Rewilding the Witch
Photo by Ksenia Yakovleva on Unsplash
Ataria Sharman: Can you describe yourself and when you first came across the idea of witches growing up?
Cassie Hart: It depends on the day as to how I describe myself. Sometimes, I'm a bog witch; sometimes, I'm not even human. Today, I'm a semi-functional human being, a writer from New Plymouth. I write a lot of magic in my books.
My first witchy characters were probably in The Witches by Road Dahl, which I’d say is similar for a lot of my age group—or Bad Jelly the Witch, which we often read in school. They were always kind of bad, but I think that's how it used to be when we were younger; all witches were bad. But something about magic, power, and the ability to control and change things appealed to me.
Claire Mabey: I'm just starting to feel more confident saying I'm a writer—and also the Books Editor at
The Spinoff. The first witch I encountered was Margaret Mahy's The Witch in the Cherry Tree. I have always loved that story and found her so curious and unsettling. When I got older, I liked The Craft, the movie.
It’s amazing and wonderful how children's fiction has changed since we were children.
Cassie: Yeah. It can be hard to go back sometimes.
Claire: Because they were like, wow, so aggressively anti-women.
Cassie: You don't think about that when you're seven. Right?
Claire: Yeah, you don't. You're right in there. Your mind is so open.
Ataria: What is a witch to you? What literary or other influences have informed this?
Claire: I feel like it's a person of any gender who has inherent power, but that's often aligned with an affinity for the natural environment.
Cassie: I think it's an individual decision whether someone would consider themselves a witch and their definition of magic. But I’d consider any writer a witch because making stories is magic. As you said, individuals can decide whether to label themselves witches. Anybody can be a witch, which can mean different things to different people, but that connection to the world around us is necessary for me.
Claire: I do align it with adolescence. The witch can also be powerful in a coming-of-age story, rubbing up against the horizon of the adult world and finding a power to get you across that line.
Cassie: Many powerful witch stories are coming of age, but we come of age often these days. There are so many different life stages and situations, you know, you lose your job, and you have to decide on a new path, or your marriage ends, or, you know, someone dies.
We are constantly coming of age, finding new sources of power and agency, and discovering who we are, which also seems quite magical.
Ataria: The adult world is almost the antithesis of magic because there's so much imagination and magic in the world as a child, and then it's kind of ‘beaten’ out of you by adults. You set that magic aside when you grow up.
Cassie: Doing boring adult things.
Ataria: Then maybe we discover magic later in life again.
Cassie: Having kids is when you rediscover magic. You know, when you have a child in your life, whether it's your child or someone else's child, watching them discover things.
I felt the same way when we got a puppy last year, watching her go to the beach for the first time. That's precious and opens that spark of life and connection inside you. It reminds you of the magic of the everyday. I was thinking a lot about the idea of being enchanted and how, as an adult, you have to let yourself become enchanted.
Claire: Children are so open to being enchanted. To be enchanted by art and by their world. And the witch is such a strong catalyst for enchantment.
Ataria: Going back to witchy literary influences, for me, it was Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Witch by Lisa Lister, and The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley. For The Mists of Avalon, the author is not seen in a positive light now.
Cassie: I agree that it was a powerful text for me as a teenager; it captured me. It’s always a shame when you find out they are terrible people. You’re awful; how dare you write wonderful books.
There’s a book called Witchbody: a graphic novel about witchcraft. I found it in Sydney at a bookstore when we were over there for the Sydney Writers Festival. And it was beautifully illustrated with connections between our bodies and the earth. It was lovely.
Claire: I’m trying to think of other books. I got Green Witch at an op-shop in Dunedin. It’s a lovely herbal directory with tips on how to use them, and it's great. I love that sense of a long history of herbal knowledge. Like in Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell, I loved how she imbued the character of Shakespeare’s wife with a certain magic of knowledge of herbs. It's such a weighty attribution for the time.
Ataria: Do you know a witch by other names than a witch?
Claire: The hag. Hexe is the German version of a Hag. And wet nurses. I read this book recently, and it’s an uncomfortable read. I found it quite disturbing. It’s called Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh, and a witch character is unusually old and lives in the woods by herself and suckles the townsmen. It’s very strange, bordering on the horror aspect of witches. But she's never called a witch or anything like that. She’d be more like the wise woman, I think.
Ataria: I think of the tohunga in Māori culture and matakite, which is more often associated with women.
Cassie: Yeah, the wise woman. Different cultures have different names, like druid and shaman; they have their own names for those who have those connections to the world.
Another term is the cunning woman. I remember that because there are cunning women in our family line, we've got my grandmother's family from England, a knowing that seems to be passed down. Before mobile phones, my grandmother always knew if people were coming over, and she'd be baking because she had that sense. That kind of knowing follows the matrilineal line in my family.
At the same time, we don't have to label these things. Witch can have many negative connotations; some people don’t want to touch it, and others want to reclaim and shape it for themselves.
Claire: Some fantasy books have ‘real-world’ magic, and others have big spells and magic academies.
Ataria: The other one I thought of was Sorceress.
Cassie: What about Morgan Le Fay? What was she?
Ataria: I thought she descended from the fae or fairy people. There’s a connection there as well between witches and the fae.
Claire: I read Lolly Willowes, or The Loving Huntsman, a novel by English writer Sylvia Townsend Warner, in 2020. It’s one of my favourites. It’s about a woman after World War 1, a spinster aunt, who’s tired and restless and can’t understand why everyone has returned to the way things were after the war. She has odd interactions at the greengrocer, where she buys nice things to try and cheer herself up. She buys flowers from him and they come with a spray of beech. When she smells the beech, she’s enchanted by it and has a sudden hunger to go where the beech grows.
The greengrocer tells her the beech comes from the village of Great Mop. Lolly decides to move to Great Mop. The first thing she does when she arrives is sleep for days; it’s like a reset of her natural rhythms and patterns, which change to one more in sync with nature. Quite soon, Lolly realises Great Mop is a coven and she’s a witch.
She goes to the Sabbath and has a dance but isn’t really into it. So she wanders around outside at midnight and has this delightful rewilding. It turns out that the grocer is the devil, and he pops up again as a gardener. He’s a benign presence, and she is able to rant to him about how women are overlooked and they’ve got all this potential that is suckered away in labour for others.
She asks him what he wants, and he’s just like, “I don't care. Do whatever you want to do. That's the condition of my being your deity. You have your freedom. That's it.” It’s funny, super domestic, and about freedom over your body and time.
Ataria: That reminds me of the difference between organised religion and personal practice.
Claire: She’s doing her own thing, I guess. Certainly, part of the witch is natural cycles of time, seasons, and life, whereas some organised religions are more about doing what you're told.
Cassie: Which is very constricting for me. Abnormal. Unnatural. Suppresses your emotions, and then all of your inherent magic is turned to rage.
Ataria: Emotions are magic, including rage and anger. Emotions can be a huge catalyst for change.
I’ve found that about being a new mother. Like we’re not real and honest about how hard it can be.
Claire: There’s a lot of silence around that, I feel. I didn’t stop working when I had my baby; it saved me, though it did catch up with me a bit later. I remember feeling judged by other people for working. Some people couldn't believe it. I didn't really have a choice. But it was like, “It's okay. He’s sleeping on me while I do my emails.” And I feel like it kind of saved me, having work to focus on and getting through that gruelling early stage.
Cassie: It doesn't matter what you do as a mother, especially as a new mother. You're always wrong. Whether you go to work, don't go to work, give up your career, or focus on maintaining your life. It doesn't matter what you do. You can't be right.
Claire: Yeah. That's so true. I’m nearly 40 now, and I feel like I'm becoming a lot less apologetic, and I have a shorter fuse.
Cassie: Yeah. I will be 44 this year, and I'll tell you what. You just get more rage-y and give less fucks about anything.
Ataria: I love that. And it reminds me of the grumpy old kuia or hag. They’re so unapologetic, and that's why society doesn't like them.
Cassie: They'll say the things that need to be said. They’ll speak the truth. No one else will tell you, but they will, straight up. Yeah, and we need that. We need that in our lives.
Claire: I just read this really interesting book, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon. It’s about human evolution through the lens of the female body, looking at breastfeeding, the evolution of a midwifery culture, and menopause and why that even happens, as it's unusual in the animal kingdom. It turns out it was because we needed the wisdom.
Humans needed wisdom, and it was often held in women who were older than everybody else. Their purpose after childbearing was to hold the wisdom—say, for example, the one to remember that ten years ago, we planted crops here, and it didn't work because it flooded. We’ve forgotten today that wise women provide necessary wisdom for us as a culture.
Ataria: Why do you think revisiting these archetypes is so powerful, particularly one so traumatised by the witch trials?
Cassie: We’re not quite at the equality stage; we still have a patriarchal society. It is particularly potent now because women who have been voiceless for so long are reclaiming their power, word, and ability to create change in the world. For a long, long time, women didn’t have that.
I think that while we've come a long way, there is power in showing ways in which anyone in any situation, whatever gender they are, whatever race they are, that there is a power inside of them and their community and the world; that whatever situation you're in, you can transform things, and that's hopeful.
Claire: There’s quite a lot of work being done to acknowledge the witch trials and how many women were killed. They were scapegoated as witches, but they were women. There's quite a lot of work being done to memorialise their lives.
There's this really interesting podcast that came out a while ago called Witch that looks at the witch trials, contemporary lifestyles, and concepts like contagion. How do the witch trials play out today?
Ataria: There can be some fear associated with being a woman who is ‘seen’ and out and doing magical things in the world. The one in the village who was singled out in the witch trials for magical things. Have you ever experienced this feeling yourself?
Cassie: I always get singled out because I have blue hair. It's been ten years now. Ten years of blue hair. Some groups of people automatically just go, you know, you're ‘that’ kind of person.
I remember when I homeschooled the kids, they went to swimming lessons, and I sat on one side of the pool, and all of the other mums sat on the other side of the pool. That's how outcast I was.
It happened in high school, too. I must have been in the 7th form, and we had quite a few churches in the small town. One of the mothers of a schoolgirl came up to me and said, “I know all about you. I know what you're into.”
To this day, I have no idea what she knew, what she thinks she knew. But we were ostracised, and it spread across the town. People served others in front of us at the store. It was so bizarre.
Then, one day, that same mother said, ‘I know you had nothing to do with it’ and then walked away, and everything was okay. And I was like, I still don't know what she thought I was doing. But that was really othering and very strange.
In Primary school, we had bible studies on a Friday. We did this meditation, where you walk along the beach and meet God. For me, God was a woman, and I told the priest that and he told me I was Satan’s child. I was a young child, not doing anything other than voicing what was in my head. So I’m familiar with that.
Claire: I went to an evangelical Christian primary school when I was very young. From a very young age, I learned I was not one of the good girls. A lot of strange experiences I had at that school came up while writing my book, The Raven’s Eye Runaways. I didn’t quite realise it when I was writing, but I was transferring some of that feeling into my character, Lea, who is uncomfortable in a rigid environment.
One morning, I brought a troll to primary school, and my teacher was unhinged about it. She was like, this is an evil object, and made me go and stand in the resource room. It was really odd. I had this power about me that I did not know, and it was very uncomfortable. It's interesting how adults can make children feel like crap. I don't understand it.
I also think there is something about having red hair, particularly in the nineties. It always felt like there was a power in having red hair, and I aligned it with characters I loved, like Anne of Green Gables and Pippi Longstocking.
I have a complicated relationship with religion because I hate fear-mongering and conforming. But on the other hand, there are elements of some religions that I find magical. I've always been obsessed with nuns—the power of monastic living. One of my favourites was Hildegard of Bingen, who was so expansive in her thinking and embrace of the natural world and God in nature. Those concepts were so radical.
Cassie: I love churches because they feel so good, and I think it's because people go there and pray and feel blessed and grateful. They're sending their thoughts to God, which imbues the place with power. Even if it's not your religion and you don’t believe in God, the place still holds the magic that the people were doing within it, even if they don't think of it as magic.
I studied religious papers at university, and I was always amazed by how different the text is and the different practices versus the controlling mechanisms of religion. Once you remove the faith and stuff from these structures, they're going to get twisted and warped.
Ataria: Perhaps we’re seeking female spiritual leaders. Powerful female historical figures, whether part of organised religion or not, were seen as spiritual leaders, like Joan of Arc. If you grow up in a society where God is a man and women can't be spiritual leaders, maybe you end up searching for what you’re missing.
Cassie: It's funny because it wasn't until we had this conversation that I thought, no wonder witches were seen as ‘under the influence of Satan’. After all, when you do bad things against the church, obviously, you must be influenced by the devil. Because someone must be making those terrible women do bad things. I was like, oh, yes.
Claire: When I think of witches, I don't think of Satan. Like, he's got nothing to do with it.
Ataria: Share a witchy connection you have.
Cassie: For me, it’s the sea, also the weather. I used to think I could control it as a kid, talk to it and it would respond in kind. I’m still invigorated by storms, high winds, thunder and lightning, the ebb and the flow and unpredictability of it. The sea is chaotic and calm, one of my favourite natural connections.
Claire: I live by the sea, by a horizon. Living in Belgium, I felt like I was going crazy, with no moving water or salt on the horizon. I couldn’t live happily inland. When I was little I used to want to be a Phyllomancer myself—someone who could hear trees talk by translating the rustling of leaves.
Cassie: I was obsessed with birds as a kid. We used to have these herons who nested in the pine trees out the back, and I always tried to save the birds that fell out of the trees. There are birds in many of my books. I love the connection to Māori culture with birds being tohu. We go for walks, and I see the same birds and chat with them in the mornings.
Lately, I've been doing a lot of walking around the neighbourhood in particular and seeing, like, one day, there are no flowers on a tree, and then two days later, it's in full bloom. Watching that progression of nature, time, and season has become important to me, even if I’m not marking it like a traditional witch might.
It reminds me of my nana, who always wrote down the first time she turned the heater on or put the fire on in the winter and then, you know, when the first frost was. She'd have these diaries from the farm over decades to track what was happening with the seasons.
Claire: I think a book that someone has interacted with for decades is a magical object. I’m obsessed with magical books. They’re powerful. I don’t like seeing them kept in cases in a museum.
Cassie: That makes sense because some of the magic is in the touch, the feel, and their use. Like pounamu, one from our hapū is Aotea Stone, the colour changes depending on who’s wearing it and dulls when it’s not worn. Part of the magic is in the use, wear, touch, and interaction.
Ataria: How does the witch inspire you in your writings?
Cassie: Everything I write has witches in it, even if they’re not called witches. There are always connections to the world around them, some kind of magic or supernatural touchstone. I don’t know why anyone would write about the real world; it’s so boring. You can pry the speculative fiction, witches, and magic from my cold, dead hands. Who wouldn't wanna add some magic to their life, honestly?
Claire: My book is very inspired by Lolly Willowes; there’s a character named Lolly in my book. Also, Hildegard of Bingen and her wild concepts of the cosmos and magic are very connected. The witch trials, King James I’s Daemonology, and other anti-magic books are also very connected.
Ataria: Another term for the witch I thought of was priestess.
Claire: I'm a big tarot card user, and I feel like the Empress, High Priestess, and The Star have witchy aspects. I also love women from Greek Mythology, like Persephone. Women who can move and transform.
Ataria: Women who can go between dimensions like Hine-nui-te-Pō. Thank you two so much.