Witchcraft Beyond the Picture Book
Witchcraft Beyond the Picture Book
Dorothy Bennett
On the Possessions and Nightmares of Motherhood
Perhaps because I was raised Pentecostal, I never completely relegated witchcraft to storybooks. The spiritual world was too important and too present to be trifled with for fun. I celebrated alternative Halloweens—Fall Fests thrown in church gyms and parking lots. I didn’t dress up for Trick-or-Treat. I sat in the hallway while my third-grade class read Harry Potter. Witchcraft, as my mother explained it, is an attempt to steal control of the world away from the Creator.
And while I did wind up reading Harry Potter in high school, I have since passed out candy for Trick-or-Treaters, and I do now enjoy a good fantasy narrative; I never felt tempted into witchcraft. I left my small town, I studied abroad, and I got married, and never once did I feel like I needed to wrestle control of the universe back from its Creator.
But then I had a baby.
*
In the classic fairy tales, a mother’s desire is often the plot catalyst. In one fairy tale, a queen desires a baby, so a witch commands the queen to prick her finger. From the resulting blood falling on ice, a child with skin white as snow and lips red as ruby is born. In another story, a queen desires her firstborn daughter to have protection on the long road to her betrothed. She gives her daughter a handkerchief that bears three drops of the queen’s own blood. The drops later cry out as the daughter undergoes trials. In a third tale, a witch wants a baby for her own. She claims a peasant’s daughter in exchange for fresh rapunzel from her garden and be-spells the daughter’s hair to grow long while secluding her away from the world in a tower. The daughter attracts a prince and falls pregnant. The witch then banishes the daughter by cutting off her long hair—a clear sign that the witch’s protection has been withdrawn.
When I was young, fairy tales were anachronistic examples of how young women were expected to behave and how young women were to be consumed. They were tales with mirrors of myself in the middle, reader and hero. But that role is not right for me anymore. Simply by growing up, I have shed one archetype for another. Now when I think of fairy tales, I don’t see myself in the maidens, but rather in the witches, mothers, and stepmothers. Regardless of the rightness of their actions or even to what degree I want to emulate them, their place in their communities more accurately echoes my own. They take care of and oversee the outcomes of children. And in this newfound resonance, my judgement of their actions is softened by my own imperfections as I navigate what it means to have a healthy relationship with a baby. More than ever before, I approach these tales with curiosity.
For the peasant wife who traded a daughter for rapunzel, did she know she needed the iron in the leaves as a supplement for the fetus’s development? Did she unwittingly exchange her involvement in the child’s life so that the child could simply have life? For the witch who locked the girl away in a tower, what had the witch experienced that made her fear the world even touching her prized baby? Beyond the belief that I should not be a domineering witch or absent mother, I now see their missteps as terribly understandable. I too could emotionally desert my child or imprison him away from the world based on my own fears. These actions, which I perceived as so dramatic when I was the maiden, are rather explainable now that I’m the mother. It will be harder not to do these things than it will be to fall into them. And I know, in many relationships, my natural instinct is to imprison.
*
Anxiety found me in my late twenties. After my second chemical pregnancy, I had catastrophic dreams, which isn’t unique, but was new to me. I fabricated macabre scenarios—things that would not be fruitful to relay here in detail. I would make elaborate plans to protect myself and my baby from imagined threats while lying in bed with short, fast breaths and a tense body. Then I had a full-term pregnancy. Then, I had a straightforward delivery.
When I met my baby, he wore my blood like anointing oil. He took his first breaths on my naked chest. The hair on the back of his head, grown in my womb, was soft under my fingers as I held him to me.
But the unearned reality of my baby’s safe arrival was at odds with my internal state of low-level panic. Never before had I encountered so many consecutive experiences that all reinforced how little control I ultimately had. And while these events should have strewn me at the feet of God, knowing He is the one who gives and takes away, I instead wrapped my heart tight around the embryo, then the fetus, then the baby, as if I were responsible for giving it breath.
As my baby gained weight and started mimicking sounds, the worry would still visit at my nape and under my rib cage, insisting that death could surprise me every time he slept. His curls grew in and then grew long. He took his first steps and then tried running. He put two words together. And then it was time for a haircut.
*
Hair has power. It sounds pagan, I know, but it’s true. Identity is conveyed through hair length and style. Tribalism is sparked by hair color and texture. At every major juncture of my life, I have shorn off more of my hair, from a bob cut, to a pixie cut, to a buzz cut. Hair has power because we give it meaning. It grows out as I grow into the new season of life. There are more drastic haircuts in my future. I fancy myself in control of my life and that manifests in my hair.
Samson’s hair was a physical sign of covenant with God. That covenant was broken in his heart first, then in the world second, as Delilah sheered him. The haircut itself was important.
The thing is, it would not be wrong to let my baby’s hair grow until it brushed the ground. It would not be wrong to keep it cut tight against his head. It would not be wrong to preserve the clipped curls in a keepsake box until he had a family and babies of his own.
But what I wanted was to keep his hair on his head because the curls, those thin, blond wisps the width of my thumb that I first saw on an ultrasound like through a seer’s glass, would protect him. I wanted to rub them between my forefinger and thumb, imbuing them with the strength of my affection, so they could cry out when he encountered danger. I wanted to gather the hair we cut off and lock it away forever as if it had a life force that I could keep beating if only I were vigilant with its location. I thirsted to control my baby’s outcome in life through any means available to me, and I knew without knowing why that his hair had power. At the very least, it had power over me. This time, the wrong was in my heart because my heart wanted witchcraft.
*
Numerous studies extol the values of maternal bonding. In 2016, Winston and Chicot stated that parental neglect and inconsistency in the first two years of life can reduce a child’s overall potential and happiness well into adulthood. Conversely, Joas and Mohler wrote in 2020 that a child who has a secure maternal bond at six months will not only perform better socially in grade school but have better mental health throughout the rest of their lives. During my scant 9 months of motherhood-preparation, the words ‘healthy attachment’ were spoken like a chorus by grandmothers and practitioners alike. Simply connecting with a child is its own life-giving magic. Through cuddles, diapers, frustrations, and sleepless nights, something positive is happening through sheer involvement.
That connection is strange, though, because it is driven by a huge, helpless need. In the past, I have regarded infancy and old age as exceptions to the human experience. Infants need us, desperately, because they cannot function alone. The elderly need us for often the same reason. As someone in-between these stages, I’ve considered them to be odd book-ends on the otherwise normal life. Surely, the ideal is to become self-sufficient and to bear the indignities of fleeting reliance with as little fuss as possible. But to write off an infant’s Lewisian ‘Need-love’ as a temporary experience is to separate myself from my own current needs before God and in community. I was divinely made to grow, celebrate, and grieve with others. We cannot withdraw from one another. But we also cannot become each other’s god.
*
My husband brought up the haircut first. I postponed it. I didn’t tell him that the idea of a haircut made me contemplate be-spelling our child, but I did insist, with a hand to my gut, that I needed more time. And, God bless him, he understood the request even though he didn’t know the reason.
I didn’t gather candles and attempt a ritual, but inactivity likewise did nothing to resolve my heart-posture. It needed something to hold onto, something to orient myself towards. The Grimm brothers, although always entertaining, were not a good guide in motherly examples. What I needed was a liturgy for my child’s first haircut.
*
Bonhoeffer writes in The Cost of Discipleship that through “the call of Jesus, men become individuals.” In Christ, that call is set up as a barrier between a person and his “natural life”—a phrase to which Bonhoeffer attributes all earthly relationships. I buck against this thought, the same as I do Christ’s imperative to “hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters” in order to be His disciple. These gifts of relationship, according to Bonhoeffer, only exist with Christ as Mediator between us. We have no true ownership over them, as they are received from God. It is a hard rejoinder to the above belief in our Christian interconnectedness. It does not negate, but rather re-positions the community. “The same Mediator who makes us individuals is also the founder of a new fellowship. He stands in the center between my neighbor and myself.” Or between a sibling and self, or a spouse and self, or, in my case, a son and self.
In another segment of his book, Bonhoeffer describes our usage of earthly goods by equating it to manna. “The disciple must receive his portion from God every day. If he stores it up…[he] makes it a barrier between himself and God.” I suspect these concepts are intimately connected for Bonhoeffer by the way he later discusses Abraham going out to sacrifice Isaac before the Lord. Abraham was in breach with his “natural life” in that moment of testing, but received Isaac back as a gift from God. In this reading, Abraham’s relationship with Isaac appears to be as important as his daily bread, a sustaining life force, manna. But God must live between them, first and foremost. Abraham cannot hoard Isaac, but instead he must give him back to God, daily.
*
While sitting in the scorched, late-summer grass, letting my baby douse himself and me with the water hose, I told myself that these maternal ties are good, these bonds are wholesome. The Lord himself had a mother and he was beholden to her insofar as to command John after her care while on the cross. While tumbling around the floor and tickling my baby breathless, I worried that I would never be able to give him back, not even in words. While soothing him into a nap, I remembered a friend wisely saying that a baby is not God’s grandchild. They are our siblings in Christ. While wiping down his face, his hands, his seat after yet another messy meal, I thought on how Hannah begged God for a child, just like the fairy-tale queen begged the witch and the witch persuaded the peasant. They desired a baby and attained a baby.
It’s interesting to me how Hannah’s narrative echoes the fairy tales. Attaining the baby is not the climax of the story, rather it is a backstory to the child’s own adventure. After her hair is cut, Rapunzel reunites with the prince and becomes nobility. And Hannah’s son, Samuel, is later called by God into holy servitude. They do not return to their mothers or caretakers. They become individuals. In the case of Samuel, it is exactly as Bonhoeffer wrote—Samuel became an individual through the call. He was called by God while alone and could, in that moment, only respond to God for himself. I doubt he thought of his mother when he heard the voice of the Lord, and it is no shame to him that he didn’t. That could seem harsh, but consider how Hannah, unlike the fairy-tale mothers, gave her baby back to the Lord.
With this realization, my scattered thoughts could finally connect. Hannah didn’t give something of her own back to the Lord. The Lord gave Hannah someone divinely made. Hannah knew she was the steward of God’s child, that her son did not, in the end, belong to her. Then I could pray. Thank you for the gift of this child. They are not my possession. They are not my creation. They are my sibling in Christ. God, make me a good steward of your child, this divine-made creature destined for the House of the Lord.
*
In the end, it took very little time. We did it with clippers—which we first touched to our arms, his arms, then our faces, and then finally his head, after he was well-accustomed to the whir of the little machine. We trimmed around his ears. We left the mess of ever-tangled curls untouched on the back. All in all, it was four brief minutes of our lives.
I swept up the fallen hair as my husband showed our baby his new look in the bathroom mirror. I doubt he understood that he got a haircut, but I know he delighted in the bonding moment. I kept one golden curl, secured with a white ribbon tied in a bow. It’s in a jewelry box on my bedside table.
By now, it is time for another haircut. It will be time again to remind myself that my son belongs to God alone. Praise the Lord.
Dorothy Bennett
Writer & Videographer
Dorothy holds a master's in Theology & Art from the University of St Andrews. She has recently published articles in Tor.com and ChristianityToday.com, and currently co-runs a video marketing company in Austin, TX. She is actively seeking a literary agent for her first novel.
Photography by Florian Peeters
