So, What REALLY Happened To The Witches?
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Did you know that when we ride a broomstick with a tall hat on our head, we are making a mockery of powerful businesswomen who were forced from their homes and who starved to death?
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As Ancient Feminine Wisdom returns (and I weep with joy as I write that), we find ourselves in chaos. Chaos precedes change. What we are witnessing is the patriarchy and its belief systems disintegrating.
I am laughed at whenever I openly talk about my passion for women who were murdered as witches. I don’t practice any odd witchcraft or do strange spells – but that won’t stop someone thinking I’m in league with the evil if they have a damaged psyche. What we have to understand is that we are all changing the world around us with every reaction and decision we make. SPELLING is named so because we bring about realities with the words we use. Magic is much subtler than wafting sage and sticking pins in dolls. You are practising little bits of magic all the time.
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Think Burning Witches Is Funny?
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People make jokes about burning me as a witch. I don’t see anyone laughing about any other mass-extermination in our history? But it’s fine, because we’re women and we should learn to take a joke. Oh, and also – you know, we’re okay now. We have nothing to complain about! I was kindly informed of this fact a few weeks ago by a man over dinner: ‘You are talking about something that isn’t here anymore. There is no problem for you. Look at you – you’re fine.’
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Pfeeeeeeeeeeeeuw. Already losing it. Take a few breaths.
Over the wretched couple of thousand years in a patriarchal society - aptly labelled the dark ages, yet which some insist has been a time of saving grace by messiahs - it is estimated that nine million women have been murdered simply for being women. NINE MILLION. Burned, hanged, and drowned – sometimes all three methods of execution were used on the same woman in one day. Some are still being murdered in this way.
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Women’s powers were ripped away so brutally that millions are still in financial, physical, and domestic crises hundreds of generations later. Society is desperately clinging on to the notion that women are possessions, and many more continue to die every year, trapped in homes and communities that take their lives. In some parts of the world, women’s genitals are still mutilated. In other areas, women are murdered if they refuse an arranged marriage.
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Other modern-day women live a much better existence, and yet never understand just how powerful they truly are. They settle for little love in their relationships and rarely go out without make up on or their armpits shaved. If they do, they feel vulnerable. And don't even get me started on the period – menstruation is sacred and yet we are taught to see it as an inconvenience. The degradation of women goes as far as to inform them they will pollute a spiritual space by being on their period.
THE LAST TWO THOUSAND YEARS
I don’t know about you, but all I remember from history classes was Hitler’s rise to power and whether Lee Harvey Oswald really killed JFK. That’s our education system for you – one large, ridiculous distraction. We seem to talk about the past as though all that matters in history is what has been happening over the last one hundred years. It is a stretch to find any unbiased education going back two thousand years, and before that we are made to think that we were just hanging out in caves and hitting each other over the head.
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As appealing as this sounds to those who love talking about recent prophets and saviours bringing a bit of order to their lives, women have suffered too greatly at the hand of the narrative for it to remain accepted.
I'd be interested to know what a Pagan is to you?
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You might think of witchcraft or animal sacrifice (ironic considering that the Old Testament is stuffed full of animal murder). The actual definition of Paganism is any unfamiliar belief system. Religious missionaries used it as a term to shun anyone not submitting to the authority of the church. Paganism is not a religion – it is simply anyone who was around before or outside of these regimented rituals and commandments.
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Paganism is as ancient as human existence, and includes people from all over the world; those who celebrated the phases of the moon, were community healers, wise women and men, worked with the four elements, and those who worshipped spirits in nature...
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SOME FACTS:
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Figurines
The oldest statues in the world are all of women – older than other statues by tens of thousands of years. They are of fertile, large, powerful Goddesses.
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The Sky
Calendars have been found based on the moon’s phases, dating 32,000 – 34,000 years old.
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The Mayan calendar that ended in 2012 (remember that?!) marked the end of a 26,000 year cycle in which the earth completed a full rotation of the tilt on its axis – modern science has confirmed it. Ancient civilisations managed to work that out OVER SEVEN THOUSAND years ago with the naked eye.
Stone Circles
Stone circles aren’t a one-off phenomenon at Stonehenge. There are millions of – bordering on a billion – stone circles, and they are all over the world. What does this mean? That people were travelling, or at least communicating, long before we give them credit for doing so. Just look up South Africa on Google Earth. There are millions of stone circles there alone, and they each omit a unique sound when struck.
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When Christians started demolishing worship sites, they built churches on the sites of old monoliths and stone circles. This strikes me as slightly odd seeing as they despise anything pagan.
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Other Wonders
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No one can explain how some of the wonders of the world were built. Have you seen the Pyramids of Giza / Angkor Wat / Gobekli Tepe? Some monoliths have stones the size of buses at their base. The number of people it would have taken to build, the tools they had to hand, and the weight of the stones used all but makes these feats impossible. Yet it was done.
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BACK TO THE PATRIARCHY
First of all, let’s be very clear on what the patriarchy is: male-centred empires which find their way into every crevice of our lives. Any religion's main saviour, prophet, or teacher is male, and God is referred to in every text with the male pronoun.
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Whenever I question the male believers in my life over this strange yet obvious pattern, they tell me I should not question these things with a wry smile …life must be a lot of fun when everyone important in spirituality seems to have a penis and you have one too.
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The reason we’re screwed right now is because the feminine half of the universal psyche has been silenced …we have forgotten what it means to hear the woman in us all speak without needing to raise our voice. The dance of the masculine and feminine that was honoured in ancient times effectively became a slaughter overnight.
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And the only thing that can cure this world now? Women working with the earth.
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WHY THE NINE MILLION MURDERS?
Why were women suddenly being dragged through ponds by their hair and set on fire? I hear you ask.
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The excuse was religion. A quote from the New Testament:
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"But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence."
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How would Jesus feel about that quote that is still in circulation, and not only that - but taught and revered? After all, the only people who never deserted him were all women. Welcome to organised religion. None of the spiritual leaders' words are listened to. People take an ideology, translate it badly, and use it to their benefit.
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This is how women could be put in a league with the Devil when they so much as spoke.
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THE TRUTH?
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There are many theories as to why the destruction of the feminine – and the witch hunts – really started.
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One, which is my favourite, is that women became too powerful in business. They ran the first breweries. They lived alone and made a living by brewing ale in a large pot (what some might call a cauldron!), they would put a broomstick outside the door to let people know they were selling ale, they had a cat to chase the mice away, and wore a tall hat to be seen in the market town.
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It is an undeniable fact that the ale business was taken from women by force. What scholars think happened was propaganda using the brewing cauldron and broomsticks alongside fake warts, large noses, and extra nipples to create a monstrous image. It’s not something that has been fixed, either, because the image is still made a mockery of. When we pretend to ride a broomstick with a tall hat on, we are making a mockery of women who were forced from their homes and starved to death.
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WHAT ELSE MIGHT IT HAVE BEEN?
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There’s a chance that women were once running the show in a matriarchal society and abused their power, causing men to revolt and tip the scale the other way. More likely, the mystery surrounding the feminine aroused suspicion and 'needed harnessing'. Perhaps (and most likely) it was simply because they were healers at a time when medicine became a money-magnet, and any real healing had to be dead and buried.
Whatever the case, the reason you see witches as being malevolent now is because powerful women from history had their image ripped apart. The origin of these nine million murders matters not, because reason just doesn't come into it.
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If anyone ever asks me why I am a feminist, why I am proud to be grouped in with the ‘witches’, and why I am still so cut up about the annihilation of the feminine …it is because it never ended. A few hundred years ago, I would have died a ghastly death for saying what I’ve just said. Not today. Today, you can call me a joke, but you just wait until the feminine energies start turning things around on our planet.
No one will be laughing when they realise how much it's needed.
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