When the Dead Need to Speak

(and we need to listen)

Yesterday, while I was sitting in the living room, apropos of nothing, except that I was thinking about my book, thinking about how sick I had been during the publicity launch and how I had to trust the dead that I had called upon already to do the work I could not do, except for that, I mean the house was absolutely still, I was still, and a painting fell off the wall.

It is a copy of a 15th century Flemish Madonna we found at a flea market over a decade ago. Our house is filled with artwork we have found here and there, mostly discarded by the no-longer-faithful, which we’ve dusted off and hung up devotionally. Nevertheless, this particular piece was over by the door and I never really spent a lot of time looking at it. It clattered to the floor from high up on the wall and, luckily, the glass did not break.

The noise brought Clark running down the stairs. “What happened?”

“The dead have sent us a message,” I said.

“Maybe the picture hook was no good,” said Clark, examining it.

“We had workmen in the house stomping past it day after day two months ago and it was fine. We stomp by it all day long and its never fallen. It fell now, at this moment, today, when I’m finally feeling better, finally ready to go full throttle for my book again.”

“So it’s a message,” agreed Clark. “But what’s the message? Who’s it from? What are they saying? Why did they grab your attention?”

Together we studied the painting, the pomegranate the Mother is holding, the various details in the painting, but nothing “spoke” to us with any urgency. I went to put on another cup of coffee and Clark, our resident researcher, got busy. “Come here,” he called at last. “It was painted by Holbein the Elder in 1484,” he announced.

“Okay….” I was still mystified.

“So in 1484 the ironically named Pope Innocent empowered inquisitors to prosecute witchcraft across Germany. In enthusiastic response the Malleus Maleficarum would be published two years later. ”

My skin prickled with goosebumps. While writing my book, Mothers of Magic, I had called upon all those women (and the men, too, because there were a few allies) who had been tortured and murdered as “witches” to help me tell their story—a story about how and why civilization has always enacted violence against the mother, pitting their daughters against them, cutting off their breasts, sexually abusing them, and burning their bodies to ash. I had invoked Alyce Young, the first known woman in the Americas executed as a witch, in Connecticut. I had called on my own forbear who had fled a land where the Pendle Hill women were condemned as witches only to find herself in a new land where the gallows were already being built.

A particular Madonna had needed my attention and I often say each of these mothers holds within her mantle legions of the dead, particular dead of particular places who have gifts and healings to offer us. These women—so many of them abused and forgotten—were showing up through her, with her, and for me and this project which has asked so much of my body to birth into the world.

The painting is back on the wall but the dead are alive in my heart. It is not just “my” book but their book, a book for all of our ancestral mothers and grandmothers who need their real story told. How can we understand why the relationships of mothers and daughters, sisters and gal pals, are so fraught if we do not understand the centuries of violence and persecution terrifying us into silence and conformity? How do we liberate ourselves from these inheritances of fear and claim our right to make noise again about what is really going on?

A painting fell off the wall and made a lot of noise.

My prayer is that my book makes a lot of noise, that the dead amplify its message, that its message must be heard, and that each person who reads it finds the faith and safety to speak their truth about this world we live in—and the world we might live in again if only we can recover the old ways. My prayers is that mothers and daughters will read this book together, that sisters will read this book together, that friends will read this book together—and together we will tell a new story about the world we live in and the world we could live in, if only we truly knew our past.

I hope you will help me tell the story of these witches, of our grandmothers, and of ourselves, stories that liberate us from the horrors of civilization.

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Perdita Finn is the author of Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World, Mothers of Magic: Summoning the Wisdom of Our Ancestors, and with her husband Clark Strand The Way of the Rose: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary. She teaches popular workshops on connecting and collaborating with both the dead and the animate everything. She lives with her family in the moss-filled shadows of the Catskill Mountains.