Hot girl summer is over; get ready for bog witch fall. Actually, get ready for bog witch decade. From Copenhagen Fashion Week to the 2024 Met Gala, from the cover art for Hozier’s Unreal Unearth to Kasey Musgraves’ Deeper Well, imagery redolent of wet earth, green moss, brackish water, and tannin-dyed corpses has seeped into the mainstream and shows no signs of receding. If you’re extremely online, you’re probably not surprised: bogs (and their ecological cousin, swamps) have been beloved of social media users for several years now. Images of boggy landscapes appear widely on Tumblr image blogs dedicated to “goblincore,” “swampcore,” and even “cottagecore” aesthetics, not to mention the Tumblrs wholly dedicated to “bogcore” images. On Twitter, bogs, bog bodies, and bog witches have been the subjects of so many viral tweets (and the inspiration for so many display names) that bog love is virtually a community in-joke.
For the uninitiated, bogs may seem an unlikely object of fascination, evoking images of scummy water, muddy boots, and clouds of insects. But wetland-heads and archeologists alike will tell you that bogs can be ethereal, even spiritual spaces—with a rich, complicated cultural history that is still evolving.
Like all wetlands, bogs are marginal ecosystems, toeing the line between land and water. But unlike other wetlands, bogs have no water-source besides rain, which means they are less watery than swamps or marshes. Often, it’s possible to walk right through a bog without even knowing you’re in one—only to take a wrong step and sink knee-deep into mire. Because of a natural process called ecological succession, bogs also tend to become less watery over time. A bog’s life cycle begins when a glacial lake is colonized by sphagnum moss, which forms a carpet on the water’s surface and slowly fills the depths with decayed moss, called peat. Over time, this peat becomes an acidic soil that most plants can’t tolerate, but certain species—pitcher plants; sundew; other ecological weirdos that get outcompeted elsewhere—absolutely love. As these plants begin to take over, the soil becomes thicker and more hospitable to shrubs and grasses. Eventually, a glacial lake becomes a mushy meadow. That meadow eventually becomes a forest. So your bog is not your grandmother’s bog, and your grandmother’s bog was not her grandmother’s bog.
Cranberry Glades, a boreal peat bog in West Virginia. Taken by the author in the spring of 2022
The “in-betweenness” of bogs marks them as liminal spaces, “liminal” being a term coined by the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep in 1908 to describe moments of transition during which a person is neither child nor adult (adolescence) neither unborn nor born (birth), and neither alive nor dead (dying). Like liminal moments, liminal spaces can feel uncanny or unnerving because our brains have trouble fitting them into familiar categories. But they can also feel charged with spiritual energy or magic.
van Gennep theorized that societies use rituals to help structure and control their experiences with liminal moments. Historically, some of these rituals have been held in liminal places—in fact, studies of the mummified “bog bodies” unearthed in countries like Denmark, Sweden, and Ireland reveal that Bronze Age civilizations frequently used bogs for burial of the dead. Although archeologists still debate whether bog bodies were executed criminals or ritual sacrifices to a boggy god (or both), most agree that bogs held a sacred significance to the peoples who buried their dead in the peat. For many Bronze Age people, bogs may have been considered a place where the boundaries break down between the ordinary physical world and the invisible world of spirits— an appropriate site for the transition from life to death. And because bogs preserve things buried in them, due to their oxygen-poor environment, burial in a bog is—almost—like achieving a kind of immortality, similar to mummification. Bog bodies are dead but not gone, their distinct facial features and even facial expressions still preserved thousands of years after death.
Ancient beliefs about bogs survive in European folklore about ghostly will-o-the-wisps and shape-shifting puca, who are both said to live in wetland areas, but they are also reflected by the “creepiness” that we traditionally associate with bog landscapes even now. Although a real-life bog on a sunny day is a perfectly friendly-looking landscape, we tend to imagine bogs as places of eternal night and mist. Think Wuthering Heights’ haunted Yorkshire moors, Lord of the Rings’ Dead Marshes, or The Bog of Eternal Stench in the 1984 Bowie/Muppets film Labyrinth. When the professional reactionary Jordan Peterson told The New York Times that “it makes sense that a witch lives in a swamp,” he was unreflectively trading on this traditional image of a wetland as a liminal place inhabited by liminal creatures – in this case, witches. People accused of witchcraft have historically been women who live outside the structures of wife and motherhood, often poor women who live on the literal margins of their community. As the anthropologist Mary Douglas writes, witchcraft “is the anti-social psychic power with which persons in relatively unstructured areas of society are credited, the accusation being a means of exerting control… Witchcraft, then, is found in non-structure. Witches are social equivalents of beetles and spiders who live in the cracks of the walls.” Witches are also social equivalents of bogs. As spaces that are both symbolically and literally messy, bogs violate the symbolic and literal sense of order that has traditionally dictated femme-presenting people’s lives. Women accused of witchcraft tend to be folks who have done the same.
Traditionally, both witches and bogs have been objects of fear, disgust, and avoidance. But for these very reasons, women and gender-non-conforming folks have recently embraced bogs and the figure of the bog-witch as symbols of defiance, non-conformity, and subversion. Like the ecosystem where she lives, the bog witch rejects beauty standards and social expectations, refusing to do what society expects of her. “I hate this whole ‘women can be sexy at fifty!’ narrative. At what age will society stop demanding I try to be hot and just let me turn into an old swamp witch, as nature intended?” asks @SmallJenna in one widely shared tweet. “Sorry if I’m not your cup of tea. I’m not even my own cup of tea. I’m barely a cup and I don’t like tea. I’m more like a rusty bucket of haunted bog water,” writes @TragicAllyHere in another.
the bog-witch revels in slime and muck in her hut, probably sans children and definitely sans husband. As a fantasy of escape from society’s rigid hierarchies and structures, bogcore may be seen as a subversive alternative to cottagecore, another Tumblr-born aesthetic that hit the mainstream in the early 2020s. Bogcore and cottagecore aesthetics both represent a desire to reconnect with nature and return to an older, more “natural” way of existing. But while the sourdough-baking cottagecore tradwife maintains an immaculately clean household for the benefit of her children and husband, the bog-witch revels in slime and muck in her hut, probably sans children and definitely sans husband. Cottagecore aesthetics also idealize a cultivated, organized, and essentially non-threatening version of nature—think vegetable gardens and fields of flowers—whereas bogcore aesthetics embrace the strange, challenging, and not obviously useful beauty of wetland ecosystems. Unlike a field or a forest, a bog naturally offers few harvestable resources. Because of its nutrient-poor soil and watery texture, a bog is also an unfit space for cultivating those resources. You can’t typically farm on a bog; you shouldn’t build a house (or a cottage) on it. Yet draining wetlands to dry them out— to make them “useful”—has yielded disastrous consequences for both human settlement and the environment, leading to increases in flooding, pollution, agricultural run-off, and the release of planet-heating carbon dioxide. Left to their own devices, bogs store incredible quantities of carbon. They also provide needed buffer zones between land and water. But “left alone” is key. There is no way for human intervention to improve a bog or make it more productive than it already is.
By embracing both the messiness and the uselessness of wetland ecosystems, bogcore resists the capitalist and anthropocentric values that typically define human relationships with nature. Acknowledging that bogs are not for us, bogcore aesthetics – and the figure of the bog-witch – let us fantasize about being close to these ecosystems, even a part of them. Appropriately, the ultimate bogcore fantasy – articulated in innumerable tweets, Tumblr posts, and Instagram memes—is simply dissolving into moss, the trials and tribulations of being human shed like an unwanted skin. “The girlboss is dead,” tweeted Daisy Alioto in 2022, “long live the girl moss (lying on the floor of the forest and being reabsorbed back to nature).” Alioto’s tweet went stratospherically viral, resulting in a line of “Moss Girl” t-shirts and baseball caps that Twitter users are still wearing.
If we were all girlmosses instead of girlbosses, we might be happier—the Earth would certainly be. Whether the rise of bogcore will have any concrete effect on the future of our wetlands remains to be seen. As with any online phenomenon, it can be difficult to tell half-ironic enjoyment from genuine care. But when I drove to the Tannersville Cranberry Bog Preserve on a cold fall night for a guided moonlit bog walk, I was pleasantly surprised to find a full house, about twenty people bundled up in winter coats who had all paid $12 for the privilege of experiencing a bog after dark. As we touched lacy pieces of sphagnum moss and listened to owl calls, the guides explained the fragility and resilience of the ecosystem surrounding us: the plants that would survive nowhere else but here, the animals that migrate through and the ones that stay all year, the multi-millennia history beneath the boardwalk where we laid our feet. There is no record of human sacrifice or Bronze Age ritual at the Tannersville Cranberry Bog, no associated folklore about witches or hauntings. It is only a place. But it felt magical to gather there just the same.
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