#🪐 — sarah / & hannah.

[musecraft]

🪐 — new muses / tags 001.

[musecraft]

🪐 — HEADCANON :  sarah  +  witchcraft

   i literally don’t have any info up for her yet but this is my most important hc for her :  sarah is a witch. but witchcraft doesn’t work like the people in union thinks it does. the intensely christian people of union believe that witches are servants of satan,  &  that therefore all witches were devil worshippers.  but witchcraft  &  satanism are not the same thing.  witchcraft doesn’t actually really have anything to do with the christian devil.  which is why the widow —  who is a green witch —  warned sarah against reading the devil’s book when she stumbled upon it.  it’s clear to me that the widow did not actually use that book, but rather was keeping the dark power it held away from the people of union.  &  rightly so, as we saw what happened when someone else actually did want to use the power of the devil for themself.     however, sarah is not aware that she is a witch.  she like her mother before her is what is known as a  hedge witch.  hedge witches are born rather than made.  they work mostly with direct life energy, rather than trigger objects.  they often have intrinsic gifts, though they are nothing that could easily be perceived from the outside.  sarah’s powers appear in extremely subtle ways.  hedge witches tend to have gifts along the lines of intuition, healing,  &  protecting life.  their words can also be turned into spells simply by speaking them with strong intention.  hedge witches are unique because their magic does not come from a sustained practice of a craft or participation in a rite, but from something inherent within themselves.                        film evidence for sarah  &  her mother being hedge witches :   ●  though we don’t see sarah’s mother in the film, her father says that it was sarah’s mother who chose that her family would settle on the land that later became union, because she could sense something different about the wind in the trees there.  this type of intuition is  classic  hedge witch behavior.  in my hc, sarah’s mother did know she was a hedge witch, but that she died when sarah was still too young for her to share this awareness with her.  ●  sarah’s arc opens on her assisting a pig to give birth. one of the piglets has gotten stuck,  &  her brother henry warns sarah that they are going to lose both mother  &  piglet.  but sarah confidently says  no we’re not.  the words coupled with the intention behind them is a textbook example of a hedge witch speaking a spell into the world without even realizing it.  &  of course, sarah miraculously succeeds in saving all the pigs, to which her father even remarks aloud that she has a gift.  of course, neither of them know that he is actually profoundly correct.  ●  most of the adults in town thinks that sarah is weird.  this is not only because she is queer, but also because she has an inherent connection with the world at large that threatens their religious worldview.  mad thomas  &  hannah’s mother  —  two of the most bigoted members of the town  —  both go a step farther  &  tell sarah that they see darkness in her, showing that they fear her differences.  sarah’s own father even tells her that there has always been a strangeness in her.  i find it particularly telling that he also says that he believes it might have been “something a mother could have rooted out,”  &  blames the absence of sarah’s mother for her differences, when in reality sarah’s mother was a witch herself  &  likely would have only honed the parts of sarah that made union so uncomfortable.   ●  when the town turns against her  &  hannah, sarah says ‘ if they want a witch, i will give them a witch, ‘  revealing that she finally has the conscious desire to connect to powers beyond the mortal.  however, with no awareness of how witchcraft actually works, she intends to go to the widow’s house  &  use the devil’s book against the town.  &  while she doesn’t end up getting or using the devil’s book, this line coincides with sarah’s stepping into her power  &  using it more consciously  &  in service of a distinct purpose :  to protect hannah.  &  she does, even willing to die to protect hannah in the end.  ●  finally, sarah’s final act is to cast a spell  —  a curse  —  not on the town, but on solomon goode  &  his family.  she promises him that she will follow him forever, that with everyone he harms, he will feel the grip of her hand,  &  that she will never let him go.  &  this spell comes true in the end when it is actually sarah whose spirit returns through her connection with deena to drive a knive through sheriff nick goode’s eye.  &  it is this act that finally completes the curse, expels the devil from shadyside,  &  sets her spirit to rest.  the witch forever lives !