
00:09:28.559 --> 00:09:31.679
That reproduces an extraordinarily old idea.
00:09:31.919 --> 00:09:39.679
The witch might appear powerful, but traditional demonology frequently insists that her power has actually been granted by somebody else.
00:09:39.840 --> 00:09:42.480
She cannot simply possess magic for herself.
00:09:42.720 --> 00:09:44.559
Satan has to provide it.
00:09:44.879 --> 00:09:47.519
Historically, this would become deeply gendered.
00:09:47.759 --> 00:10:00.720
Demonologists such as Kramer drew upon broader misogynistic assumptions about women's supposed intellectual, moral, and sexual weaknesses to argue that women were particularly vulnerable to demonic temptation.
00:10:01.039 --> 00:10:08.320
Female sexuality could be presented as dangerous precisely because it was imagined as something that the devil would exploit.
00:10:09.120 --> 00:10:19.360
When Darrell arrives among three women and begins encouraging desires and abilities that polite society has restrained, he therefore steps into a very old narrative position.
00:10:19.519 --> 00:10:23.360
He is the tempter, while the women appear to be the tempted.
00:10:23.679 --> 00:10:27.120
Except the witches of Eastwick don't just leave it there.
00:10:27.759 --> 00:10:33.440
Eventually, the women realize that Darrell's apparent liberation is actually another form of control.
00:10:33.759 --> 00:10:39.519
They turn their magic against him, creating a wax figure through which they torment and ultimately defeat him.
00:10:39.759 --> 00:10:43.360
Most importantly, their power does not disappear when Darrell does.
00:10:43.600 --> 00:10:45.679
The women retain their magic.
00:10:45.840 --> 00:10:47.840
The devil loses control of it.
00:10:48.080 --> 00:10:54.480
That makes the film much more interesting than a straightforward story about witches receiving supernatural abilities from Satan.
00:10:54.639 --> 00:10:59.039
It begins within that familiar cultural framework and then gradually starts dismantling it.
00:10:59.360 --> 00:11:07.600
Darrow may believe he created these women as witches, but the ending suggests their power was never really his to own, and that it was there all along.
00:11:07.840 --> 00:11:11.919
Other screen witches remain much more firmly inside the satanic tradition.
00:11:12.159 --> 00:11:28.240
Rosemary's baby, for example, gives us a coven whose witchcraft and Satanism are explicitly intertwined, while the witch, which we have already encountered this season, reconstructs witchcraft through the theological imagination of 17th-century Puritan New England.
00:11:28.480 --> 00:11:34.639
Black Philip isn't simply a spooky goat who happens to have excellent screen presence, he is Satan.
00:11:34.879 --> 00:11:44.960
When he finally offers Thomason the possibility of living deliciously, the film gives physical form to precisely the bargain Christian authorities once feared witches had made.
00:11:45.279 --> 00:11:50.960
But the witch is doing something more sophisticated than simply announcing that witches worship Satan.
00:11:51.120 --> 00:11:54.799
It constructs its horror form within the worldview of its characters.
00:11:55.039 --> 00:12:05.519
Thomason lives in a society that already believes the devil is real, that he can physically tempt human beings, that magic can come from him, and that women are particularly vulnerable to sin.
00:12:05.679 --> 00:12:08.960
The film takes those fears and makes them literally true.
00:12:09.200 --> 00:12:18.000
When we watch Thomason enter the woods and eventually rise alongside the other witches, we are watching the nightmare imagined by her own religious culture.
00:12:18.320 --> 00:12:22.080
Modern audiences barely need that visual language explained to us.
00:12:22.320 --> 00:12:32.080
The goat, the woods, the naked witches, the blood, and the devil all fit together because centuries of Western culture have taught us the grammar of the satanic witch.
00:12:32.240 --> 00:12:35.360
And then inevitably we come back to supernatural.
00:12:35.679 --> 00:12:45.279
If you've listened to this podcast for more than about 10 minutes, you've probably realized that supernatural is going to keep wandering into episodes whenever I can reasonably justify it.
00:12:45.519 --> 00:12:57.360
Fortunately, a programme containing witches, demons, angels, Lucifer, Hell with two L's, and 15 seasons of increasingly complicated theology gives me quite a lot of opportunities.
00:12:57.840 --> 00:13:03.440
Early Supernatural often treats witchcraft as dangerous and strongly connected with demonic forces.
00:13:03.679 --> 00:13:12.639
Witches use hexbags, summon demons, make bargains, and generally appear in the Winchester's lives because somebody somewhere has made an extremely poor decision.
00:13:12.960 --> 00:13:20.240
Then the series gives us Rowena McLeod, played by Ruth Connell, and Rowena complicates everything.
00:13:20.480 --> 00:13:28.000
She is dangerous, she is manipulative, she is frequently selfish and perfectly capable of killing people when it suits her.
00:13:28.240 --> 00:13:36.320
She is also extraordinarily powerful, intelligent, funny, and as the series progresses, increasingly sympathetic.
00:13:36.639 --> 00:13:43.440
Most importantly, for our purposes, her identity as a witch cannot be reduced to being somebody's satanic servant.
00:13:43.840 --> 00:13:46.559
Rowena certainly has relationship with demons.
00:13:46.720 --> 00:13:52.080
Giving birth to Crowley rather guarantees that hell is going to turn up at the occasional family gathering.
00:13:52.320 --> 00:13:55.519
But she isn't powerful because she worships the devil.
00:13:55.840 --> 00:13:59.120
Rowena is powerful because she is a witch.
00:13:59.440 --> 00:14:06.240
Over time, supernatural allows witchcraft to become considerably broader than some of its earliest episodes suggested.
00:14:06.480 --> 00:14:09.679
Magic can be harmful, but it can also be protective.
00:14:09.919 --> 00:14:13.679
It can be learned, weaponized, and used against supernatural evil.
00:14:13.840 --> 00:14:16.960
A witch can fight demons just as easily as summon them.
00:14:17.200 --> 00:14:25.440
Once a witch can stand against hell, rather than automatically belonging to it, one of popular culture's oldest assumptions begins to crack.
00:14:37.279 --> 00:14:41.519
So where does that leave us when we try to separate fact, fiction, and folklore?
00:14:42.000 --> 00:14:50.399
The factual answer is slightly more complicated than saying witches do not worship Satan, because contemporary witchcraft is enormously diverse.
00:14:50.639 --> 00:15:03.840
There are people who identify as both witches and Satanists, just as there are witches whose practices intersect with various forms of paganism, Christianity, atheism, occultism, and other spiritual or philosophical traditions.
00:15:04.159 --> 00:15:09.519
Human belief rarely organizes itself into the neat boxes that popular culture would prefer.
00:15:10.080 --> 00:15:16.000
What is fictional is the idea that Satanism is an inherent or defining feature of witchcraft.
00:15:16.240 --> 00:15:21.360
There is no single universal witch religion and therefore no universal witch theology.
00:15:21.519 --> 00:15:25.440
Some witches are Wiccan, but witchcraft and wicca are not synonymous.
00:15:25.679 --> 00:15:33.440
Some witches work with gods, like I do, or other spiritual beings, while others do not believe in literal deities at all.
00:15:33.679 --> 00:15:42.000
Some understand magic spiritually, while others understand what they do psychologically, symbolically, culturally, or through combinations of those approaches.
00:15:42.240 --> 00:15:48.320
The folklore sits somewhere in the enormous cultural mythology that developed around the satanic witch.
00:15:48.559 --> 00:15:58.960
Stories of witches gathering at Sabbaths, flying to secret meetings, making diabolical pacts and interacting with demons became recognizable traditions in their own right.
00:15:59.200 --> 00:16:05.919
Whether those events actually happened is a very different historical question from whether people believed that they happened.
00:16:06.080 --> 00:16:11.279
Because beliefs have consequences regardless of whether the thing being believed is true.
00:16:11.519 --> 00:16:14.080
There are always three sides to every story.
00:16:14.240 --> 00:16:23.759
Those beliefs shaped interrogations, they influenced prosecutions, they informed theological writing, they helped construct the stereotype of the witch.
00:16:24.000 --> 00:16:27.360
Eventually, they gave cinema one of its favorite villains.
00:16:27.600 --> 00:16:32.320
So the presence of an individual witch who also worships Satan is perfectly possible.
00:16:32.559 --> 00:16:36.080
The claim that devil worship defines witchcraft is not.
00:16:36.320 --> 00:16:44.159
That assumption tells us far more about the religious framework historically imposed upon witches than it tells us about witchcraft itself.
00:16:55.840 --> 00:17:00.720
This is probably one of those episodes where I should make my own position particularly clear.
00:17:01.039 --> 00:17:04.720
I am a practicing witch, and I do not worship Satan.
00:17:04.880 --> 00:17:13.440
I haven't secretly pledged myself to him, I haven't signed anything in blood, and there isn't a demon hiding behind the curtains waiting patiently for me to finish recording.
00:17:13.680 --> 00:17:18.160
Crucially, Satan simply isn't part of my personal religious framework.
00:17:18.400 --> 00:17:25.599
My own witchcraft involves things like protection, intention, nature, divination, lunar cycles, and ritual.
00:17:25.839 --> 00:17:33.839
That is my practice, and I would never present it as a definition of everybody else's because contemporary witchcraft simply doesn't work like that.
00:17:34.079 --> 00:17:40.160
Another witch could practice in a completely different way and still use exactly the same word to describe themselves.
00:17:40.319 --> 00:17:44.079
This is where conversations about Satan can become particularly frustrating.
00:17:44.319 --> 00:17:53.039
Because if somebody tells me that my witchcraft must involve the devil because their religion teaches that magic comes from the devil, they aren't actually describing my belief system.
00:17:53.200 --> 00:17:55.599
They're interpreting it through theirs.
00:17:55.920 --> 00:17:58.480
That difference is incredibly important.
00:17:58.880 --> 00:18:06.799
I have lost quote unquote friends because their religion told them I must worship the devil, and they were gone before I could show them I do not.
00:18:07.200 --> 00:18:09.599
Historically, it could be fatal.
00:18:09.839 --> 00:18:21.680
Today it can still produce stigma, suspicion, and understanding, particularly when fictional images of witchcraft are much more familiar to the general public than the lives of actual contemporary witches.
00:18:21.920 --> 00:18:30.960
Someone can look at a pentagram, a tarot deck, a ritual, or even the word witch, and see Satan because centuries of culture have taught them to make that definition.
00:18:31.279 --> 00:18:39.279
The witch herself might be talking about something entirely different, which brings us rather neatly to this week's hidden hex.
00:18:51.039 --> 00:18:58.400
The strangest thing about the devil-worshipping witch is that historically the stereotype doesn't actually require witches to believe in Satan.
00:18:58.640 --> 00:19:01.599
It only requires everyone else to believe they do.
00:19:01.839 --> 00:19:03.599
That is this week's hidden hex.
00:19:03.759 --> 00:19:07.279
The satanic witch is constructed from the outside.
00:19:07.599 --> 00:19:10.640
Imagine the logic of a historical witch prosecution.
00:19:10.960 --> 00:19:16.079
Someone can insist that they are not a witch and authorities can decide that they are.
00:19:16.319 --> 00:19:21.440
They can insist that they have never made a pact with the devil, and authorities can decide that they have.
00:19:21.599 --> 00:19:26.720
They can deny worshiping Satan, and that denial itself can be treated as deception.
00:19:26.960 --> 00:19:31.839
The accused person loses control over the definition of their own beliefs.
00:19:32.160 --> 00:19:35.279
Remarkably, traces of that logic still survive.
00:19:35.519 --> 00:19:44.160
A modern witch can say, I don't worship Satan, and occasionally someone will respond with some variation of, well, you do really, you just don't know it.
00:19:44.400 --> 00:19:49.519
It has happened to me if you listen to the previous episode in the middle of a high street.
00:19:50.160 --> 00:19:53.759
At that point, there isn't actually a conversation taking place.
00:19:54.000 --> 00:20:03.680
One person has decided that their theological interpretation of somebody else's identity is more authoritative than that person's own record of what they believe.
00:20:04.000 --> 00:20:09.680
Film and television have helped preserve that assumption because Satan is incredibly useful narratively.
00:20:09.920 --> 00:20:13.599
He gives magic an immediate source and an immediate price.
00:20:13.839 --> 00:20:21.920
If a story tells us that somebody has made a deal with the devil, we understand the danger without requiring 20 minutes of magical exposition.
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But that storytelling shortcut carries centuries of cultural baggage.
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Every time witchcraft automatically becomes satanic on screen, the story risks quietly repeating an argument once made by demonologists.
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Magic cannot simply belong to the witch.
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Someone else must have given it to her.
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Somewhere behind her, therefore, must stand the devil.
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That is what makes the witches of Eastwick so interesting.
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Darrell thinks exactly like that.
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He assumes the women's power belonged to him because he awakened it, encouraged it, and positioned himself at the center of their transformation.
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Then they discover that they don't need him.
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The devil turns out not to be the source of the witch.
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He's just a man who thought he owned her.
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When we put all of this together, the satanic witch becomes one of the clearest examples of the central idea we keep returning to throughout hexposition.
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Screen witches don't appear from nowhere.
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They arrive carrying history.
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The witch who signs the devil's book, attends the Sabbath, acquires a demonic familiar, or receives supernatural power in exchange for her soul existed in Western cultural imagination long before cinema.
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Film inherited those images, horror defined them, television repeated them, and eventually audiences became so familiar with the language of satanic witchcraft that filmmakers barely needed to explain it.
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A goat can enter the frame and we become suspicious.
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A pentagram appears and the soundtrack changes.
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A group of women gathered.
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In the woods at night, and centuries of cultural association begin doing the storytelling before anybody has said a word, because gods forbid a woman can have hobbies.
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There is an important addendum to that goat, though, because the image has a history that reaches back further than modern horror.
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Early Christian writers and missionaries encountered Celtic peoples who worshipped horned or antlered gods, most famously the figure we now know as Senunus.
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He is genuinely depicted with the antlers of a stag, not the horns of a goat, and he was not simply a Celtic version of the Christian devil.
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But as Christianity spread, older gods were often reinterpreted through Christian demonology.
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The horned deity could be recast as demonic, and the people who worshipped him could be accused of worshiping Satan.
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In my own practice, I believe in the horned god, who is the consort of the goddess, and he is simply a symbol of nature, and he has the antlers of a deer, not the horns of a goat.
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That is widely understood as one of the roots of the later visual association between the devil, goats, and witchcraft.
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The distinction between stag antlers and goat horns was not necessarily important to people determined to condemn an older religion.
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What mattered was the presence of horns.
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A complex indigenous deity could be flattened into a Christian symbol of evil, and from there the horned figure could become attached to stories about witches, sabbaths, and satanic worship very neatly.
00:23:30.960 --> 00:23:35.599
So when the witch gives us black Philip, the goat is not just a random spooky animal.
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He is part of a much older visual tradition, one shaped by the Christian reinterpretation of pre-Christian horned gods.
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The film is drawing on centuries of accumulated imagery, even though the historical figures that helped inspire the imagery were not interchangeable with Satan and were not necessarily goat-like at all.
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Yet contemporary film and television have also increasingly allowed witches to own their magic.
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Alexandra, Jane, and Suki can reject Daryl.
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Rowena can wield magic against demons rather than serving them.
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Witches can exist inside magical systems where Satan simply has nothing to do with their abilities.
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That doesn't mean the devil-worshipping witch needs to disappear from fiction.
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She belongs to horror, folklore, and an enormous tradition of Western storytelling.
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And sometimes she makes for fantastic television.
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But the problem comes when one fictional tradition is mistaken for a universal truth.
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Witches don't need Satan in order to exist.
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Historically, it was often the people who feared witches who did.
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So what have we learned?
00:24:51.839 --> 00:24:56.640
The association between witches and Satan isn't an inevitable part of witchcraft.
00:24:56.799 --> 00:25:09.119
It emerged from particular historical and religious circumstances as ideas about harmful magic became increasingly entangled with Christian demonology, heresy, and fears about diabolical conspiracy.
00:25:09.440 --> 00:25:12.640
That transformation changed the cultural meaning of the witch.
00:25:12.880 --> 00:25:24.160
Someone suspected of performing harmful magic could become something much more frightening to Christian authorities, an enemy of God who had willingly allied themselves with Satan.
00:25:24.640 --> 00:25:27.839
Centuries later, Cinema inherited that mythology.
00:25:28.079 --> 00:25:36.880
The Witches of Eastwick gives us the devil, standing directly alongside female magical awakening, but ultimately allows its witches to reject his control.
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The witch reconstructs the satanic witch through the fears of 17th-century Puritan Christianity, while supernatural, particularly through Ruena, shows how modern television can begin separating witchcraft from automatic allegiance to hell.
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Perhaps the most important thing to remember is that when somebody tells us what witches believe without actually asking witches, we should probably start asking whose story we were really hearing.
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Because sometimes the history of witchcraft isn't actually the history of witches.
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It's the history of what other people were frightened witches might be doing.
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And those are not the same thing.
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Next time we're leaving Hell with two L's behind and heading somewhere considerably greener: the woods.
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Fairy tales send witches there.
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Horror films hide them there.
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Folklore fills forests with spirits, monsters, dangerous women, and things that sensible protagonists really should not be following after sunset.
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Even when the witch herself isn't visible, sometimes all a film needs is a crooked tree, a misty path, and a cottage that absolutely wasn't there five minutes ago for us to know whose territory we have entered.
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But why?
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Why does the witch belong in the woods?
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What happens when the forest isn't merely somewhere she lives, but part of the reason we recognise her as a witch in the first place?
00:26:58.079 --> 00:27:06.960
And why, after centuries of being told that women alone in the woods are dangerous, have so many witches decided that actually the woods sound rather lovely?
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That's next time on Hexposition, which is on screen.
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Until then, question the stereotype, check the folklore, and if an extraordinarily charismatic stranger called Daryl Van Horn suddenly buys the largest house in town, maybe don't invite him round for tea.
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This has been a Familiar Footsteps production.
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Love and light.
