Welcome to Witch Week, a campaign dedicated to exploring how witchcraft, magick and sweetness intersect. Discover photo stories shot featuring real witches in NYC, a contemporary reimagining of the witch, and one witch’s mission to get a tan, in addition to in-depth features exploring herbology, science and alchemy, and male witches. Elsewhere, we’ve created 4 special covers to have fun the campaign and our one 12 months anniversary – something wicked this fashion comes.

Selecting a witch costume for Halloween isn’t as easy because it sounds. Do you go as Sarah Jessica Parker’s choker-wearing witch in Hocus Pocus, full plum lip liner and massive bushy brows? Do you pump for full-blown Disney Maleficent, blood-red nails and purple hooded eyes? How about one among the angsty teens from 90s cult classic witch flick, The Craft, with full smokey eyes, dog collars, and tartan skirts? It’s a giant old witchy pop-culture canon on the market and an interesting one to not only enjoy, but unpick too. 

Today, in 2019, dressing as a witch for Halloween isn’t so simple as: broom + big pointy hat + black cat = killer witch costume. Albeit small, the list above is a snapshot of Hollywood’s litany of witchy iterations that stretches far and wide, and goes some solution to showcasing how often the role and identity of the witch has mutated throughout visual history. It’s fascinating while you stop and take stock. How did these trends and tropes even come about? Why did they occur once they did, and what do they are saying about how society at any given time contextualises the role of ladies, and of magic? Sexy, fearsome, grotesque, and gothic, we try to code break the representation of witches in popular culture.

It’s almost unimaginable to pinpoint who or when the primary witch happened, or no less than, was formally documented. There are mentions within the Bible, with one among the primary recorded witches appearing within the book of Samuel (penned between 931 BC and 721 BC). She was the Witch of Endor, or the Endorian Sorceress, who summoned the spirit of prophet Samuel. She’s depicted in an 1857 painting wearing long, baggy robes that mask her eyes. Her aura is mysterious, ethereal – she stands bathed in the sunshine of wisdom. No broomstick, no crooked nose. All lightness and style. 

Truly, witches and witchcraft pre-date the Bible. Egyptian witchcraft is an excellent place to start. There’s Isis, first mentioned within the Old Kingdom (2686–2181 BC). She was the Goddess of magic and wisdom, using her magic to guard children and heal the sick. In art, she’s seen wearing a sheath dress, and a headdress emblazoned along with her name. Sometimes she’s seen wearing a crown of cow horns with a sun disk, or a crown with a cobra looming above her head. Isis can also be at the basis of those tyet amulets (aka ‘the knot of Isis’). The amulets signified the binary nature of life and were typically placed on mummies within the hope that Isis’s power would shield them from disease and evil. Now while you see any depiction of a generic ‘Ancient Egyptian goddesses’, you’ll see them wearing amulets to ward off bad vibes. Isis kickstarted the trend. 

One other of history’s iconic witches was Alice Kyteler, Ireland’s first convicted witch. She was accused, in 1324, of getting sex with a demon, though it’s not clear what evidence authorities actually had. What did she appear like? In paintings, she’s shown with red hair parted down the center, with a single plait on the back. She looks plain, a quiet enigma, just like the silent girl behind the classroom. By some accounts, she was attractive and complex, able to manipulating men, including her 4 husbands who died from illnesses that allegedly originated from her spells.

When witch hysteria took hold in 1500s Europe, certain visual stereotypes also dug their heels in. Witches were transformed into old, hunched women, who were mostly poor. Any woman unlucky enough to be ‘crone-like’, snaggle-toothed, sunken cheeked or possessing a hairy lip were assumed to own the ‘Evil Eye’. Throw in a cat and also you’ve got iron-clad proof that said women was a witch. It was around the identical time the broomstick emerged, having derived from the rumour that “witchy women applied psychoactive ointments on their crotches after which mounted the phallic mode of transportation”. The visuals are imbued with a sexist bias that may dog the depiction of the witch as sexually deviant and a hag well into modern times.

Women’s looks were key when witchcraft became a capital offence in Britain in 1563. Between then and 1750, around 200,000 witches were tortured, hung, or burnt on the stake in Western Europe, largely due to the best way they looked. There was even a book focussing on the way to discover and exterminate witches. Malleus Maleficarum, aka ‘Hammer of Witches’, directs witch-hunters to physically examine the feminine body for marks. Hair was to be shaved off to make it easier to identify ‘devil’s marks’. Examinations almost at all times uncovered a wart or mole that may justify a witch’s killing. The mole or wart was said to be the ‘witch’s teat’ from which she fed things like cats, frogs, newts, demon creatures. Hence, the stereotype of the warty witch.

Shakespeare’s Macbeth obviously fuelled this ugly stereotype. His Three Witches, dreamed up around 1606, prophesied Macbeth’s future and appear “wither’d and so wild of their attire” – in response to Banquo. He also notes their facial hair: “You have to be women, and yet your beards forbid me to interpret that you simply are so.” By all accounts, the three witches are hideous. They “don’t appear like inhabitants of the earth”. This description little question informed the image of a witch you had as a baby. Cauldron-stirring, toad-loving, cackling social pariahs, out to do no good. 

The concept of witches and hideousness being synonymous was cemented throughout the notorious witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. There, greater than 200 people were accused of witchcraft, with 14 women executed by hanging. Judging by artists’ depictions, these women were plain-looking pilgrims with pasty faces who wore long dresses. Again, their bodies were examined due to the idea that the devil would make a pact with a witch by leaving a mark on their skin. (You may see this within the famous painting, “Examination of a Witch”, by Thompkins H. Matteson, which shows a young semi-nude girl being eye-ogled.) 

One Salem witch was depicted in Thomas Satterwhite Noble’s painting “The Salem Martyr” (1869). She has thick eyebrows, milky skin, dark eyes, and flat dark hair. She’s a far cry from the seductive movie incarnation present in 1937’s Maid of Salem. Claudette Colbert stars because the sentenced witch (saved by a person!) who’s been given a Hollywood makeover, including trimmed eyebrows, perfectly curled hair under a white bonnet, and innocent eyes brimming with humanity. This, in contrast, is the image of so-called American beauty and purity.

Within the twentieth century, there have been two images of witches that dominated popular culture. They were either sultry and seductive (just like the Queen of the goths, Morticia Addams) or green-faced and wart-ridden (just like the Wicked Witch from The Wizard of Oz). The latter’s pointy black hat, too, became a mainstay on the Halloween costume circuit. Its roots and significance are disputed. Some say it arose from anti-Semitism within the thirteenth century, where Jews were forced to wear identifying pointed caps, which became related to Devil-worship and black magic, acts of which Jews were accused. Some say the hat got here from an anti-Quaker prejudice. Others claim its roots lie in alewife hats, a sort of hat worn by women who home-brewed beer on the market.

That said, popular culture did slowly grow to accommodate every form of witch you possibly can consider. There was the smiling Sixties housewife in Bewitched, along with her hair curlers and curiously doll-like face. There was Anjelica Huston’s grotesque Grand High Witch, vulture-like with wrinkles and a crooked nose in The Witches. Modern movie adaptations depicted them as goth schoolgirls and hippies on drugs, cranking up the sex-factor and sometimes framing them as the choice love interest. There was Sabrina, the innocent teen with blonde hair, blue eyes, and rosy complexion, and, in fact, the aforementioned grungy schoolgirls of The Craft. 

So what about Twenty first-century witches? Where are we now? If anything, today’s witches smartly subvert old stereotypes, as in The Love Witch. The movie’s titular witch is cloaked in pastels, with soft green eyeshadow, blood-red nails, soft blusher, and long black hair. Her palette is a nod to the rosy Technicolor movies from yesteryear, however it also parallels hazy Instagram filters that evoke the softness of 70s Polaroids. It’s knowingly pastiche – old-fashioned but whip-smart.

With Instagram in mind, that’s where you’ll find the aesthetic of the occult sprinkled over millennials’ accounts. Gabriela Herstik is a modern-day witch and writer who frequently posts selfies holding tarot cards and daggers, pentagrams product of roses often looming behind her. Her head is half-shaved, leaving the remaining of her black locks to fall all the way down to her chunky choker. Like The Love Witch, it’s knowingly stylised, with a wink down the lens as she dons a Satanic Feminist t-shirt. That is her gallery – her space – of self-expression, where she could be different, powerful and accepted as a witch. 

One Instagram beauty trend is the Mallen streak, which has turn out to be an indication of witchy otherness and alt girl beauty. You’ll know the look – which refers to a bolt of traditionally, but not at all times, white hair styled at someone’s hairline – see Billie Eilish. Billie’s look should truly be credited to Lily Munster and the Bride of Frankenstein.  

Witches of 2019 is perhaps harder to identify than your traditional Hollywood conjurer. Witches are much absorbed into the visual culture of the on a regular basis now. There’s nobody uniform: they wear Supreme box t-shirts, and black lipstick, they wear athleisure and baggy jeans. They’re you they usually’re me, they usually’re that lady on the tube and that man on the bus stop. 

All of which is to say: the times of an all-encompassing witch stamp are gone. See Frances F. Denny’s portraits of contemporary witches in America as proof. Tall, small, young and old, like all clan they’re a various and eclectic community. Netflix’s smash hit series Sabrina The Teenage Witch is a nod to this latest heritage that’s playing out as you read this. There’s nobody costume or face that summarises the varied and wealthy history and way forward for the witch. So this Halloween, ditch your broom, and do your homework, and failing that there’s at all times ‘sexy cat’.