Girls Against God

same time so near that you can stretch out your hand and pluck some wilted grass for your witch’s cauldron from the exit to Grimstad on the E18 highway. Magic is far away, because it’s a place where God can’t see you, I think; that’s how we can find each other there. We leap out of the sinful, lonely subjective and into something that’s somewhere else. In that place I’m no longer subjective, but subversive. In that place I can write. I can write because language is allowed to transcend and transform. It’s the film’s place, and it’s the band’s place.
Strictly speaking, band is probably not the most accurate classification language has for us, but witches. In the old days some called us beldams – belles dames. That probably carried a more positive charge and could’ve made a cutesier band name, but we honestly think that’s too much about appearances and not enough about magic. Witch is the more commonly used term anyway. Definition: ‘Witch represents that which defies God.’ Definition: ‘Witch represents the ideological being that symbolises everything capitalism has had to destroy.’ All in all, we’re pretty pleased. Witches were the first band, but no one calls us a band, because a band is a transgressive community. A community like that can’t take the blame for anything, and blame is what we’re supposed to take.
Traditionally the world has been seen as a series of binaries: inside and outside, living and dead, man and woman, fact and fiction, science and witchcraft … (We know all this, Venke, Terese and I, and you probably know it, too; it’s obvious, it’s ‘reality’.) Power, too, needs an antithesis, an ‘it’ or a ‘her’ that can be a container for everything that has threatened it. The witch is that container; she’s the one who threatened the church, God, Christianity’s domination, the establishment, emperors, kings, barons, Freemasons, medical science, philosophy, logic, brute strength. The deciding characteristic of a witch is: she hates God.
I move on from looking at ’90s Darkthrone to poring over old books on witchcraft, studying the language used to describe the witch, her transformation, her art and her crimes. A lot of effort has been put into these definitions. Since the witch is the symbolic antithesis of power, her existence has to be constantly accounted for, and the threat she poses justified. The witch hunts of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries mostly targeted women, and as a result a lot has been written about why women more often become witches. The witch is most often referred to as she and her. The old scriptures claim that witchcraft has to be more accessible to women. Some describe the witch as dormant in all women, intrinsic to woman’s nature. Others, later, claim that only certain kinds of women perform those devilish rituals. The real rituals are where the transformation happens, where witches swear that they really do hate God, with both soul and body, and in the presence of Lucifer and other witches. Witch-begat.
I read that the laws concerning witches and witchcraft were usually interpreted by secular courts of law, not the Church. Maybe that’s why it seems as if most of the people burnt at the stake during the witch trials were those who had challenged the establishment in some way. Political rebels, disobedient wives, shamans, midwives, unmarried lovers, agitators, Sámi people, and other people who threatened the position and prerogatives of church or kingdom, were singled out, persecuted, prosecuted and convicted as sorcerers.
What’s supposed to perish when these women are convicted and burnt at the stake? What is it that must go up in smoke? It usually boils down to two words: communal resistance. The fire is symbolic as well as real, meant to inspire social as well as bodily fear, to weaken any lingering resistance in the remaining population. The witch trials are in many cases associated with the establishment’s own fears of revolts by the common people and the strengthening of collective movements. They take place at the time of the emergence of capitalism, a period when ideologies had to be shared and developed without provoking any particular resistance in order to be established. The new theories of society include not only religion and the nation state, but also value production, exploitation of workers, and definitions of paid and unpaid labour.
Women’s work becomes a crucial problem within capitalism because reproduction is seen as nonwork. Reproduction as mystery isn’t new, but in capitalist rhetoric the mystery surrounding reproduction is redefined in economic terms, so that childbearing becomes not necessary but personal, a private rather than public concern, something that ‘belongs behind closed doors’, not labour performed but a ‘natural resource’ (making women generally ‘natural resources,’ too). These ideas and distinctions are pretty much the pillars of capitalism, of a capitalism that aims to become itself a mysterious, natural and uncontrollable force (that is, God). This is how definitions are created that decide what constitutes paying work, and what isn’t actually work and therefore cannot be paid: all based on ancient cultural and religious prejudices that profit the powerful. In one stroke, a hierarchy is also created that determines which people can be paid or should be paid the most. At the same time, linguistic hierarchies develop between clearly defined tasks and tasks that are less quantifiable, more social, less valuable, in all kinds of labour. Work produced in bonds isn’t work. Not even in art. The band isn’t work, either.
Reproduction, this work that isn’t work and that can’t be paid, is oddly tangled up in theories about witches. During the witch trials it was constantly pointed out that witches aren’t fertile and that childlessness itself could be proof of witchcraft. Fertility (the ability to be impregnated and reproduce, not the ability to produce, or create), itself the proof of womanhood, is what the witch sacrifices in the pact she enters into with the devil.
Instead of bearing children, witches are said to devour them, or sacrifice them to the devil,