Throughout history the cautionary tales of Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, and their countless kin have done more than entertain children: they have fixed in the Western mind a durable suspicion of the witch as an agent of disorder, one who traffics in hidden powers that unmake the ordinary bonds of family, harvest, and law. That suspicion was not idle superstition. It was a practical recognition that certain forms of occult practice, once licensed or romanticized, tend to erode the distinctions between sacred and profane, between what may be known and what must remain veiled. The modern fashion for rehabilitating the witch therefore collides with an older and more durable judgment.

Enter the photographer Harley Weir and the designer Dilara Findikoglu, whose collaborative project Witch took its cue from the childhood memories of their art director Matthew Scrote. Those memories were of a Romania still thick with mysticism and half-forgotten rites. Over five days the pair moved through eight cities and villages, speaking to anyone who would answer, until they reached Mihaela Minca, matriarch of Europe’s most powerful clan of witches, and her daughters, for whom the practice of magic—black and white alike—is simply the family trade. The resulting images and interviews present the craft as continuous, professional, and largely unremarkable to those who live inside it. What they do not register is the older European conviction that such continuity is itself the problem.

The findings of that excursion, once set against the historical record and the present epidemiological ledger, point in a single direction. One is better advised to trust the disciplined theosophy that distinguishes higher principle from local glamour than to indulge the romantic reclamation of the witch. The war on monkeypox is forever; it is one more manifestation of the same porous boundary between the human order and the powers that feed on its disorder. The fairy tales, in their blunt way, already knew the remedy.

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