The Role Of Witches In Supernatural

Witches have been around for many centuries. Premodern texts primarily claimed that witches were female who work with the devil to bring about harm. Although there are some modern texts that argue against the stereotype, many follow the same reasoning of female witches. The show Supernatural is a modern example of this ideology. Two brothers, Sam and Dean Winchester travel all around the country to fight evil spirits. During one of their trips, they come across some witchcraft. This leads them to discovering a coven practicing witchcraft with an undercover demon. (Supernatural 2008). With the gendering of women in modern television and premodern texts one can ask: To what extent does the gendering of witches imply that they work with demons?
One scene in Supernatural shows Sam Winchester interrogating the three witches of the coven. Sam and his brother, Dean, went to the town to investigate a series of unusual deaths. They narrow their killers down to 3 witches in a coven. Sam goes to a meeting they are holding and accuses them of witchcraft. He later finds out that one of them is a demon. Of the three women, two of them are wearing blue, feminine looking clothing. The last is dressed in a gray, boxy blazer. The last woman ends up being an undercover demon. All of these women are portrayed as everyday housewives. Their appearance is very put together, which contrasts the image that pops into one’s head when the term witch is said.
However, according to Edward Bever’s article, Witchcraft, Female Aggression, and Power in the Early Modern Community, women most likely to be accused of witchcraft were married women who didn’t fit the stereotype of a witch (Bever 2002). Bever states the idea that witches have been women who have somewhat of a “normal” demeanor. They are usually married and well liked by others around them. This contrasts the stereotype of a witch being that a witch is usually a woman that is not as put together, and is a social pariah. With
There is dialogue between Sam and the demon, Tammy, switching back and forth between them, as if to show the duality of good and evil. The witch stereotype includes working with a demon and harming others. The earliest instance of this is explained through Laura Stokes’ Toward the Witch Craze. Laura writes about the Alpine witch, the earliest witch that was gendered. “One of the reasons that the early modern witches were predominantly women can be traced to the fact that the Germanic popular concept of the Alpine witch, which predated the concept of the diabolic witch and helped to determine the details of demonology, was strictly female” (Stokes 584). Witches were feared, because they were thought to have caused unnatural harm. Stokes mentions the word diabolic periodically throughout her text. Witches were seen as diabolic back with the Alpine witch and current day with Tammy the coven leader. As seen later in the episode, she admits to killing other people, and then proceeds to murder one of their own coven members for questioning her. The back and forth shots show that Sam is there to defeat the evil witch. Sam is seen as the good guy throughout most of the series, which pours over into this episode. The duality of the camera shots emphasizes the evil female witch, by contrasting her with the supposed “good”, male counterpart. Misogyny