A Wiccan Responds to True Blood Season Four

I feel that I have a foot in both camps. Having only recently discovered True Blood, as its sixth season is about to air, I've spent a fortnight avidly getting up to speed. Episode after episode, season after season, I've watched the storyline reach this point quite naturally.

Then there they were. Wiccans. I didn't see that one coming. I approached it as a fan, with no warning at all that my religion was about to take center-stage in a major story arc. I saw it play out. I watched season four to the very end, before making any snap judgements.

I am a Wiccan High Priestess. I swore my first oath before the God and Goddess over twenty years ago. I've initiated others in my turn. Nor am I prone to kick-jerk reactions. I wouldn't deserve the triangle over my pentacle if I was; and Janet Farrar certainly wouldn't have confirmed that it was there.

I've stood in the midst of burgeoning 'witch wars' myself, and I've always done my best to bring things back down to Earth. I hope to do the same now. Though admittedly none of those were quite so dramatic as what happened in True Blood season four.

In the back of the Moon Goddess Emporium, in Shreveport, Louisiana, a Wiccan coven meets, apparently every night.

The High Priestess is a rather weak and fluffy woman named Marnie. There appears to be no High Priest at all. The coven itself appears fairly representative. It's not all stick thin teenage girls in Gothic make-up. It could perhaps do with a few more men, but otherwise realistic.

We join them as a member wishes to introduce his boyfriend. He brings his cousin, who is allowed to just sit in the room, reading a magazine, about a foot away from the edge of the circle. Interesting in terms of how that would work energy-wise, but still within the realms of possibility. If you have a rather weak and fluffy High Priestess.

The coven all sit cross-legged on the floor. Candles are lit in pots in front of each member. They all hold hands and chant. Marnie is upset that her pet budgerigar has died. Its corpse is on a block in the center of the circle. As the Wiccan coven continues its chant, the lifeless bird suddenly twitches and flies out of the circle. It immediately crashes back to the ground. Though briefly reanimated, it's now dead again.

The True Blood universe supposes that vampires are integrated with society. A human member of the coven is secretly a vampire spy. She reports this occurrence to the vampire king. Such necromancy is bad news for the Undead. It allows witches to control them. A vampiric sheriff is dispatched to basically intimidate the Wiccan coven into disbanding.

Marnie panics at his arrival. She's bitten by the vampire, but only as a warning. She sneaks away and starts cutting lines into her forearm, begging the Goddess for assistance. Suddenly Marnie's whole aspect changes. She begins chanting in Latin. Her eyes blaze, with flames reflected within them, and her hand rises. The vampire sheriff has his memories wiped clean away. He's kicked out onto the street not even knowing his own name.

As the episodes go on, Marnie demonstrates several such powerful spells. She's able to mind-control several vampires, while causing the flesh of another to start rotting. Marnie also gains the ability to protect the whole block around her New Age shop with a wall of pure sunlight. She uses a 'repelling spell' to clear the whole neighborhood of human beings, in order to initiate a witch war against vampires without witnesses.

The climax of her power comes at a tolerance festival. Marnie uses her mind-controlled vampires to attack and kill dozens of humans in attendance. She castigates them as 'vampire sympathizers'.

It eventually emerges that a 17th century witch named Antonia, who was burnt at the stake by the Spanish Inquisition, has possessed Marnie's body. It's her spells that are being unleashed upon the vampires. It's revenge. It transpires that the Inquisition was infested with vampires.

By now, her own coven is questioning Marnie's violence. In response, Marnie magically shields the shop, so that any Wiccan wishing to leave is burned. When they all try to charge her, she uses her telekinetic powers to pin them to the wall. A young Wiccan woman named Casey attempts to flee. Marnie stabs her to death with an athame.

Unfortunately for the coven, it didn't end there. Jesús's boyfriend, Lafayette, is a natural medium. As the couple lay down to sleep that night, the ghost of Marnie returned to possess him. She began her murderous campaign all over again using his body. 

It started with stabbing Jesús to death, licking his blood from the knife so to imbibe his powerful brujo magic. Practically unstoppable now, she captured two vampires and tied them with silver (these creatures are vulnerable to silver in this show) to a stake. Not the usual stake for vampires, the one for witches, as in burned at the...

So rapt in her own power, Lafayette-possessed-by-Marnie didn't notice a single Wiccan lady encircling the whole scene in salt. Without actually doing anything else, this created an energized Wiccan circle. It was Samhain (pronounced Sammer-ha-en in True Blood). The Wiccan Holly called upon her ancestors, who all came through the veil.

The ghosts dragged Marnie from Lafayette's body and took her through the veil. End of the witch wars.

One of the biggest complaints by the Wiccan community is that True Blood portrayed us as murderous manipulators. It's a fair enough concern.

The most cursory examination of the history of witches will quickly show how dangerous such charges can be. The Burning Times looms quite large there. Hundreds of thousands of suspected witches were tortured and killed. In the modern day, people have lost their jobs, had their children taken into care and suffered other social exclusion due to being 'outed' as witches.

However, did True Blood actually depict us like that? I watched a Wiccan coven do its best to stop an out of control, possessed High Priestess. One of them was killed in the process. At the finale, it was a savvy Wiccan who harnessed the Sabbat, at Samhain, to call for reinforcements. She saved the day.

The real message, as far as I interpret it, is much more subtle. It said that Wicca is so ineffectual, that it doesn't stand a chance against the real thing. That being, in this instance, the kind of magic that got you burned at the stake in 17th century Spain, or is happening right now in Mexico. If anything, it's not anti-Wicca, it's anti-Latino.

It also implied that those targeted by the Spanish Inquisition really were powerful witches, capable of mind manipulation, murder etc. That's an unsettling suggestion for an historian, but even that was qualified. The witch Antonia was a gentle woman, who healed people and delivered babies. What upset her was rape, torture and being fed upon by vampire priests. It was being burned at the stake which really turned her magic bad.

Let's also look really long and hard at the effective magic in True Blood. Give or take Christian Witchcraft circles, where have you ever seen Wiccans crossing themselves? Every strong spell invoked a Christian saint, angel, God or the Holy Spirit. This was not Wicca. It was witchcraft with Christianity at its root.

Was Wicca maligned?  No. It was dismissed. It had no power. The message of True Blood season four was this: beware any Christian spell delivered by Spaniards or Mexicans. Now that is truly dangerous.

I'm not talking about in the show, I'm referring to those of us watching it. When I read blogs and forum posts ranting about how True Blood shouldn't pick on a religion, I scrolled back a bit. I was looking for the same kind of rhetoric during season two.

Back then, it was Christianity under the spotlight. This brand of fundamentalism owed more to Westboro Baptist Church, than the nice people in the church down the road. Except they were preparing for actual genocide.

There is more than a hint of hypocrisy about us all screaming discrimination now, when we watched season two in silence.

In retrospect, my feeling is that True Blood didn't accurately depict the Wiccan religion, but nor did it purport to do so. 

If viewers believed that they were seeing real witchcraft here, then they'd also have to believe that shape-shifters run bars, werewolves are building our houses, vampires are running around unseen and the local drug dealers can all turn into panthers.

This is a fantastic world. Its story-lines are overblown entertainment. It's not meant to be realistic. My feeling is that some things can be taken too seriously.  The True Blood Wiccan furor is one of those times.