Watching
a recent Geico commercial, it just dawned on me that a witch riding a
broom is one of the most heinously sexist icons of human history. Not
only does it present the notion of the bitter old hag, but her mode of
transportation is a cleaning instrument. Thus, the fear of the old hag
is that she has somehow liberated herself from the rigid confines of her
womanly or wifely duties, and, even worse, she has liberated herself by
turning the tables on gender roles by using an instrument of her
enslavement as an instrument of liberation and terror. Of course, there
is also the phallic symbolism of the old hag straddling the broom
handle, which makes her a succubus, which is the nightmare of
male-dominated societies. And while the succubus appears to men as a
beautiful female, her goal is to seduce and cause the male harm, so the
witch is presented as how the succubus actually looks to warn and
convince men against the evil powers of women. Ironically, what became
known as witches were originally the sage women of the earliest times of
human history.
…sage
women that learned the value of healing herbs, and other types of
homeopathic treatments. These women were actually very wise when it came
to their knowledge of herbal remedies. Many people received aid and
were helped by the homemade remedies made by these wise women. These
astute women, skilled in the art of natural medicine, also sometimes
functioned as midwives and assisted in the delivery of babies, using
various plant-based medicines to ease the pain and suffering experienced
during childbirth. (“The History of Witches”).
Yet, the spread of Christianity across Europe changed how these women were perceived.
Little
was understood about healing and medicine in those ancient days, and as
Christianity spread across Europe, many clergy from the church felt
very upset by the existence of learned women who were healing others
with medicine and other remedies. As far as the church was concerned,
all healing should be done strictly through men in the church. There
were many others who felt that if a person was sick or ill that it was
God’s punishment for some sin committed and the suffering that came from
it was just something that must be dealt with by the afflicted person.
Over time, the healers began to be associated and accused of various
things including heresy, being anti-Christian, and eventually many were
accused of devil worship (“The History of Witches”).
And
while many of these sages were not Christian, how most of the world
feels about witches or understands what witches are, or rather were, is
based not on biblical scripture but on the fear of men and their need to
dominate women, which caused them to pervert biblical scripture as a
means to demonize and marginalize sage women into the current global
notion of witches. Thus, it cannot be surprising that most intelligent
and assertive women are viewed negatively in most male dominated
societies with the witch being just one of the many ways that art is
used to subjugate women.
Of
course, most will argue, “Man, it just ain’t that deep.” But, humanity
must remember that the greatest trick of both the Devil and the CIA is
to convince people that they never existed. Or to put it another way,
for approximately 6,700 years or until the European Renaissance, all art
was the essential part of tribal or cultural rituals or emanated from
some religious (teaching) purpose. However, once the Age of
Industrialization gave mankind what it never had before, leisure time,
art was removed or separated from ritual and became a use of leisure
time, and worse, art for art’s sake. Over time, the notion of the
innate socio-political nature of all art became unknown to the masses.
Let me be clear. Art never stopped being an innately socio-political
creation, but as art became gradually more concerned about leisure and,
later, a vehicle to earn large amounts of money, it becomes less
politicized, mostly due to the owners of companies (books, records,
films) who realize that it is easier to sell art that provides the
fantasy of mental and emotional release (often foolishness), which soon
becomes mindlessness and later perversion. This is the natural
progression of art without ritual (purpose or teaching). This is not to
say that prior to the 1700s that the commoners, peasants, and, even,
slaves of all civilizations did not have their own, often, bawdy art,
but that art usually made commentary on the ruling class; it was not
mindless spectacle, such as much of today’s reality television, the
epitome and precursor being The Jerry Springer Show, for
spectacle is the only thing that can occur when art is removed from
ritual (or when the purpose of educating is removed from the production
of art). And for even more clarity, art never stopped being
propaganda. To paraphrase W. E. B. DuBois, all art is propaganda
because all art, by its very nature of being celebratory or educational,
either supports of denounces something. So, the fact that so many
people living after the 1700s do not realize that all art is propaganda
does not stop art from being propaganda. (Just becomes one doesn’t
believe that fat meat is greasy doesn’t mean that it won’t give one
hypertension.) People’s misunderstanding of art’s innately
socio-political nature simply causes them to be more vulnerable to the
powers of art. (Because the angels didn’t know that Satan is a pimp,
their lack of knowledge allowed him to more easily pimp them, in the
same way that Jacksonians didn’t know that former Mayor Frank Melton was
a pimp, and we see how that worked for the city.) By not realizing
that the thing to which people are allowing themselves to be exposed is
actually affecting how they understand and engage life makes it easier
for that thing, especially art, to affect and influence them. So, any
negative portrayal of women or people of color, no matter how minor or
playful, negatively affects women and people of color because making
people familiar with those negative portrayals eventually causes people
to be accepting of those portrayals. Accordingly, the regular practice
of calling women “bitches” and “whores” or the regular portrayal of the
person of color as the criminal or the mindless physical specimen makes
people more accepting of these notions, which, then, can be used to
justify the types of socio-political policies created by a society,
especially a society based on white male dominance. And of course the
extreme of this is “justifiable” or “legitimate” rape of women and the
murder of young African American boys because they adhere to the white
supremacist notion of criminal, especially when wearing a hoodie, or a
white t-shirt, or baggy jeans. Furthermore, these constant negative
portrayals of women and people of color can eventually cause those
groups to accept those notions about themselves and perpetuate their own
second-class citizenship and demise, such as the manner in which
African American women attacked Gabby Douglass’ hair.
Again,
this is all possible because most people living after the 1700s do not
realize the innate political nature of all art. The poem, “Riverscape,”
by JQ Zheng, who is a quality poet and solid editor, opens with an
epigraph from Robert Carpenter: “You don’t really need a reason to
spend time on a river, do you?” Zheng’s point of using Carpenter’s
quote is not just to present art for the sake of art but to make the
case that poetry is somehow above or separate from the pondering of
man’s socio-political issues. The problem with Zheng’s premise is that
the correct answer to Carpenter’s question is a resounding “yes!” As
Wordsworth, Emerson, and Thoreau have all shown, spending time on a
river is an innately socio-political act because the countryside or the
riverbank symbolizes the metaphysical or the spiritual for most humans
as a contrast to the urban clang of so-called human progress, which
Tolstoy, Eliot, Natasha Trethewey, and others have shown to be a
corruption of the divinity of nature. So, spending time on a river is
an innately socio-political activity, and writing a poem, story, or song
or painting a portrait about the river are all socio-political
activities where one is either juxtaposing the rural and the urban or
forthrightly celebrating the rural over the urban. And not to
understand this is to allow those that do understand this to maintain
the power to use art to control the masses. Whether it is Akhenaten
using his poem, “The Hymn to the Aton,” to seize complete and
unquestioned political power or whether it is President George W. Bush
quoting “Psalm 23” to galvanize America in support of a war based on a
lie, when people do not understand the innate socio-political nature of
art, it leaves them vulnerable to those who do understand art’s
socio-political power. Thus, it is critical to the development of
healthy civilizations to ensure that more individuals are able to
analyze the ingrained or imbedded sensibilities of a group or society as
presented in the art that they create to understand who they are and
what they believe, especially in regards to their notions of
marginalizing or demonizing (othering) certain groups of people, namely
women and foreigners (people not of their tribe or group).
Understanding the history and meaning of witches allows humanity to
understand the history and struggles of women. And while Geico’s
portrayal is “all in good fun,” a play on words, per se, it can also
speak to or communicate the types of latent sensibilities of
marginalizing certain groups of people that societies can mindlessly
perpetuate because that same society does a poor job of developing a
mass of critical thinkers.
Works Cited
DuBois, W. E. B. “The Criteria of Negro Art.” The Norton Anthology of African American
Literature. Eds. Henry Louis Gates and Nellie Y. McKay. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1997.
“The History of Witches and Witchcraft.” HalloweenExpress.com. October 7, 2012. October 7,
2012. http://www.halloweenexpress.
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