Freya Waley-Cohen's women and witches

This article was originally published in our Summer 2022 issue. Click here to subscribe to our quarterly print magazine and be the first to read our January 2025 issue features.

There's a story in Jewish folklore about Lilith, the very first woman. Created from the same clay as Adam, she refuses to be subservient to him. and chooses to leave the garden of Eden. God offers her the choice to return and submit to Adam or be banished and become a demon. She chooses the latter. Mythologised in countless stories, she steals children from their beds, has love affairs with archangels and demons, and generally haunts the night. In each version, Lilith is an example to little girls of how not to be.

Myths and fairytales are some of the first narratives we are given as children. They become a lens through which we understand society and the archetypes available to us, and are constantly rewritten, changing with the ideas that shape society. Even so, the most common female figures in fairytales tend to give us two options for female identity: be helpless and loved, or powerful but feared. Such is the story of Lilith.

Rebecca Tamás's spell for Lilith is one of 21 spell-poems in her poetry collection WITCH, and it became the first song in my dramatic song-cycle Spell Book. Tamás reimagines the world through the eyes of a witch, full of desire and power. She doesn't think about the same things that other people are thinking about, she exists outside of the framework of good and bad. After first reading WITCH I started to dream witchy dreams, her spells and stories expanded the ways in which I understood the world around me, and I knew that I needed to turn her spell- poems into spell-songs.

Spell Book was first staged at Longborough Festival Opera in summer 2022 as part of a double bill with Francesca Caccini's La liberation di Ruggiero ©César Vásquez Altamirano

My upbringing prepared me for Tamás's view of the world through a witch's eyes. My mother's early ancestors in the US landed in Salem and when the famous witch trials came along, they got tangled up in the mania and mess. I had ancestors on both sides of the chaos, one taking the stand as a witness, while others were accused as witches. Growing up, I remember hearing about an ancestor who was killed as a witch. I was the sort of child who lived as much in my own imagination as outside of it and I recall trying to imagine how it would have felt to be accused of being a witch, and what sort of person might that ancestor have been. I pictured her as someone brave, unafraid to stand out, even when it put her in danger. As I have read more about witches in history different, although not unrelated, to witches in folklore – I think it would be fair to say that a witch was someone who stood outside of the accepted norms of society, someone who rejected or didn't fit the role they were given.

Using the word 'witch' to describe someone was, historically, a way of taking power (and often their life) away from them. Deciding to embody the figure of the witch and look through her eyes is an act of defiance in itself. Tamás first stumbled upon the subject for her poetry collection at an exhibition called 'Witches and Wicked Bodies’. Although many of the depictions were deeply misogynistic, she found being in a room full of paintings of powerful women doing what they liked without considering the repercussions to be a thrilling experience. It was this that drew Tamás to write from the witch's perspective. Spell Book was first staged at Longborough Festival Opera in summer 2022 as part of a double bill with Francesca Caccini's La liberation di Ruggiero. Considered to be the first opera written by a woman, the two heroines of Caccini's opera are powerful witches.

Waley-Cohen's ancestry contributed to her preoccupation with the topic of witches: 'My mother's early ancestors in the US landed in Salem and when the famous witch trials came along, they got tangled up in the mania and mess.' ©William Marsey

I can't pretend to know Caccini's motivations for writing about witches, but for me, I know that on top of the attraction of writing powerful women, I'm drawn to the space between what we logically know and what we feel and believe. Tamás writes that 'poetry, like the occult, embraces the necessary irrationality that exists squashed up against rationality in the material world. It does not "reject" the rational, but it does extract what else is there, the elements that don't fit.' This space between rationality and the 'other', is where we place the occult magic of witches, but it's also where poetry and music live. Spell Book exists in this place entirely, as spells are the meeting point between magic, poetry and music. Nowhere is this idea faced more combatively than in spell for logic.

While poetry, music and magic present knowledge that sits outside of the mundane logic of everyday life, spell for logic teases us with the smallness and un-humanness of restrictive logic. In spell for logic, a set of instructions are directed at the listener, making it especially playful to set to music. It's not a straightforward spell: full of wry humour, it plays with the contradiction of imposing logic on the illogical mess and beauty of human lives. Instructions like 'you should menstruate exactly when the packet tells you too' are comically close to the sort of directions given on medical packaging, and yet the logical-sounding words are totally inhuman. Contrasted with these instructions are summons for a different kind of logic, a logic tied to earthly rhythms and celestial bodies.

Writing music for spells gave me space to be playful and strange, to create moments of ritual in my music, and to play with different shapes and forms. In spell for Lilith, I identified a moment in the structure of the poem which I saw as the exact moment of summoning in the spell. The moment when the spell-caster addresses Lilith to ask for what they want:

'the things you have seen

a whole universe of your own making

entirely pleasure

Lilith

take us back with you'

These few lines open up a universe in which Lilith's world is still out there, an alternative world with an alternative set of rules. A world founded by a woman who rejected binary gender roles, who refused patriarchal power dynamics – what would it be like? Might the invisible rules that force us into narrow archetypes in society be lifted, or totally different? And what would our relationship to the earth be like? My music leads up to these words with an off-kilter ritual that takes over the ensemble, spilling over the meter in a way that shifts out of sync under the vocal line, and building to the first real tutti moment. After this, nothing in the music can be the same. The final lines of the spell-song exist in a sustained and glowing music-space, with interjections that represent little bursts of hope and joy from the piano.

© César Vásquez Altamirano

The magic in Spell Book is earthy and visceral, coming from the human connection to the earth, the moon and stars, and our own bodies. It is a way of looking at the world and our way of being in it from a different slant. We humans are creatures who understand our lives through narratives, so it matters which stories are put on stage. Hearing a story or a set of words put together in a new way can open up new ways of understanding ourselves and the world around us. The stories we tell about women, in opera but also in most narrative forms, have tended to reinforce the paradigm of the lovable helpless woman versus the evil powerful one. It's time to reinvent these paradigms. In the introduction to Spells: 21st-century occult poetry, the book she edited alongside Sarah Shin and Tamás, So Mayer writes that 'what a spell creates, as you speak it, is you: a sense of your power to create'. Creating music on stage is a type of spell-casting, a kind that changes the space and the listeners contained in that space for the moments they are there together. Occasionally, some of that change stays with the listener after they've left the performance space and gone out into the world.

Freya Waley-Cohen's debut album Spell Book will be released on NMC Recordings on 25 October.