Hags: 'eloquent, clever and devastating' The Times

Product Information

Nonetheless, despite how different they could be, all hags recognized each other as kindred spirits, members of a kind of sinister sisterhood by which they were undeniably connected. It required them to stay within 10 ft (3 m) of one another the entire time and prevented them from making hag eyes that month or using their coven abilities the day after, the brewing having already expended all of such magic. Cegilune was unaware of her waning adoration until her eternal beauty was ended by her first wrinkle. The other reported way hags reproduced was far faster, involving the hag simply devouring human infants after stealing them from the cradle and giving birth to, again, an ordinary looking child. Baba Yaga was a trickster deity whose next moves and methodology were incomprehensible even to other gods, and thus she was only contended with warily.

At other times they were more obviously manufactured, resembling taverns, ruined towers, mausoleums, giant coffins, and even gingerbread houses.

Of course, the story on both sides is complex and, to readers not au fait with the intricacies of gender politics, or who don’t spend their downtime scrolling through Twitter to keep up with the latest permutations of the culture wars, some of this might seem bewildering. As new deities began to emerge, all but her adopted daughters left, the rest having bitterly left her in favor of adopting new patrons while mocking the aloof moon goddess. We wonder where you would be without the Abortion Act, the Equal Pay Act, and the women – your grandmothers among them, I expect – who struggled to make sure their daughters might have all the things they were denied themselves. Despite these disparate tales, there was one origin story of the hags that included not only the disparate green, annis, and sea hags, but also the hag goddess Cegilune. Some of these things were earned, while others were inherited from the hag that spawned them, so the determinations of a hag's status were by no means fair.

They haunted the legends of all cultures, and though a few common tales could be found, it was difficult to tell their veracity. Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex Features The Glenn Close character in Fatal Attraction is ‘a perfect metaphor for the feeling of having been screwed and then ghosted by life itself’.Thirty years ago, I longed for others to see the world as I did, and after all, there is still so much to be done.

Uniquely, hags possessed the ability to imbue common mushrooms with their essence as a safeguard against death. And we have to hold on because the hags who came before us, that we ignored or dismissed, won us our sex based rights.So, while obnoxious, racist individuals undoubtedly deserve to be denounced, it’s disturbing to read that the name has been co-opted as an insult often aimed at older feminists who fought tirelessly for equality but whose views on sex-based rights are at odds with the current liberal orthodoxy. Magic items that a hag needed to keep a literal eye on had the hag's eye worked into it so that they could chase down and slaughter the unsuspecting thief. In the event that a hag was acting friendly, or at the very least ambivalent, it was important to remember that hags ultimately didn't care about the thoughts or desires of anyone but themselves.