The Pre-Raphaelite Witch and the Aesthetic Trap

The flowing-haired sorceress in a velvet gown is one of the most seductive aesthetic traps in modern witchcraft. A patient case for why she keeps practitioners from doing the actual work.

The pre-Raphaelite painters of the late nineteenth century — Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Waterhouse, Hunt — produced a particular visual archetype of the female magical practitioner that has been reproduced approximately ten thousand times since. The figure is long-haired, often red-haired, in a flowing dress (usually green, blue, or red). She holds something — a crystal ball, a vial, a lily, a knife. The lighting is romantic. The expression is melancholy and beautiful. She is alone in a forest, by a pool, or at a window. She is, in the painting, a poet's idea of a witch rather than any working practitioner's.

This figure is, in modern witchcraft content, the most-reproduced image of what a witch is supposed to look like. The image is seductive. The image is also a trap.

Why it is a trap

Because the image privileges being a witch over doing witchcraft. The practitioner trying to look like the painting is doing a different kind of work than the practitioner who is actually doing the work. The first work is curatorial. The second work is the slow, often unromantic, sometimes-photographable-but-mostly-not labor of keeping a practice through long years.

The pre-Raphaelite figure is always alone. The pre-Raphaelite figure is always young. The pre-Raphaelite figure is always conventionally beautiful in a specific narrow way. The pre-Raphaelite figure is always melancholic but not exhausted. The pre-Raphaelite figure is never folding laundry, paying taxes, taking medication, having a difficult conversation with a sibling, going through perimenopause, or staying up with a sick child. The pre-Raphaelite figure is never visibly forty-five.

Real working practitioners, by contrast, are usually doing all of those things. The pre-Raphaelite witch cannot help with any of them.

What the trap costs

Three things, in our observation of new practitioners.

One: the practitioner who tries to look like the painting spends money. The velvet cloak. The herbal-witch dress. The specific candle. The romanticized vintage jewelry. The expensive deck. None of these tools are bad. All of them, purchased to look like the painting, are doing aesthetic work rather than practice work, and the practice often does not get built. The practitioner ends up with a beautifully curated shelf and very little working tradition.

Two: the practitioner who tries to look like the painting performs solitude even when not actually alone. The witch in the painting is always solo. Real working practice tends to involve community at some point — a teacher, a friend, a coven, a small set of fellow practitioners. The pre-Raphaelite figure has none of these. The practitioner who tries to look like her loses the practice's social architecture, which is, in the long run, where most of the practice's durability comes from.

Three: the practitioner who tries to look like the painting expects to be melancholy and beautiful. Working practice has many moods. Melancholy is one. The other moods — boredom, contentment, ordinary cheerfulness, frustration, satisfaction — are equally real, equally part of the practice, and almost never in the painting. The practitioner who expects the practice to look like the painting is disappointed by the part where the practice is, mostly, ordinary.

What to do instead

Notice the painting. Enjoy the painting. Hang the painting on a wall if it brings the practitioner pleasure. Treat it as art, which is its real category.

Then build a practice that looks nothing like it. A working altar with three objects. A weekly bath. A handwritten recipe. A small ceramic familiar on the mantle. A daily one-card tarot pull. A monthly esbat. A yearly Yule vigil. None of these will photograph as well as the painting. All of them will, over a decade, produce a practitioner who looks nothing like the painting and has a working tradition that the painting could never have given.

The painting is not the enemy. The painting is just art. The mistake is thinking the painting is the practice. The practice is the slow long thing that happens in actual life, in actual kitchens, by actual practitioners who are aging and ordinary and irreplaceable.