Fierce Self-Love, and the Perfect F*ck Patriarchy Antidote to Your Winter Blues
Two quick announcements!
One, my class The Elixirs of Aphrodite is this Saturday in Berkeley, and I'd love to have you there. I'm also considering it as an online-course for y'all from afar, so let me know if that's something you're interested in.
Two, Seraphina and I just opened the doors for PlantWitch, an Herbal Priestess Apprenticeship, which begins in April. You'll be hearing a lot more about this from me over the next couple of months, but I wanted to make sure you knew about it and that this community had first dibs, since spots are limited and by application only.
If you are curious or interested, please fill out an application at PlantWitch.com, and we can arrange a time to connect by phone or skype to discuss whether this course is the right fit for you, and how it can deepen your connection to plant medicine and magic for you, your family, and your clients.
Now, on to other matters...
May I heartily, deeply recommend to you that you find time in the next couple of weeks to nourish your heart, spirit, and f*ck the patriarchy inspiration to go check out The Love Witch?
Because, honestly, it's still really hard. Each executive order, viral meme, all of the things going on in our personal lives (if you have a chance to think about that here and there), and we need to laugh. We need laughter, and we need films that are an intoxicating funhouse feminism and a heady retro-chic 60s aesthetic that practically drips off of the screen, where quite a few doltish chauvinists end up dead.
Which is exactly what The Love Witch is. I just wrote a review of it for Witch Magazine, The Love Witch is the F*ck Patriarchy Antidote to Your Winter Blues.
Yep, I went there.
So, of course, I've been thinking a lot about Love Witches, not just the cinematic kind, but all of us out there doing magic in our millions of ways on behalf of the heart of this world, and our own hearts and spirits, and caring for one another and being vulnerable and taking risks. It's that time of year.
One of the hardest kinds of Love, for me, is Self-Love and Self-Care. But I agree with Audre Lorde, one of my great heroines, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
Lorde's choice of words may be challenging, and, I think, intentionally so-- but remember that she was writing, and living, publicly out as a black, lesbian feminist at a time when being so was a very dangerous choice to make. (Which it still very much is, and in this political climate, perhaps more so every day, not less).
I think for many of us-- especially healers, practitioners, coaches, non-profit workers, and mothers-- tying in our Self-Love with our ideals about justice, healing and generosity is the only way we can get past the voices in our heads which tell us we're being weak, lazy, and self-absorbed when we focus on the things that deeply nourish our hearts, bodies, and souls.
Understanding that overcoming those voices is the only way we can create the world that we want for ourselves, our loved ones, and our children allows us to take the time we need to care for ourselves, and replenish the well of love that we want so much to share with others.
One of my dear friends calls this work "Fierce Self-Love," which for me, takes the cotton-candy pink feel out and replaces it with something strong, golden, and powerful.
The heavens are raining down blessings on us right now to do deep shadow-searching, fierce work to reclaim our power as Love Witches. This Friday, February 10th, begins this year's eclipse season with a lunar eclipse on the Leo Full Moon, and completes with another eclipse on the New Moon in Pisces on February 26th.
Eclipses always occur in pairs, and in my mind, they're like a portal of transformation, healing, and potential. So it's a great time to look at and embrace your own Inner Love Witch!
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THE LOVE WITCH IS THE “F*CK PATRIARCHY” ANTIDOTE TO YOUR WINTER BLUES
by Riyana Rose
{as seen on Witch Magazine}
The Love Witch is Anna Biller’s cinematic balm for those of us who have been experiencing a dark month of the soul ever since the orange-tufted groper-in-chief claimed the presidency.
It’s an intoxicating blend of funhouse feminism and a heady retro-chic 60s aesthetic that practically drips off of the screen, and quite a few doltish chauvinists end up dead.
In a word, it’s delicious.
Biller wrote, directed, and designed the sets and costumes for the film, instilling female leadership and empowerment into it’s very blueprint.
This makes the protagonist, Elaine–a beautiful witch who is desperately in-love-with-love and is everything but a feminist heroine– seem a counter-intuitive choice at first.
While Elaine’s successful-but-bland friend Trish argues for gender equality and mutual respect between the sexes, Elaine spouts a gendered dynamic about relationships that feels as pulpy and vintage as her 60s-inspired sex-kitten wardrobe.
Her secret to success in love is “to give men what they want,” and to become “their ultimate fantasy,” a philosophy she mixes with a healthy dose of love & sex magic and herbal concoctions that unfortunately leads to notably unhealthy repercussions for her lovers.
Elaine is played masterfully by Samantha Robinson, blue-lidded and with silky gravity-defying lashes, whose stilted speech patterns and simpering purrs of “oh baby” feel as indebted to a modern Lana Del Rey video as to the retro B-movies of bygone days.
Like Lana, Elaine plays with both the power and the vulnerability inherent in meticulously crafting and taking on a persona of perfect female desirability, a porcelain mask that the men in the film project their passions and insecurities upon, at their own peril.
Eventually she manages to fall in love with the strong, charismatic man of her dreams – unfortunately, he also happens to be the detective investigating her for homicide.
Beyond merely the allure of being the fragile, submissive, devoted sexpot, Elaine’s power comes from being a witch, initiated by a cosmic-and-slightly-creepy Northern California couple that lead a coven of renaissance-faire-esque bohemians and who frequent burlesque clubs as a backdrop for the tutelage.
Playing with the archetype of the witch– as both a powerful and titillating symbol for women and the essential femme fatale for men– was one of the things that inspired Biller to begin the project.
“I wanted to make a movie about a witch, because I think that every woman is made to feel like a witch by the men who don’t understand her: that is, mysterious, dangerous, different, abnormal,” Biller says. “Elaine is monstrous, wreaking havoc wherever she goes, but she is also sympathetic, because she has essentially been driven mad by being a woman, and is struggling to find love and acceptance in a world that has disappointed her at every turn.”
The Love Witch is the most recent incarnation in the modern-day revival of the archetype of the witch, which is showing up in all aspects of pop-culture and social media.
A quick search for #witch on Instagram brings up nearly 3 million results, mostly of young twenty-somethings sporting black lipstick, and altars with large chunks of quartz crystal and animal skulls on them. Witches are bringing back kitchen apothecaries, selling handmade candles and soap on Etsy, and crowdfunding unique, newly-minted tarot deck projects.
“It’s tempting to write these things off as being merely superficial affectations, but to do so would be a grave underestimation,” writes Anne Theriault in her essay, The Real Reason Women Love Witches. “Beneath all that glossy packaging hums the same idea that has tantalized girls for millennia: the fact that to be a witch is to be a woman with power in a world where women are often otherwise powerless. On some level, all of the contemporary trappings of witchiness tap into that desire to feel powerful.”
Much of the power of the witch comes from the fact that she is subversive — the subversion of conventional beauty through dark makeup and gothic clothing, the subversion of reality as mutable with magic instead of fixed and logical, the subversion of power as a feminine rather than masculine quality.
The Love Witch, which plays homage to many genres from Hitchcock’s horror of the 1950’s to late 70’s exploitation films like Rosemary’s Baby and Necromancy, is similarly subversive, twisting and turning away from genre conventions and tropes, which were largely created by men.
Biller’s witchcraft rituals are lengthy and sometimes geeky-sweet instead of bleary and Satanic.
Her protagonist, although clearly psychopathic, is driven by love and because of that, makes us love her too.
Her depictions of sex and romance are anxiety-producing and uncomfortable, yet at the same time, are often funny and strangely heartfelt.
She’s playing with both the dark and the light of witchcraft, the shadow and the healing, without placing them in a hierarchy of “goodness” or “rightness.”
In that way, her work feels authentic and organic, even with the deep devotion to trope and elaborate, hyper-stylized costuming and sets.
“It’s not like other horror films because it has such strong moments of romance and melodrama, which are my attempt to get at something fundamental in female psychology and fantasy,” Biller says. “Normally the witch figure is a siren who eats men alive and has no heart, but Elaine is a woman whose heart has been broken because she has been rejected by the man she loves. I think of Elaine as a modern Medea. She would rather see a man dead than to see him alive and not loving her.”
Like Medea, The Love Witch is bound to become a classic—probably a cult classic—and unlike that tragic play, is certain to cheer you up from the post-election, the-patriarchy-is-not-yet-smashed blues.