Week Five: Witches

For week five, I read Black Maria, the first part of the Witchcraft series, and watched Dario Argento’s The Three Mothers Trilogy (Suspiria, Inferno, The Mother of Tears). The readings show two different takes on witches but ultimately revolve around the same theme of the empowerment of women. In Black Maria, Aunt Maria seems to be running the whole town with her gang of Mrs. Urs and their zombie husbands in a sort of matriarchal fashion. As she manipulates the main characters family into doing whatever she pleases, I can definitely see many of my own relatives in her unfortunately -- which made the story a little harder to get into. Witchcraft takes a different approach by showing the protagonist, a woman, first as the victim of a savage rape and murder, then with the help of the goddesses she worshipped coming back stronger to exact the revenge she seeks. This idea of a triple goddess consisting of the maiden, mother, and crone is very prominent is Wicca and other forms of Neopaganism and also represents the phases of the moon which is a major symbol of feminine power. All in all, I think I preferred this story more compared to Black Maria although the ending was frustrating.  Moving on to the films, I was really excited to watch these, as Suspiria was already one of my favorite movies. I found it interesting that Argento drew inspiration for the three mothers from a piece in Thomas de Quincy’s Suspiria de Profundis naming them after the three Sorrows that appear in that work. Aside from the captivating use of color and other strong visual elements, I enjoyed learning the mythos of the mothers as it unravels throughout all three movies.