Out of the Fires

A Message from the Ancestral Grandmothers

[art: Jules Bastion Lepage]

[The following is an excerpt from my upcoming book Mothers of Magic … I felt called to share it with everyone in my Substack. It took a lot out of me to write.]

You would think by now we would not be surprised by what good men can do in the name of empire and justice. We have seen them inscribe their codes and laws, hold their courts and call their witnesses, announce their verdicts and prepare the pyres. We have seen how much they enjoy the interrogations and the torture. We have watched them for so long now cloak their violence in the authority of order and enlightenment. We have watched so many of our daughters, our sisters, our mothers, and our friends burn in the fires lit by reasonable men.

Let us tell you the story of Jehanne of Domremy who listened to our voices and danced with us under the beech tree of her ancestors. In those days we still had the old stories and followed the old ways. A bard might come in the winter and tell us the tales of that old shapeshifter Merlin and his prophecies, of the Lady who always came back to the lovers of the land, who would be called Jehanne, who would be born in an oak wood, who had always been our mother, always been our daughter. An old seer, weathered and worn, might ride into our village and over a crust of bread whisper to us that the Mother was returning to heal the world. “Her mother called her Jehanne,” they’d say, “and her father called her D’arc.” Our eyes would widen in recognition. Jehanne who was the ark, the holy covenant, the lost grail we’d all been seeking for so long to liberate us from the oppressions of pious priests.

No one read the Bible in those days. No one could even read, not even the country priest. Ask someone who Jesus was and they might know or yet again they might not. We laughed when we heard an old man, questioned by the authorities, say “Jesus? I know that fellow…he hangs upside down on his tree in the spring so his blood can renew the world.” Oh, we laughed behind our hands. Because the old man still knew what mattered—the tree at the heart of the world, the blood that renews the land, the stories of his grandmothers. That old man knew that when a little girl was born to the sound of ringing bells in an oak wood that she was the one the visionaries had foretold. He still listened, as we all did, to the songs of the birds, the whispers of the trees, the messages of the weather. The land was still our scripture. The earth was still our law.

Jehanne rode into battle and performed wonders. All the king’s men could not figure out how to put their kingdom back together again—but Jehanne, who’d never ridden a horse before, pulled the lost sword from the stone altar, triumphed over their enemies, crowned their prince, and won the hearts of the people who brought her their children to bless and their babes to bring back to life. But none of that was her real work, none of that was even the miracle.

Her real battle was with the Church.

She was captured, betrayed, imprisoned, and brought before a tribunal of learned scholars, each one ready to parse her words and condemn her soul to hellfire. They knew already the outcome of their trial but it mattered to them that it seem reasonable, conclusive, and fair. No matter that each night she was wrapped in chains and raped. No matter that they showed her the pincers and the rack. No matter that they were already collecting the wood for her pyre.

[still from The Trial of Joan of Arc]

Still, they were fools, as such men always are, and they wrote down everything she said. They wanted to inscribe their own greatness for history as they vanquished the witch, the heretic, the nineteen-year-old girl the people were whispering was really the queen of heaven and earth. They wanted to vanquish the whispers and the legends under an edifice of legality and paperwork. But the scribes didn’t just write down their questions they also recorded for posterity the Maid’s wise and witty answers. That illiterate girl defeated, again and again, the most educated men of Christendom. That was the miracle. She exposed them as the monsters they really were.

Still they burned her alive.  But not her heart. That they could not burn. One of them reached into the embers, searing his hands, grabbed it, still beating, and hurled it into the river, not even realizing he was giving back that immaculate heart to the earth itself.

Perhaps because they knew that they had lost, they amplified their efforts to silence our voices, the voices of their mothers and grandmothers. Most of all they wanted to silence the of the earth beating in rhythm with Jehanne’s wild heart. They wanted to silence and terrify their wives and their daughters for posterity. Their pronouncements became louder, their arguments more nuanced and complex. They invented a machine that would give birth to a thousand machines to impose their reality upon the world. Once they had inscribed their commandments onto stone but now they were printed on paper and distributed throughout the kingdom. Less than ten years after Jehanne’s murder, they began printing the Bible and demanding that men know how to read it. Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. To ensure the truth of this they wrote another book, The Malleus Maleficarum, The Hammer of the Witches, justifying the terror and violence they were ready to unleash upon the world.

How many women were tortured and murdered? We did not keep accounting books—we wept and raged. In some villages not a single woman was left alive after the inquisitors had left. Daughters were encouraged to betray their mothers, mothers their daughters, neighbors and friends their sisters. The accused were subjected to elaborate tortures, pornographic tortures, until they confessed. They had felt the stirrings of sexual desire so they must have been seduced by the devil. They didn’t want to sleep with their husband, their lord, their priest, the man who held power over them so they must be possessed. They dreamt they could fly in their dream so they were demonic. They saw the future. They knew which plants healed. They left milk out for the kittens and the fairies and they were suspect. They made poppets to hold their petitions to their ancestors. They whispered prayers to their mothers and grandmothers on the other side and were confirmed as witches. More than anything it was seeking solace and guidance from the dead that got them accused and condemned.

[art: Rudoph Epp]

Just as Tiamat’s body had been split in two so were women divided from each other—indoctrinated into fear and silence. Kill all the women in a single village and the women for hundreds of miles around will know what is possible. They will hold that memory in their bones for hundreds of years. No wonder they will vilify each other for any behavior that might attract the wrong kind of attention. Don’t get yourself noticed or we all might find ourselves swinging from the gallows. Don’t dress like that. Don’t speak like that. Don’t do that. Nice girls don’t.

Mothers feared for their daughters and daughters feared their mothers as they became older and less fearful. After centuries of terror women learned to ally themselves with men protectively instead of other women.

The lie that these men will impose on their own history is that all of these events belonged to a distant superstitious past, a dark age when people would believe anything and knew nothing. The actual truth is that the worst horrors erupted in those places with the most educated of scholars in the very times when philosophy and the sciences were first emerging. There were significantly more atrocities in Germany, in Scotland, in England, and in the Americas among men who were sure the entire world could be divided into pieces, categorized, organized into hierarchies of meaning, analyzed and understood. There was no mystery that could withstand the minds of great men of learning. The whole world could be conquered, colonized, documented, mined, plowed, known and owned. The Age of the Enlightenment, the whole modern world, was built on a foundation of horrors. The wholesale terror against women is not a side-effect of “progress” but the basis of it.

It never really ended. If the attacks against white women subsided, they only increased against indigenous women, enslaved women, and any woman on the margins of society and colonial power. Not to mention the virgin forests that were leveled, the rivers that were dammed, the fields that were irradiated by chemicals and bombs. Violence against one women, or a small group of women, in the aftermath of the official witch craze, became an effective means of forcing all other women into conformity and obedience. Our legacy from all of those mothers and daughters burned, hung, drowned, mutilated, and buried alive is an almost never acknowledged soul-silencing terror handed down from one woman to another.

Almost none of these women would have called themselves witches. They were housewives and church ladies and spinsters and crones and maidens and good girls and bad girls. They were simply women whose only crime was their wombs. Men wanted to own the land and control the means of production.

Yet as much as they suffered, they are done with being victims. They do not need to be rescued, they need to be remembered. They know the lost truth that we all return no matter what is done to us. This is the wisdom the men of empire most wanted to suppress and silence: the dead don’t stay dead. As Jehanne’s body turned to ash, a dove emerged from the flames, her soul set free, and ready to return to another body and lead another army.

But this time her army is the earth itself and all the souls that have suffered under the horrors of civilization.

Let us call on our ancestors who endured these atrocities to give us the courage we need to stand with Jehanne and stand together. They will empower us to recover the lost arts of our ancestors. They will help us recover our intuitions and imaginations. With their help we will begin to trust our dreams and reveries again. We will remember how to listen to our voices, receive their guidance and collaborate with the unseen world.

Let us say the names of all those who died in the times of terror. Let us summon these souls to our cause. Who better to help us set the world right than those who were sacrificed to make it wrong?

---

The very best book about the European gynocide is Witch Craze by Anne Barstow. The best book about Joan of Arc is Vita Sackville-West’s biography and a little known 19th century monograph The Wonderful Story of Joan of Arc and the Meaning of Her Life for All Americans. Both were written before Joan was “sainted” by the Church, by non-pious writers and capture her true spirit. To understand how literacy changes our brain and sparks violence read the brilliant The Alphabet Vs. The Goddess by Leonard Schlain.

This has been the free offering for my substack. I also have a paid substack that allows for conversation and community, including a monthly Zoom conversation about the unseen world.

You can learn more about my books, workshops, and offerings at takebackthemagic.com