Witch, Please: Misogyny, Myth & Memory

Unspelling the Stories Patriarchy Told About Her (Part Two)

There are stories that burn the body. And there are stories that bury it.

In Part One, Witch, Please: The Fierce Feminine Wisdom Empire Tried to Burn , we looked at how empire tried to erase the witch through force, through fire, through law, through spectacle. But violence alone isn’t enough to reshape a world. To truly unmake a way of being, you need something subtler. You need a story. Because stories don’t just reflect power. They create it. They tell us what’s true, what’s possible, and perhaps most insidiously, who we are allowed to be.

This part of the series is about those stories. About the myths that hollowed out the witch and replaced her with something twisted. About the language that turned wisdom into wickedness, and sovereignty into sin. About how patriarchal religion and culture didn’t just punish the witch, they rewrote her.

Here, we shift from gallows and trials to tales and tropes. But make no mistake, this is still the terrain of power. Because mythology is not neutral. Neither is language. They carry the fingerprints of the systems that shaped them.

So it did what systems always do when faced with power they can’t control: it reframed it as threat. It told stories about Eve. About Lilith. About sirens and hags and temptresses. It turned the priest’s desire into the woman’s fault. It turned the herbalist into a heretic. The wise woman into a warning. But these stories weren’t just fiction, they were strategy.

They taught us to fear ourselves. To laugh at the witch. To distrust our bodies. To forget the sacred. To become strangers to our own cycles, our own ancestors, our own wild wisdom. And to confuse that forgetting with freedom. This chapter is about remembering otherwise. Because the witch wasn’t just burned in the flesh. She was buried in the story. And we are the ones who can dig.

I. Words as Spells: The Etymology of “Witch”

Language is not passive or neutral. Language constructs reality. It orders the world, shapes our perceptions, and delineates the boundaries of what we consider possible, permissible, and powerful. Words do not simply reflect what already is, they actively participate in the making of what becomes. To name something is to frame it, fix it, make it legible. And to make something legible within a patriarchal culture is often the first step toward controlling it.

Few words reveal this process more clearly than witch.

The word witch in Old English appears as wicce (feminine) and wicca (masculine). Linguists trace its root to the verb wic, meaning “to bend” or “to shape,” with alternative associations to wit, meaning “to know.” This duality, between shaping and knowing, captures the essence of the early witch figure: one who understands the hidden patterns of the world, and who can, through that understanding, enact transformation. In other words, a force to be reckoned with.

This kind of knowing was not theoretical or institutional. It was embodied. Relational. Cyclical. The witch knew when to harvest, when to bleed, when to bury the dead. She read dreams and weather patterns. She walked in right relationship with the land and listened to the wisdom of her own body. It is precisely this situated, experiential knowledge that patriarchal systems have long sought to discredit. The rationalism of empire cannot abide intuitive knowing, nor can it tolerate forms of power that arise outside sanctioned hierarchies.

As the church tightened its grip on social, political, and moral life, the term witch began to shift. What had once indicated a wise woman became entangled with sin, heresy, and diabolical threat. The word was no longer a recognition of knowledge but a condemnation. This was not accidental. The deformation of language has always been one of patriarchy’s most effective tools. To alter the meaning of a word is to alter the social role of the person it describes. And when that word is applied to women with power, the consequences are profound.

This linguistic reframing did more than justify persecution. It embedded suspicion into the very fabric of cultural consciousness. Consider how other words underwent similar transformations: “spinster” once denoted a woman with financial independence, skilled in textile work; now it evokes bitterness and dried-up solitude. “Hag,” derived from hægtesse, a word with roots in ritual and ancestral knowledge, now signifies a grotesque old woman, to be feared or mocked. In each case, the word’s descent mirrors a broader cultural agenda: to ridicule or erase forms of feminine power that cannot be domesticated.

Language, in this way, becomes a spell of its own, an invisible architecture shaping how we see, what we believe, and who we trust. When a culture collectively agrees that a witch is evil, irrational, ugly, or laughable, it doesn’t matter what a witch actually is. The spell has already worked. And crucially, it doesn’t require violence to enforce, it relies on internalised consensus, the slow erosion of reverence into ridicule.

But this is not the end of the story. If language can be used to erase and distort, it can also be used to remember and restore. The recent resurgence of the witch as a figure of power, autonomy, and sacred rebellion is more than an aesthetic trend. It is an act of cultural reweaving. To speak the word witch now, as many do with pride and intention, is to reclaim meaning. To resist inherited narratives. To challenge the idea that power must always be tethered to domination.

Reclaiming language is not merely semantic. It is a spiritual and political act. Because how we name ourselves shapes how we move through the world and whether the world makes room for us at all. When we say witch with reverence, we unpick centuries of distortion. We interrupt the old spell and cast a new one in its place. One that remembers the original meanings: to bend, to shape, to know.

II. Her Body, Their Sin: Desire, Control, and the Myth of the Dangerous Woman

If language is one of patriarchy’s tools of erasure, the body is often its battleground. Particularly the female body, cyclical, sensual, unruly, and irreducibly alive. Within patriarchal religion and social order, this body was not simply feared in its own right, but because of the power it seemed to wield over men. Not the power to harm, but the power to disrupt. To awaken desire. To threaten control.

In this context, it is not surprising that so many of the women accused of witchcraft were not only midwives, herbalists, and widows, but also women deemed sexually suspect: too beautiful, too seductive, too independent, or simply too visible. The Church, in its attempts to uphold a system of spiritual and moral purity, especially among the male clergy, could not tolerate the ambiguity of attraction. Nor could it permit the possibility that desire might be something internal, something to be owned and integrated. Instead, it was externalised. Blamed. Made demonic.

The fear of feminine power did not arise in a vacuum. Within the dominant religious institutions of Europe, particularly the Catholic Church, sexual repression was enshrined as virtue. Celibacy among clergy became institutionalised not only as a symbol of spiritual purity, but as a mechanism of control. Priests, monks, and inquisitors were expected to renounce sexual activity, marriage, and romantic love entirely. But the human psyche does not simply dissolve desire when doctrine demands it. It suppresses, redirects, distorts.

Unable or unwilling to acknowledge their own longing, many of these men externalised it. Rather than reckon with desire as something within themselves, they cast it onto women, especially those who were sensual, sovereign, or unbound by marriage. A woman who stirred feeling was accused of witchcraft. Her sexuality became evidence. Her beauty, a threat. Her autonomy, a crime.

This was not only a pattern of emotional projection, it had devastating material consequences. Women were tortured, imprisoned, and killed not because they broke laws, but because they disrupted male self-concept. And this projection was not limited to adult women. The sexual repression and hypocrisy embedded in patriarchal religious systems also laid the groundwork for centuries of abuse against children and young boys, violence that many institutions covered, denied, or quietly justified under the guise of protecting the Church’s reputation.

To understand the witch hunts, and the archetype of the dangerous woman more broadly, we must recognise this interplay of repressed desire and institutional power. The Church’s horror of the feminine was not just theological. It was psychological. It was bodily. It was seeded in shame, sustained by silence, and sanctified by systems that rewarded denial over self-knowledge.

The witch, then, became the scapegoat for a failure that was never hers to carry. She bore the blame for desires not her own. And in doing so, she revealed the fault lines in a system that feared the body precisely because it could not master it.

This logic is disturbingly consistent. Across texts, trials, and theology, the same pattern emerges: a man experiences desire, and a woman is punished for it. The theological term for this was temptation. The cultural vehicle was the witch. In the popular imagination of early modern Europe, the witch was not simply an old woman with a cat and a cauldron, she was also the beautiful seductress, the one who could “bewitch” a man simply by existing in her body. Her sexuality was treated as a spell, her power over male attention as proof of manipulation.

This projection reached grotesque proportions in both ecclesiastical doctrine and popular culture. The Malleus Maleficarum, the 15th-century witch-hunting manual written by two Dominican inquisitors, argued that women were inherently more susceptible to demonic influence because they were “weaker in faith” and “more carnal.” It also claimed that women used their sexuality to lure and weaken men, and that witchcraft often operated through seduction. Such texts laid the ideological groundwork for centuries of persecution.

The moral panic surrounding female sexuality wasn’t confined to theological tracts, it seeped into stories, superstitions, and social norms. We see it echoed centuries later in fictional characters like Claude Frollo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, a celibate priest who becomes obsessed with the Romani dancer Esmeralda. Rather than confront his own desire, he accuses her of sorcery, framing her sensuality as a kind of spell cast over him. His failure to control himself becomes her crime.

This is not just metaphor. It reflects a broader cultural truth: when patriarchal systems are faced with their own instability, when desire threatens discipline, or intuition challenges authority, they often respond by punishing the one who reveals that instability. In this case, women’s bodies became sites of both fascination and fear. They were exalted as mothers and yet condemned as temptresses, expected to be both pure and fertile, modest and available, sacred and subordinate.

From this contradiction, a brutal logic emerged. If a woman caused desire, she must be dangerous. If she possessed power over a man’s attention, she must be punished. And so, a generation of women were cast as witches not for harming others, but for simply being perceived as powerful, through beauty, through sensuality, through spiritual sovereignty. The system could not tolerate a woman who did not belong to it. Especially not if she reminded men of something they had denied in themselves.

This fear of feminine power, and the subsequent need to control it, is not a relic of the past. We see its legacy in the continued policing of women’s clothing, behaviour, and bodies. In purity culture and victim-blaming. In the way menstruation is still shrouded in shame, and female pleasure remains taboo. In the rituals of modesty that masquerade as virtue, but are really designed to preempt male desire by erasing female presence.

To call this misogyny is accurate. But to call it myth-making is essential. Because these ideas were never simply about individual resentment, they were systems of story. Narratives constructed to invert accountability. To position male discomfort as female guilt. And to ensure that women would internalise this framework themselves, shrinking before they could ever be called dangerous.

This, too, is a form of witchcraft, just not the kind we were warned about.

III. Myth-Making and Myth-Breaking: Archetypes in British & Celtic Lore

If language constructs the world, myth gives it meaning. Myths are not quaint relics of the past, nor idle fantasy. They are cultural blueprints. Psychic architecture. They encode values, reinforce hierarchies, and reflect who is granted legitimacy, especially when it comes to power, wisdom, and the sacred. When empire and church sought to dismantle feminine sovereignty, they did not only burn women at the stake. They rewrote the stories that once honoured them.

In pre-Christian cosmologies across the British Isles, female figures occupied complex, often contradictory roles, guardians of the land, initiators of transformation, embodiments of seasonal cycles, and keepers of deep time. These weren’t women as ornaments or afterthoughts. They were forces of nature. Sometimes terrifying. Often sovereign. Always sacred. But with the rise of patriarchal religion and imperial culture, these figures were gradually defanged, demonised, or reduced to symbols of temptation and decay.

Consider Hecate, a liminal goddess whose roots stretch from ancient Greece into British folklore via Roman influence and later esoteric traditions. She is the keeper of thresholds, crossroads, torches, and the underworld, a guide through death, dream, and decision. Far from malevolent, she was once invoked as a protector of households and a guide to lost souls. Yet over time, she was recast as sinister: a dark sorceress, a symbol of occultism and fear. Her associations with death and the unseen were reinterpreted not as wisdom, but as danger.

Then there is The Cailleach, one of the most ancient figures in Celtic mythology. Often depicted as a hag or crone, she is the goddess of winter, mountains, and storms, the one who shapes the landscape, commands the elements, and governs the turning of the seasons. Far from being merely a symbol of decline, she embodies the regenerative power of stillness, darkness, and endings. But in patriarchal renderings, her image became grotesque: old, ugly, and feared. The archetype of the crone was no longer honoured as elder or earth-shaper, but marginalised as monstrous.

Morgan le Fay offers a case study in mythic character assassination. In earlier Arthurian cycles, she appears as a healer and priestess of Avalon, deeply educated in herbcraft, transformation, and the liminal arts. Her relationship to Arthur is complex, but she is not inherently villainous. Over time, however, Christianised retellings painted her as jealous, scheming, and dangerous, an enchantress whose magic was wielded not for balance or healing, but to seduce, manipulate, and destroy. In Morgan, we see the full arc of patriarchal rewriting: from wise woman to witch, from sacred to suspect.

Lastly, Ceridwen, the Welsh goddess of poetic inspiration and transformation. Keeper of the cauldron of Awen, the divine breath of creativity, she represents alchemical change, sacred knowledge, and the initiation of the soul. Her story, in which she brews a potion for her own son but accidentally initiates the boy Gwion instead, offers a profound allegory of transformation through chaos. Yet even Ceridwen’s legacy has been flattened in some modern tellings, reduced to a sorceress archetype, detached from her cosmological context. (In that spirit of mythic reweaving, I’m very excited that

Jodi Garrod

and I are currently brewing something very special around Ceridwen in our Substack cauldrons. There’s more to come, so keep your eyes peeled.)

These figures remind us that mythology is never static. It is a living language, continuously shaped by the cultural forces that tell it. When patriarchal systems seized the narrative, they altered not just the endings of these stories, but the moral frameworks they taught. Women who held power were no longer guides, but warnings. Knowledge was reframed as cunning. Transformation became threat. And the archetype of the witch emerged from this alchemy of reverence and revision.

To remember these figures in their original complexity is not just an act of historical recovery, it is a spiritual and political practice. It challenges the implicit belief that feminine power must always be contained, that women who walk with death or change must be feared, that wisdom without approval is dangerous. In reclaiming these mythic lineages, we begin to reimagine what power can look like when it is cyclical, intuitive, and untamed.

This is precisely the work I aim to do through Playing Her Part, a podcast series on The Wisdom Path, where I explore mythic feminine archetypes that have been distorted, diluted, or demonised through patriarchal retellings. From Lilith, Hecate, Persephone, to Aphrodite, and soon Inanna, I offer each figure a space to be re-seen through a female-empowered lens, stripping back the layers of shame and subjugation to reveal their original potency. These aren’t just stories of the past; they are invitations. Their archetypes offer us mirrors, tools, and medicines to reclaim our own sovereignty, sensuality, and sacred knowing. Through this mythic recovery work, I’m interested in what it means to restore the feminine to a place of matriarchal reverence, not as reversal, but as rebalancing. As a return to a deeper order that honours wholeness, honours life, and ultimately, benefits us all.

These stories are not static. They are alive, shape-shifting alongside us. And when we return to the archetypes not as passive inheritors but as active participants, we begin to change their course. Through Playing Her Part and the wider work of The Wisdom Path, I see this as an act of sacred revision, a chance not only to remember what was buried, but to restore what was powerful, beautiful, and true. The witch, in this context, is not merely an outsider or a warning. She is a guide. A lineage-bearer. A mirror. She invites us to take up the pen, the camera, the altar, and write ourselves back into the myth, not as villains or victims, but as visionaries.

IV. Patriarchy and the Suppression of Feminine Archetypes

If language constructs reality and myth encodes cultural power, then archetypes function as blueprints for identity. They are the deep structures beneath our stories, the inherited patterns that tell us what a woman is, what she should be, and what she must not become. And for centuries, patriarchal systems have relied on reshaping these archetypes to maintain control over the feminine.

In many indigenous, matriarchal, and pre-Christian cultures, feminine identity was not linear or singular. It was cyclical, multifaceted, and held within seasonal rhythms. The triple archetype of Maiden, Mother, Crone, so often dismissed as poetic cliché, once served as a map for feminine life-force: the vitality of beginnings, the fullness of creation, the depth of completion. These weren’t moral categories or lifestyle labels. They were sacred roles in an ecological and spiritual continuum.

But patriarchy does not tolerate power that cannot be controlled. So it flattened these rich, fluid archetypes into narrow instruments of social function. The Maiden was exalted, but only in her innocence, desirable, fertile, passive. She became the cultural ideal: youthful, beautiful, untouched. She represented possibility, but only insofar as that possibility served others.

The Mother, too, was idealised, but conditionally. She was sanctified not as a sovereign being, but as a symbol of self-sacrifice. Her worth was tied to service: to child-rearing, homemaking, emotional labour. And crucially, she was desexualised. This is where we begin to see the split take root, what psychology later named the Madonna–Whore complex. The feminine was cleaved in two: the Maiden, youthful and desirable, was to be pursued and possessed; the Mother, nurturing and domestic, was to be respected, but never desired.

This binary haunts our collective psyche. In Christian iconography, we see it played out in the figures of Mother Mary and Mary Magdalene: one venerated for purity, the other vilified for passion. One fit for worship, the other for warning. But both flattened. Both distorted. And in this division, a deeper truth was lost, that the erotic and the maternal are not opposites. That power and tenderness can coexist. That the mother is not just a martyr, a caretaker, or a vessel, but a force of nature.

The reclamation of the Mother archetype today is not just about celebrating caregiving. It is about reanimating her full spectrum. Her sensuality. Her sovereignty. Her creative fire. It is about leaving behind the image of the selfless martyr that was sold to us as the feminine ideal, and returning to something wilder, deeper, more alive.

And then there is the Crone, the final figure in the triad, and the most feared. Once the seat of ancestral wisdom, of deep time, of endings and transformation, she was not simply discarded. She was demonised. Turned into the hag, the witch, the madwoman in the woods. If the maiden was a threat because she aroused desire, the crone was a threat because she no longer needed it. She could not be seduced, subdued, or used. She belonged to no one. Her power was no longer tethered to reproduction or attractiveness. She saw through things, and that was dangerous.

In patriarchal systems, a woman’s value is often bound to her utility: to men, to family, to the economy. The maiden represents potential. The mother, productivity. But the crone? She is past usefulness. Past control. She cannot be punished through shame because she has survived it. She cannot be dismissed as naive because she has seen it all. She threatens the entire system by embodying a form of power that is rooted in experience, not approval, clarity, not compliance.

What frightened the church about the crone wasn’t just her wrinkles. It was her refusal. Her refusal to be ruled. Her refusal to be desirable. Her refusal to disappear. And her deep knowledge of the cycles that govern life and death, grief and renewal, power and decay, knowledge that no priest or patriarch could ever fully claim or comprehend.

And so, the older woman became the final taboo. Not the virginal ideal, not the mother-sacrifice, but the wild elder, walking with death at her heels and truth on her tongue. In the cultural imagination, she became grotesque: the hag in the woods, the eater of children, the wicked stepmother, the monstrous witch. This was not just a fear of age, it was a fear of sovereignty. A fear of the woman who no longer plays the game.

What we see here is not the natural evolution of culture, but a deliberate disruption of feminine wholeness. The erasure of the Crone archetype is part of a larger cultural amnesia, one that disconnects women from their own cycles, from the earth, from each other, and from any model of power that doesn’t involve youth, beauty, or productivity.

Where the Maiden was desired, and the Mother was used, the Crone was exiled. And with her, we lost an entire map for ageing with power. The archetype of feminine eldership was replaced with invisibility or ridicule. In a culture that fears ageing, fears death, fears women who no longer serve the script, the Crone became the final threat. And therefore, the final liberation.

Reclaiming these archetypes is not about fitting ourselves into new categories, it’s about healing the splits. It’s about remembering that we are not meant to be one thing. That the feminine is not linear, not fixed, not neat. She is spiral. She is seasonal. She is sensual, maternal, wise, wild, and everything in between.

To bring these figures back into wholeness is to bring ourselves back into wholeness. Not as a nostalgic return, but as a radical rebalancing. A remembering of what was severed. A rewriting of what it means to belong to ourselves again.

But here’s what patriarchy couldn’t erase: the archetypes live on. They continue to surface, in dream, in desire, in disobedience. We carry them in our bodies even when we can’t name them. And when we do name them, when we remember them as sacred rather than shameful, we begin to loosen the grip of a system that was never built for us to thrive.

To reclaim these archetypes is not about fitting ourselves into new boxes. It’s about undoing the erasure. It’s about recognising that you can be maiden and mother and crone in a single day. That these phases are not just biological, but energetic. That feminine power is not a linear life-stage, it’s a spiral. And the spiral doesn’t serve empire. But it does serve life.

This is why the return of the Crone, and the reclamation of the witch as her cultural twin, matters so deeply in this moment. Because she reminds us that value doesn’t expire. That wisdom isn’t always soft. That rage can be holy. That endings can be sacred. And that when we honour these archetypes on our own terms, we begin to remember who we were before the forgetting.

V. Oral Storytelling as Resistance

When empire erased the archetypes and the Church rewrote the myths, women turned to other forms of preservation. Not official. Not sanctioned. Not written in stone. But whispered. Sung. Embroidered into lullabies. Folded into recipes. Coded into fairy tales. Passed from mouth to mouth like breath. This is the long, quiet resistance of oral storytelling. Because long before history was written by victors, it was spoken around the fireside by grandmothers.

The witch may have been burned in the courts of empire, but she survived in story, in the hushed tones of hearthside whispers, in lullabies laced with warnings and wisdom, in folktales passed from mouth to mouth like spells disguised as bedtime entertainment. While institutional power wrote women out of the official record, oral tradition kept them alive, not always whole, not always honoured, but present, and potent. In the face of systemic erasure, storytelling became a form of resistance.

Women, especially elders, midwives, healers, and kin-keepers, found ways to pass down truths that could not safely be spoken in plain language. A tale about a crone in the woods might contain coded herbal knowledge. A song about a woman turned into a bird might hold a lesson about grief, transformation, or escape. These weren’t just amusements or superstitions. They were cultural technologies: memory-keepers, containers for grief, and vessels for survival. And though the surface of the story may have conformed to the dominant worldview, its bones remembered otherwise.

This is why storytelling has always been a threat to empire. It cannot be fully controlled. It slips through the cracks of literacy and law, adapting, reshaping, whispering where shouting is forbidden. Its power lies not only in preservation, but in its capacity to evolve. Each time a story is retold, something new can enter. Each time a woman adds her voice to a lineage of telling, the myth is altered, reclaimed, or recharged.

Even now, this tradition continues, not only through folk singers and poets, but through podcasts, film, image-making, ceremony, and collaborative acts of mythic reclamation. The digital age hasn’t extinguished oral storytelling; in many ways, it has reactivated it.

This is where my own work as a myth-maker and photographer finds its roots. The Playing Her Part series on The Wisdom Path podcast is, in essence, an oral storytelling project, one that uses voice, story, embodiment, and visual language to bring these archetypes into present time.

These stories were never just about gods and witches. They were about us. About how we survive erasure. About how we encode memory in metaphor, grief in fable, power in parable. When we tell them now, with reverence, with revision, with fire in the belly, they become ceremonies in themselves. Invitations to reinhabit the parts of ourselves that patriarchy told us were too wild, too emotional, too much. Oral storytelling has always been a way of remembering forward. And in our remembering, we become what was once forbidden: the bearer of wisdom, the keeper of myth, the witch who speaks.

This is why I believe platforms like this. like Substack, matter more than we realise. We’re not just posting online. We’re participating in a lineage. We are the modern torch-bearers of the oral tradition, reimagined in pixels and prose. And whether you know it or not, every time you share your story, every time you speak your truth into the silence, every time you write something that feels just a little too wild, too honest, or too sacred, you are breaking old spells. You are unspelling the stories that told us to stay small, stay silent, stay safe.

Your words are powerful. They don’t have to be perfect to be important. They don’t have to be academic to be wise. They don’t have to be long to be lasting. Whether you’re writing newsletters, journaling in the dark, crafting poems, recording voice notes, or whispering dreams into the wind, this, too, is resistance. This, too, is witchcraft. Because it’s not just about reclaiming the old myths. It’s about making space for new ones to grow.

But we need your voice. Not some curated, polished, palatable version of it, the raw one. The real one. The one that says the thing and shakes a little after. The one that breaks open myths and replaces them with truth. Because here’s the thing: storytelling is spellwork. Always has been. And whether you’re writing poems in your Notes app or publishing weekly essays, whether you have three readers or three thousand, you’re part of something. You’re keeping the witch alive. You’re making new myths. You’re helping us all come home.

So please, keep writing. Keep weaving. Keep speaking even when your voice trembles. This isn’t just my work. It’s ours. And it’s working. And thank you for being here, reading, writing, remembering with me. This is not a solo act. It never was. It’s a chorus. A coven. A conversation between those who came before us, those of us weaving now, and those who are yet to speak. Keep going. Your voice matters more than you know.

But this work isn’t just about looking back. It’s about what comes next. Because the witch isn’t just a relic. She’s returned, and this time, she’s everywhere. In tarot apps and TikToks, in brand aesthetics and herbal tinctures, in self-help language and the logos of luxury wellness. She’s in the boardroom. She’s on the billboard. She’s in the algorithm. She’s in the feed.

So now we must ask: what does it really mean to reclaim the witch in a world that sells her back to us in sparkles and slogans? When the sacred becomes marketable, when the ritual becomes content, when the archetype becomes aesthetic, how do we keep the fire from going out again?

In Part Three: Rising from the Ashes, we spiral into her return, not as costume, but as calling. We’ll explore the witch’s place in modern feminism, sacred business, and creative resistance. We’ll speak to intersectionality, embodiment, and the difference between performance and presence. We’ll ask what it means to live like a witch in a world that still benefits from your silence, and what it takes to become the ancestor who breaks that spell for good. This isn’t a revival. It’s a reckoning. This isn’t an aesthetic. It’s a lineage. And we’re only just beginning. The match is struck. The circle is cast. The witch is rising.

And if something in this piece stirred you, woke something, cracked something open, please share it. That is a vital part of this living oral tradition. When you share these words, comment, like, and pass them on, you’re not just supporting my work, you’re weaving the web. You’re lifting up voices that were silenced. You’re showing the algorithms and the old stories that this matters. That we matter. That the myth is not over, it’s just being rewritten, together.

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Images in this peice are all my photography, of the magnificent Madame Culpeper a true embodiment of the sacred witch, I highly recommend connecting with her work.