Confessions of a libra

Priestess-in-waiting | Credit: Here

20.06.25

The Love Witch is an independent cult classic. This movie is part ritual, part feminist commentary, using vintage beauty aesthetics in technicolour.  A movie mainly popular in alt-femme circles and witchy subcultures as it is a little abstract in its presentation. That’s exactly what I love about it with all my 11th house placements. They call it a horror movie, but don’t expect any gore. It’s horror in the suffocating way that patriarchy chokes women into submission. It’s horror in that, it’s poking at too many truths simultaneously, all the while seducing with beauty. Accidentally making you hard and have an existential crisis at the same time. Just the kind of nuance to which I am accustomed. The kind of complexity we need to uplift and see more of.

We can excuse many things in the name of beauty. I dare you to watch this movie with grateful eyes and critical thought. Definitely more than once. Elaine Parks is a recently widowed witch, with a 60’s aesthetic.  She dons her classic blue eyeshadow and cat eye in hyperfeminine armour.  She would have been the ultimate femme fatale if she truly knew her worth. She is an example of feminism not being truly embodied. My personal take is Elaine is a true witch. She is brilliant, messy, intelligent and powerful. She is a woman trying to find power in a society not made to accommodate her. As in nature, she has learned the best preening and camouflage to achieve her desired goal. But ultimately, she cannot win because no matter how much she tries to balance the scales and enact justice, it will never soothe the wound – until she learns to decentre men from her magick. She is ultimately, just a survivor through and through and this is a story of her becoming.

Elaine is someone many women can relate to, because of her romanticism and refusal to give up in the face of constant disappointment. She attempts to meet romance and attraction through wielding all the right tools (from the wrong foundations) but is ultimately disillusioned.  She is ahead of the men because she is in touch with her own sensuality. It’s what drives them crazy and its what gives her an edge. Same thing with her engaging in magick. Then, she panders to them as we women are often taught or trained to do as a form of seduction.

Elaine infantilises men. She infantilises herself by pretending to not be so expansive and multidimensional, so as to save the ego of the man she desperately wants. Yet Elaine is clearly the predator in her romantic life, she is a wild woman. She is not made to be tamed, but she is yet to awaken to this fact for herself. We can see it in the life that she lives, which is a stark difference to the rest of the society. It is the day that she wakes up to this knowledge and removes men off her pedestal, that she becomes the fully fledged femme fatale. A sovereign woman, in her embodied Lilith energy capable of great seduction from a true place of power, not lack.

Elaine moves into an old friend Barbara’s house. There she meets Sally, a more conventional woman. These women present different archetypes of feminists. We have Sally, who is the caricature of the modern feminist you were warned about turning into. Cold, sexless and so committed to equality so as to restrain herself from the liberties that come with unguarded pleasure. Elaine however, presents as the feminist who tries to reclaim herself through sex. She is immensely free in ways other women are not, but at the end of the day socialisation has its grip on her as well. Neither of the two women are devoid of blind-spots. Both women criticise each other’s survival techniques; with Sally feeling uppity for being in a marriage and Elaine feeling uppity for her wielding sex to garner intimacy.

Elaine never achieved true intimacy with these men because she wasn’t being met halfway. She was in effect dumbing herself down, and still being spoken down to by these men. She wasn’t getting nearly enough of those connections as she could have. After all the effort she made in learning how to do the right things at the right time to elicit the right reaction. Underpinning Elaine’s decisions is a belief in the patriarchal lie that a woman’s worth lies in her ability to love a man. You can see how this colours her decision-making and her magick. She tailors her seduction to each man (down to the colour of her underwear). You can see the strategy in the way she leans into each man’s hobbies so she can lower his defences. Elaine has a flow in how she approaches dating. A flow forged in negative previous experiences and an overwhelming need to control and achieve the perfect outcome. A man on her arm. Keeping him however…

Her flow is as follows; marks her target, performs a love spell (one that influences will), seduces them with terrifying psychic precision, controls the pacing of her sexual encounters, learns them with terrifying accuracy, they become vulnerable while giving her the attention she supposedly craved and she is ultimately still unsatisfied. Relevant side note, this reminds me of a time I manifested to get this job with a government agency, through a Recruitment consultant.

I was in the middle of my spiritual awakening and I felt like all I wanted in my next job was to earn a certain amount. That was the only criteria. So, I pray and speak to my ancestors in the shower. That was around the time I started doing that, not knowing that I was remembering something sacred. How to commune with water ancestors and spirits, but I digress. I went through the interview stages and ultimately got the job. Oh, but I learnt my lesson. The systems were not up to date. I was in the call centre and the calls were very intense. Many people in real need, crying and trauma dumping over the phone. Yes, the pay check was good. Yes, I got exactly what I asked for – but I learnt about a little thing called specificity.

Elaine tell us in the movie that, ” all it [magick] means is using your will to get what you want”. We inadvertently learn the true definition of magick and performing it. It’s not something crazy like you see in Harry Potter. Magick is simply about intent and will. Elaine learning magick is one of the great keys of her liberation. However, she will gain sovereignty by disengaging from the cult that initiated this knowing within her. Elaine was taught by a man called Gahan, who represents the negative and predatory men in the spiritual spaces. Just like there are pastors in churches posing as religious leaders while being human manifestations of greed, so to do we have male predators in the spiritual spaces.

Gahan understands how to talk about the feminine and the Goddess, but his messaging is self serving. As we can tell in how he initiates Elaine into sex magick, by performing a rite with her – which is not necessary. You can see in the body language when he is around that she is disgusted by him. She is often swatting him, making digs and doing just enough to protect herself. As many women can relate to. This points to an aspect of patriarchy wherein women are exposed to to much predatory behaviour, that we start looking at only the most overt behaviour as damaging. For many of us, our understanding of harmful behaviour can become blurred when we have experienced worse. I have heard amongst women the saying, well at least it wasn’t… It saddens me that women have to contort themselves this way in a world that devalues womanhood.

Elaine was taught in that cult to use sex magick to open a man up. While this is certainly one way to do it, beauty will always lie in a connection that is built on truth – on seeing and truly being seen. Elaine was taught dominion over a man’s mind and thoughts. She believes as the modern woman does, that she simply needs to train him into becoming her Prince Charming. Women have felt that it was their only option, to be better able to cope with the cognitive dissonance of the real world not being like what we were promised before our breasts grew and we synced with the moon.

Magick is powerful. Sex magick is powerful. Yet the most powerful magick she could have done, was magick to increase her own beauty and magnetism. A spell to open up the path to true genuine love. Elaine doesn’t realise that she doesn’t understand what true love looks like, so she’s chasing her tail. Many people engage with magick from a place of wanting to conquer (hello colonialist), but the beauty in magick is that it is natural. Magick is nature. As such, when you try contort it to fit you – you are going to have problems. She is also doing this magic from a place of lack. She is constantly signalling to the universe or the Great Goddess that she prays to, that she is in lack. All she does it want, want, want. She is never fortifying, beautifying or simply receiving.

🔮 Support My Work
I write as an act of devotion—to truth, to spirit, to the ancestral memory that lives in us all. If something in these words has stirred you, softened you, or brought you closer to your own knowing, you’re welcome to pour something back into the well.
Offerings help sustain the sacred labour of this space and are always received with reverence.
💌 Paypal link here
Thank you for valuing what is felt, not just seen.

She is constantly commanding, demanding and wanting to force. I recognise this behaviour in myself as I am sure other women will too. I believe women can architect their love lives through seduction. However, women should not be trying to control men. Attracting, luring sure. Implanting the right information at the right time (in true Libra fashion). These are rooted in consent. Instead of doing a love spell to make someone love you, it would be better to do a spell to increase your magnetism. Instead of a domination spell, you do a road opening and some heart chakra meditations envisioning letting this person into your heart-space. These are the things I believe that turn someone from a witch to a High Priestess.

I believe that even without socialisation women would likely have higher emotional intelligence. I want to explore this as a side note to explain why Elaine was in the right for wanting to be the architect of love, but how she hadn’t deconstructed enough to land there. With women having higher intelligence, they can help guide men to themselves but it must be selfless, and the men must listen. Men must actually protect the wise women in society, for they will lead us all forward. Women are not only highly emotionally intelligent but utilise more grey matter in their pre-frontal cortex. This makes women great at processing sensory information, have better memory, self-control, process complex social data and multi-task.

The second reasoning I would say would be the womb. The womb operates as a vault of ancestral memory. We know that in each of our cells we hold the Mitochondrial DNA of our mothers and their mothers before them. Well, the womb holds the eggs that have potential to become human beings who carry this ancestral generational information. Wombs are the first emotional regulation for babies. It has it’s own sensory intelligence because it responds to many stimuli (that’s why you can hold stress or trauma in your womb), it shares connections with the vagus nerve and is linked to nervous in the sacral spine. Spiritually, women also receive spiritual information (downloads) through their womb (not just the crown chakra). Likely that exact ancestral information.

Men use more white matter pathways making them better at task specific performance, making mental maps and abstract manipulation. I bring this up to state that in a world where men’s egos aren’t centred. Women are the driving force behind society’s decisions, and men provide the implementation. The problem is in a male centred society where men in nature (including male animals) thrive on competition and domination – women leading society is seen as women being better than men. I say in a society that is operating from strength, and all the chakras activated, leadership is about who can best holistically lead society. Women have better foresight due to the pre-frontal cortex activation, as such it makes sense for them to plan for our society’s future. And a leader is not an absolute power as many men seem to associate leadership. Therein lies the problem.

A leader is one of the people, beholden to the people, beholden to and an instrument of the higher realms. That is the missing conversation in how leadership should actually be conducted. Where Elaine is concerned, she was failing to lead emotionally by trying to stroke the men’s egos. You can have or the other, you choose. When you stand in truth as a woman, you hold a man accountable. Where Elaine pretended to be interested in literature or old Steve McQueen movies, she was failing to connect with men emotionally. As such, her ploy to orchestrate an idyllic romance was foiled from many angles. The foundations simply weren’t there, but I sympathise.

The men she wanted to participate in her reality of love were also damaged by patriarchy. We can see this in how the men are trained to look at her as a mere sex kitten, as such they miss her red flags that could have saved their lives in the literal sense. Were they looking at her with more discerning eyes, they would have felt strange about her want to rush into intimacy. They wouldn’t have abandoned relationships with other women in their lives for a crumb of her attention and affection. The men did not deserve to be killed, if we are taking that aspect of the film literally. However, this is a cautionary tale for men as well. The very methods you use to subjugate women, can be the tools they use to retaliate (as with Aileen Wuornos).

Every time Elaine rejects a man once he’s obsessed, she cannot be blamed her being repelled by the very thing patriarchy built her to be. She’s learnt how to perform being a man’s fantasy. She’s studied men enough (the way prey studies its predator) because it’s how she’s survived. You can see Elaine struggles to hold space for men’s emotions, the very ones she wants to extract. I see this as an example of how modern women both want men to be more in touch with their emotions but the structure of patriarchy hasn’t prepared them either for how to hold them. Sometimes women also run when they meet men who are earnest, romantic and poetic. It can seem intense or too good to be true. Underlyingly many of us are carrying a program that tells us that men crying, and holding emotional nuance is pussy. Which is literal insanity.

In the end Elaine meets Griff. A man she had previously seen in tarot cards. She described him as having shown up as the Knight of Wands. If you know anything about the Knight of Wands you know this could just be a fire sign man, or this is more likely to be a man interested from a sexual perspective. This is your veritable fuckboy. Here for a good time, not a long time. A man there to sweep you off your feat with heat, speed, adoration and fleeting memories. She tells him she always said she’d marry a man who loves animals. She asks him if he does, he confirms it. The way men on dating apps put ‘open to long-term’ and ‘open to children’ on their dating apps in order to wave enough of the right flags to get the immediate pleasure. No sense of proper forethought as to the longer-term effects.

Griff compartmentalises love in the way many modern men do, the descendants of the rake. He sees it as an inconvenience. As Griff thought to himself during some an intimate scene with Elaine, “The more your get to know a woman, the less you can feel about her. At first she’s this incredible object of mystery that fulfils all your wildest fantasies. But then she starts to reveal little flaws, and after a while it just gets pretty hard to care. Feminine Ideal? Only exists in a man’s mind. No woman can ever fulfil it. And sometimes, when she tries to love you more, give you more? You feel like you’re suffocating. Drowning in oestrogen. It’s the most awful feeling.”

A deep part of Griff sees and enjoys Elaine for her whimsy, her beauty and the magical feeling she brings. But Griff is married to his ideas of culture, structure and systems. As such any signs that he’s fallen for her are rooted in the magick, and it’s not perfect because it should not have been done in that way. It’s unsurprising that in the ending when Elaine is outed as a murderous witch, men reached for her body with one hand and their belts in the other. This speaks to the way that men like to control women through sex. Those men were supposedly insulted by her witchy way of life, and yet there is no morality or discernment where their satisfaction is concerned. Not the same morality they would have tried to impose upon her, ironically.

In the end, Elaine let’s go of the fantasy that was men and Griff was the straw that broke the camel’s back. She met someone so perfectly encapsulating her issues with finding a suitable partner. He, unlike the previous men – was the least affected by her. When Elaine kills Griff, she kills the part of herself that expected to force an outcome out of love. She reclaims love, as something to revere but not something to conquer. In killing Griff, she kills the old part of herself that held on too long to a path that was no longer working. Anna Biller is the brilliant mind behind this amazing film. She wrote, directed, produced and scored the movie as well. She created many of the costumes and props as well, a true creative powerhouse. This movie alone has fed me enough if she never decided to make art again. My Libra Sun, Libra North Node in the 12th house’s wet dream. It’s everything that I am, it’s everything that society is.

Elaine represents the Divine Feminine. She represents many women in their idealism, dramatism, romanticism and yearning to love the world into submission. All being explored through overt and covert symbolism while distracting you with sublime aesthetics. Let me be the one to be enlighten you on how much aesthetics matter to Librans. It’s not about shallowness, it’s about frequency. When I see aesthetic harmony, or I see eclectic creativity or even just intentionality in any space – I feel that in my very blood cells. I have been prone to feeling visceral disgust when I see or experience an aesthetic that doesn’t match my frequency. It’s not a matter of superiority, but just like water signs love their emotions – we infuse our lives with beauty. The Love Witch scratches my itch to only be surrounded by beauty. I love the balance of deeper colours to pastels. I love the use of hues to accentuate the different aspects of Elaine.

I hope you have enjoyed this long exploration of Elaine Parks, by Anna Biller. Please support her work. This is a movie I can watch to escape, so don’t think I am watching it all the time thinking this deeply about it. I think we need to have more art that teaches you through your senses. We need to bring back more layers and allow others to catch up, instead of dumbing down media so that we all collectively slow down our thinking patterns. May your journey of decolonising and de-centring men lead you to greater freedom and fluidity. May the truth of women’s lived reality soak deep in your subconscious so as to never perpetuate harm. So be it.

[ Thank you to bestie Weneiya for introducing me to this movie. What a gift! ]

Written under Lilith’s jusridiction.

Signed in bone and brilliance.