Quinn & The Witch Hunt

As I examined this week’s transcripts, depositions, and documents in The Salem Witch Hunt, something that caught my eye – in the last section, which focused on John and Elizabeth Proctor – was the connection to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Senator McCarthy’s 1950s witch hunt. I found this connection interesting and helpful in contextualizing the relationships, motives, and tragedies of the trials of 1692. As The Salem Witch Hunt shares, for example, the purpose of McCarthy’s witch hunt was “to root out alleged Communists threatening the security and moral fiber of the nation” and “Miller’s play is a gripping piece of theater and a powerful commentary on the deadly impact of fear, suspicion, and malice.” It was also interesting to investigate the broad and specific Merriam-Webster definitions of “crucible” – “Crucible looks like it should be closely related to the Latin combining form cruc- (‘cross’); however, unlike crucial, it isn’t. It was forged instead from the Medieval Latin c...

     Over spring break, I began the series A Court of Thornes and Roses by Sarah J. Mas – and found myself quickly enthralled by the little details, fantastic adventures, and frightening perils of the ACOTAR world. Currently, there are five books in the ongoing series: A Court of Thornes and Roses , A Court of Mist and Fury , A Court of Wings and Ruin , A Court of Frost and Starlight , and A Court of Silver Flames . While the series doesn’t focus directly on witches – or at least on witches in the sense that we’ve been discussing them – as its protagonists or antagonists, it does remind me of some of the themes we’ve explored about magic and belief – the power to harness the elements and the earth to do one’s bidding, the aliveness of the natural world around us, and the huge power of one’s imagination to build out and breathe life into a believable story or world.      Interestingly, I came across this fantasy series in a podcast I’ve mentioned in previou...

In preparation for this week’s class, I decided to take a trip down memory lane and re-read the Italian folktale, Strega Nona (1975). When parents would come to read to our class in elementary school, Strega Nona was a book that they would often bring with them – and I remember it being one of my favorites. To this day, Strega Nona has a uniquely comforting and familiar quality to it. Having the same effect on me at twenty-two years old as it did at five years old, Strega Nona – which means “Grandma Witch” – is a warm, maternal, and welcoming figure; she is someone who reminds me of my late grandma, Gail. Reading her story never fails to make me hungry for a home-cooked meal! In her small Calabrian town, Strega Nona is an integral source of potions, cures, magic, and comfort. Interestingly, the book begins with the line: “ Although all of the people in town talked about her in whispers, they all went to see her if they had troubles. Even the priest and the sisters of the convent went,...

     This week, something that I’ve found myself reflecting on is the idea of looking for and creating meaning in the world around us – for example, in the ways we practice religion, try to connect with the divine, and cherish the objects and trinkets that we decorate our lives with. As I sat in class last week, a train of thought that sparked this reflection was about the concept of transubstantiation taught within the Catholic church. According to the teachings of the Catholic church, during communion, the consecration of the bread and the wine by the priest allows for a change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Jesus and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his blood. In other words, during the Eucharist, Catholics believe that the body of Jesus himself is truly eaten and his blood truly drunk. I think that this is fascinating especially when connected to our discussions of magic and witchcraft because, again, it ...

  Venturing deeper down the rabbit hole of magic, imagination, and belief to be found on TikTok, after my previous discovery of Ella and her practice of energetic medicine, I’ve decided to spend some time exploring WitchTok. My first stop along my journey was at the hashtag, #witchtok. At the very top of the list, there’s a heading almost like a ‘toast’: “Here’s to the entire WitchTok community.” I made a note of the use of friendly and inclusive language concerning ‘community’; it reminded me of a branch of discussion that we explored in Lexi’s and my presentation last week when we discussed the intertwined ideas of sisterhood and feminism in witchcraft and drew upon the importance of belief systems in drawing people closer to one another. It was exciting to see this practice – a practice that has, as we’ve seen, popped up since the beginning of mankind– manifested on social media. Reflecting on this friendly introduction to WitchTok, it was intriguing to think about how these wit...

This week, something that’s caught my eye in the realm of magic, imagination, and belief is the practice of “energetic medicine” on TikTok. One account in particular, @ela_qi, caught my eye. Essentially, the energetic healer – Ella – claims that she’s able to heal us through our screens. She shares videos for many different emotions and conditions, including headaches, coughing, poor concentration, depression, intrusive thoughts, anxiety, ADHD paralysis, and insomnia. She focuses on psychic surgery, aura cleansing, brain massage, toxic energy removal, and evil eye cleanses. She explains to her followers that she’s channeling healing energy called qi to us from her side of the screen to ours; she says that, while qi defies explanation, it is a universal life force energy that runs through all things and all of the meridian pathways in our bodies. She claims to have been taught by an acupuncturist, by someone who does energy healing in conjunction with Chinese medicine. She cla...