Pop Culture Witches -- "Sanctuary: A Witch's Tale"
In which this witch looks at a pop culture witch portrayal that really gives some food for thought.
It's official. Pop culture loves witches.
I won't go into the laundry list of movies and tv shows that are now featuring main characters that are witches. We are apparently the new pet supernatural creature, now that zombies and vampires have been played out. Truth be told, we've always been cool. That's why some people still aren't over the cult classics "The Wicker Man" or "The Craft." It's why pre-teen girls have been swooning over YA novels featuring witches since E.W. Hildick's forgotten 1973 classic, "The Active-Enzyme Lemon-Freshened Junior High School Witch." It's why the cable network AMC+ (which is not known for being a hotbed of YA television activity) has aired not one, not two, but no less than three series built around a main character who is a witch in the past few years.
*SPOILERS AHEAD*
The latest of this trio is based on a novel by V. V. James, and it's called "Sanctuary: A Witch's Tale." It's the story of Sarah Fenn, a "registered witch" in the English town of Sanctuary. The alternative history underpinning the series is that because witches provided assistance to Oliver Cromwell back in the 1600's witchcraft has been open and legal in Great Britain for centuries, although witchcraft is highly regulated and witches are still viewed with suspicion by those who do not have their (hereditary) magical powers.
Sanctuary has apparently long been just that, a sanctuary that extends acceptance to witches like Sarah, and when we meet her, she is ensconced in an enviable circle of friends who are having the kind of afternoon garden party that we all wish we had with our friends, but somehow we can never get anyone to come over to the house on a day when the weather is cooperating. Sarah has a good life in Sanctuary. She has an apparently thriving practice doing witchcraft consultation (which appears to be regulated much as the practice of medicine is), a group of friends who form a coven from which she can draw energy for her magic, and a daughter named Harper, who is a bit surly. (Then again, if you were a non-magical teenage girl whose mom is publicly known as a badass witch, wouldn't you be a little pouty too?)
And then at a warehouse party for the senior class of the local school, the star of the local rugby team, the son of one of Sarah's best friends, falls down the stairs and dies, and then the whole warehouse goes up in flames. Naturally, everyone is devastated because this guy was (according to the adults) a beloved pillar of the community.
But hey, what if he was pushed? What if his former girlfriend, Sarah's daughter Harper, somehow pushed him? After all, she's the daughter of a witch, even though she herself apparently never passed the super special test that identifies someone as being a witch. And for something like this to happen, clearly magic had to be involved, right?
There are all kinds of twists and turns, and the sides line up pretty readily. On one side, Sarah and her daughter Harper and those who believe that there is nothing nefarious about witchcraft and who see all kinds of reasons why someone other than Harper might have pushed the rugby player. On the other, Abigail, the dead teen's mother, who is determined to destroy Sarah because she needs someone to blame for what increasingly appears to be an accidental death of a teenage boy who was not as wonderful as he was made out to be. Abigail ultimately succeeds in winding up the whole town in an anti-witch fervor that almost leads to both Sarah and Harper being publicly lynched.
I'll start with my tv critic assessment of the series. It's engaging. The acting is a tad overwrought and there are some exceedingly frustrating moments where people on all sides do things that are so stupid and unreasonable you want to throat punch the entire writers' room. The story is sometimes inordinately predictable and sometimes genuinely surprising and deft in its movements. On the whole, if what you're after is quality television it's all right, but you might go back and watch "The Essex Serpent" with Claire Danes and Tom Hiddleston instead. It mines a lot of the same territory with a lot more aplomb. Sanctuary, however, is a solid watch. A solid B or B+ as television goes.
Now, as a witch, with a heavy interest in the cultural themes and what the series has to say about witches and acceptance and power, there is a whole 'nother level that kicks in...
What Sanctuary does that is extremely clever and intriguing is it explores a lot of ethical questions that witches would do well to think about. Like, exactly what happens when you put someone into a friend group who has "special powers" and who is ostensibly "just trying to help" and what that means in a world that does not always like it when people who are different have power, particularly when those people are women.
Where Sanctuary shines is showing how Abigail, the mother of the dead boy, goes from being Sarah's best friend to wanting her dead, and how Abigail's descent into hate and destruction leads her to betray everyone she loves in one way or another, including herself. It also unpacks Sarah's folly in using her power to engender goodwill in her community, and how that very quickly turns into reasons why people turn on her. The woman who begged Sarah for a spell that would turn her cheating husband's heart back to her finds that her husband resents being enchanted when he learns of the deed. Abigail herself actually owes the life of her son to Sarah, as he nearly died in an earlier fall some six years prior, and Sarah literally brought him back from the dead. The friends who were happy to accept favors from Sarah when it was all kept quiet and they reaped the benefits, now proclaim to having been tricked or are resentful or otherwise want to blame Sarah for giving in to their demands, rather than accepting responsibility for having asked for such outrageous things to begin with.
That's the trouble sometimes with magic. Having the power to bend the arc of the Universe any way you like sounds really terrific at first blush. If you have an intractable problem, an obstacle that you can't seem to unstick, magic promises to alter things that ordinarily you can't control. It can bend a man's heart away from its urges and towards another. It can turn a lazy good for nothing into an ambitious money-making machine. It can raise the dead. But what about consent? We think we know what's best for others, but in truth, magic that alters people is not something you do casually, as a favor for a friend. The risk of unintended consequences is too high and the damage it can do is too great. Most importantly, the consent when you do magic that alters another is critical to preserving the mutuality and respect in the relationship. In the end, human relationships are forged and flourish best when you apply human connection, rather than use magic to bestow favors. Sarah thought she was buying the town's goodwill with her magical gifts. Instead she was creating transactional relationships that would break down under pressure.
It's a mistake that Sarah makes over and over and over again. Because Sarah is so reliant on magical solutions to her problems, she seems to have no instinct for how to solve her problems any other way. And that ends up contributing to the destructive spiral that engulfs the whole town and almost ends in a lynching. She keeps thinking that she can use magic to fix things, even when it's obvious to everyone but her that doing so is only making things worse. If there is one message that witches should take from Sanctuary, it's that magic's power can easily become a source of resentment and pain if it's not used responsibly, if it's treated like a get out of jail free card rather than a very powerful tool that can harm as easily as it helps. Thinking through the potential consequences of applying magic in any given situation is essential, because anything less will undermine your efforts.
The other, more sinister lesson witches should take is that we should never confuse tolerance with acceptance in the wider world. We have thankfully entered an age where in some parts of the world, being publicly known as a witch is okay. You can live your daily life with the expectation that you can go about your business in peace. But there are still many parts of the world, even in this country, where being "out" as a witch will have severe negative consequences. In many countries, they are still burning us. The fictional town of Sanctuary prides itself on being a place where witches are welcome, and Sarah Fenn is treated as a respectable member of the community. Until it's time to find a scapegoat for a kid's death, and then it's fascinating how fast all the pride Sanctuary has in how it treats witches unravels in favor of the same old bullshit we've been dealing with for millennia. It is all too easy to "other" Sarah and her daughter, despite their having lived in Sanctuary all their lives.
It turns out that despite the law recognizing Sarah, and the acceptance of friends who have known Sarah for decades, there is still lots of fear and recrimination. Because in the end, being a witch means having identity and power that other people don't have and don't quite understand. That power leads to resentment, fear, jealousy, ignorance, and all kinds of negative emotions that add up to Sarah not having many allies when the chips are down. And if you are not letter perfect in your presentation, beyond reproach, you are not considered worthy of help. There's a really deft portion of the plotline having to do with the Moot, the fictitious official witch governing body, and their attempt to investigate events and potentially offer legal help and protection for Sarah. It turns out that the Moot will only defend a witch's right to fair treatment if the witch has been letter perfect in their adherence to the legal restrictions placed on witch activity. If you know anything about how Black and brown communities have had to deal with "respectability politics" you understand immediately what is happening.
As modern witches, we need to be aware that mere tolerance of our presence is not a guarantee of our long-term safety as a community. With women, LGBTQ+ and Black and brown people seeing an erosion of their rights and the diminishment of their safety in an America that is way too fucking tolerant of white supremacy, we cannot afford to be complacent in pushing for true acceptance by our governments and in our communities, both for other marginalized populations and for us. Because if everyone isn't fully empowered with all rights and freedoms, none of us is. And as long as we think being merely tolerated is sufficient, we set the stage for those who want to destroy us to lean into fear and prejudice as a way to build momentum for their smear campaigns and hate mongering.
How do we know we are accepted instead of merely tolerated? That's a fair question. We'll know we're accepted when our holidays are treated as legitimate days of religious observance. We'll know we're accepted when saying out loud we're a witch doesn't mean risking our job, or custody of our children, or our membership in community organizations, or giving up the dream of running for public office. We'll know we're accepted when our observances of milestones like birth, marriage and death are not viewed as quaint or exotic. We’ll know we’re accepted when telling someone we’re a witch doesn’t instantly devolve into a lot of intrusive questions where we have to explain that we don’t worship the devil and no, we aren’t going to turn you into a frog. Even in communities that call themselves progressive, people don’t know what to do with themselves when you tell them, “I’m a witch.” We cannot let the current popularity of stories like Sanctuary make us complacent about the fact that we’re still considered at best weird and potentially suspect, and at worst an evil that must be destroyed.
Sanctuary may not be winning any Emmys anytime soon. But it’s worth a watch as a witch for all the issues it raises and the avenues it explores around what it means to be a responsible practitioner, whether we’re better off in our out of the “broom closet” and what really are the ethical limitations one should have around one’s spellwork. It would really make a terrific group watch and discussion session for a coven or a class, frankly. You’ll have a lot to think about by the time it’s over. And that’s a good thing.
All 7 episodes of "Sanctuary: A Witch's Tale" as of this writing are available for streaming through Amazon Prime, AMC+, The Roku Channel, You Tube Premium, and other outlets. The series was produced by Sundance Now and first aired on January 2, 2024.