Are we becoming the witch again?

In the last patreon post on the Wise Herbal Ways weaving the feminine path, we looked at the archaeological remains of an Anglo-Saxon woman who has been described as a wise or cunning woman.  Wise women would have had great power and healing skills to help the community and animals. They would have mediated between the people and the spirits, been midwives and therapists.  As Christianity and the state became more powerful, their role in society was inverted, and they became painted as witches, spreading illness, making animals infertile, spoiling milk, stealing, killing, and encouraging unnatural sexual acts. 

This subversion of their role has had many consequences, one of which is that we question and query any finds that even suggest that a wise women may have been a healer and physician and may have been found within Anglo-Saxon and Viking Britain doing good work.    The victorian archaeologists also had a huge role to play in this as they viewed all their finds through a patriarchal lense, and so only men were considered to have been capable of being physicians.  In this way, history and our view of society in the past can be changed.  Despite this narrative, many women have an inate knowing that there were medicine women in tribes and families, and they often find that they identify with the witch.

We often look back at the past and wonder how any of this could happen, and yet we see what is slowly happening in America.  Christian nationalists, technocrats, and the oligarchy appear to be trying to take us back to this past.  The rise in the tradwife who glorifies, on social media, being the perfect stay at home wife and mother pushing this agenda, the increasingly alarming laws that seem to be taking women’s freedoms, body autonomy, and rolling back centuries.  From the UK, we watch, amazed, that all this is happening to a supposedly democratic, free country, and yet we worry that that is what is also heading our way.  We look back at the history of the witches, and we have been left with the scar of their persecution, every halloween we are reminded that they were ugly women, with warts on their faces and an evil cackle; a warning that women were persecuted for their speech, their views, their disobedience of male society.  And we find ourselves wondering if this fate awaits us yet again.

Image: A witch casting spells over a steaming cauldron. Engraving by H.S. Thomassin after Demaretz.