If spoilers aren’t your thing and you haven’t watched the third season of Netflix’s Sabrina, don’t read this.
In Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, there are plenty of references to excite readers of occult literature, mythology and folklorists. Many of the names derive from the history of the Victorian occult revival, literary figures, and old grimoires. The name Stolas, Lilith’s crow, for instance, is straight from The Lesser Key of Solomon, while Blackwood has inherited the name of occultist Algernon Blackwood. Tarot is explored as a means of getting closer to what lies in our unconscious mind, while astral projection and necromancy are also used as plot devices. In season three, Blackwood goes to Loch Ness, once the home of Aleister Crowley, who is often mentioned in passing. Hell is informed by Dante’s descriptions of it in his Divine Comedy.
But this show goes beyond namedropping, and season three, more than the two preceding it, reveals the writers’ knowledge of the Western Occult.
‘We are not devil worshippers,’ said many who identify as witches when the first season of Netflix’s The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina first aired.
By season 3 we learn the writers draw from an ongoing discussion in occult circles about the ‘authenticity’ of practices and lineage, and the shape-shifting nature of the witch archetype.
What exactly is a witch? In the time of the witch trials, witches were thought to convene with the devil, sometimes with the assistance of familiar spirits—supernatural entities, often under the guise of a household pet (like Salem). The infamous Malleus Maleficarum, published in the late 15th century, endorsed the elimination of witches, followed by James I’s Daemonologie in the 16th century which helped create the witchcraft reform that ‘discovered’ witches and condemned them to die. The European witch trials entailed a mass scapegoating of women, and some men, blamed for crop failures, illness, adultery and other kinds of unexplainable misfortune. In some parts of the world today, including more conservative regions in the US, Christians still believe that witchcraft is connected to devil worship. It must be said that historically these accusations have no base in reality; the people condemned as witches were likely innocent of all charges.
For most of us, the idea that witches worship Satan is now laughable, and the show runner’s decision to frame the coven like this can’t have been made without irony. In the centre of the Academy of Unseen Arts is a statue dedicated to Baphomet, its image lifted from a real statue designed by the Satanic Church in the US, who, by the way, tried to sue the producers for its inclusion. In the documentary Hail Satan?, the same Satanic cult was introduced to the world. (Those who belong to the church emphasised they don’t believe in god, nor satan, but they come together with a common cause to promote religious plurality, to ensure all faiths are represented and that the state remains secular; they value community and miss the rituals associated with religion, but tend towards an anarchic stance on institutions, tend to be atheistic and among their tenets, emphasise that beliefs should conform to one's best scientific understanding of the world. Anyway, I digress.)
In season 3, we see Sabrina’s Satanic witch coven turn their backs on Satan and turn instead to Lilith. Soon they seek answers even further back in history, finding a new source of power in the worship of the Greek goddess of sorcery, Hekate. The worship of and resonance with Hekate and Lilith bring to mind another modern form of witchcraft: the feminist resurgence of witchcraft as something political—a means for female emancipation and solidarity with the marginalised or othered.
The coven, with its new cosmology, invoke Hekate’s three forms—the mother, maiden and crone. This triple goddess is not of classical origin, but a modern and creative interpretation of the past; Robert Graves helped popularise this idea in his book The White Goddess.
With creative license, again Sabrina hearkens back to the history of the Western occult in Britain. In 1951, the witchcraft act in Britain was abolished and Gerald Gardner introduced the world to Britain’s first ‘homegrown religion’: Wicca. He, like others before him, including Margaret Murray, imagined an uninterrupted witchcraft tradition that had nothing in common with Satan worship, as accusers of Witchcraft believed. The idea was that this tradition preserved the practices and beliefs of pre-Christian pagans. People who held onto these beliefs were condemned, Murray asserted, as heathenry was considered at odds with the Christian worldview. These witches believed in the old gods or an all-encompassing mother goddess figure. Or perhaps not.
In his Triumph of the Moon, historian Ronald Hutton shows that witchcraft and Neo-Paganism don’t have an uninterrupted lineage with the past, but borrow from the past and grow through creative invention. He also debunks the myth of the mother goddess, instead revealing those we remember as ‘the Pagans’ had a more polytheistic cosmology, and likely worshipped several deities. Despite these conclusions, Hutton remains sympathetic toward Neo-Pagan religions, emphasising the creative imagination of these new religions and their ability to inspire people and to be progressive. With what little archaeological evidence there is from a time when written documentation is scarce, we have a framework with which to create something new. He proposes a form of creative world-building where we can borrow, invent and constantly review.
The Netflix series also proposes this non-dogmatic, adaptive approach to magic and the occult. There are so many different ways of looking at the world and navigating it, of bettering it, of inspiring creativity or wonder; all somehow valid, but all susceptible to being corrupted by hierarchies or the power-hungry.
In Sabrina, we see false prophets and gatekeepers of “the hidden knowledge.” Many make false claims and are not really in communion with Satan, or any other powerful force or being, for that matter. The culture of magical orders who work on the basis on concealing and revealing knowledge is put into question.
Today many people identify as witches, Neo-Pagans, or druids, but these archetypes and labels are constantly evolving and shapeshifting. Disillusioned by the lack of historical accuracy in the Wiccan story, some practitioners neglected Gardnerian Wicca. Still inspired by the archetype, some created a new witchcraft, or witchcrafts, based on cunning craft, or looked to classical deities like Circe and Hekate. Some go even further into the past, in pursuit of the ever-elusive truth, looking at our earliest written texts in Babylonia.
Sabrina represents many different types of practice and identity. The work of cunning-folk is alluded to with Ros, who goes blind but gains a new type of vision—the cunning. Cunning-folk initially sought magic through the medium of fairies, and in the earlier modern period this moved to books; they were, for the most part, Christian and generally accepted as integral members in their communities, though some were also sentenced to death as witches.
Meanwhile, in the Netflix show, a new enemy appears in season 3. To the frustration of some viewers, I’m sure: the Pagans. Among their ranks: the nature god Pan, the Greek witch Circe, who in The Odyssey turns men into pigs, and Medusa, whose eye contact will turn you to stone. This might infuriate some peace-loving Neo-Pagans, but it’s a reminder that nature was viewed as something terrifying in ancient times. Whether true or political propaganda, Tacitus wrote that druids in Britain were involved in blood sacrifice. This is not the practice of Neo-Pagans today, but a reminder that re-connecting with nature also means coming to terms with the more terrifying part of nature—of our own natures too—and of finding ourself face-to-face with the wildness and uncertainty of Pan, in the dark woods, which over the centuries we have tried to eliminate too. (And come on, it’s a bit funny, the idea of a Satanic witch coven being persecuted by nature-loving Pagans.)
In Sabrina, we also meet the hedge witches, who derive their magic from someplace other than the Pagan gods or Satan. They are solitary, with their own gifts; some draw from an eclectic mix of traditions. Marginalised even by other witches, when they are called to join forces with those who have forsaken them, they unite for a common cause.
We are also reminded that our way isn’t the only way, that there are other traditions which do things differently from which we have a lot to learn. Mambo Marie introduces the Greendale coven to Hoodoo, the folk magic tradition often mistaken for the religion voodoo. Both were born in a culture of oppression, in Haiti, and are the result of a syncretic fusion between Catholicism and beliefs from the Congo.
Neo-Pagans and occultists might spend a lot of the time arguing, like other religions, about which way is right. In this binge-worthy series, we are reminded there are many paths in the forest, many of which lead to the same place. By choosing creativity over dogma, maybe we’ll get closer to some penultimate truth that transcends dualities and the limitations inherent to words; because as Mambo Marie says, the mèt-téts are another word for guardian angels, limbo is just our name for a place that exists in every religion and spiritual practice.
Showrunner Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa has said season 4 will be a ‘demonic’ version of ‘The Crown’ with an ‘HP Lovecraft vibe’. As we spiral further back through history we enter the speculative area of prehistory, where only imagination can fill in the gaps. Already we have seen Lovecraftian themes introduced via the Eldrich Horrors. Will the strange egg Blackwood lifted from Loch Ness contain Cthulhu? What’s clear is that for all our differences, Pagans, Wiccans, Thelemites, Hedgewitches, those who practise Hoodoo, Christians, sceptics, muggles, etcetera: we all need to forget (or better, embrace), our differences, learn from one another, and unite for a bigger battle, soon to come.