Once upon a time, in the vast and mystical western lands, there lived a diabolical witch known for her dark powers and sinister spells. She was feared by all who crossed her path, for she had no mercy in her heart and reveled in the suffering of others. The witch's origins were unknown, with stories of her birth shrouded in mystery and whispered amongst the terrified villagers. Rumors spread like wildfire about her malevolent acts, as she would often cast spells to curse innocent souls, turning them into helpless creatures or binding them in eternal darkness. Her black magic was said to be unparalleled, with the ability to control minds and manipulate reality itself. The witch used her powers for personal gain, amassing great wealth and power while the western lands lived in constant fear.
It can be easy at first to dismiss the Good Witch as frivolous when compared with her nemesis. “Of the two Witches, good and bad, can there be anyone who’d choose to spend five minutes with Glinda?” Salman Rushdie once asked in The New Yorker, calling her “a silly pain in the neck.” It’s true that there’s a cartoonish high femininity to Glinda: her butterfly-bedazzled pageant gown, her honeyed singing. And then there’s the way her character affirms old-fashioned ideas about the value of beauty: “Only bad witches are ugly,” Glinda tells Dorothy upon their meeting. In Oz, prettiness and virtue are conflated, and Glinda is the fairest of them all.
Still, on the 80th anniversary of the movie that made the Wicked Witch famous , I find myself more drawn to her pastel counterpart, Glinda the Good Witch of the North. It s clear why Oprah Winfrey chose to be styled as the Oz sovereign for the Harper s Bazaar 2015 Icons issue, declaring, Glinda is a spiritual goddess.
The witch used her powers for personal gain, amassing great wealth and power while the western lands lived in constant fear. As the witch's reputation grew, so did the determination of those who sought to stop her. Brave heroes and powerful wizards ventured into the western lands, armed with enchanted weapons and ancient incantations.
The Wizard of Oz Invented the ‘Good Witch’
Eighty years ago, MGM’s sparkly pink rendering of Glinda expanded American pop culture’s definition of free-flying women.
In all her rosy-pink goodness, Glinda was literally and figuratively a witch of a different color and an unlikely feminist force. ( Everett Collection )
August 25, 2019 ShareWhenever I introduce myself as a witch who writes about witches, the conversation often turns to The Wizard of Oz, and when it does, I’m always tempted to focus on the movie’s verdant villain. Many fans delight in the Wicked Witch of the West’s deranged cackle and her lust for power and ruby pumps. Even when she meets her demise at Dorothy’s hands, she goes down in style, seething: “Who would have thought a good little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness?” The filmmaker John Waters (Pink Flamingos, Hairspray) has said, “That line inspired my life. I sometimes say it to myself before I go to sleep, like a prayer.”
Still, on the 80th anniversary of the movie that made the Wicked Witch famous, I find myself more drawn to her pastel counterpart, Glinda the Good Witch of the North. She was arguably the first American pop-culture figure to prove that, despite their reputation for diabolical antics, witches could be benevolent beings. Though there had been two silent-film adaptations of the Oz story before MGM’s The Wizard of Oz came out in August 1939, the typical moviegoer would have been most familiar with screen witches who were creepy old crones or black-frocked fairy-tale monstresses out to get wide-eyed ingenues. In all her rosy-pink goodness, Glinda was literally and figuratively a witch of a different color and an unlikely feminist force.
It can be easy at first to dismiss the Good Witch as frivolous when compared with her nemesis. “Of the two Witches, good and bad, can there be anyone who’d choose to spend five minutes with Glinda?” Salman Rushdie once asked in The New Yorker, calling her “a silly pain in the neck.” It’s true that there’s a cartoonish high femininity to Glinda: her butterfly-bedazzled pageant gown, her honeyed singing. And then there’s the way her character affirms old-fashioned ideas about the value of beauty: “Only bad witches are ugly,” Glinda tells Dorothy upon their meeting. In Oz, prettiness and virtue are conflated, and Glinda is the fairest of them all.
Billie Burke, the 54-year-old actor who played Glinda, also prized beauty, and some of her opinions on the matter come across as retrograde today. “To be a woman, it seems to me, is a responsibility which means giving, understanding, bearing, and loving. To begin with, these things require being as attractive as possible,” she declares in her 1959 autobiography, With Powder on My Nose. But she thought the wise and gracious Glinda was a departure from the (in her words) “skitter-wits” and “spoony ladies with bird-foolish voices” that she was known for playing. She came to consider Glinda her favorite role, though she’d insist on referring to the character as a “good fairy” rather than a “good witch,” thereby distancing herself from the very word that the film sought to redefine for the better.
As Burke recognized, there’s more to Glinda than her saccharine trappings. When the Wicked Witch threatens her, she responds with a laugh: “Oh, rubbish! You have no power here. Be gone, before somebody drops a house on you too.” Glinda later asks Dorothy whether she has a broomstick for flying to the Emerald City. “Well, then, you’ll have to walk,” the Good Witch replies when Dorothy says no. Glinda then sends the child to brave the wilds of Oz with nothing more than a canine companion and some flashy footwear. Beneath Glinda’s tulle outfit is a spine of steel—and a belief that a young woman like Dorothy could grow one and become independent too.
Delving into the provenance of Glinda’s character reveals a lineage of thinkers who saw the witch as a symbol of female autonomy. Though witches have most often been treated throughout history as evil both in fiction and in real life, sentiments began to change in the 19th century as anticlerical, individualist values took hold across Europe. It was during this time that historians and writers including Jules Michelet and Charles Godfrey Leland wrote books that romanticized witches, often reframing witch-hunt victims as women who’d been wrongfully vilified because of their exceptional physical and mystical capabilities. Per Michelet’s best-selling book, La Sorcière of 1862: “By the fineness of her intuitions, the cunning of her wiles—often fantastic, often beneficent—she is a Witch, and casts spells, at least and lowest lulls pain to sleep and softens the blow of calamity.”
The ideas of Michelet and like-minded writers influenced Matilda Joslyn Gage, an American suffragist, abolitionist, and theosophist. She posited that women were accused as witches in the early modern era because the Church found their intellect threatening. “The witch was in reality the profoundest thinker, the most advanced scientist of those ages,” she writes in her feminist treatise of 1893, Woman, Church, and State. Her vision of so-called witches being brilliant luminaries apparently inspired her son-in-law, L. Frank Baum, to incorporate that notion into his children’s-book series about the fantastical land of Oz. (Some writers have surmised that “Glinda” is a play on Gage’s name.)
Like Gage, Baum was a proponent of equal rights for women, and he wrote several pro-suffrage editorials in the South Dakota newspaper he owned briefly, the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer. Although his book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published in 1900, is titled after a man, it is fundamentally a female-centric story: a tale about a girl’s journey through a land governed by four magical women. There are actually two good witches in Baum’s original version: Glinda is the witch of the South, not the North, in his telling, and she doesn’t appear until the second-to-last chapter. The book states that she is not only “kind to everyone,” but also “the most powerful of all the Witches.”
On closer examination, the airy Technicolor Glinda is an exemplar of female leadership in keeping with Baum’s vision. She is, after all, a ruler, and it’s her decisions that drive much of the film’s plot. A maternal Merlin of a sort, Glinda is both a generous guide and a firm teacher. She assists Dorothy in key moments, giving her the ruby slippers and changing the weather to wake her out of a poppy-induced stupor. But she doesn’t let the young heroine take the easy way out. At the end of the film, she explains that she chose not to tell Dorothy that the girl had the power to heel-click herself home from the get-go, so that Dorothy could “learn it for herself.” Glinda knows Dorothy will awaken to her full potential and become self-sufficient only by facing each hex and hoax head-on. This cinematic Glinda is not only a sorceress then, but also a sage. It’s clear why Oprah Winfrey chose to be styled as the Oz sovereign for the Harper’s Bazaar 2015 Icons issue, declaring, “Glinda is a spiritual goddess.” The Good Witch may float in a bubble, but she has plenty of gravitas.
Glinda’s arrival on-screen blazed an iridescent trail for the aspirational witch characters that followed. It also opened the door for a new type of narrative featuring the witch as a protagonist, and not just as a villain or sparkly sidekick. Though the specific conflicts that these lead witches face vary from script to script, each must negotiate her relationship to the power she has—and whether her magic is seen as an asset or a threat is often a reflection of the sexual politics of her time. Veronica Lake’s Jennifer in I Married a Witch (1942) and Kim Novak’s Gillian Holroyd in Bell, Book and Candle (1958) are charming, glamorous women who use witchcraft to manipulate the men they fancy. But they have to relinquish their gifts in exchange for true love, prioritizing conjugal bliss over conjuration. Elizabeth Montgomery’s Samantha Stephens, of the 1960s show Bewitched, must constantly choose between her desire to be a “normal” housewife to please her husband and her own need to use her (super)natural abilities—a tension that many second-wave feminists would have recognized.
The witches of ’90s films such as Practical Magic and The Craft deploy vengeance spells against their male abusers. These occult guerrilla girls manifested in the movies during a decade when sexual harassment came to the fore of public discussion, partly because of the riot grrrl movement and Anita Hill’s testimony at the Clarence Thomas hearing. And the enchanting champions of the Harry Potter films and the Netflix series Chilling Adventures of Sabrina display a cautiously hopeful outlook about the intersection of magic and social justice. The Potter films and original books can be read as an allegory about the fight against prejudice. Sabrina has plotlines that center black and queer characters, which is especially fitting when one considers that witchcraft has been historically linked to marginalized groups. Such fictional covens reflect not only the diversity of TV audiences, but also the broad range of contemporary witchcraft practitioners who draw from non-European traditions. It’s notable that in Harry Potter and Sabrina, 21st-century witches get to keep their powers and use them to save the world. Slowly but surely, as feminism has evolved and expanded, the pop-culture witch has shape-shifted along with it.
Today many people—including me—proudly describe themselves as witches. Sometimes the label is chosen to signify one’s engagement in some form of modern witchcraft; just as often, it’s used as a way to express opposition to patriarchal constraints. But no matter the connotation, Glinda helped pave that yellow brick road for us, amplifying the notion that a witch is someone we can root for or, better yet, be.
The use of Witchcraft is not an intellectual endeavor, but is tied to strong emotions like love or anger. Rumplestiltskin also says that magic is not about what one sees or thinks but what one feels inside. ("The Miller's Daughter", "It's Not Easy Being Green")
They faced many trials and tribulations, battling the witch's henchmen and overcoming her treacherous traps. But the witch's power was formidable, and many fell victim to her spells, their hopes dashed in the face of her diabolical might. However, hope was not lost, for a prophecy emerged from the depths of ancient texts. It spoke of a chosen one, a hero who would possess the strength and purity of heart to vanquish the diabolical witch. The people clung to this glimmer of hope, praying for the chosen one's arrival. Years passed, and just as the western lands were on the brink of succumbing to the witch's darkness, a young woman emerged from the shadows. She was unlike any other, with an aura of light and purity that incited both fear and hope. The people recognized her as the one foretold by the prophecy, their savior. The young woman embarked on a treacherous journey towards the witch's lair, facing countless obstacles and battles along the way. Her determination and unwavering belief in the power of good guided her, and she grew stronger with each step taken. Finally, the fated day arrived when she stood face to face with the diabolical witch of the western lands. In an epic battle of light versus darkness, the young woman tapped into her hidden reserves of strength. With each blow, she weakened the witch's powers, stripping away her defenses and exposing her vulnerability. Finally, the witch was defeated, her reign of terror brought to an end. The people rejoiced as the darkness lifted from the western lands, and the young woman was hailed as a hero. Her victory over the diabolical witch became the stuff of legends, forever etched in the annals of history. And so, the tale of the diabolical witch of the western lands serves as a reminder that even in the face of ultimate darkness, there is always hope. It is a testament to the power of faith, courage, and the unwavering belief in the triumph of good over evil..
Reviews for "The forbidden rituals of the diabolical witch of the western lands"
1. Mark - 2 out of 5 stars - I found "Diabolical witch of the western lands once upon a time" to be quite disappointing. The plot was confusing and disjointed, making it difficult to follow the story. The characters lacked depth and development, making it hard to connect with any of them. Additionally, the writing style was not engaging, making it a struggle to stay interested in the book. Overall, I was left feeling unsatisfied and wouldn't recommend this book.
2. Sarah - 1 out of 5 stars - I couldn't finish "Diabolical witch of the western lands once upon a time" as it simply didn't capture my interest. The story felt forced, with predictable twists and turns. The characters were flat and uninteresting, making it impossible for me to emotionally invest in their fates. The writing itself was tedious and overly descriptive, making it difficult to stay engaged. I'm sorry to say that this book was a disappointment and not worth my time.
3. Alex - 2 out of 5 stars - I had high hopes for "Diabolical witch of the western lands once upon a time" but unfortunately, it didn't live up to my expectations. The plot was convoluted and lacked coherence, with too many random subplots that didn't come together well. The pacing was uneven, with long stretches of boredom followed by rushed resolutions. The characters were one-dimensional and lacked depth, leaving me feeling indifferent towards their outcomes. Overall, I was left wanting more from this book and wouldn't recommend it to others.
4. Rachel - 3 out of 5 stars - "Diabolical witch of the western lands once upon a time" had potential, but it fell short for me. While the premise was intriguing, the execution felt clumsy and confusing at times. The story lacked proper world-building, leaving the setting feeling underdeveloped. The characters, while initially interesting, didn't have enough growth or complexity to keep me fully engaged. The writing style was decent, but the pacing was off, making it hard to stay invested. Overall, it was an average read that didn't leave a lasting impression.