The obvious, technical reason for all this was skirted by Prachett, but never addressed directly: a "witch" is, by the oldest definition, a woman who is "in communion with" or "consorting with" (sleeping with) a devil or demon, and that is wherefrom she takes any power she may possess. A wizard has no such requirement--his magic is actually of an internal nature.
To put it another way: all magic--all power, really--actually comes from men, and more specifically, from their "wands" (ahem.) A woman doing magic is just serving as an avatar or proxy for her boyfriend's "will." Further, because she is committing a carnal sin by not being married to this creature (by definition: you need a priest, and no priest will marry you to a devil), she starts off on the "evil" side of the line, even if she wants nothing to do with it.
Then there's the whole matter that she's "draining his willpower for her own purposes"--mythology tends to discretize single creatures into multiple over time, so "witch" and "succubus" were likely the same idea. Even if she was sleeping with a perfectly good Wiz, she'd still be a vile temptress.
That all seems more in line with medieval European folklore to me.
(Of course, the question of what happens when someone marries a wizard is left unanswered; it's usually assumed that wizards are too ingrained in their world of rites and formulae to go a-courting, but what if a girl were to just love them anyway--like I'm sure the wives of many mathematicians today do? Would she gain "legal" access to his magical energies, or is there some sort of biblical clause against that? In fact, would the wizard be allowed to marry at all? Would a priest condemn Merlin in his time, even in his role as the king's advisor?)
It seems to me that the character of the wizard borrows a bit from the clergy. If you sit through a Catholic or Episcopalian mass, with its incense, music, communion, and ritual incantations, it certainly has the feeling of a magical rite. Also, believers do think that these rites have the ability to effect the world in extraordinary ways outside the normal rules of cause and effect (heal the sick, cast out demons, etc.); so the rites could be said to be magical.
The fact that priests do not marry also adds to the case.
Little known fact: some Catholic priests are permitted to marry.
Theology, like programming, has edge cases. Here's an example: you're an Anglican. Anglicans have apostolic succession -- i.e. if you're a priest, you were admitted by a bishop, who was in turn once a priest admitted by a bishop, who was in turn ... by St. Peter who was chosen to lead the Church by Christ Himself. Despite the fact that Anglicans are not Catholics, and do things differently (such as permitting priests to marry), under Catholic theology their claim to holy orders is good if a little misguided.
But what if one who is married converts to Catholicism? They're still a priest until they forsake it. Their marriage was licit when they entered into it. We're famously touchy about dissolving marriages -- either it was illicit when it was entered into (perhaps due to reasons that were not discovered yet) and thus requiring an annulment, or its good and binding until death.
Which means married Anglican priests who convert to Catholicism (slightly more complicated -- you need the bishop to sign off on it) are now married Catholic priests.
Actually, Anglicans don't have apostolic succession; all Anglican ordinations were declared null and void in the late 1800's by the Pope at the time. (They did examine the case very carefully--note that there are plenty of non-uniate Christians who have succession.)
> Which means married Anglican priests who convert to Catholicism (slightly more complicated -- you need the bishop to sign off on it) are now married Catholic priests.
If you are correct, then by the same trick a woman can become a Catholic priests, but I don't think the rules of theology are quite as literal as that. While I don't doubt that such a person is married, and Catholic, and a priest, I doubt that he would be considered a Catholic priest. Either that, or God itself is trapped in a logical paradox and the universe explodes.
>>
I doubt that he would be considered a Catholic priest
>>
For the first time in my life I get to say "What do you want, signed authorization from the Pope?" and it is actually responsive!
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith published in July 1980:
*[T]he Holy See has specified that this exception to the rule of celibacy is granted in favor of these individual persons, and should not be understood as implying any change in the Church's conviction of the value of priestly celibacy, which will remain the rule for future candidates for the priesthood from [persons converting from Anglicanism to Catholicism]."
Oh, Gandalf definately wasn't human - even the LotR itself was surprisingly clear on this point, considering how much magic was presented obscurely in the book.
On the otherhand, I would have thought that LotR was the perfect refutation of Pratchett's thesis - I mean Galadriel was one of the bad-asses on the White Council, with ambition to boot! She was one of the holders of the three elven rings, marking her a peer of Gandalf's, and it was she that was tempted by the One Ring's power.
And then, in that other grand fantasy series, The Belgariad, there was of course Polgara, another strong female magic-using character, even though she ended up playing second fiddle to her father any time some direct application of power was required.
Overall, I can't help feeling that the speech was in response to Pratchett's own innate tendancy against female magic-users, as a close examination of most of the major series shows that many, if not most, had strong female magic-using characters, both good and evil. At least Pratchett was able to see that he had a bias, and apparently fought against it to create Granny Weatherwax - full marks to the man :-)
Its tempting to counter with something snarky like a good "whoosh!", but maybe a better response would be to remember that human beings write science fiction and fantasy.
It's interesting to see how Pratchett thought about this over two decades ago, given that I have read most of his Discworld books. There is a sharp contrast between witches and wizards in his work. While in many ways his witches do the "dirty work" and the wizards sit in the university, the way it's presented is such that the witches are about helping people and getting things done, whereas the wizards are a bunch of doddering old windbags in slippers who don't really do anything at all...and when they do, they usually screw something up pretty badly.
Granny Weatherwax (a witch) is easily one of Pratchett's best characters. (She shows up in Equal Rites, and then again in Wyrd Sisters, which is a sort of retelling of Macbeth...and in several books since.)
"Let's talk about wizards and witches. There is a tendency to talk of them in one breath, as though they were simply different sexual labels for the same job."
This is one of the many reasons that Harry Potter is so subversive. Witches and Wizards are just words for the same thing in different genders, and it's ingrained in every kid's head.
As long as they don't start burning wizards on the stake...
I think it'll be interesting to observe how fantasy terminology evolves within the next 30 years, as leagues of Harry Potter readers start writing fantasy.
If you want real subversive fantasy, I recommend Andrzej Sapkowski's The Last Wish and the other of books from the saga. It has everything: The main character is a male witch (or witcher), the female wizards have formed a secret society to take over the world and nonhumans (elves,dwarfs) are subjected to human racism and bigotry.
If you are just looking for fantasy that equalizes male and female practitioners of magic Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series levels the playing field. In fact, it is seriously tilted towards women for the first part of the series.
in the first part yes.
unfortunatley in the second part all the men are just naturally more powerful and everytime a women is exposed to the male side of the onepower they freak out because oh it's so violent and hard to control, while the men have no problem dealing with the womens side.
not to mention that about half of the problems in the series are caused by women scheming and interferring because they're all thus so convinced that men are incompetent.
I remember being dumbfounded when I read an intervew with Jordan and the interviewer asked how he wrote such strong women.
... yeah if you assume strong women are all horrible humans sure I can see thinking he writes strong women.
You think they're horrible bc you see the world from rand/mat/perrin's eyes. If you were aes sedai & a bunch of ignorant kids with that much power popped up you'd do anything to control them. Brandon Sanderson said that as he gets older he finds himself thinking more like Moiraine. I feel the same way.
Well I mostly agree with Brandon, and frankly even as I was writing my post I felt that Nynaeve and Moraine were the best of the bunch, Nynaeve particularly.
But the arguement of "but they ARE reckless ignorant kids" only works for the first couple books. 8 books in women are still running around saying Rand/Mat/Perrin is a wool headed moron who will only make things worse if left to his own devices, despite each having shown their competence time and time and time again, while the women's meddling caused things to go pear shaped just as often.
Rand still does insanely stupid things. At the end of ACoS he runs off alone to kill Sammael & nearly dies half a dozen times before Moridin(!) intervenes. That retinue of Aes Sedai was probably the best thing to happen to him. He nearly died numerous times without them in APoD. He would have died at the end of winter's heart if he tried that alone with Nynaeve like he originally planned. He'd never have left Far Madding.
The other two also do stupid stuff (well, Mat more than Perrin), but it's easy enough to argue they shouldn't be running around loose either, not this close to the end. They have no real protection.
As I wrote a comment above, I was trying to rack through my mind to come up with examples of strongly written females from Jordan. I decided to ignore the forsaken and royalty (as perhaps Graendal, Morgase and Tuon might count) - and I managed to come up with Aludra and Tylee Khirgan.
While the concept was good - in almost no place where the gender disparity was shown - does Jordan portray the women in a good light. (Perhaps only the Village Council / Womens Circle comparisons)
University of the Island of Gont? FAIL. He is thinking of the school at Roke, not Gont. In Gont they herd goats, which is what Ged did as a kid. Boy, you sure can tell the old Pratchett beats the young Pratchett for domain knowledge.
Female wizard (not witch): Herald-Mage Savil. That book was 1989, though.
If you don't feel like reading The Colour of Magic & The Light Fantastic (the sequel that completes the story) then look for the DVD of The Colour of Magic (it originally ran as a double-bill made-for-tv movie, the first was CoM and the second part was LF).
There's also the Hogfather, a book released later in the Discworld universe, that got turned into a double TV movie. It is a much more faithful reproduction as they had more time, which in the case of the Hogfather was truly necessary.
Equal Rites, which came after that book, deals with this topic more directly. A seventh son has a seventh son...no wait, a daughter. She has raw magical power, and with some help gets to the wizard university. I'm not going to say any more; I don't want to spoil anything.
It is also worth noting that Equal Rites was published 1-2 years after this speech. Was Prachett trying to gauge the reaction to his satire by explicitly stating it?
I doubt he was thinking in those terms. More likely this was a concept that he'd already started to think of, and so the things he wrote about concerned things of that nature.
It's like how programmers designing registration systems become obsessed with talking about registration forms and CAPTCHAs. It's just where their minds dwell as they work.
I wonder how his same talk would be given today. In a post-Harry Potter, World of Warcraft world, the idea of a female wizard no longer raises eyebrows in the same way.
Way before Harry Potter, there was Polgara the Sorceress and her mother Poledra. While both of them could be said to have played second fiddle to the preeminent Belgarath, there was no doubt that their power was of the same nature as that of his. There was also Sephrenia and her goddess Aphrael, but then I guess David Eddings wasn't as popular as J.K. Rowling is.
One of J. K. Rowling's truly great accomplishments (that is, one of the things that if anything isn't praised enough) is that she takes a very liberal worldview and she portrays it in such a straightforward manner that very few people think to argue with the things she's talking about.
She describes a world where there's no difference between men and women. There are heroes and villains on both sides. Furthermore, women aren't made out to be fundamentally superior or inferior in terms of emotion versus ration. She makes the difference apparent - you get dumb guy moments and giggly girl moments - but at the same time, every character has dumb blind emotional moments, and moments where a clear head prevails.
She does similar things with racism and libertarianism. (That's not to say Rowling is ultralibertarian, but she expresses certain views - like the fallibility of government and the acknowledgement that people aren't created entirely equal - that promote the agenda, while simultaneously being mature enough to acknowledge that government isn't inherently bad and that people are defined by more than just their talent.) The funny thing is that the one thing she's accused of - promoting witchcraft - is the least radical of the various things she tries to do. Combine that with a very adult understanding of death couched into a book series that, for the first few books, was considered fluff kid fantasy, and you realize that Rowling is very underrated as a kid's author. People ignore her merits for her popularity, which is a shame.
Eddings, from all I've heard, is a talented writer, but he's not good at reaching out to a wide audience. He's a niche writer. Rowling, meanwhile, has a talent for making people fall in love with her writing that I've rarely seen in any writer, and she combines that with surprisingly mature plot development.
Yeah, Harry Potter's definitely an escape. There's a psychotic mass murderer who leads a fanatic cult into a school and has them killing droves of people, an 18-year-old attempts to kill a group of students just to take a treasure from them and ends up burning alive, a man spends a lifetime obsessed with a woman only to lead to her death and get killed by a snake.
For what it's worth, I've got quite a few female friends who don't get treated necessarily like stereotypical females because they quite clearly aren't. Maybe I'm just in a lucky part of the world, but I haven't seen females get discriminated against much unless they invited it on themselves.
I was thinking that as I read it.. I wonder if Jordan was influenced at all by this speech? (Eye of the world came out in 1990)
Jordan was definitely trying to play with gender politics through his work. From the only female magic users (at the start of the story at least), to the Queens of Andor and entire city of Far Madding - he liked to shift some of the gender-balance on its head. The constant Village Council / Womens Circle examples also bring this up.
That being said - the hero is still the young male with a sword. And the bad guys: Fain / Moridin / Shaidar Haran are all male as well. So while it does play some havok with traditional magic use (at least for the first few books) - most of the male-centric fantasy genre is still intact.
For more Wizardry / Hacker tales you could read Wizard's Bane (available online here: http://www.baen.com/library/rcook.htm ) a tale of a programmer transported to a world where magic exists.
I prefer Diane Duane's Young Wizards series. Wizardry is hacking. Oh, and teleportation spells can take you to other planets. It's excellently written, and as addictive as Harry Potter. More information:
To put it another way: all magic--all power, really--actually comes from men, and more specifically, from their "wands" (ahem.) A woman doing magic is just serving as an avatar or proxy for her boyfriend's "will." Further, because she is committing a carnal sin by not being married to this creature (by definition: you need a priest, and no priest will marry you to a devil), she starts off on the "evil" side of the line, even if she wants nothing to do with it.
Then there's the whole matter that she's "draining his willpower for her own purposes"--mythology tends to discretize single creatures into multiple over time, so "witch" and "succubus" were likely the same idea. Even if she was sleeping with a perfectly good Wiz, she'd still be a vile temptress.
That all seems more in line with medieval European folklore to me.
(Of course, the question of what happens when someone marries a wizard is left unanswered; it's usually assumed that wizards are too ingrained in their world of rites and formulae to go a-courting, but what if a girl were to just love them anyway--like I'm sure the wives of many mathematicians today do? Would she gain "legal" access to his magical energies, or is there some sort of biblical clause against that? In fact, would the wizard be allowed to marry at all? Would a priest condemn Merlin in his time, even in his role as the king's advisor?)