Witches are just cool kids with superpowers.

In the light of secularism and scientific advancement, people started to realize that there are no such things as werewolves or witches. We stop blaming everything that doesn’t make sense on a particular person or population like we used to. Once we encounter confusions, we seek for scientific reasons. Thus, people lost the natural fear for these two monsters and start to manipulate them for our own pleasure. Much more can be done with their superpowers and much more to be explored with their superpowers. I think this is the biggest difference between the contemporary witches/werewolves and such definition of the early days as Palmer describes in chapter 3 Witches.

As we lose the fear for witches and start to make story of them for pleasure, we humanized witches whose power is limited and these witches have troubles just like us even with their superpowers. They are no longer the reasons of natural calamities. The witch world is no longer black or white and it is just like ours. Compared to the benandanti who claimed to be the genuinely good witches, the contemporary witches don’t just fall into one category. Think about Harry Potter. Think about Draco Malfoy. There is no doubt that Harry Potter is supposed to be the “good” witch. However, we cannot really claim that his peer counterpart Draco Malfoy is intrinsic to evil.  Witches these days are humanized by our new definitions. Someone tries to save the world while someone tries to reign/ruin the world. This is something normal people like you and me are capable of. Witches’ stories are just a little bit more interesting, spiced up with the touch of superpowers –something that we are not capable of.

Likewise, in American Horror Story 3: Coven, there are no good or bad witches. At the end of the day, everyone is out there for herself just like in the world we live in. So the fine line between good and evil with the color discrimination is also fading out. The voodoo black witch Marie Laveau seems to be an advocate of justice and vengeance while the white witch supreme Fiona seems to be capable of anything, including killing one of the students at her academy, so that she can to stay immortal. In summary, we cannot label the witches anymore just like we cannot label anyone in our life.

Even though there are numerous difference between the modern witches and the ones from early days, they still share something in common. The modern witches derive from the culture of old days. For example, the black witch Marie Laveau signed a contract with a deity who is equivalent to Satan. So I think no matter how the definitions of the modern witches may vary/change, witches as a population still derive from the culture of its own from the past. They share something in common. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be identified as witches.