Witches in Popular Culture
Especially in media aimed at children (such as fairy tales), witches are often depicted as wicked old women with wrinkled skin and pointy hats, clothed in black or purple, with warts on their noses and sometimes long claw-like fingernails. Like the Three Witches from Macbeth, they are often portrayed as concocting potions in large cauldrons. Witches typically ride through the air on a broomstick as in the Harry Potter universe or in more modern spoof versions, a vacuum cleaner as in the Hocus Pocus universe. They are often accompanied by black cats. One of the most famous modern depictions is the Wicked Witch of the West, in L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
Witches also appear as villains in many 19th- and 20th-century fairy tales, folk tales and children's stories, such as "Snow White", "Hansel and Gretel", "Sleeping Beauty", and many other stories recorded by the Brothers Grimm. Such folktales typically portray witches as either remarkably ugly hags or remarkably beautiful young women.
In the novel by Fernando de Rojas, Celestina is an old prostitute who commits pimping and witchcraft in order to arrange sexual relationships.
Witches may also be depicted as essentially good, as in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, in Hayao Miyazaki's 1989 film Kiki's Delivery Service, or the television series Charmed (1998–2006). Following the movie The Craft, popular fictional depictions of witchcraft have increasingly drawn from Wiccan practices, portraying witchcraft as having a religious basis and witches as humans of normal appearance.
Read more about this topic: European Witchcraft
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, witches, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture is seductive; high culture is imperious.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark, though the witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles have been introduced.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It is said the city was spared a golden-oak period because its residents, lacking money to buy the popular atrocities of the nineties, necessarily clung to their rosewood and mahogany.”
—Administration in the State of Sout, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting the progress of the arts and the sciences and a flourishing culture in our land.”
—Mao Zedong (1893–1976)