Before she was feared, she was named.
And before she was named, she was known.
Not as a monster, not as a corrupter of men or a devourer of children, but as a woman who understood forces others could not.: the rhythms of the body; the healing properties of herbs; the mysteries of blood, birth, desire, and death.
The witch, in her earliest form, was not an aberration.
She was continuity.
Invention of the Witch
The figure of the witch, as we have inherited her, is not ancient truth, it is constructed fear.
Across centuries, particularly in Europe’s violent campaigns against so-called heresy and deviance, the witch became a repository for everything that threatened patriarchal order: female autonomy, sexual agency, knowledge outside institutional control.
The persecutions that culminated in events like the Salem witch trials were not isolated hysteria. They were part of a larger pattern, a systemic effort to discipline bodies, especially women’s bodies, into submission.
To name a woman a witch was to render her dangerous.
And once dangerous, she could be silenced.
Policing of Female Body
What, precisely, made a woman suspect?
Too much knowledge. Too much solitude. Too much desire.
A woman who did not belong to a man-- father, husband, priest-- became unreadable within the logic of patriarchy. And what cannot be controlled must be explained.
Thus, the myth: she consorts with dark forces. She seduces. She corrupts.
The witch became the narrative solution to a cultural anxiety: what to do with a woman who belongs to herself.
Her body, once a source of life and intuition, was rewritten as a site of danger. Her sensuality, once sacred, became suspect.
In this rewriting, we see not merely superstition, but strategy.
Erotics of Fear
There is, within the myth of the witch, a deeply erotic undercurrent.
Why was the witch so often imagined as both repulsive and irresistible? Why the fixation on her body—her touch, her gaze, her supposed ability to enchant?
Because desire itself was feared.
Not male desire-- that was normalized, even sanctioned-- but female desire that did not seek permission. Desire that chose. Desire that refused containment.
The witch, then, becomes a projection.
She embodies the fantasy and the terror of unregulated female sexuality. She is punished not only for what she knows, but for what she awakens.
Rewriting the Witch in The Witch of Pontevedra
In my novella, the witch is not a singular figure.
She is refracted through characters, most explicitly through Vina, but also through Lyra, who, though not the witch in lineage, becomes entangled in her evolution.
Vina, a descendant of the mythic Manananggal, inherits the burden of the “bad witch.” She is feared, misunderstood, defined by narratives imposed upon her long before she could speak for herself.
But as the story unfolds, this label begins to fracture.
What if the “bad witch” is not a truth, but an inheritance?
What if her monstrosity is not innate, but constructed?
Through her entanglement with Lyra and Noah, Vina evolves, not into something less powerful, but into something more conscious, more deliberate, more compassionate.
She does not shed her nature.
She redefines it.
The Witch as Post-Human Figure
To deconstruct the witch is not merely to correct a historical wrong.
It is to open a new way of imagining the human.
The witch, especially as reimagined in speculative fiction, becomes a post-human figure, one who exists at the threshold of categories. Human and other. Self and network. Body and memory.
She is not confined by binaries.
She embodies contradiction.
In this sense, the witch is not a relic of the past, but a figure of the future, a symbol of what it means to exist beyond imposed definitions.
From Fear to Recognition
To write the witch anew is to refuse inherited fear.
It is to look at what has been demonized and ask: what truth was buried here?
What knowledge was silenced?
What forms of power were deemed unacceptable?
In reclaiming the witch, we do not sanitize her.
We allow her complexity.
Her anger. Her desire. Her capacity for harm and for healing.
We move from condemnation to recognition.
The Final Undoing
The patriarchal myth of the witch depends on distance.
On keeping her other, separate, contained.
But what happens when we recognize her within ourselves?
When we see that the qualities once feared: intuition, autonomy, sensual knowledge, emotional depth, which are not aberrations, but aspects of being fully human?
The myth begins to unravel.
And in its place, something more honest emerges: not the witch as villain, but the witch as mirror.
In The Witch of Pontevedra, this undoing is not complete.
It is ongoing.
As all deconstructions are.
But in the act of writing: of giving voice, depth, and agency to those once reduced to myth, we participate in a quiet revolution.
We do not destroy the witch.
We release her.
And in doing so, we release ourselves.
Read more about the Poetics of the Witch on my Substack .
