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 witches, popular and/or culture:
“A major difference between witches and psychotherapists is that witches see the mental health of women as having important political consequences.”
—Naomi R. Goldenberg (b. 1947)
“Lawyers are necessary in a community. Some of you ... take a different view; but as I am a member of that legal profession, or was at one time, and have only lost standing in it to become a politician, I still retain the pride of the profession. And I still insist that it is the law and the lawyer that make popular government under a written constitution and written statutes possible.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“The best hopes of any community rest upon that class of its gifted young men who are not encumbered with large possessions.... I now speak of extensive scholarship and ripe culture in science and art.... It is not large possessions, it is large expectations, or rather large hopes, that stimulate the ambition of the young.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)