Mombi - The Ex-Wicked Witch

More about Mombi - The Ex-Wicked Witch

Mombi is a practitioner of magic, Baum saying: "Mombi was not exactly a Witch, because the Good Witch who ruled that part of the Land of Oz had forbidden any other Witch to exist in her dominions. So Tip's guardian, however much she might aspire to working magic, realized it was unlawful to be more than a Sorceress, or at most a Wizardess."

This is where there seems to be distinction between witches and sorceresses in Oz. Witches seem to have some innate power (some adaptations of Oz—like The Witches of Oz and Oz the Great and Powerful—maintain that witches need talismans for their powers, and in later books, we meet Yookoohoo witches who this is quite the case for) that they may have sold their beauty, youth, and even possibly their names for. Sorceresses (such as Glinda) find other ways to use magic through tools, herbs, incantations, potions and the like.

What we discover about Mombi later in Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz is that she may very well be an ex-Witch. That book establishes that before the Good Witch of the North took the Gillikin Country, Mombi was the Wicked Witch of the North until she was conquered by the Good Witch of the North. What seems curious is that Baum gives Mombi a name, but not the other two Wicked Witches that we met in Wizard. I have theorized that perhaps those Witches gave up their names for magic power. Perhaps Mombi refused to sell her name, so her magic was not as strong. Or perhaps the Good Witch of the North managed to take away her powers by restoring her name to her.

Ozma says that Mombi had the job of jailer for the Kings of Oz, specifically her grandfather and father. This is how she says that Mombi stole her as a baby. But if we take a revisionist angle and try to reconcile the accounts in The Marvelous Land of Oz and Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, then she apparently used her (former?) position for the kings to assure the Wizard that she would faithfully take care of Ozma when he decided to turn her over to Mombi. As I suggest in my blog about the Wizard, he didn't do it to get the heir out of his way to the throne, but so that she would be safe in case his newly-built Emerald City was attacked by the Wicked Witches. Who else would be better at tricking the Wicked Witches than an ex-Wicked Witch?

Mombi says that the Wizard taught her "all the magical tricks he knew. Some were good tricks, and some were only frauds..." Since we know the Wizard wasn't a real practitioner of magic at the time, this seems to be what led her to realize that she could be a Sorceress instead of a witch. At any rate, I suggested that since the Wizard did not have an heir to his throne, he seems to have intended to hold it until Ozma would be of age.

- From https://newwwoz.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-characters-of-oz-mombi.html