by Quimera Rosa
This text was published in “Sexual Herria” book, by Itziar Ziga.
Txalaparta Ed. 2012. ES
English Translation: S.
The witches are not women
I never changed because someone convinced me about is reason. I never changed convinced by a good or fair action. I always changed moved by spells, been this relationships, theories, practices or narrations…and, in fact, a spell is what can undo this limits. Changes that appear to me firstly as a witchcraft. Each orgy as a sabbatical ceremony. Each new knowledge and practice, as a spell. Each member of the herd as a witch.
The witches existed and they continue to exist. The witches were and are the herectic to the heteropatriarchal order. They are not any fantasy of the fairytales. Witchcraft is a word that was stolen to us to be replaced by politic. And art. And science. And knowlodge…a daytime and normative activity, incapable to subvert that same order.
The official story (the consensual narrative) oscillates between one and another denial. The denial that the witch-hunt was the basis to the establishment of the occidental nowadays society. And the denial that there was the witches…
The first, denies that there was a very clear exterminate plan: the plan of voluntary and organized elimination of those who clear oppose and were different for the universal normative in expansion, in those days. This first denial comes from the side of those who defend this nowadays rules from is right side.
The second one, denies that the witches were more than women. They deny, under the paternalistic pretext of defending them, that they were against heteropatriarchal order. A victimizing posture that pretends to present witches as “normal” women, when they specific defend themselves as the opposite of this normative, as they present themselves as feminist. At the same time, they try to minimize the violence of the heteropartriarchal order, as they present the witch-hunting as an occasional excess and never as a structural trace. With this it is given the opportunity for this power to be another kind of power. A denial that come this time from the left side and that defends tat the witches, as such specificity, didn’t exist. With this, they also deny that they can still exist.
The witch-hunt has been a destruction of antagonists and deserters to the established normative. They have sexual conducts different than the heterosexuality and they lived apart of the patriarchate. They have organized living routines organized and they mixed the creation of autonomous areas with the nomadism so like this they opposite the patriarchal and state heritage of the land and the wealth. They have specific knowledge and symbolic orders that oppose to the centralization of the knowledge and to the dogmatic theology. They also worked for themselves or they didn’t work and they were against any kind of feudal or matrimonial hierarchical relation or interaction. This hunt has been a total war (military, ideological, cultural, gender, sexual, territorial and economic) to achieve the modernization (meaning imperialist, totalitarian and state phases) from the heteropatriarchal regime. The witch-hunting has been more than anything a systematic and planned normalization.
The folkloric image that we create in modernity about “the witch” is a reflection of this normalization. It is an image that presents us a witch without the witchcraft, a woman that has more connectivity to “nature” because her own “nature”. With this essentialist perspective they deny that the witches – with an heretic identity choose by themselves – couldn’t have developed alone their knowledge. They defend that they have developed this know how not by their innate traces – that allow to them to understand better the plants, the body, the earth – but by their practice. And by this they limit, retrospectively, her knowledge to some herbal portions and esoteric spells without concrete effects. Like this they could oppose the witchcraft to the technical and “modern” science. They maintain the idea that those witches practices were pre-logical, pre-scientific, although they were the ones that have the most extensive knowledge at that moment.
The witches didn’t had more knowledge about the “nature” but knowledge about the “surrounding context”. They were the most “hi-tech” at that time. They were already “cyborgs”. They could manipulate the signs, the symbols, the objects and the bodies to effectively change and transform the world…this based on set out laws and read statements, on basis of new narratives about new realities, using chemical and it’s possibilities to change mental capacities, or on basis on body interventions to change their functions or also on sexual practices capable to create non-normative identities…their witchcrafts were real and nowadays they are labeled as art, politic, philosophy, technique, science, sexuality,…
Witchcraft was and is nowadays the effective transformation of the world based on spells. The witches were and are heretic to the heteropatriarchal order and rules. And not even the repression or the assimilation will made them disappear because they are the only ones who have the real capacity to effectively change the world. We all need another kind of politic and we may discover that this is no more than the witchcraft. And the most effective spell is to recognizes us as WITCHES.