Magical Spaces Force Fields of Female Knowledge in Minka Czóbel’s Witch Poems

Abstract

In Minka Czóbel’s poetry, the witch figure embodies female otherness, social exclusion, exceptional knowledge and secrecy. It may be read as a quasi‑autobiographical alter-ego, yet a non‑referential approach reveals that the allegory more fundamentally articulates shared female experiences, desires and anxieties. The witch motif operates simultaneously on natural, social, psychological and metaphysical levels: she is a liminal figure, at once sacred and accursed, pure and guilty, outsider and initiate, whose knowledge does not conform to normatively sanctioned forms of wisdom. The witch‑poems construct an interconnected system of female knowledge, otherness and ecological sensitivity within the heterotopic spaces of the English landscape garden and the forest. These sites function both as topographies of social exclusion and as experimental terrains for cultural‑ecological alternatives, where witch figures, initially confined to “deviance‑heterotopias”, become autonomous agents in deep continuity with the non‑human world. A biopoetic reading shows that the poems speak of selection and adaptation, exclusion and non‑anthropocentric modes of relationality, foregrounding the agency of non‑human entities and a reconfigured, more‑than‑human web of relations. In this corpus, otherness appears as a collective, cultural and evolutionary issue: the community expels the “winged” female subject through mechanisms analogous to biological systems that eliminate non‑normative individuals, even though the very difference they represent enables new forms of life and knowledge. Female knowledge thus emerges not only as a source of perceived danger but also as an indispensable resource: it is associated with healing, community maintenance, ecological awareness and spiritual orientation, while dominant norms continue to stigmatise it as witchcraft. Ultimately, Czóbel’s witch figures emblematisise the ambivalent status of female knowledge, embodying both the experience of exclusion and stigmatisation and an alternative epistemology grounded in holistic unity with nature, in the relativisation of boundaries and in the permeability of body and soul, human, animal, plant, earthly and celestial realms.