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One Pagan lists her favorite "witchy" movies, a transwoman discusses her complicated relationship with Ranma 1/2, and the late Terry Pratchett's legacy is discussed. It's Airy Monday, our weekly take on magic and religion in popular culture. All this and more for the Pagan News Beagle!

Robert Cochrane (1931-1966), father of the contemporary Old Craft movement, was wont to say that the true name of the witch goddess is Fate (Cochrane 25). Yet he writes to Joseph Wilson in 1966 that the “prime duty of the Wise” is to “overcome fate” (Cochrane 23).

What is one to make of this?

Permit me to draw on the traditional vocabulary of the Elder Witcheries and to reframe the discussion in terms of “Wyrd.” Wyrd was anciently seen both as a goddess and as the inherent pattern of things: what Is, the sum total of everything that has happened until now, and the cumulative momentum towards the future inherent in that pattern. In the most abstract sense, one could say that the witches' goddess is Being, as the witches' god is Duration: in effect, Mother Nature and Father Time.

Where I come from, we call it Witchcraft.

Where I come from, we call it Voodoo.

Voodoo? Isn't that all dead people, and sticking pins in dolls?

Witchcraft? Isn't that all dancing around without your drawers on, and sticking pins in dolls?

Hmm. I see what you mean.

Everybody knows that witches don't have leaders. Granny Weatherwax is the leader the witches don't have.

The knock came late. The boy looked scared when Granny opened the door.

“What?” she said.

“Mistress Weatherwax, come quick: the cow kicked Mrs. Brown and she's hurt bad and she's gone into labor early,” said the boy.

“You don't need me,” said Granny, “You need the midwife.”

“It's the midwife that sent me,” said the boy.

When you look at the twigs and branches of bare trees, do you ever see pentagrams?

I thought so. Me too.

It's March in Minnesota: there are plenty of bare branches to be seen, and the random patterns that they form as they move in the wind keep making pentagrams. Looking out the window this morning, I actually saw the pentagram before I saw the branches, as if it were standing in the foreground of my visual field, between me and the tree. Weird.

It's called pareidolia, literally “image instead of” (Greek eidôlon also gives us “idol”): the tendency of the human mind to interpret random stimuli meaningfully. Pareidolia is a type of apophenia, identifying patterns in random data. Our brains are really good at this; it's the basis, for example, of divination.

I used to wonder if it meant that I've been living in the broomstick ghetto too long. In Rosemary Edghill's novel The Book of Moons, one of our heroine's coven-sibs tells her, “Bast, you really need to get out more and read some history that doesn't have witches in it.”