The Witch and the Dark Forest of Autonomy
An Analysis of Robert Egger's The Witch (2015)
At the beginning of Robert Eggers’ movie, The Witch, Thomasin is the doubtful, yet earnest daughter of the hyper-religious (even by Puritan standards) William and Katherine.1 By the end, she has gone through a radical transformation, not merely defying her parents, but throwing off everything she has ever believed to be normal and moral conduct. Her transformation may seem radical to many of us, as if it is only possible in the realms of movies and literature, but I actually think it’s the perfect allegory for rebellion of the Individualist against conformity.
So before I continue, full spoilers for the movie. Please do yourself the favour of watching it because it is amazing. It’s one of my favourites and perhaps surprisingly, is very important for men, as you’ll see by the end.
Either way, this framing of Satan as individuality may seem counterintuitive, especially given the violence of the movie, but I’ll make even that make sense by the end. However, the first character I think we need to understand is the character of Satan himself.
Peter Schock writes about how romantic literature re-interpreted the character of Satan from Milton’s Paradise Lost.2 He refers to this process as transvaluing. This is where we take a traditional moral narrative, and then transvalue that narrative, turning Satan from the literal personification of evil into the hero. God is also transvalued from the benevolent, all-loving divine judge into an oppressive tyrant. You can think of this in simple terms as flipping the script.
I’ll be taking this same perspective on Satan as he appears in the Witch. He is the promise of individuality, free from the stifling conformity of the Christian religion. This role reversal shouldn’t be news to those of you who’ve read my previous essays like Psychology of the Succubus. There I mentioned Dr. Jordan Peterson writing that conformity is often represented as a masculine God.3. He may not necessarily agree with me saying that Satan is a liberator against the Christian God, but as you’ll see in the rest of this essay the Witch provides some interesting allegorical evidence for this.
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Satan, the Liberator
The character that I think best represents Christian conformity is definitely William, the patriarch of Thomasin’s family. However he is a complex character. He’s conscious of himself as separate from the group and that’s precisely why he’s choosing exile. He’s clearly a hardline Puritan, and yet he has this weird stance where he’s able to handle a lot of social pressure and say, “no I have the best interpretation, and you the rest of the village aren’t the true believers.”4,5
Again, that’s a pretty powerful thing to be able to do, and yet he is still tightly, tightly bound to the Puritan faith. For example, in one conversation with his son he basically says that only God knows who is good or evil, and that it’s up to them to have faith in God as best as they can. Despite his ability to question the group, he could never question God himself. He can’t question the norms, rules, and expectations of his faith, and so he tries to be the best of what the Christian faith represents.
It’s William’s one-foot-out-of-conformity perspective that acts as a catalyst for Thomasin’s individuality. As a kid living in this kind of culture, she likely hasn’t seen many real conflicts over social norms. In this kind of very puritan, religious community, people aren’t likely focused on expressing their unique authenticity. They’re concerned about conforming to the community of God-fearing Christians. Then, right before her eyes, she sees that entire worldview disintegrate after her own father violates the rules established by that very community.
What’s more, as her family walks away, she is the only one who hesitates. She lingers, eyes wide in astonishment, likely experiencing the very painful internal conflict between staying and going with her family. In other words, she begins to think about thinking for herself.
The rest of the movie is shot almost entirely on the family’s farm, which is the perfect representation of the safety of the established conformity that everyone must follow. Here, everyone has their proper place relative to one another already determined within the social order. Like I said, the father is the leader of the family. The mother, Katherine, tends to the children and other domestic tasks, whereas the children all do as they’re told by their parents.
The forest, on the other hand, represents the dangerous chaos outside the established order of the farm. It’s almost exclusively presented as a source of evil and danger. I mean really, there is even discordant music meant to give us a sense of foreboding anytime it’s shown on screen. It is this forest of chaos that acts as the second catalyst for Thomasin’s change by making a mockery of the established order. Something profane sneaks its way in to violate the alleged safety of our social norms in the most obscene way possible – by murdering the innocent.
The disappearance of the baby calls into question everything Thomasin thinks she knows to be true. She’s already experienced internal conflict about how much faith she can put in her father, but now her worldview is shown to be fundamentally inadequate to protect the most defenseless and guiltless from chaos. Thomasin must ask herself, “How can I, sinful as I am, continue to put my faith in this conformity when it cannot protect even the blameless?”
What’s more, think about the symbolic meaning of the baby being taken from Thomasin. The entire social order has already been brought into question, but as a girl, Thomasin is being raised almost for the sole purpose of having kids. As Martin Luther is supposed to have said, “Let them bear children to death …they are created for that”.6 Now, her very identity as a person, as a human being, within that social order has also literally been taken away from her. Her entire world has completely disintegrated around her, it’s completely incoherent and the one person who could provide her comfort, her mother, blames her viciously.
I think Thomasin’s mother, Katherine, is the second of the three foils for Thomasin’s development. A foil is basically just a character that helps us understand the main character by being different from them.7 The first is William and his patriarchal conformity. The second, Katherine, represents what Thomasin should have become within that patriarchal conformity – a mother. The fact that Katherine is so helpless in the face of her baby’s disappearance represents beautifully the inadequacy of that conformity. The more desperately she prays the more ineffective faith in conformity seems. Then, when she is actively hostile toward Thomasin, she demonstrates vividly the lie of mother’s safety and love.
Think about that. By rejecting Thomasin while simultaneously devouring her other children in love and safety, Katherine marginalize Thomasin into an outsider’s perspective where she can see how inadequate motherhood really is. The social order is useless, her social role as a mother has again literally been taken away from her, and now she sees time and time again how ridiculous and absurd motherhood really looks from the outside.
I’ll be going deeper into the third foil, Caleb, in a moment, but his death is the final straw on the back of conformity. Katherine collapses completely into despair, falling into Caleb’s grave. I don’t know if there’s a better way to symbolize the death of motherhood. Then, of course, we finally come to the character of Satan himself.
Throughout the movie we see William, again representing Christian patriarchal conformity, trying to grapple with the goat Black Philip, who we later discover is Satan. At first he succeeds at keeping individuality under control, but eventually William dies by the horns of Black Philip. Conformity is helpless in the face of individuality’s rebellion. At this point the entire farm is destroyed, the crops are diseased, the patriarch is dead, and all that is left is the forest of chaos, ever-present despite the illusions of safety that conformity had.
However, in one final attempt to demand Thomasin’s submission, motherhood attacks her in a frenzy. The promise of comfort, safety, and purpose that motherhood was supposed to provide, is now unleashed fully as the false promise it really was. As Thomasin is quite literally smothered by the safety of the womb, Thomasin deals the final blow and kills her mother. She frees herself from the final demand on her agency as an Individualist. She then summons Satan, individuality itself, she’s liberated as an Individualist, and then, walks proudly into the Dark Forest of Autonomy.1
Here you can see the transvaluing. Up to this point we’ve seen the dark forest from the perspective of conformity. It’s a place of danger and threat, a place where children aren’t allowed to go alone, and even adults explore only with the safety of a rifle. As an individual though, Thomasin is naked of the social norms whose false safety held her back and made her unnecessarily afraid. She walks slowly, confidently into the dark forest. Once within, she dances naked by moon and firelight with other liberated Individualists.
I am going to tie all of that violence into this analysis by the end, so don’t think I’m ignoring that. However, look at everything that has happened to Thomasin from this transvalued, flipping the script perspective. Her father is an incompetent who sacrificed his family’s safety for his sinful pride. Her brother is constantly trying to steal glances at her chest. Her own mother completely rejects her, then accuses her of seducing her little brother and her father, then accuses her of murdering all of her siblings, and then finally, tries to strangle her to death. Her own mother.
And what was her consolation prize supposed to be if she had submitted to all the demands placed upon her as a woman – likely married off to a much older man so she could pump out kids until she died. Again, from this transvalued perspective, how can we see her development as anything other than a liberation? From this transvalued perspective, this kind of seems like a pretty feminist movie and I’m not saying I’m the only one to notice this.8
The Witch as an Individualist
While the Witch has been considered a movie about feminist empowerment, Jess Joho writes that it’s not. She writes the following about the movie:9
“women, Puritan’s believed, were more susceptible to the devil because their souls and bodies were inherently weaker … [so rather] than tell the easier, more typical modern witch story about female empowerment, [The Witch] tells the story of female anxiety and dread.”
I appreciate her perspective, but I actually think the movie includes both perspectives and this is precisely why I’ll explain later that it’s an important narrative for men. So, with that being said, you may have noticed that I haven’t yet mentioned the Witch. We’ve seen how Thomasin’s individuality is defined by the process of becoming a Witch after liberation by Satan. However, the role of the Witch in the narrative is almost exclusively negative. Literally, she kidnaps a baby, mashes him up, and then rubs his mush on her skin…
Okay, let’s try to make that make sense. In a book about the history of witches, Dr. Silvia Federici writes:6
“the accused [witches] were charged with sexual transgressions and reproductive crimes (such as infanticide and causing male impotence), and among the condemned there were women who had achieved a certain degree of power in the community…female sexuality was both seen as a social threat and … a powerful economic force.”
She also writes elsewhere in the book that a witch was often enough a marginalized woman who had lost economic power during the rise of capitalism, and was basically needing to be gotten rid of. The opposite is also true with powerful women being accused. Even today in Africa, older women and men who have a lot of capital are accused of being witches by their younger family members so that they can take their property. Like actually this same thing happens today.
So, viewed from this perspective, who exactly is the Witch in this movie? It isn’t such a leap to say that, viewed symbolically, the mashing of the baby is a liberation from motherhood. I know this seems bizarre, but that’s the point. The power of transvaluing is that, with the profane, with the obscene, and the satanic we are able to see a new vision of morality. Obviously mashing a baby is beyond the mere obscene, but that’s the point. It’s meant to show us that beyond the infant, there is a human being in that woman who is that woman, and she has worth beyond her ability to produce an infant.
The extremity of the baby mashing to us is in some ways as extreme as a woman rejecting motherhood for the Puritans of this era. Again, it was so extreme that it led to such women being murdered as a witch, as a danger to society in league with Satan, the personification of evil.6
To be clear, I don’t mean to denigrate motherhood as something that is inherently oppressive, but remember back to the Martin Luther quote, “Let them bear children to death …they are created for that” (emphasis added).6 Motherhood is great, but the point is that it’s not what a woman should be reduced to.
So, yes, Jess Joho was pretty on the mark when she said that this is a story of female anxiety and dread. Is it any wonder then that the witch has become a symbol of female empowerment? Satan is the gateway to individuality, but the witch herself is the Individualist. As such, Thomasin becomes an Individualist by becoming a witch through the transvaluing power of Satan, who is able to flip the oppressive norms of a patriarchal God on their head.
With that said though, how does Thomasin’s third foil, her little brother Caleb, fit into the narrative? Firstly, he represents the transition from Pre-Conformist to Conformist. He’s old enough to understand the rules and expectations that are being placed upon him, but he still has some issues following them. He’s reaching the age where his…biology is starting to activate and I think this is best demonstrated through his relationship with his sister.
Caleb repeatedly sneaks glances at Thomasin’s body. Again, in early puberty, Caleb is likely just learning to put social norms above the biological needs that are also only just emerging. The fact that his inner conflict is between the satisfying of his sexuality and the very common social standard against incest, clearly demonstrates this transition from Pre-Conformist to Conformist. Unfortunately, he gives into lust and falls out of established order into what he can only see as the chaos of the forest.
Here, the witch represents the danger of female sexuality to men. If you remember from my essay Psychology of the Succubus, I had discussed Dr. Mary Ayer’s history of the succubus as a mythological representation of the projection of male sexuality onto women.10 If you as a man are taught to view your sexuality as sinful, then the succubus, as a demonic seductress, is an easy thing to blame for your sinful desires. Again, many of these people literally believed the succubus and witches actually existed. The witch is a natural evolution from the mythology of the succubus, except this time her sexual power over men is punished by real execution.
I’ve argued in my Myth-Making playlist that myths are the stories a culture uses to understand themselves and the world. The witch-hunt is the perfect example for why a myth isn’t just a fanciful story, but has very real consequences. The witch is the culmination of the denigration of the divine feminine by patriarchal culture, her demonization into the succubus, and finally, into the mass murder of the witch. Now, in present day, that Witch has become the symbol for the reclamation of women’s individuality and power.
But again, what exactly is the role that Caleb is playing here as a Pre-Conformist boy who loses the battle with lust? Caleb’s demise is his inability to fully understand and live the social norms of incest and sexual propriety. He literally vomits up the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil – the apple.11 He’s barely Conformist, let alone being capable of transvaluing as an Individualist. Transvalue what exactly? You have to have social norms to transvalue. To be an Individualist, you must first have conformity.
Point being, Caleb fails because he has not yet integrated conformity. He is swallowed up by lust and then spat back out, disheveled and naked, dominated by the female sexual power that conformity would have had him dominate. As a foil then, he demonstrates how Thomasin is a successful evolution beyond that conformity. She can swallow the fruit so-to-speak, so she can challenge social norms through transvaluing and become her own individual. However, this capacity doesn’t necessarily mean that Thomasin is free of sin.
The assumption so far is that her liberation has been a wholly good thing. I’m not about to reverse everything I’ve said so far, but I don’t think we can ignore the violence of this narrative. We have to understand that the liberation of the Individualist is not inherently good, but is more about increasing our capacity to be good, which also implies that we increase our capacity to be evil. This point is all in reference to what developmental psychologists call the growth to goodness.12
This is one of the more common mistakes that people make when they first learn about models of psychological development. We almost automatically assume that any development is toward more goodness. Instead, it’s more an advance in the complexity of our feeling, thinking, and acting, which is something altogether different from good or evil.
Thomasin developed into an Individualist, but whether or not her growth was good or evil is really dependent on how you specifically want to interpret it. If any Christians read this, they would likely have a very different opinion than an atheistic feminist, but the fact of the matter is that she did still develop beyond conformity. There is an obvious reference here to moral relativism, where good and evil are seen as a subjective point of view rather than as an absolute order. Regardless of what you think about that, do you think it because an external authority has told you what to think or because you yourself have decided to think it?
Following the Witch into the Dark Forest
Several times throughout this essay, I’ve said that this narrative is very important for men to understand. Obviously understanding the experiences of women and conformity can be helpful for men, but this does seem more like an essay for women’s development rather than for us.
To understand why we as men need to understand this, we first need to understand that the symbol of the Witch does not merely represent a return to a pre-patriarchal femininity, but is precisely so powerful because she includes both the reclamation of pre-patriarchal feminine power AND the oppression of women under patriarchy. There is no pretending the oppression never happened. They choose the witch precisely because she is the ultimate symbol of patriarchal oppression. As such, through transvaluing, she now becomes the ultimate symbol for women’s liberation.
So this is what I mean when I say that men must follow the Witch into the Dark Forest of Autonomy. All the way back in my essays on the Succubus and the Divine Feminine, I had said that the Succubus was a threshold guardian standing in the way of a new vision for masculinity, and that the Divine Feminine was a signpost on that journey.13
Dr. Mary Ayers has written that the Succubus is the Divine Feminine after she’s been denigrated and demonized by patriarchal mythology.10 The Witch then, might be a transition myth from the Succubus to a new Divine Feminine. That obviously has to be done and is being done by women, that has very little to do with me, but that process is something that we must learn as men from women because they have in many ways lead the way to post-patriarchy.
I’ve also written that, when considered as a masculine archetype, the Divine Feminine serves an Anima function. This means that she is meant to guide men away from the hyper-narrow specialization of patriarchal masculinity.14 Not necessarily toward a “feminized” masculinity, but a masculinity that has grown to be a greater masculinity because of its dialogue with femininity, with something that it is not.15
So, when we come to the purpose of the Witch, in her function as a masculine archetype, she provides a specific process for transitioning away from patriarchal masculinity. Again, she is the perfect representation of not only throwing off the weight of patriarchy, but honouring the weight of patriarchy. We’re not meant to pretend that the oppression never happened. I may lose some people on this, but I also don’t think women should forget their role in upholding patriarchy, but sticking to men, the new vision of masculinity that we create must honour the fact that the masculinity we are dealing with was born out of thousands of years of patriarchal oppression. We cannot forget that.
That is such an important part not merely because we can learn from the transvaluing process of the Witch, but because of the very real burden that comes with being a post-patriarchal man. Federici writes about the men who have been persecuted for supporting the witch. From the European witch-hunts of the past to those going on today:6
“[the] few men murdered there were guilty of association with suspected witches or were killed in their stead, when the women targeted could not be found or when the men tried to protect them.”
This is the risk of being a post-patriarchal man. Just the statement “post-patriarchal man” is going to make so many people cringe. Men who speak against patriarchy are often accused of using a sneaky strategy to sleep with women, and it’s not always an unfair accusation for sure.16 However, it’s often assumed to be a bad thing. Of course I want to sleep with women who share my values.
When this accusation comes from anti-feminist men who claim to stand up for men, there is an ironic anti-man sentiment with that accusation. The assumption is that if I want to sleep with women who share my values that suddenly means my intentions are suspect. Why exactly can’t I have certain values and actually believe in those values, while simultaneously also wanting to sleep with the women whose liberation I support? Who else would you have me want to sleep with? To frame that as a sneaky strategy is to denigrate male sexuality itself as an inherently sneaky and manipulative enterprise.
Notice the transvaluing I’m doing here. I’m flipping the script on narratives that would demean men who seek a post-patriarchal masculinity by attacking their sexuality. I think that also offers us a better way to view male sexuality in a post-patriarchal way. Here I’d like to take another look at Caleb’s inability to swallow the fruit of good and evil. He sought to possess feminine sexuality for his own gratification. Just look at how he treated his sister. He was denying her humanity by viewing her as a sexual object, because he hadn’t yet become Conformist enough to view her also as reproductive property that was off limits to him, her brother.
Obviously in moving beyond this cultural norm, we want to start seeing women as more than sexual or reproductive objects. Remember that I said that the Succubus and the Witch are objects on which men project their sinful sexuality, they relinquish responsibility for it. With the deconstruction of patriarchy, we’ve seen a paradox between viewing women as human beings while at the same time we’ve had the emergence of a culture of nihilistic hedonism.
This is argued in greater detail in my essay Psychology of Epithymia, where I discussed Epithymia as a Succubus of nihilistic hedonism, specifically through my discussion of porn. I’m not trying to reduce Epithymia to male sexuality or porn, as I argued in that essay. However, the point that I’m trying to make here is that with the deconstruction of patriarchal masculinity, we’ve lost cultural norms in regards to how men should engage with women, especially in a romantic sense.
Epithymia then, represents the projection of male desire in a culture of nihilistic hedonism. Our desires are ripped from us and projected onto and shaped by this techno-mindlessness, through the iPhone, tiktok, porn, etc. We can blame these things as Epithymia, just like the men of 17th century Europe blamed the succubus and the Witch. You can blame instagram and tinder for how they’ve made women entitled narcissists. You could also take responsibility for how your actions can make the dating landscape worse, and then go out into the real world to engage with real women and create the experiences you actually want. Either is your choice.
I’m also not saying that these technologies aren’t causing problems. They definitely are. What I am criticizing is how easy we all can fall prey to an unnecessary victimhood in the face of those problems. Again, it’s far too easy to blame the affect instagram, tinder, and porn have had on women and how that has limited you, all behind the safety of a keyboard or even atop the meditation cushion. It’s another thing entirely to actually get into the thick of the dating world and to realize the range of people of all genders that actually exist.
However, I think part of that problem is the deconstruction of patriarchy and the inability of progressive masculinity to come up with a legitimate response to that. So many men have gone to Red Pill for solutions to their romantic issues because they are often the only ones offering anything that appears to be a legitimate solution, even if it’s not. As I argued throughout my Psychospiritual Prison series, women and feminism become a ready scapegoat for why they can’t achieve the impossible goal Red Pill gives them.
So, let’s tie this all back into the topic of this essay. Following the Witch into the Dark Forest of Autonomy is not just about learning about how to deconstruct the influence of patriarchy, but to also begin reconstructing masculinity. Erich Fromm has written that people escape from freedom back into conformity because as an individual we feel powerless and insignificant.17 As men we can’t let go of our individuality and we shouldn’t expect women to, which is of course, the mistake of Red Pill and their hyper-patriarchal masculinity. To reconstruct masculinity, we also need to learn how to relate to the Witch in the Dark Forest.
The Jungian psychologist D. Stephenson Bond wrote:18
“outside the walls of culture we come upon the dark wood where the individual walks alone. We come upon the personal myth.”
That’s what my substack is about. We are now in the Dark Forest of Autonomy, but without a map, and so we’re in search of a personal myth. The next series that I’ll be working on is to try to get a sense of the Dark Forest we find ourselves in and to try to sketch-out a way for you to create your own personal myth to guide you through it.
Either way, that is more than enough for today. Thank you so much for your time and attention. Please hit the like button and subscribe for more conversations on masculinity, psychological development, and the cultivation of a personal myth. Thanks again, and all the best to you on whatever journey you find yourself on.
If you like this essay, please find the recommended order here. Scroll to the bottom.
References:
1 – Eggers, R. (Director). (2016, February 19). The VVitch: A New-England Folktale [Drama, Fantasy, Horror]. Parts and Labor, RT Features, Rooks Nest Entertainment.
2 – Schock, P. (2003). Romantic Satanism: Myth and the Historical Moment in Blake, Shelley and Byron (2003rd edition). Palgrave Macmillan.
3 – Peterson, J. B. (1999). Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (1st edition). Routledge.
4 – Cook-Greuter, S. (2021). Ego Development: A Full-Spectrum Theory Of Vertical Growth And Meaning Making.
5 – Kegan, R. (1998). In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life (Reprint edition). Harvard University Press.
6 – Federici, S. (2018). Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women (1st edition). Between the Lines.
7 – Foil (narrative). (2024). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Foil_(narrative)&oldid=1231509665
8 – Cohen, D. (2016, March 17). “The Witch” Isn’t a Horror Flick—It’s a High-Powered Feminist Manifesto. Marie Claire Magazine. https://www.marieclaire.com/culture/a19362/the-witch-review/
9 – Joho, J. (2016) The Witch isn’t an empowerment narrative and that’s why it’s great. Kill Screen - Previously. Retrieved from: https://killscreen.com/previously/articles/the-witch-isnt-an-empowerment-narrative-and-thats-why-its-great/
10 – Ayers, M. Y. (2011). Masculine Shame: From Succubus to the Eternal Feminine (1st edition). Routledge.
11 – Tree of the knowledge of good and evil. (2024). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tree_of_the_knowledge_of_good_and_evil&oldid=1258229068
12 – Stein, Z. (2008) Now you get it, now you don't: developmental differences in the understanding of integral theory and practice. In Esbjörn-Hargens and Forman (eds.) Serving Self, Other and Kosmos: proceedings of the first biannual Integral Theory conference. SUNY Press. Retrieved from: https://www.zakstein.org/uploads/1/4/2/4/142408092/stein_developmentaldifferences_in_itp_copy_2.pdf
13 – Campbell, J. (2008). The Hero with a Thousand Faces (2 edition). New World Library.
14 – Ellis, R. M. (2022). Archetypes in Religion and Beyond: A Practical Theory of Human Integration and Inspiration. Equinox Publishing.
15 – Alderman, B. (2024, September 12). What is Integral Postmetaphysical Spirituality? Medium. https://medium.com/@balderman_52405/what-is-integral-postmetaphysical-spirituality-6ea728556036
16 – Iselin, K. (2015, October 19). Why I won’t date another “male feminist.” The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/19/why-i-wont-date-another-male-feminist
17 – Fromm, E. (1941). Escape from Freedom. Farrar & Rinehart, inc.
18 – Bond, D. S. S. (2001). Living Myth: Personal Meaning as a Way of Life. Shambhala.
“Individualist” is capitalized because I am referring to a specific stage in Cook-Greuter’s model of psychological development (reference 4 and my essay on Positive Disintegration). As are “Pre-Conformist” and “Conformist” below. I do not refer to anyone as Autonomous because I’m not sure that the Witch can be called Autonomous, whether as a character or as an archetype. However, she is definitely an Individualist as she is able to question cultural norms. It’s interesting to think of the Witch as an archetype for patriarchal deconstruction, but not as a post-patriarchal reconstruction. What might the Witch become or be re-interpreted as in a reconstructive mood? Obviously she might be already, but still interesting. Additionally, the Dark Forest represents the metamodern environmental pressures that require Autonomy to be adequately navigated. This currently fits into my work more in an intuitive sense so I will make this more clear in the future or perhaps change it. To be clear, metamodern environmental pressures and Autonomy have been correlated by others, but specifically how it relates to the Witch, the Dark Forest, and the rest of my work is what I mean to articulate further.