Who Am I?

Endora

I'm Endora, Samantha's wicked witch of a mother from the popular old sitcom Bewitched. You probably remember me best as the tormenter of Derwood—er, Darrin—Sam's dreary mortal husband.

Nowadays, I'm better known as the sort of gender-based stereotype that's keeping men from being assigned their rightful role in the history of witchcraft. That's the claim of two Canadian historians who say that one-quarter of all witches executed in Europe between 1450 and 1750 were really warlocks.

"We're interested in setting the historical record right," Andrew Gow told The National Post the other day. "We want to produce a balanced and equitable picture of events that have been enormously important in academic history in the last 20 years, and also in popular culture….Look at Bewitched and other popular TV depictions of witches and witchcraft. They all revolve around women exclusively. This is all malarkey."

In fact, that statement is malarkey. Bewitched alone boasted Sam's daddy Maurice and her Uncle Arthur as popular, recurring characters. And do I really need to call in Dr. Bombay to drive home the point?

Gow and his colleague Lara Apps want to take back the night from feminist scholars who view witch hunting as symptomatic of a women-hating culture. They have a book on the subject coming out in January from Manchester University Press. Their research, says Gow, "makes it much harder to maintain the standard, stereotypical narrative of unrelieved misogyny, of blind ignorance, superstition and woman-hating … I think what we've shown, among other things, is that witch-hunting is not woman-hunting."

Well, maybe, but it seems awfully inconvenient that three gals were snuffed for every guy way back when. And what's it say about equal opportunity in more recent times that fellas like Aleister Crowley and Anton LaVey have made a pile off witchcraft (or that producer William Asher made a pile off Bewitched)?

Perhaps the real lesson here is that scholarship—whether traditional, feminist, or revisionist—that reduces the past to simple morality tales is just as tiresome as yet one more sitcom episode in which Dar Dar gets turned into a jackass.