At a time in which we still don’t believe women—Harvey Weinstein’s conviction was overturned because too many women had testified against him for too many crimes—our collective healing journey can seem quite hopeless. However, I don’t like to dwell on that for too long. I prefer to alchemize my grief and anger, and cultivate tiny bits of mossy hope in hard places. Recently, one such cushion of hope-filled moss has been coming back into relationship pace. A teacher of mine speaks about how “moving at earth pace is where we will find healing and liberation.” That’s the speed at which we deconstruct (belief) systems, reclaim our hope, and integrate new ways forward—in relationship to all living beings. I heard this in the context of our current collective fight for Palestinian, Sudanese, Congolese (and so many more) liberation, decolonization, the unsettling of indigenous lands, and divesting from white supremacy.
And on this beautiful Beltane evening (a night that often conjures images of broom-riding witches flying around large bonfires on mountaintops), I would like to invite you to the idea of moving at relationship pace in order to heal one of the most prevalent core wounds of modern Euro-centric civilization: the Witch Wound—a collective intergenerational trauma that wisdom keepers such as Yeye Luisah Teish believe we are still in PTSD for.
I used to teach classes on the Witch Wound, focusing on what it means to be a witch, how antiquity viewed witches, the long history of witch persecutions, our intergenerational trauma, and how to overcome it. Those were pretty good workshops and I was always very proud of them. But I recently recognized that it was time to dive deeper—it isn’t enough to talk about the figurative and literal magic that’s been missing from our lives ever since the Burning Times; this wound is about more than that. As my own deconstruction work around this particular scar curled its spiral way one level deeper into decolonization territory, I realized the systemic elements of oppression hiding in plain sight: the Witch Craze was about much more than just the oppression of women—although that in itself is systemic misogyny. The unjust persecution of women, gender-non-conforming people, and all heretics was mostly about land and money grabs, and the wedge that was pushed through entire communities sowed a mistrust and fear mentality that lives on in our collective and individual shadow today. This means that healing the Witch Wound is about more than just reclaiming our intuitive knowing. It is about coming back into earth relationship pace, re-learning to trust each other, and simply believing each other. The more we speak the truth of these past events—and similarly, current events—the more we’ll be able to focus our attention on collective action for liberation and healing. Because we won’t be able to shadow work our way out of the global polycrisis of genocide and ecocide, alone. We’ll need to do it in healthy community.
Beltane or Walpurgis Night
Beltane is one of the eight festivals on the Neopagan and Wiccan Wheel of the Year. While many claim that this “calendar” is itself an ancient one, it is a fairly new synthesis, created by men of the 20th century, like Gerald Gardner. However, the underlying original festivals do have some Celtic roots: the four solar events (Yule, the midwinter solstice, Ostara, the spring equinox, Litha, the midsummer solstice, and Mabon, the fall equinox) were mainly used to track the seasons in pre-Christian Alpine regions of central and western Europe. The other four cross-quarter days (Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasad, and Samhain) are considered to be indigenous to the pre-Christian Insular traditions of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and parts of England.
Beltane is a significant festival marking the beginning of the summer season and the pastoral calendar. It is a time of transition from the harshness of winter to the warmth and abundance of summer. This imagery shapes the most common Beltane celebrations: rituals and customs aimed at ensuring fertility, protection, and prosperity for the community and its livestock. Maypole dancing, large bonfires, and the gathering of herbs and wildflowers all come to mind.
This fertile coming together of opposites—not unlike some of our most ancient myths of the Sacred Marriage—could become our new-ancient call to action. How can we use the myths of Inanna and Dumuzi or Isis and Osiris as recipes for coming into relationship pace, both within and without? We’ve heard a lot about the inner alchemical integration process of what many modern traditions call sacred masculine and divine feminine energies. That form of shadow work can be very important for healing our individual wounds. But to get to collective liberation, we need to take it further, beyond just the internal binary. How can we extend this to our families and communities? How can we embody and cultivate trust with one another from a place of interdependence? We are a part of the living world and the living world is a part of us. We are both whole unto self and fully connected to others.
“[...]Allowing the horned god to live within us means accepting death as transformation. It means living an incarnated life—a life in which spontaneous spirit is allowed to transform matter. […] Not only do we have to die to a false image of ourselves, but we have to change our outer life accordingly.
Change means change.”
Marion Woodman & Elinor Dickson, Dancing in the Flames
Understanding the dual nature of masculinity through the lens of the horned god, and marrying that to the triple nature of the feminine principle, is more than a modern polarity teaching. It’s a portal into a beautiful spectrum of magic that awakens our relationship to Self, our relationship to Nature, and our relationship to the people with whom we’re trying to co-create a new world.
“If we, as a collective, continue to be driven by projections and splits between disembodied spirit and unconscious matter, we can never be present to each other beyond the demands of an ego that is trapped in a one-sided need for order and control. When conscious matter becomes a vessel that can receive spirit, this joining together can bring us to a new level of consciousness. The ego can stand in a creative relationship to the Self. To stand in relationship to the Self is to be totally present to oneself. When we are present to ourselves, we are present to others in a totally new way. In the world of the Self, we meet all those of whom we are a part, whose hearts we have touched; here there is no aloneness, only presence. There is no egoism involved here, no need to win or lose, no need to control. The projections have been withdrawn and reclaimed as parts of ourselves. Only when this happens, is genuine relationship possible.”
Ritual of Amends
In a personal and symbolic attempt at reclamation, I am naming both the women who were burned or killed in the little protestant town I live in, and their families and kin. Thanks to the meticulous hybris of white Christian patriarchy, the records of the Burning Times in Germany (and most of Europe) are exceptionally meticulous. If you currently reside in western or central Europe, or if you have ancestry here or on the British Isles, I would like to invite you to consider engaging in a somewhat different and unusual Beltane practice: I am going to create a personal ritual of amends and repair. Maybe this resonates with you as well. I’d love to hear how this lands for you in the comments.
Because while “We are the daughters of the witches you couldn’t burn” is a cute little slogan—I get it; we’d all like to think we (/our ancestry) were on the “right side of history”—considering the sheer numbers of those killed, it’s unlikely. And seeing what’s currently happening in the world, yet again, we can assume that our ancestors were probably at least complicit, if not directly responsible, for the atrocities committed against heretics and healers at the end of the middle ages.
I have looked up the public archives of my area’s witch prosecutions and I will read their names out loud around a fire-staring practice. I will offer my amends and other tokens of healing to these family lines (I have made a poultice of fresh herbs, and collected wildflowers, rocks, sticks, and pinecones to make little forest altars for each of them in the coming weeks). I will try to learn as much as possible about their stories, I will sit and grieve with them, and I will renew my vows to co-create tangible action of liberation and healing in this lifetime. I will journal on the question of where I have the Oppressor in me and how I have contributed to oppression myself. I will re-examine my attitude to what we now call gossip and judgment, I will meditate on what healing could look like for all of us and how I can decenter myself from that conversation (as a white European, I feel like it is my job in this entire rebirthing process to let my ego fully dissolve). I will take immediate action in the form of joining a Mayday protest for a Free Palestine in my region and I will sign up to support the refugee community in this town. I will continue to work on deconstructing colonization and my lineage’s ancestral role in it (stay tuned for that piece…). And I will continue to learn from those who have been able to keep their ancestral wisdom traditions alive and not pretend like I know anything about mine (continental Celtic traditions are so terribly documented or well hidden away somewhere that it’s virtually impossible for me to confidently reclaim anything other than my own cauldron of intuition and humility). This work is ongoing.
As always, take what’s yours and leave what’s not.
Reclamation
I name the names of the women who were burned or killed in my town. I celebrate and elevate all women in my life who are willing to fail forward on their healing paths, to leave their weapons in the yard, and to fight for liberation and healing for all.
From the year 1596,
May 19th: Anna Leicht, wife of carpenter Michael Leicht
June 9th: Anna Schott, Barbara Blei, Barbara Keget
June 23rd: Catharina Menlein
June 19th: Ursula Luntz
July 5th: Margaretha Strampfer and her daughter Margaretha Ickelsheimer
July 30th: Barbara Sprintz
August 9th: Margaretha Krantz, Anna Buhling, Anna Lechner
November: Ursula Rösch (Külsheim), Elisabeth Mörser, Barbara Hornung, Helene Burk, Margaretha Gerber, Helene Link, Anna Gütleins, Cordula Knoll, Christina Windsheimer, Frau Siber, and Frau Klee, wife of Hans Klee
December 10th: Barbara Joha
From the year 1597:
Anna Jordan (Wiebelsheim) and
her daughter Barbara Nagel
Stunning and potent as always, my friend