Season of the Witch, part 6

dismemberment

Long after the last fires blazed to burn the witches, long after the ashes had been raked into the river, long after the trials and the tortures were seemingly over, the terror remained.

How long does the trauma last after you burn every single woman in a village? In how many towns do you have to arrive with lists of suspect behaviors, with your sharpened implements of horror, before every woman in every town in a radius hundreds of miles wide is lowering her eyes, shutting her mouth, and guarding her every thought? Many of the women (and most of the men) who were murdered as witches died because they dared to defend or express support for a friend or family member who had been accused. Friends were encouraged to protect themselves by accusing suspect friends. Daughters were encouraged to turn in their mothers. Woman was set against woman--and the range of acceptable feminine behavior radically narrowed into an eye-lowered kerchief wearing conformity.

I was raised in New England and often wondered how many of those stolid Yankee ladies in their sensible sweaters could still feel the long shadow of the gallows--of women who had been too expressive, too wild, too outspoken, too this, too that, something other. And I wondered about women from the south polished into belles who could still hear in their cells, in their souls, the cries of their black and brown sisters subjected in their very homes, on their very lands to unspeakable atrocities.

How many women do you have to rape and torture and murder before the behavior of ALL women changes for generations?

In high school I appeared no less than three times in Arthur's Miller's play The Crucible which we also read in my high school English class like millions of adolescents across America. It was an allegory, of course, for the McCarthy hearings, of whom Miller himself had been a victim. Except that what I took away as a teenage girl was that the problem was not the good men of Harvard arriving with their religious tracts and vile judicial system to hang some out-of-control ladies--but slutty women tempting married men and hysterical girls whipped into a froth of frenzy bringing down a reign of terror upon the world. The message was clear. The maniacs, the problem, the enemy were these women. If it was an allegory it said the Senators of the House Un-American Committee were behaving like...women.

It's fascinating to me how ubiquitous this play is in curricula around the country--and how little is taught about the actual genocide enacted upon women for two hundred years, about how little is taught about how ubiquitous the witch accusations and murders were in the New World, about how such a terror campaign never actually ended but just shifted its locus of attention to the bodies of indigenous and enslaved women.

Over the centuries, their terror long since internalized, women have become adept at policing each other, especially, not surprisingly, in high school.

There is no one way to be a woman. There is no one way to be a witch.

For mothers and daughters to link arms with each other, to vow to protect each other in the expression of themselves psychically and sexually is a radical act of revolution against the world we live in. For women to stop policing each other's appearance, behavior, and sexuality is a radical act of revolution against theworld we live in. We must not turn away from the violence still being enacted upon the bodies of ANY of our sisters ANYWHERE in the world for ANY reason.

To stand with our Mother the Earth and her right to throw off the yoke, the whip, the asphalt, and the concrete of empire is a radical act of revolution. Can we trust Our Mother the earth as she liberates her own body and our bodies from the horrors of civilization?

The goal is not to find some way to adapt ourselves to civilization which has from its origins been set against the earth and women, the goal is not to yet again imagine that there is some way to tweak civilization and its institutions of violence and get it right. No the goal is to see it, at last, for what it really is and to begin to imagine a radically different way of returning to the ways of the natural world.

What we will need in order to do that are the witch ways we have lost--the guidance of the dead, our conversations with the unseen world, the care and help of our plant and animal familiars, the ability to see into the deep past and far into the future. We will need the very things that the inquisitors thought they had burned out of us.

We will only rise above the terror together.

This is a seven part series I am offering as part of my Free Substack. I also have a paid substack that includes a montly Zoom conversation about these posts and our experiences with the unseen world.

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