A Witch Is A Wise Woman
For my Women Who Run With the Wolves sisters
A deep dive into the witch archetype and when the divine feminine started being feared
Each time we don’t say what we want to say, we’re dying.
— Yoko Ono
The fact that I am writing this — would have had me killed.
The fact that you are reading this — would have had you killed.
If you think you have problems, try being a woman in 17th-century Scotland.
It was illegal for women to read in 1642.1
It was also illegal for a woman to:
gather herbs
make tisanes and tinctures
be caught looking at the moon at night
have a strange birthmark
live alone (often with a cat)
live with another woman
be pregnant (if your husband didn’t want you to be)
not be pregnant (if your husband wanted you to be)
be poor, elderly or widowed
act outside of gendered expectations
have a strong personality
heal ailments or help animals
practice rituals or ceremonies
give blessings
practice midwifery without a license from the Church of England
This was published in Latin (only 1% of women could read, so we were screwed from the get-go) in a book called the Malleus Maleficarum (known in English as The Hammer of Witches2). Apparently, it outsold the Bible.
It’s a 15th-century manual for witch-hunting that defined "witch crimes" as anyone practising maleficium (translated from Latin as sorcery or harmful magic). It was used to identify witches and prosecute witchcraft.
Essentially, it was a long list of things that women couldn't do.
During the mass hunts, women became suspect for going out at night, or being alone in the woods, or kindling a fire on a hilltop, or dancing, alone or in groups.3
Witchcraft wasn’t just spells — it denoted women who were connected to and possessed a knowledge of nature.
Passed down from woman to woman, it denoted those who were the keepers of wisdom in medicine, herbology, midwifery, agriculture, and healing.
— Hannah Hooper
If you practised any of these activities below, you were labelled a ‘witch’.
The penalty for being a witch was death.
You were doused in flames and burnt alive, drowned in a river called ‘swimming the witch’, strangled or hung in public with spectators.
All witch persecution was penance for embodying the qualities of the divine feminine.
Female speech was also dangerous, especially when a woman expressed anger at a wrong done to her, defended herself or another, or answered back to harassment.
Female expression, mobility, and freedom were all signs of defiance.
Though persecution targeted both men and women as witches, almost three-quarters of the accused were women.4
From 1484 to 1750 about 200,000 people were accused of witchcraft, tortured and/or killed in Western Europe alone.5
It was an awful time in history to be a woman — when a violent paranoia swept obsessively across mainly Scotland and Scandinavia targeting, well you.
Do a quick test, how many did you score?
Me:
I have a black cat.
I live alone.
I’m a big fan of divination in all forms — tarot and book divination particularly.
I weave baskets.
I brew medicinal herbs (drinking a Blue Lotus flower tisane right now)
I serve tea in ceremonies and perform marriage ceremonies.
I have a coven of witchy friends.
I relate to the moon, I hug trees, I self-heal with plants, and definitely talk to animals.
I get downloads in dreams and channel messages from the world around me.
I give Irish blessings.
And the paradigm of this time certainly doesn’t understand me.
I score almost 10/10.
There is no doubt I would have been accused, tortured and most likely burnt.
The reason they want women to believe that it all goes downhill after 35 is because that’s when you get your superpowers and they are afraid of what you’ll do with them.
— Violet Clair
Recently, a perceptive male asked me during a date conversation: “Are you a witch?”
I paused, leaned in and proudly replied: YES.
Why? Because —
A witch is a wise woman.
My interest in witches started when I read that the true meaning of a witch is ‘wise woman’ in the female soul bible Women Who Run With the Wolves.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes, “Like the word wild, the word witch has come to be understood as a pejorative, but long ago it was an appellation given to both old and young women healer, the word witch deriving from the word wit, meaning wise.”
A witch is a healer.
A witch is an emotionally attuned woman.
A witch is a powerhouse.
‘Witch’ can also mean doula, diviner, shamanic practitioner, older woman (Cailleach), or spaewife — Scottish for a woman who can foretell the future (from the Scots word spae, meaning to see into the future).
In Irish, the wise woman is the bean feasa (pronounced ban fasa) or ‘woman of knowledge’ in Irish Gaelic.
Women in villages and hunter-gatherer times were revered as healers, midwives, and caretakers to the dying, when there were no physicians.
There are also many old ethnic names for the witch archetype including:
Wise woman
Priestess
Sage
Elder
Folk medicine practitioner
Midwife
Astrologer
Oracle
Diviner
Herbalist
Healer
Prophetess
Knower
Visionary
Dreamer
Weather maker
Shapeshifter
Crone
We were all persecuted at one time and en masse.
A witch doesn’t cast spells (but can if she wants to — that’s called Wicca)
A witch doesn’t levitate or walk on water (The Craft tricked you)
A witch doesn’t practice malintent or inflict evil (anyone can do that)
A witch is connected to nature and like nature — has light and shade.
A healer is someone who seeks to be the light that they wish they’d had in their darkest moments.
— Alan Watts
It occurred to me recently:
A bitch is often just a woman pointing out the truth.
A whore is often just a liberated woman.
A slut is a slur for a woman exploring her sexual desires.
So then I got really interested in one question — when did the divine feminine start being feared?
Every Indigenous and nature-based matriculture around the world honours the Mother and the Earth.
The Celts, Aboriginal Australians, Native Americans and Sámi people (and many more) understand that women carry intuitive wisdom and they respect the balance that is needed between the masculine and feminine for survival — as seen in the cycles of nature and the seasons of life.
Powerful women were once revered, not feared.
When the Catholic Church began their religion (yes, it was invented) — they started to realise that people were far more sovereign than they wanted them to be. It was a threat to their authority.
So to control them… they had to invent something.
Make them fear an entity that was everywhere:
Mothers. Daughters. The Wise Ones.
WOMEN.
“Witch. The word slithers from the mouth like a serpent, drips from the tongue as thick and black as tar. We never thought of ourselves as witches, my mother and I. For this was a word invented by men, a word that brings power to those who speak it, not those it describes. A word that builds gallows and pyres, turns breathing women into corpses.”
— Emilia Hart
Now to be clear — I love men and the masculine (in the embodied form).
But a weak man fears a strong woman.
The men of this time (interrogators, churchmen and lawmakers) were obsessed with women having sex with the Devil.
‘Men trying to make women into the Devil’ is the short of the long story of the witch hunts.
Theologian William Perkins in his 1618 book Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft stated: “The woman being the weaker sex, is sooner entangled by the devil’s illusions with the damnable art than the man.”
A witch represents a woman who knows herself and has innate powers.
Wise women were seen as different, and therefore dangerous.
Most women now have a wound around being “a lot” or “too much” (cue: Adam Brody healing every woman when he said “I can handle you” in the TV show Nobody Wants This)
I believe this comes from the witch hunt era.
Women who were deemed ‘witches’ possessed feminine powers.
A sexually alive woman with vital life force.
A woman who reads and cannot be tricked.
A lit-up woman who is attuned to nature and can heal others and herself.
The most dangerous thing a women can do is keep herself in the bud and shut herself off from eros — the erotic life force that courses thorigh her body. She is cut off from passion for life and she stops blossoming.
Her magnificent flame dies.
— Sarah Durham Wilson
The men (patriarchy and the Church) of this time did not want this, so what did they do?
They persecuted women for the very things that make us divine:
PLEASURE.
FREEDOM.
SISTERHOOD.
Without the feminine, life becomes rigid, exhausting, and disconnected. With it, we return to something deeper, something truer.
Integrating the feminine isn’t just about balance — it’s about wholeness. It’s about reclaiming what has been suppressed, denied, or undervalued in ourselves and in the world.
We all know this: women are amazing.
We bleed every month, and somehow don’t die.
We intuit deep knowing.
We birth the next generation or creation.
We sync our cycle to the moon (and other gals) and have four inner seasons too.
One of my favourite things about the feminine is the intense closeness of our friendships — there is no love like the love of an anam cara.
This goes for all genders, and friends are the BEDROCK OF LIFE.
Coffee,
on the couch,
with a good friend.
Wounds bared,
sunlight kissing the floor —it’s the closest thing to godliness
I know.— Harriet Selina
So this is why, in the 17th century, they went after and exploited female bonds first.
Tattling on each other was one way to attempt survival from the noose.
Women outed other women as ‘witches’ to escape the fate of a wise woman.
They denied their supernatural powers and banned their divine feminine qualities.
Some would say the witchhunts never ended, now existing on more subtle realms.
Words are important.
Words have power.
Words matter.
Witch means ‘wise’ — but then it was weaponised.
On my most recent year-long pilgrimage in Ireland, I took a side trip to Scotland for a month and visited witch monuments and sites of hangings and public burnings. I wanted to understand the meaning behind the word ‘witch’ and leave offerings for the souls who perished for simply being themselves.
In Edinburgh, I saw with my own eyes the place where the last woman was hung in public on account of being a witch.
It was a spectacle, in a public square — and in front of a pub called ‘The Last Drop’ (now a trendy watering hole) in the Grassmarket where crowds would gather to watch public executions. Nowadays, buskers play in front of no adequate monument (a sad-looking metal fencing held together by tape was all I saw in September 2023) and revellers drink unaware.
I also visited the Witches Well which is meant to honour the accused witches burnt at the stake, and left an offering of flowers and a moss agate crystal.
I love that ‘weird’ comes from the 10th-century Old English noun wyrd (a feminine one) from the verb weorthan which means “to become” (associated with fate and personal destiny)6. So being called ‘weird’ is a compliment and means you are becoming more yourself.
The etymology of witch is also “life force” or seeing and knowing.
And yet, to summarise: if you owned a black cat, were caught looking at the moon, picked herbs to make a tisane, displeased a man, or your husband just simply wanted to get rid of you — YOU WERE A WITCH.
You would be dead.
So, what actually happened in the witch hunts?
I’m not a witch scholar, but Max Dashu is.
Max Dashu shared that “witch as evil doer” was completely made up by men.
In a workshop, Max shared the extraordinary facts of the era including —
Witches kept earth-based wisdom alive
Witches are connected to pagan festivals in the Wheel of the Year
A witch carried and passed on oral cultural wisdom — in a time when all the wisdom (religion and law) came from men
The written record of European witches and witchcraft is by white men
The penny for me dropped when Max shared that witches (as midwives and doulas) would perform ceremonies over babies.
Women had bathing child practices they did in ceremony that involved blessing, signing, chanting, calling ancestors to protect the child, and smoking the wee bairn with mugwort.
Women had been doing these rituals for a long time, and priests saw this and decided that only men could do it.
BOOM.
The end of matriarchal wisdom culture.
And to end this — they had to put an end to powerful women.
I read Allyson Shaw’s Ashes & Stones: A Scottish Journey in Search of Witches and Witnesses and it hugely illuminated what most likely (using historical records) happened in the witch trials:
“Over the course of their lives, almost everyone in early modern Scotland would have witnessed the spectacle of women strangled and burned at the stake. It was an event, and ale was often given to the spectators. The bonfire would have been seen for miles and the smoke would have lingered for days, a signal to other women. No one was safe; none were immune to accusation. This is how terror works.”
Firstly, they would exhaust your soul.
The authorities (men) were obsessed with asking women if they’d had sex with the Devil and they wanted all the details.
Women suffered until they gave the answers with exhaustion, withholding sleep, beatings, starvation, and many other forms of torture — until the crime of witchcraft could be proven by ‘meeting with the Devil carnally.’
So many women in imprisonment — by the point of confession — were so depleted, fatigued, and deprived of their humanity that they were often hallucinating and confused by endless cross-examination.
As Allyson Shaw writes, “Sleep deprivation was the most common form of torture used to extract confession from the accused.”
A man would be paid to watch her and keep her awake. It was effective.
Then, they would terrorise you.
Witch torture methods were extreme and inhumane.
One included carrying a chunk of red hot iron for precisely three steps, without dropping it. If you dropped it, you were a witch.
Or the impossible-to-pass ‘swimming the witch’ test that involved being tied to a stone and thrown into the water. If you lived, you were a witch. And killed. If you drowned, you were innocent. But dead.
A room of powerful men would interrogate a terrified and tortured woman until she confessed to sordid behaviour with the Devil, to being a witch, and to (crucially) sharing the names of the other witches in her coven.
Even though most of the torture after arrest (based on unverified evidence) was illegal, “The church needed evidence to take to the Privy Council in Edinburgh” — so in your ground to the bone state, they would essentially make you so tired that you would hallucinate and say anything for your survival.
There was no limit on how long the Kirk (Scottish word meaning church) justice system could hold someone before producing the ‘evidence’. Often extracted over months in a dingy, lightless, cold, bare room at the town ‘tollbooth’ (a cell). Heads were shaved, body marked with torture from ‘examinations’.
— Allyson Shaw
Max Dashu shared that a witch would be offered the grace of being strangled instead of being burnt alive if she reads her “confession” to everyone.
What were they looking for in witch examinations?
Literally — marks of the Devil on your body.
This could be a birthmark, bite, scar, scratch, or mole.
The witches needed to describe the Devil in their confessions. And as Allyson Shaw so astutely highlights — in reading hundreds of records — the Devil is repeatedly described not as a ‘supernatural menace’, but as a human man.
“Repeatedly, women under interrogation describe Satan as a man, perhaps drawing on memories of sexual violence they had endured, details of other partners, or even the men who stood in judgment before them.”
Then, the accused were killed.7
The cause of death was often not recorded in the Scottish records of the time.
In their last recorded words in the hours before they were to die, often the ‘witch’ would make a statement retracting their confession and claim “it all a lie extracted under torture” to say things that weren’t true.
Then were also promised mercy, but never received it.
This is to say, almost every woman and girl was innocent. Only to die in vain, anyway.
Historians refer to the 300 years during which anywhere from 200,000 to 9 million victims were killed in Western Europe and Scandinavia as “The Women’s Holocaust.”8
Witches were not middle-class women. They often lived in rural villages.
The reason the witch hunts started was because King James suspected Danish witches were in a conspiracy with Scottish covens when they raised a severe storm that he and his new bride Queen Anne of Denmark were caught in — and so he began his own witch hunt in Scotland.
Probably my favourite line from a book ever: “In 1589, Queen Anne of Denmark married King James in a ceremony where neither were present.”
Another really disturbing thing is the sexualised nature of the torture.
The sadistic obsessions underlying the witch trials in Scotland are outstanding, and “these innocent women were caught up in the perverse fantasies of the men in power,” Allyson Shaw writes.
This is the bit I have been trying to unravel.
Women were forced to confess to intercourse with the Devil, then read a script of their demonic sex act, and then be accused of witchcraft as a result. I MEAN, HOW COULD YOU WIN?
“They were often asked what the Devil’s penis felt like inside them,” Allyson Shaw reports after reading hundreds of parish records of witch interrogations.
Allyson Shaw reports:
“Scottish women of the sixteenth century were modest. They would have rarely been fully naked in their lives, washing only their hands, feet and faces regularly, and wearing their shifts while bathing.
All their conservative ideas about sex would have been dictated by the Church.”
Suddenly, a woman or girl of this time (i.e you and me) would have been taken from our home, put in a damp cell with no fresh water or air, stripped naked, sleep deprived, malnourished, scared and intimidated, and then —
There was the prick.
This was an actual profession. A man called a ‘witch pricker’ would be paid very well to examine suspected witches and prick their naked flesh with large, sharp needles and pins to locate their ‘witches mark’.
The belief was that when found and pricked on, the witch would not feel pain.
It was of course used for coercive control and to humiliate a woman, especially to be stripped naked in the presence of a group of men.
This is where the term ‘prick’ comes from.
Allyson Shaw writes: “To stand naked, shaved, and subjected to intimate examination in front of men of power would have been beyond endurance, and the impact of this psychological torture must have been overwhelming.”
It is not humane to withstand that much dehumanisation.
The sexualised nature of the witch hunts were an attempt to control women, by means of torture… as well as meticulous interrogations to which the witches were subjected, which were a mixture of sexual exorcism and psychological rape.
— Silvia Federici
Even the strongest of women would have been broken.
To add to all of this — women who read were the most suspicious, as female literacy was significantly low (most men could sign their names, and only about 25% of women could).
So if you could read the written word, you were a powerful woman. And men of the time did not want that.
They used face cages and iron masks to silence women. I haven’t looked up these torture devices as I am afraid I will never be able to unsee them.
“An iron cage was fitted over the head of the accused with a spiked protrusion inserted into the mouth to prevent the wearer from speaking.”
— Allyson Shaw
You can see why women would confess anything to their captors just to not be put back in this contraption (and many scary others) for a potentially undefined, long time — often months.
Every woman was at risk.
King James VI published Daemonologie in 1597 — the same year that famine and plagues swept the country — and the first wave of witch-hunting ensued from this text that intended to convince people of witchcraft as evil.
The expense for killing a witch was passed on to their families.
The pyre on Castle Hill was never cold. The smoke from the perpetual bonfires and the bodies of those burned in them, would have choked the air and darkened the skies over the North Sea.
— Allyson Shaw
Witches were hunted purely for male desire. By men who wanted to find women guilty of being a woman.
A witch was a seductive figure — and perhaps because she was mysterious, she was sinister.
So the men in power could rage all their power over her. And they did.
Women and girls endured branding, rape, torture, sleep deprivation, starvation, and no agency over their mind and body for centuries.
Witches were stripped of their life force, gifts of healing, connection to nature, and each other.
Witches are magic, and the men of the time made the divine feminine a killable offence.
Being a wise woman was a crime and every woman was a criminal.
Living alone as a single woman was a criminal act, and living with other women was scandalous.
Scaldrie, or scolding — a woman’s use of her critical voice — was also illegal.9
Women who would naturally gather — to collect water from wells, herbs for healing, and help each other during childbirth — was also lawbreaking.
The witch hunts set up women against each other — often confessing or outing another ‘witch’ with the promise of ‘getting off’, then both being burnt together.
But what women knew wasn’t magic in a supernatural sense — it was real healing.
Some men are still afraid of the witch.
It’s still everywhere in mainstream culture, and it’s going to take a lot of deconditioning.
I was reading a book to my four-year-old nephew and there was a picture of a witch in an illustration, he said: “I’m scared. Witches are scary.”
I said, “A witch is a woman who helps other people.”
He didn’t look convinced.
The divine feminine looks different in this century.
Women can keep their surnames.
Women earn their own money.
A woman won’t be killed for saying ‘no’ to a man — but she still might.
Women are also forgetting the divinity within.
Women are poisoning themselves to look attractive.
And women are not being taught earth-based wisdom.
The demonisation of the divine feminine was catastrophic — but it didn’t kill us all.
Every woman at some soul level — burns at the injustice and cruelty that was inflicted on our female ancestors.
TRUST YOUR INTUITION, COMPLETELY.
It is our inheritance as women.
Our intuition is a feelings-based somatic wisdom. It is an in-built profound awareness of what is true.
Intuition is irrefutable.
A witch is ‘the one who knows.’
You are the one who knows.
You are the heart of everything.
Your feminine secrets are a soul gift to the masculine psyche. You must simply let go — and know this is the work of the Goddess — our gifts are always offered to those who truly need them.
— Sophie Bashford
This isn’t to degrade men, this is to elevate women.
We need the masculine.
The union of the healthy masculine and feminine is what we are here for.
Women of that era lost the sovereignty and respect always given to the divine feminine by every Indigenous and nature-based people since time immemorial.
Interestingly, the Church’s creation story of Eve shows that a curious woman wanting her own knowledge dared to eat the fruit of a tree and brought suffering to all of humanity.
In short — female desire cannot be trusted and is doomed.
We were socially conditioned to be obedient and small — or risk death.
We all consciously or unconsciously seek male approval or male desire.
As Sharon Blackie of If Women Rose Rooted — a book I read while travelling Scotland — writes:
“Women might have been complicit — we had been well-trained for centuries, after all; a bit of burning at the stake, incarceration in nunneries and lunatic asylums if we didn’t do what we were told, and the constant threat of rape and violence: all of them do wonders for compliance.”
A witch is an authentic, rooted woman.
When we uncover the burned feminine — we shake the ashes off all the parts of our own lives that are dormant, cloaked in fear of judgment and persecution, or not ready to leap — for fear of death.
Restoring the power of the word ‘witch’ means restoring the original meaning back into the collective psyche. And the true power of the archetype.
To be a witch is to be fully alive and embodied in the divine feminine.
This is not about fighting the patriarchy (although we’ve been doing that forever and we’re tired).
A witch is not afraid of the shadow side of life, meaning she is able to go to hard and deep places inside herself and, in turn, she is able to stay steady and spacious with those hard feeling in others. The witch cares and loves. To be a witch is to be a woman who is embodied in practices that are both mystical but also very real and human.
— Deborah Claire Bagg
This is about revering womanhood and the witch archetype.
“The feminine has never let me down.”
I had this reflection recently where I realised that female friendships, the Mother archetype and nature have consistently been there for me.
The masculine — well, there have been many disappointments.
I have a Father wound, and I’ve been actively working on healing that.
On days I could not move
it was women
who came to water my feet
until I was strong enough
to standand it was women
who nourished me
back to life— Rupi Kaur
The assumption about who and what a witch is can be clarified once and for all.
A witch is a wise woman.
And the divine masculine — in other words, an embodied, safe man — has a role to play.
As my friend Jordan said, “A guy doesn’t need to shop around for safety.”
Women do.
And now we don’t have to wonder why.
We inherited the fear from centuries of soul loss.
To be without the pelt [sealskin] causes a woman to pursue what she thinks she should do, rather than what she truly wishes… in a world that values driven women who go, go, go, the stealing of soul skins is very easy.
— Clarissa Pinkola Estés
And men who empower women by letting the divine feminine dance and who make our nervous systems feel safe — really help.
Deep women need deep partners (read that scrolling on the ‘gram)
As Bell Hooks wrote, “Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.”
I think most women have a past life witch wound — whether it’s conscious or not.
I wasn’t aware that I did until I started seeing an intuitive massage healer.
I was already obsessed with the priestess archetype, the witch hunts in the Middle Ages in Europe, and why the divine feminine is so feared.
But I didn’t know it had anything to do with me.
During a massage, Mara channelled a message for me: “You were tortured many times, and conscious for it.”
I hadn’t looked into past life persecution, but this felt very true.
At a recent massage Mara said: “In previous lifetimes, you were with abusive partners and trapped in not having boundaries and sovereignty over your body. In this incarnation, you’ve come to set that all straight. To choose and have complete knowing over who you allow to share your energy and body.”
OKAY, WOW.
As usual, this is a long piece and it needs to be.
Words matter.
Words have power.
‘Witch’ was weaponised against women, and it’s time to reclaim its original meaning.
No, we don’t need more sleep. It’s our souls that are tired, not our bodies. We need nature. We need magic. We need adventure. We need freedom. We need truth. We need stillness. We don’t need more sleep, we need to wake up and live.
— Brooke Hampton
The next time someone brings up a witch, you remind them:
A witch is a wise woman.
Every woman is intuitive and psychic.
Every woman channels healing energy.
Every woman is connected to nature — stone, trees, plants, flowers, moss, and wellsprings. Animals often accompany us as guardians and friends.
Every woman is a witch.
You are a witch.
You were born wise.
Now — WE RISE.
What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would split open.
— Muriel Rukeysev
Subtle changes to embody wise woman energy:
Stop apologising when you did nothing wrong: “Sorry, can I ask…” “Sorry, do you mind” — ASK OR REQUEST.
Swap ‘but’ for ‘and’, you are doing it to be polite or likable — STATE THE TRUTH.
Take ‘just’ out of your vocabulary: “I just did a degree” or “I just got a job” — it’s minimising yourself, you didn’t ‘just’ do it, YOU DID IT.
Honour what you say you will do — AND DO IT.
Also, read Women Who Run With The Wolves.
Again, language is important.
Speech is our truth device.
One we didn’t have for the longest time, so use it.
If we don’t tend to the fire inside, it will kill us.
But if we nourish it, it will guide us.
— Marion Woodman
Now in 2025, a new Scottish official tartan has been created to honour the thousands of victims — primarily women — falsely accused and executed for witchcraft under the Witchcraft Act 1563-1736.10 This is the first attempt at a living memorial.
Now, that is wild.
So what does this mean? 400 years later? For women?
We are in a witch renaissance.
We have to celebrate having choice in our bodies and lives.
We ought to never take our freedom lightly.
We give immense gratitude to our ancestors.
AND WE LIVE.
It is often said —
We are the ones they couldn’t burn.
Reclaiming the word ‘witch’ means remembering you are a wild woman.
A wise woman. A divine soul. The one who knows.
You are a witch.
You are in rhythm with the earth.
You are all four seasons.
Forage, craft, purify, conjure, weave, dance, and share your magic.
You are safe to be wise and to be alive.
May it be that way for every woman to come.
You don’t have to conform to the good girl complex you’ve been indoctrinated to embody.
Free yourself.
— Maddie Moothart
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Silent reading was considered dangerous and solitary reading was self-indulgent and potentially rebellious. It was also seen to distract women from their homely duties and serving their husbands and children.
Max Dashu is the author of Witches and Pagans: Women in European Folk Religion, 700-1100 and the writer of Suppressed Histories, source here.
The Malleus Maleficarum claims that women are more susceptible to demonic possession due to their lack of physical and spiritual strength and their promiscuous nature, source here.
Allyson Shaw writes: ‘One in ten accused witches were tried in Edinburgh. Two-thirds of all accused tried across Scotland were sentenced to death. Most of the women tried for witchcraft were taken to Castle Hill and burned, more than anywhere else in Scotland.’
A figure of 9 million victims in the European witchhunts is an influential popular myth in 20th-century feminism and neopaganism. The nine million figure is ultimately due to Gottfried Christian Voigt. The history of this estimate was researched by Behringer in 1998, source here.
Direct quote from the Malleus Meleficarum: ‘When a woman thinks alone, she is evil. They are more credulous…they have slippery tongues…the natural reason is that she is more carnal than a man…those among ambitious women are more deeply infected….she is a liar by nature.’
I live in a village called Sort in Catalonia where the trials of many women accused of witchcraft were held.Many were burned. The main accusation against them was that they refused to acknowlege the power of the feudal lord over them. I would imagine this was the sexual right of the nobility. This was in the 1600's. Ugo Bardi has written some very good stuff on witch burning which he seès as a reaction of societies under strain. He notes that it was not chiefly a Medieval problem but peaked in the Enlightenment.
Thanks. Great article.
Although this feels like somewhat of a departure, the form is intact and so is the charm. Thematically it couldn’t be more on point. I love a well-researched article, brilliantly written, and woven together with the personal. Bravo x