Witchcraft to Myth; Crafting a Language That Allows For Liberation

When female spirituality is not presented by white men of class privilege, the readers can empathize with the women who typically would be presented as witches, harmful beings. Rather, the transition between prosecuted witchcraft and the witch-myth is telling of shift that still breeds a proposed paradigm of women’s expectations within society. Myths change with cultural context, however, when feminine spirituality is presented as a myth it is often a portrayal of how women are not meant to behave. Unconquered Spirits written by Josephina Lopez is a pioneering text in its craft and transformation of a myth originally meant to confine femininity and motherhood in the context of religious colonization. Lopez has allowed the La Llorona myth to be one of comfort, an act of aid to women fighting for freedoms under a different type of oppression.  In the contemporary era of understanding the importance of feminism, literature, and the power of myth-making, it is crucial to consider the ways myths that previously upheld patriarchal ideas of gender, can be pivoted into a source of empowerment. Myth will always matter on a global and domestic scale, however, those who tell the story have the ability to create a substantial liberating impact. 

A vast array of myths and literature exists to tell the story of witches present before a proper understanding of propaganda and its relationship to fear and gender could be articulated. Importantly, these stories are written from the perspective of highly educated men, those who existed in a world of privilege that allowed them to create a story showcasing the potential harm of powerful women. In her essay, “The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking”, Ostriker argues that a specific language has been applied to create myths, this is a language that has been dominated and crafted by men, leaving a sort of female rhetoric absent from the literature of Greek and Roman times. In part, this language does not acknowledge the active ways women are involved in everyday life, nor does it attribute their importance and significance in the creation of these myths.  This language has power and has shaped stories as it has “been an encoding of male privilege, what Adrienne Rich calls an "oppressor's language" inadequate to describe or express women's experience, a "Law of the Father" which transforms the daughter to "the invisible women in the asylum corridor" or "the silent woman" without access to the authoritative expression we must also have it in our power to "seize speech" and make it say what we mean” (Ostriker, 69). Furthermore, the existence of this language has inherently created a binary in which women can exist in myth, either as a destructive force through their lack of upheaval to feminine expectations, or a nurturer that is the shining example of classic femininity. “At first thought, mythology seems an inhospitable terrain for a woman writer. There we find the conquering gods and heroes, the deities of pure thought and spirituality so superior to Mother Nature; there we find the sexually wicked Venus, Circe, Pandora, Helen, Medea, Eve, and the virtuously passive Iphigenia, Alcestis, Mary, Cinderella. It is thanks to myth we believe that women must be either "angel" or "monster” (Ostriker, 69). Ostriker goes on to argue that women poets in the modern Romanticism age are mythmakers who have used a different language than the oppressor’s language, through disguised rebellion as obedience. It is important to note that Unconquered Spirits written by Josephina Lopez does not use this language, it is active and fierce in its presentation of systematic violence. Lopez does not “seize speech” but commands it through metaphorical characters and an interwoven experience that showcases Chicano femininity.

The shifting negotiation of motherhood and the expectation of mothers is a battleground nestled on feminine bodies when comparing literature written by men and women, white women, and women of color. The La Llorona myth directly tackles the concept of motherly expectations. The extreme taboo surrounding infanticide is created because there is an expectation that mothers must endure the pain surrounding the freedom of female sexuality. “The ideology of motherhood, specifically in its reference to matriarchal roots, reduces a woman to her biological functions. Compared to the full range of powers which women actually held in matristic times at the beginning of agrarian societies, only the ability to bear children survives in such projections of motherhood in the highly industrialized society of the 20th century - as if this reduction did not, in fact, correspond to an older misogynist ideology of femininity”, implements the social idea that culturally, it is most significant to view women in regards to their status as a mother (Bovenschen, 89). Unconquered Spirits can also be analyzed through a psychological lens that has been applied to many myths and their relationship to archetypes, specifically following Jungian psychology. In “Women Who Run With the Wolves” Estes examined the wild woman archetype and the ways this analysis can provide translated insight from folklore and myth into tangible and applicable thinking processes. When considering how “women’s culture may have evolved into more conscious reasoning about the role of mothers”, there will always remain to be “the internal mother will have the same values and ideas about what a mother should look like, act like, as those in one’s childhood culture.” (Estes, 186). In respect to Unconquered Spirits, the audience finds themselves battling a societally accepted stance on motherhood, as well as their own internal mother. In Act I Scene 14, the audience witnesses Xochitl throws her children to Tonantzin, the lake as well as the Aztec Goddess of the Earth, so that they are not caught and not baptized. Here the audience is confronted with the questions: is death a kinder option than that of colonized religion? Especially on a white audience whose identity may not exist in this play, the question can be easily blurred. 

What Unconquered Spirits does so brilliantly, is convey the complexities of motherhood in a colonized and unjust world. It presents the reader with extreme discomfort, as we are forced to address 3 women who do not follow the traditional path of motherhood, and their infanticide is procured through, literal death in “little pieces”, a metaphorical death upholding traditional myth, or one that renders the reader to evaluate whether the protagonist, Xochimilco, abandoned her children or freed them from a life of harm at the hands of potentially abusive men (Lopez, 180). Lopez presented questions that can not be easily answered, but by existing in the form of theatre, there is a reality the audience must experience and thus question. Lopez has transformed the myth of La Llorona as “ a scapegoat to explain conquest, incest, male treachery or infidelity, sexual desire, and the dichotomy between love and hate” to one that showcases the potential for female and Chicano liberation (Boffone, 93). Though neither of these things comes lightly, they require a sacrifice that is often not made among white feminist movements, which is why this myth and play push the reader/audience so intently. 

A lingering question remains, are witchcraft and myth synonymous? Blatantly no, they are entirely different sects of culture. However, witchcraft prosecution has transformed, and what we know see is the utilization of myth as a psychological tactic cohering feminine bodies to remain out of power. It is important to understand this transition as “that which male historiography omitted, suppressed, or tabooed did not simply disappear; even experiential action is at certain moments historically aware, to the extent that it elicits the collective 'return of the repressed.' This re-recollection is neither reflective nor simply intuitive - it is possible given a continual and consistently unfulfilled longing for liberation, measured in comparison to the most blatant examples of those things which still cause suffering” (Bovenschen, 85). Rather, “the witch and the saint became myth”, leaving readers and consumers of myth with the same ideology regarding feminine expectations. 

Myths need to be reclaimed, and rewritten, absent of both the “oppressors language” and the language created in a clever, but silent, rebellion. “Gone is the bogeywoman version of children’s nightmares; when La Llorona reappears after Xochimilco’s confession before God,13 thus replacing the Anglo- and male-centric spiritual leader and replacing him with an indigenous female figure, she is merely a woman and no longer the horrific figure previously seen on stage” (Boffone, 103). There is fear within myth, but there is also the opportunity to transform said myth into a liberating and applicable foundation. According to Frantz Fanon, “Decolonization, we know, is a historical process. In other words, it can only be understood, it can only find its significance and become self coherent insofar as we can discern the history-making movement which gives it form and substance”, and the recreation of historically harmful myths is something of significant substance (Fanon, 3).

Works Cited

Boffone, Trevor. “La Llorona on Stage: Re-Visiting Chicana Cultural Paradigms in Josefina 

Lópezs Unconquered Spirits.” Latin American Theatre Review, vol. 51, no. 2, 2018, pp. 91–107.

Bovenschen, Silvia, et al. “The Contemporary Witch, the Historical Witch and the Witch Myth: 

The Witch, Subject of the Appropriation of Nature and Object of the Domination of Nature.” New German Critique, no. 15, 1978, p. 82.

Estés, Clarissa Pinkola. Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman 

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press, 1968.

López Josefina. Unconquered Spirits. Alexander Street Press, 2004.

Ostriker, Alicia. “The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking.” Signs: 

Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 8, no. 1, 1982, pp. 68–90.