The Witch Was Never the Villain

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 .

A Field of Power

There are moments in a woman’s life that defy logic.

A man enters a room, nothing extraordinary, perhaps not even conventionally handsome, and yet something in his presence alters the air. He looks at her, and in that glance, something travels: a current, a quiet voltage. It is not merely seen; it is felt. Her body responds before her mind has formed a thought. A shiver, subtle but unmistakable, moves through her.

What is this power?

It is not technique. Not yet. Not even proximity.

It is recognition.

Somewhere beneath the visible, something in him has touched something in her: an alignment of energies, histories, longings. It is as if the body knows before the intellect can interpret. The gaze becomes not an act of looking, but an act of entering.

And yet, there exists the opposite mystery.

There are men who have learned every choreography of desire, who know the rhythms, the gestures, the sequences said to produce pleasure. They approach intimacy with confidence, even mastery. And still, the woman beside them remains unmoved, unresponsive, distant, as if her body was present, but her being had withdrawn.

Why does one glance awaken, while a thousand practiced motions fail?

Because love, real intimacy, is not a performance. It is a field of power.

And like all fields of power, it cannot be simulated.

We often speak of foreplay as though it was a prelude measured in minutes. A sequence of actions designed to prepare the body for what follows. But this is a profound misunderstanding.

Foreplay does not begin in the bedroom.

It begins much earlier.

It begins in the way one is spoken to. days before, weeks before.
In the tone of a message.
In the attentiveness of listening.
In the subtle affirmations that say: I see you. I recognize you. I value your presence.

It begins in trust.

In the slow accumulation of emotional safety.
In the absence of manipulation.
In the quiet consistency that allows two people to lower their defenses, not out of obligation, but out of ease.

By the time two bodies meet, something far more intricate has already been woven.

Or not.

If that weaving has not occurred, if there has been no genuine meeting of minds, no resonance of emotional frequency. then no amount of physical expertise can compensate. The body, especially the female body, is not merely mechanical. It does not respond reliably to stimulus alone. It responds to meaning.

And meaning is relational.

This is where love becomes a site of power struggle.

Not power in the crude sense of dominance or control, but in the subtler negotiation of presence and absence, of giving and withholding, of vulnerability and defense. Who opens first? Who risks more? Who holds back? Who seeks to be seen, and who fears being known?

Desire intensifies in this space of tension.

The gaze that sends a shiver is not empty, it carries intention, curiosity, a certain daring. It says, without words: I am willing to meet you where you are, if you are willing to meet me.

But if one partner remains closed, guarded, distracted, emotionally absent, then the field collapses. The gestures may continue, but they no longer carry current. What remains is movement without connection, contact without encounter.

Intimacy, then, cannot be forced.

It cannot be manufactured through technique or accelerated through urgency. It emerges almost inevitably when two individuals arrive at a shared state of presence. When they are, in some profound sense, synchronized.

Emotionally. Psychologically. Even temporally.

This synchronization is rare, which is why its effects are so powerful.

When it happens, the body responds not as an isolated organism, but as part of a larger, relational system. Sensation deepens. Time alters. What might otherwise be ordinary becomes charged with significance.

And in such moments, pleasure is not merely physical.

It becomes expressive, an unfolding of trust, a release of accumulated tension, a recognition of being met without fragmentation.

This is why some encounters feel transformative, while others feel hollow.

Not because of what was done, but because of what was shared.

The woman who lies unresponsive is not necessarily cold nor indifferent. She may simply be unconvinced, unreached at the level where response begins. Her body waits for something more than touch. It waits for alignment.

And the man whose glance ignites may not even be aware of what he carries. He has, perhaps unknowingly, entered the field fully without pretense, without fragmentation, and in doing so, has invited a corresponding openness.

This is the paradox of love as power struggle:

The more one seeks to control the experience, the less power one actually holds.
The more one is willing to be present, the more the field responds.

In the end, intimacy is not about winning.

It is about meeting.

And when that meeting is real, when it has been prepared not in minutes but in the quiet, accumulating gestures of days, months, even years, then what unfolds between two people is inevitable and powerful: a shared, fleeting, and profoundly human moment of being fully alive-- together.

Purity: The Paradigm Has Shifted

There was a time when a woman’s worth was measured by what remained untouched.

Purity, in its most literal sense, was a physical condition: guarded, inspected, demanded. The unbroken hymen became not merely a biological detail, but a symbol upon which families, traditions, and entire moral systems rested. In many cultures, including the Philippines, it was once expected that a bride would arrive at marriage bearing this invisible seal, as if her body were a document requiring authentication.

Elsewhere, the meaning of virginity took on more complex, almost paradoxical forms. In the refined and ritualized world of the Japanese geisha, a young woman’s initiation into adulthood could involve the ceremonial “sale” of her virginity, a practice known historically as mizuage. To modern eyes, it may appear indistinguishable from exploitation. Yet within that cultural framework, it was not equated with prostitution. It was layered with symbolism, patronage, aesthetics, and power dynamics that resisted simple moral classification. The man who participated in this rite was expected to behave not as a conqueror, but as a custodian of a transition, an act framed, however problematically, as both intimate and honorable.

These histories reveal something essential.

Purity has never been a fixed concept. It has always been shaped by the values, anxieties, and structures of its time.

And now, the ground has shifted.

The contemporary woman stands in a different landscape, one where knowledge is more accessible, where the consequences of intimacy are better understood, and where the language of agency has begun to replace the language of control. She is no longer asked, at least not in the same way, to preserve an abstract ideal of untouchedness. Instead, she is confronted with more nuanced, more demanding questions:

What do I choose?
What do I consent to?
What do I value in myself and in another?

She may still feel desire. She may still long for connection, for the warmth of another body, for the recognition that intimacy promises. But she navigates these longings with a different awareness, not of prohibition alone, but of consequence, of autonomy, of the delicate balance between freedom and responsibility.

She understands that life is in flux.

That relationships are not always permanent.
That love may deepen, or dissolve.
That the body is not a static emblem, but a living, changing presence.

And so, she refuses purity, not because she rejects dignity, but because she rejects a definition of dignity that denies her complexity.

The woman who refuses to be pure is not careless.

She is, in fact, governed by a different code, one that is less visible, but no less rigorous.

She believes in mutual consent: that intimacy must be entered into freely, without coercion, without silence mistaken for agreement.

She believes in not using and not being used: that another person is not a means to satisfy hunger, nor is she a vessel for someone else’s convenience.

She believes in fidelity: not as an imposed rule, but as an ethical commitment freely chosen within the boundaries of a relationship.

She believes in honesty: that truth, however uncomfortable, is kinder than deception.

And she believes in letting go: that when a relationship no longer honors these principles, it is not failure to walk away, it is integrity.

This is her honor.

Not a membrane, not a myth, not a performance for the approval of others. but a lived, conscious alignment between her body, her choices, and her values.

In this sense, she is neither the “pure” woman of the past nor the “fallen” woman of old moral narratives. She exists outside that binary.

She is something more difficult to define, and therefore, more difficult to control.

She is a woman who understands that intimacy is not a transaction of worth, but an encounter between two evolving selves.

She may love more than once.
She may desire without apology.
She may grieve, withdraw, begin again.

And through all this, she does not lose herself.

For purity, as once defined, demanded stillness. It demanded preservation. It demanded that a woman remain unchanged so that she might be deemed worthy.

But life does not honor stillness.

Life honors transformation.

The woman who refuses to be pure chooses, instead, to be whole.

And in her wholeness-- contradictory, desiring, discerning; she becomes not less honorable, but more.

Because she no longer lives as an idea.

She lives as a consciousness awake to itself.

Desire is a Signal

There is a moment in a girl’s life that arrives quietly, almost ceremonially, yet with irreversible consequence. It is called menarche, the first blood, and it does not merely mark a biological shift. It is the body’s first unmistakable declaration: You are no longer only a child. You are becoming a woman.

With it comes an awakening that is at once bewildering and luminous. The girl begins to notice her body not as a passive vessel, but as a field of sensation. She feels currents she cannot yet name. She becomes aware of beauty, her own, and that of others. A glance lingers longer than it used to. A voice, a gesture, the outline of a shoulder or the cadence of laughter, these stir something within her that feels both thrilling and dangerous.

Desire enters not as an intruder, but as a native force.

At first, it does not attach itself to a specific person. It is more elusive than that. She does not fall in love with a man, not yet, not really. She falls in love with the idea of love. With romance as a possibility. With intimacy as a promise. She imagines herself seen, touched, understood in ways that seem to glow just beyond language.

This is not foolishness. It is the psyche rehearsing its future.

Yet, the world around her responds with caution, even alarm. Adults speak in warnings. They gesture toward danger: pregnancy, heartbreak, betrayal, loss of innocence. And they are not wrong. There is danger. There has always been danger wherever vulnerability meets longing.

But something essential is often misunderstood.

The young are called reckless, even foolish, echoing the old adage that “fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” And perhaps they do. But what if this rushing is not merely naivety? What if it is obedience to a deeper law inscribed not by society, but by life itself?

Because beneath the confusion, beneath the fantasies and risks, the body is issuing a signal.

It is saying: Grow.

It is saying: Expand beyond what you have known.

It is saying: Leave the enclosure of childhood and step into the uncertain terrain of becoming.

Desire, then, is not a moral failure. It is not a stain upon innocence. It is a threshold phenomenon, a call to movement, to encounter, to transformation.

The metaphor is not accidental: the girl must “break camp.”

She cannot remain indefinitely in the safe, contained world of childhood. The body will not allow it. Hormones, sensations, longings are not enemies to be subdued, but messengers to be interpreted. They urge her outward, into relationship, into risk, into the complex dance of self and other.

To deny this entirely is to deny nature itself.

And yet, to surrender blindly is equally perilous.

Here lies the tension that defines the human condition: the necessity of desire, and the necessity of discernment.

If desire is a signal, it does not dictate the path, it only announces that the journey must begin.

So the question is not whether desire should exist. It already does. The question is how it is to be understood, guided, and integrated into a life that honors both the body’s wisdom and the mind’s clarity.

Who, after all, can thwart the law of nature?

One may delay it, suppress it, moralize against it, but it will find expression in one form or another. For desire is not merely about sexuality. It is about being alive. About the impulse to connect, to create, to transcend isolation.

In this sense, the girl at puberty stands at the edge of a vast and ancient river. She does not yet know its currents, its depths, or its dangers. But she feels its pull.

And perhaps the task of a wiser culture is not to shame her for standing there.

But to teach her how to swim.

For in that river lies not only risk, but the very possibility of becoming fully, irrevocably human.

 

Desire Becomes The Story

In the quiet hours of dawn, when General Trias is caught between stillness and the first murmur of a new day, fictionist Cymbeline Villamin WRITES.

No rituals, only a mind attuned to intimacy, sharpened by decades of witnessing human desire and a voice that moves fluidly between tenderness and danger.

This winter season of her life, Villamin enters an ever fresh threshold in her evolving journey as a storyteller. On 3 December 2025, she has signed another major traditional publishing contract (actually, her third)for her new speculative fiction The Witch of Pontevedra with 8Letters Bookstore and Publishing, the independent Filipino press that has become synonymous with experimentation, creative courage, and literary inclusivity.

The contract signing is more than a career milestone. It is a cultural moment, an affirmation that stories forged by sensuality, subtlety, and emotional risk belong in the contemporary canon of Philippine Literature.

Villamin's trajectory is non-linear. She has lived several creative lives: essayist, science writer, memoirist, Christian writer, romance storyteller, and speculative fictionist.

Her works, Ang Maghuhurno, Lovers in Kyoto, and "Total Resistance Extreme" revolve around characters suspended between longing and awakening, silence and confession, selfhood and surrender.

Her fiction is marked by the ability to navigate the tangled and secret cartography of the heart; the turbulence of desire, magnetic pull between souls, ache of memory, electricity of touch that could alter destinies.

Yet her writing is not merely sensual. Beneath every intimacy is an undercurrent of philosophy. What does it mean to love? Who do we become in the presence of another? How does a heart reinvent itself after a rupture?

In Villamin's hands, desire is not an ornament of the narrative. It becomes a method. It becomes a myth. It becomes THE STORY.

Emotionally Ambitious Novella by Cymbeline Villamin

Her forthcoming novella with 8Letters, The Witch of Pontevedra, still under wraps but already stirring curiosity, marks one of Cymbeline Villamin's emotionally ambitious works. Scheduled for release in 2026, the beta readers describe the book as "lyrical," "fierce," and "beautifully unsettling."

The pages unfold a narrative where romance is intertwined with spiritual metamorphosis. Characters encounter each other in moments of vulnerability. There is longing. There is sensuaity. There is a mythic pulse that insinuates intimacy altering reality, reshaping time, and revising the architecture of self.

 

Rooted in Filipino Sensibility

Though her fiction travels across borders-- Tokyo alleys, Spanish mythscapes, imagined futures-- Cymbeline Villamin's voice remains distinctly Filipino.

It is in the emotional generosity of her characters, in their quiet acts of courage, in the intersections of spirituality and longing that color their choices.

Her novella reflects this cultural grounding. It draws from the Filipino relationship with destiny, memory, and the unseen; the way myths exist side-by-side with everyday life, shaping the emotional vocabulary of the people.