Feature Image:
Priscilla Hernandez

Enchanting clothing for the modern witch or fairy has gotten far easier with the internet—especially with trends like “whimsigoth” and “witchcore” on TikTok and the Daily Faeshion Facebook group giving you all kinds of ideas. But it’s still hard to know what to wear in the summer. For example, many of the suggestions involve velvet, dark colors, and tons of layers, which are all pretty much the last things you want to wear if it’s sweltering outside!

In the 1810 ballad collection Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song, editor R.H. Cromek wrote that Scottish fairies tended to wear “mantles of green cloth, inlaid with wild flowers” and “green pantaloons, buttoned with bobs of silk, and sandals of silver.” Though the ballads included in this collection are of dubious origin (many were likely the work of poet Allan Cunningham), Cromek’s description of fairy clothing is pretty spot on, traditionally speaking, and we think it makes great inspiration for magical summer wear.

To start, embracing the color green in summer works well no matter if you lean more toward the witch or fairy side of dress. Summer is the time of vibrant green grass and tree leaves—it is the color of life thriving everywhere you look. Folklore frequently associates the color with the fae, but you can make it witchwear too if you go for the hedge witch aesthetic: Lightweight fabrics in the color and leafy, mossy accessories are good places to start.

If you’re thinking you still want to embrace some layers, we recommend white lace. White is also a common fairy color, and it will keep you much cooler than layers of other colors would.

If your witchy heart says No, thank you—all black, all the time, we get it—we’re frequently in the same boat ourselves. Lightweight black cotton and black lace are great summer staples. Go for short styles or tea-length rather than floor-sweeping hems to survive the heat, and create texture and visual interest with jewelry instead of adding more fabric or layers.

Next, while it may be a little bit difficult to create garments “inlaid with wild flowers,” you can embrace wearing flowers in other ways. Fantastical prints, floral jewelry, and even a flower crown can evoke the magic of both spring and summer. We tend to like the brighter, bolder colored flowers in the summer—we’re talking sunflowers, hibiscus, marigolds, phlox, coneflowers, and zinnias. Last, we highly recommend those silver sandals Cromek talks about. Sandals are made for the summer, and having some with a bit of shimmer, shine, and glitter can take your outfit from mundane to magical instantly. If silver’s not your thing, pretty much any metallic color can work. We’re especially fond of the ones that wrap a bit up your leg—they always seem a little extra ethereal!

During the time of year that most people want to dress lightly for comfort, you don’t have to sacrifice your magical style. What do you have in your closet already that might add that little spark to your summer wear? Be creative—you never know what you might come up with when you keep your most enchanted self at the forefront of your mind.

Feature Image: 
The Wizard of Oz 1939 MGM film with Billie Burke as Glinda the Good Witch of the North. Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo

When you think of the good witch Glinda, you most likely picture a woman with red hair, an enormous, frothy pink dress, and a truly impressive amount of sparkles. You probably think of bubbles and magic wands, and—let’s face it—a slightly cloying voice. This image of the character, depicted by Billie Burke in the famous 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, has been cemented in Western consciousness as much as her counterpart, the mean, green Wicked Witch of the West. If you’re a fan of Broadway, you might also think of a calculating popular girl named Galinda with a secretly good heart in the 2003 musical Wicked, by Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman, based loosely on Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel.

But there’s a lot more to Glinda than these adaptations reveal. In L. Frank Baum’s original novels about the land of Oz (1900–20), Glinda is among the most powerful magic users there. One of her strongest gifts is the ability to control the weather (as hinted at in the 1939 film, when she summons snow to counteract the sleep of the poppies sent by the Wicked Witch of the West). She’s a wise ruler in her own right—of the country in the South of Oz, not the North—and she is a protector of Princess Ozma, the rightful ruler over all the countries of Oz. There are multiple allusions to her great age, though she consistently appears young. The red hair is there, but she’s usually described as wearing white, and she owns a workshop full of fascinating objects. (In fact, she’s a bit of a scientist!) One of those objects is the Great Book of Records that allows her to know everything that happens in Oz. While she is consistently called “good,” she is not averse to using her skills to threaten, coerce, and wage war when necessary. She even commands an army of all female soldiers.

Still, a witch that is, overall, shown to be an exceptionally good and kind character in a story was pretty revolutionary for the time that Baum was writing. Most of this characterization was due to the fact that the author modeled Glinda on his mother-in-law, Matilda Joslyn Gage. Gage, a suffragist and abolitionist, was—by all accounts—a formidable and impressive woman. She famously argued that the women called witches and burned at the stake were much more likely to have been doctors and scientists who threatened the status quo of men’s exclusivity in such positions. She believed that these women were branded as evil to prevent them from taking power away from men. The good witch was Baum’s tribute to her as a scientist and a sorceress.

And let’s not overlook the fact that setting Glinda up as a beautiful, kind, incredibly powerful witch probably scored Baum major points with his mother-in-law in reality!

In the books, it’s Glinda who most often saves the day. She is powerful, independent, and kind without being easy to take advantage of. She knows her own mind and makes her own choices. She is ruthless when she must be, though always in service of what she has determined to be the greater good. Her many years of rulership have meant that she has often pulled strings behind the scenes and shaped the world of Oz more than most know.

In 1852, Matilda Joslyn Gage gave a speech at the National Woman’s Rights Convention in which she argued passionately for the rights of women. She concluded with these words:

Work sows the seed:
Even the rock may yield its flower:
No lot so hard, but human power,
Exerted to one end and aim,
May conquer fate, and capture fame!
Press on!
Pause not in fear:
Preach no desponding, servile view—
What ever thou will’st thy will may do.
Work on, and win!
Shall light from nature’s depth arise,
And thou, whose mind can grasp the skies,
Sit down with fate, and idly rail!
No—onward! Let the Truth prevail!

Words for witches to live by, right?

by Sara Cleto and Brittany Warman

Feature Image:
Detail from Sirin and Alkonost: The Birds of Joy and Sorrow (1896), by Viktor Vasnetsov

“First to the Sirens ye shall come, that taint
The minds of all men whom they can acquaint
With their attractions.
Whosoever shall,
For want of knowledge mov’d, but hear the call
Of any Siren, he will so despise
Both wife and children, for their sorceries,
That never home turns his affection’s stream,
Nor they take joy in him, nor he in them.
The Sirens will so soften with their song
(Shrill, and in sensual appetite so strong)”
—Homer, The Odyssey, translated by George Chapman

We’ve all heard of sirens, but their song remains elusive. Are they birds? Women? Murderers? Musicians?

It depends on who is telling the story.

Sirens are always a mix of the human and the avian, but that mixture is delightfully unstable. In Greek art, they have been painted and sculpted as birds capped with oversize women’s heads, with prominent feathers and scaly feet. But they have also been drawn with bird legs and beaks, with wings and without. They’ve been little birds with female faces, or sparrows from the chest up and human below. Sometimes, they have fish tails rather than legs at all. In art, they’re often shown carrying harps, lyres, and other instruments to accompany their strikingly beautiful voices.

Even more fantastically, sometimes they’re depicted as part bird, part man, though such representations have been scarce for many hundreds of years!

Greek mythology tells us of the danger that sirens pose, painting them as monsters who lived to lure men to their deaths. Harnessing the enchantment of their own voices and the magic of their instruments, they’d play music so sublime and irresistible that sailors would shipwreck their vessels just to be closer to the sound.

In Homer’s epic The Odyssey, the hero Odysseus hears tales of the sirens and determines to hear their notorious and deadly song for himself. He plugs his sailors’ ears with beeswax but ties himself to the mast of his ship so that he may hear them without jumping to his death in the sea. Having ordered his men not to untie him no matter what he says, Odysseus becomes the only known man to survive the experience of a siren’s song. Some later stories speculate that the sirens are so distraught over their failure that they seek their own deaths beneath the waves.

According to Ovid, the sirens were once the companions of Persephone, goddess of spring and the underworld. After she is kidnapped by Hades, the god of the underworld, the sirens beg for wings so that they can search the world for their lost friend. Perhaps their song, then, is a song of grief and a punishment for all men because of the cruel actions of one god.

Through the fish tails that some sirens wear, these mythical creatures are also connected to mermaids, fellow temptresses of the sea. One need only look to Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” to note the similar emphasis on the voice that both figures share.

The enigmatic, enchanting siren has served as inspiration for countless stories, songs, novels, poems, and other works of art. Indeed, some view them as being related to the Muses themselves. They are, after all, profoundly connected to music. From John William Waterhouse’s eerie painting The Siren to the Starbucks logo to Disney’s The Little Mermaid, sirens and their kin saturate our culture, reminding us what it is to sing, to listen, and to yearn.

Photography by THE WITCHING HOUR PHOTOGRAPHY

Model: Tatiana Pimentel
Jewelry: Parrish Relics
Set and styling: Jen Parrish-Hill
Wardrobe: Lisa Gill

An enchanted castle, bursting with roses and secrets. A princess, a youngest son, a clever girl living by her wits.

A king, a queen, and wishes.

We know a fairy tale when we see one. We feel it in our bones. This is a fairy tale, a story drenched in wonder, magic, and possibility.

But pinning down what exactly a fairy tale is, how to define it and understand what it does—that’s an altogether trickier proposition!

Our English term fairy tale is a gift from the daring French authoresses of the 17th century who wrote contes de fées, or “stories of the fairies” … even though most fairy tales don’t feature fairies at all! Folklorists might use the German term märchen, or “wonder tales,” instead.

We find our way into fairy tales using many different paths. The simplest path is to consider what fairy tales are made of: the standard plots, characters, and themes that we see repeated again and again. Folklorist Stith Thompson says that fairy tales take place in “an unreal world … filled with the marvelous. In this never-never land, humble heroes kill adversaries, succeed to kingdoms, and marry princesses.” Often, fairy-tale characters are very poor or very wealthy, very good or very bad, full of extremes and exaggeration. These tales are full of quests, searches, and problems to be solved, all against the backdrop of magic and enchantment. But even though they sparkle, they’re not always light or frothy. Many of our most beloved fairy tales involve challenging topics like difficult marriages, murder attempts, starvation, and neglect, revealing that these stories were once considered very much the province of adults—not tales suitable only for children, as too many people tend to think today!

Another, more rugged path considers what fairy tales do. Fairy-tale scholars Jennifer Schacker and Christine Jones write that “the idea of the fairy tale might be better understood as an open-ended, playful way of engaging social and political issues in a form that defies the constraints of realist fiction rather than as a fixed discursive form that corresponds to a set of narrative rules.” In other words, fairy tales are supernatural or magical stories that are told in order to comment on the real world that we live in—they’re a way to challenge how things are through the mirror of metaphor and magic. This isn’t always through a tidy moral printed at the end—in fact, fairy tales frequently don’t have those—but instead through broader themes, the cunning use of humor, or a playful turn of phrase.

Perhaps the twistiest, most challenging path, knobbly with tree roots and fading into fallen leaves, is to return to where we began, with how fairy tales make us feel. Word-magician J.R.R. Tolkien once wrote that a fairy tale “touches on or uses Faerie, whatever its own main purpose may be: satire, adventure, morality, fantasy. Faerie itself may perhaps most nearly be translated by Magic—but it is magic of a peculiar mood and power.” For Tolkien, a fairy tale is atmosphere, sensation, the spell it casts on the reader.

But why, in our world of smartphones and Netflix and Frappuccinos, do these short, simple stories of the unreal still matter? Why do we still feel their pull, the magnetic force that makes us turn back to them again and again? Why do so many television shows, movies, books, and even advertisements still depend on their structures, their characters, their ideas?

It’s because a fairy tale is a spark, a challenge, a lesson, a spell. It’s how you feel when you think, Oh, if only this story were true, followed by a kind of knowing: It is true. As Neil Gaiman stated when he paraphrased G.K. Chesterton, these stories are “more than true—not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.” They tell us that there is more to the world than what we can know rationally, that there is a kind of magic everywhere, if we choose to see it. They tell us that the powerless can sometimes overcome the powerful, that kindness helps, and that you should always be careful what you wish for. They give us a structure for understanding the world through stories.

So, this evening, when the world is quiet and the stars wink through your windows, take down your favorite book of tales and read one. Read two. Feel their “peculiar mood and power.” Soak up their spells.