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Large-scale witch hunts and accusations of witchcraft began in Europe around 1400 and lasted for more than 300 years till about 1775. These were mostly conducted in secular courts and took place in small rural communities (estimation is about 85% were women or girls). The majority of people targeted were women, though not exclusively so. Estimations of how many people might have been victims of witch hunts run from about 100,000 people up to 9 million people, though not all might have been killed. Jailing, torture, inquisition, and execution were a normal procedure of the times. It's very hard to estimate because of lack of graves, records, monuments, or even letters or documents of the period cataloging statistics. Sometimes this period is referred to as the 'female Holocaust.' The witch-hunts were particularly severe in parts of the Holy Roman Empire and in Europe spanned from Northern Italy to Scandinavia. They also took place in the early US colonies and in colonized regions of Latin America and Africa. They tended to be instigated by religious doctrine, a need for scapegoats in dark times, a fear of pagan ritual and religion, and misogynist sentiment. Some of these sources will give some idea of the scope and impact of this period of history and the impact on culture, pagan or indigenous religions and rituals, women's rights and status in society, and more.

You can read more about witch trials in the early modern period here on Wikipedia. Estimates of the scope of the victims differ widely.

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3 min: What do you see in your mind or heart or feel in your body when you hear the words “witch wound”? 

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3 min: What do you see in your mind or heart or feel in your body when you hear the words “witch wound”? 

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Before knowing more about witches or witch wounds, what is your first association with the term "witch wound"? What do you see in your mind or heart or feel in your body when you hear the words “witch wound”? Jot down random words: thought fragments, images, words that pop into your mind, fragments of visions or dreams, random associations; it does not matter how strange or dream-like or mundane or disconnected they may seem. Just go for it without censoring yourself.

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Mothering Each Other Home: Healing the Witch Wound

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Mothering Each Other Home: Healing the Witch Wound

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Thursday Feb. 22, 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM CT

Do you feel unsafe to speak your truth or be your authentic self? Do you make yourself smaller and hide your power and magical self and gifts? Do you doubt your own intuition and tune down your emotions so others won’t feel threatened? Are you a mystic at heart, though you don’t dare tell anyone?

If so, you may carry the ancient burden of the witch wound, the collective trauma of all the women, men, and children who were innocently tortured, burned at the stake, beheaded, drowned, or hanged for their magic, independence, and free-thinking spiritual beliefs. Through many centuries, healers, midwives, wise women and men, those who were gifted and spiritually awake, diviners, teachers, those who were too outspoken, too magical, too old, too rich, too beautiful, too poor, too ugly, or too wise and knowing to be tolerated by patriarchal, capitalist, and religiously conservative society, were persecuted for simply being themselves. Many perished, and if they survived, they carried the memory of persecution in their minds and bodies. This ancestral fear of persecution and dimming of inner light may have been passed down from generation to generation.

And here you are, a writer or creative, and you are aware that something is holding you back, that you don’t feel totally safe to be deeply seen and known, which affects your creative powers. In this two-hour workshop, we’ll discuss the witch wound and go through a series of rituals and enchantments to reunite you with your lost authentic self. We’ll create sacred space to empower your voice to be heard and your being to be seen so you can write and create from this deeper, more magical place where your heart and soul are at home.

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Nynke Salverda Passi is the director of the Soul Bone Literary Center and Festival and MIU's MFA in Creative Writing. She was born and raised in the Netherlands. Her work has been published in CALYX, Gulf Coast, Poetry Breakfast, Life & Legends, and more. Her poetry has been anthologized in Pandemic Puzzle Pieces and River of Earth & Sky (Blue Light Press), Carrying the Branch (Glass Lyre Press), and Oxygen: Parables of the Pandemic (River Paw Press). Together with Rustin Larson and Christine Schrum, she edited the poetry collection Leaves by Night, Flowers by Day.

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Heal the Witch Wound: Reclaim Your Magic and Step Into Your Power. by Celeste Larsen

From Good Reads:

“A rare achievement that discusses the witch wound with historical depth and also offers practical invitations to heal the wound on a personal and collective level.”—Danielle Dulsky, author of  The Holy Wild You were born to live a magical life. Deep within your soul, you know this; it is why you picked up this book. But there is another reason why you now hold this book in your because some part of you feels it is unsafe to fully embrace the magic that exists within and around you. This part of you carries an age-old wound—one that keeps you from claiming your magic, owning your power, and shining fearlessly in your truth . This is the “witch wound.” Healing the witch wound is not about going back in time or dwelling on the atrocities of the past—quite the opposite. This work is about taking steps now to reclaim your power, live a more magical life, and embody your most authentic self. This book will lead you through a diverse range of practices, including spell work, rituals, meditations, and journal prompts to help you uncover and work through feelings of reticence, uncertainty, and fear. Some practices may not resonate for you, while others may be deeply impactful. Take what works, adapt and customize where you can, and leave the rest. This is your journey.

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You can read about several trailblazing literary witches here on Maria Popover's blog, The Marginalia.

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"The absence of the witch does not invalidate the spell," Emily Dickinson wrote. So great writers bewitch us with their work long after they have absented themselves from the world. The enduring bewitchment of thirty such titans and trailblazers of the written word, Dickinson herself among them, is what author Taisia Kitaiskaia and artist Katy Horan honor in Literary Witches: A Celebration of Magical Women Writers (public library) - a lovely compendium of impressionistic sketches, fusing biographical facts with flights of the invocational imagination to celebrate such enchantresses of literature as Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Octavia Butler, Sappho, Audre Lorde, Anaïs Nin, Gertrude Stein, Flannery O'Connor, Anna Akhmatova, Toni Morrison, and Emily Brontë - women born "before they invented women," as Ursula K. Le Guin put it in her brilliant unsexing of literature.

Accompanying Kitaiskaia's wondrous spell for each writer, reminiscent of Gertrude Stein's word portrait of the love of her life, are a haunting painted portrait by Horan - a fine artist specializing in folkloric, fairy tale, and mythological art - and a brief list of recommended reading for an initiation into the respective writer's world. What emerges is a most unusual memorial of talent and a vibrant testament to Toni Morrison's wisdom from her spectacular Nobel Prize acceptance speech: "We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives."

Anaïs falls asleep in her sunken glass ship. As she dreams, her many selves rise from her body. They have dark owing hair, and eyes blink slowly all over their faces, chests, and arms. Some collect seashells, others chart the sun's movement. Some keep house, make lace, pursue lovers. Another operates a printing press. Before dawn, the selves gather around the sleeping Anaïs, kiss each other's eyelids and mouths, and dive back into the single body like the mermaids they are.

Crossing the street on a rainy day, Virginia leaps easily from one pool of consciousness to another. She loves these puddles, the creatures wrapping around her ankles in each. But before she can get to the next street, Virginia sees her own pool: it floods with rain, rises higher, becomes a deep, turbulent river. She will not survive this one.

Carried along in her river, Virginia's body becomes a lighthouse - a tower of perception with one large eye, illuminating all she sees with rich, buttery vision, transforming bottom-feeding fish and debris into objects of beauty and meaning.

Before Virginia is pulled under forever, a wolf cub leaps from the lighthouse's eye, like Athena from Zeus's forehead. This is Virginia's only child. The wolf daughter fights her way to the bank of the river. She survives.

When she brushes the carpet, Emily imagines she is smoothing the moors for Heathcliff's perfect feet. He'll come in, Emily dreams, like the winds she walks against - muscular gusts, clenched hands snarling under her coats.

What do the ants whisper to Emily as they climb the ruined trees outside? She puts her ear to the bark and listens. She will join their palace... She will be their ant queen... She will pit them against other ant queendoms... She will watch their love and war play out.

Emily makes a telescope from ice and twine. Through this tunnel, she stares into her own eye until she sees a galaxy, and through the galaxy until she sees a stranger's eye.

Octavia takes a break from writing to water her plants. The potted heads, of various races and humanoid species, totter on thick stems and wave their leaves at her as she enters the greenhouse. She feeds them from her pitcher.

Buying groceries, Octavia looks around at the people putting cabbages and apples into their carts, and sees what will one day overtake the innocent scene: communities overpopulating, mutating with violent need for food, power, and sex.

Walking back from the store, Octavia covertly tosses the seeds she always keeps in her pockets into her neighbors' yards. Seeds that won't save us but urge, We can do better.

After Stalin threatens her family, Anna fires up the cauldron: in go the ripped pages of forbidden manuscripts. The sodden papers become bandages for the wounded. The bitter broth - gulped down, so the words are never forgotten.

The deaths of Anna's people are woven into her shawl. She sucks on these silver threads during the famine to stay alive.

Anna waits in line for rations of potatoes, cabbage, and milk. When it's her turn, the government official slips Anna a strange object. "You must tell our story," she says. Anna looks down and sees a golden egg. She can hear the wild heart of her nation beating inside.

Sappho is the hot green insect in every jealous quarrel, zinging between you and your lover, agitating the ions, biting your skin and making you seethe, raising the hair on the cat's back.

Sappho is the beautiful woman you lock eyes with across the party. She has a garland and a sweet voice, and no matter how many times you try to get closer, she eludes you. Finally, she approaches, only to push a piece of papyrus into your hands and slip out the door. All you can make out is you burning in perfect handwriting. The rest of the words are illegible.

Sappho is a pair of wings - pearling between pigeon blue, moody emerald, and golden white - smoldering in a hidden cave. The wings disappear from time to time, reappearing in young girls' closets. How seriously each girl puts these wings on in the mirror, readying herself for the pain and pleasure of love.

Gertrude is a spider, weaving a web of funhouse mirrors. Flies trap themselves by staring at their warped reflections, which repeat, repeat, repeat.

For Gertrude, each word is a hedgehog in a metal cage. Gertrude bangs at the cages with a stick; the noise is deafening. The hedgehogs grow feathers, slink into worms, shrink into dragon flies - anything to get out. Only then is Gertrude satisfied.

You can still catch glimpses of Gertrude in miniature, living on in her salon's paintings. There she is, holding hands with Alice B., hobbling off into the shadow of a Cézanne apple. Skiing down the curvy hip of a Matisse nude, yelling with high-pitched glee.

After she loses most of her family, Mary experiments with potions to bring back the departed. She places her mother's papers, locks of her children's hair, and a tiny model of her husband's sailboat into a vial. Pours in seawater, buds from the garden. Shakes.

Queen Toni sees - cleaving from the skin of every person - the child they were, their parents, great-grandparents, all the way to the first human. She can see this ancestor's original hurt, carried around in the generations like a splinter in the spleen.'

With her mind, Toni ferries her people's unsettled ghosts across hostile rivers, carves smooth blue boats for them to travel in. Builds shelters to cradle their rest before the great migration.

Toni is at velvet ease at her throne. Her supplicants line up to present offerings of rubies, roast duck, wild flowers. But one approaches empty handed: he tells Toni a joke instead. Everyone gasps. Finally, Toni lets out a big, rumbling laugh and joy flushes through the palace.

Complement Literary Witches with an illustrated celebration of trailblazing women in science and artist Judy Chicago's iconic tribute to women in creative culture, then revisit the picture-book biographies of remarkable women whose work has transformed our world: Ada Lovelace, Jane Goodall, Frida Kahlo, Louise Bourgeois, Nellie Bly, and Virginia Woolf.

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Literary Witches: An Illustrated Celebration of Trailblazing Women Writers Who Have Enchanted and Transformed the World

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"The absence of the witch does not invalidate the spell," Emily Dickinson wrote. So great writers bewitch us with their work long after they have absented themselves from the world.

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Here you can read about Witchy Women in Poetry.

“WITCHES” by Fleassy Malay

In the past, they burned us
Because they thought we were witches.
Because we knew what to do with herbs outside of the kitchen.
Because we knew how to dance, and seduce, and pray.
Because we moved with the cycles of the moon.

The Witch

By Elizabeth Willis

A witch can charm milk from an ax handle.

A witch bewitches a man's shoe.

A witch sleeps naked.

"Witch ointment" on the back will allow you to fly through the air.

A witch carries the four of clubs in her sleeve.

A witch may be sickened at the scent of roasting meat.

A witch will neither sink nor swim.

When crushed, a witch's bones will make a fine glue.

A witch will pretend not to be looking at her own image in a window.

A witch will gaze wistfully at the glitter of a clear night.

A witch may take the form of a cat in order to sneak into a good man's

chamber.

A witch's breasts will be pointed rather than round, as discovered in

the trials of the 1950s.

A powerful witch may cause a storm at sea.

With a glance, she will make rancid the fresh butter of her righteous

neighbor.

Even our fastest dogs cannot catch a witch-hare.

A witch has been known to cry out while her husband places inside her

the image of a child.

A witch may be burned for tying knots in a marriage bed.

A witch may produce no child for years at a time.

A witch may speak a foreign language to no one in particular.

She may appear to frown when she believes she is smiling.

If her husband dies unexpectedly, she may refuse to marry his brother.

A witch has been known to weep at the sight of her own child.

She may appear to be acting in a silent film whose placards are

missing

In Hollywood the sky is made of tin.

A witch makes her world of air, then fire, then the planets. Of

cardboard, then ink, then a compass.

A witch desires to walk rather than be carried or pushed in a cart.

When walking a witch will turn suddenly and pretend to look at

something very small.

The happiness of an entire house maybe ruined by witch hair

touching a metal cross.

The devil does not speak to a witch. He only moves his tongue.

An executioner may find the body of a witch insensitive to an iron spike.

An unrepentant witch may be converted with a little lead in the eye.

Enchanting witchpowder may be hidden in a girl's hair.

When a witch is hungry, she can make a soup by stirring water with

her hand.

I have heard of a poor woman changing herself into a pigeon.

At times a witch will seem to struggle against an unknown force

stronger than herself.

She will know things she has not seen with her eyes. She will have

opinions about distant cities.

A witch may cry out sharply at the sight of a known criminal dying of

thirst.

She finds it difficult to overcome the sadness of the last war.

A nightmare is witchwork.

The witch elm is sometimes referred to as "all heart." As in, "she was

thrown into a common chest of witch elm."

When a witch desires something that is not hers, she will slip it into her glove.

An overwhelming power compels her to take something from a rich

man's shelf.

I have personally known a nervous young woman who often walked in

her sleep.

Isn't there something witchlike about a sleepwalker who wanders

through the house with matches?

The skin of a real witch makes a delicate binding for a book of common prayer.

When all the witches in your town have been set on fire, their smoke

will fill your mouth. It will teach you new words. It will tell you what

you've done.

Elizabeth Willis, "The Witch" from Address. Copyright © 2011 by Elizabeth Willis. Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.

Source: Address (Wesleyan University Press, 2011)

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Faith, Witches, Grief & Smoke: New Poetry Books to Read in February on LitHub

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" I want children," insists the transmasculine speaker in Cyrée Jarelle Johnson's Watchnight, " wise black children / who are close to their mother, the black earth." Representing several generations, the poets in this month's releases approach the theme of the child-birth, childhood, the fact of being someone's offspring-in their own indelible ways.

Tracy Fuad's speaker, expecting a child, has a dream of her baby pressing "its face against the inside of my body / so hard that I could see its features through my skin," while Gregory Pardlo's speaker reproaches a father for the choice of circumcision: "He felt the threat a son implies, and took you, my infant / virility, scarf-skin like a halo, angel of my innocence / fore-fledged."

With a mother's tenderness Katie Peterson appeases the fear that a child feels on an outing at the beach: " Little fear, rest, I said to my child, / the waves crash too far out to be interested / in you." When Sarah Ghazal Ali writes, "Father prayed / for a son, I revised myself // a daughter," the crucial act for the young poet shoring up an identity is "revision." And Dorianne Laux, celebrating her 70th birthday in her new book, shows how a poet always remains her mother's child: "Now I feel her warm breath / on my neck summer nights, peering / over my shoulder as I write every poem, whispering / Let me in. I let her in."

*

Sarah Ghazal Ali, Theophanies
(Alice James Books)

Informed by the cadence and stories of the Qur'an and the Bible, from Eve and Magdalene to Maryam and the poet's namesake Sarah, the poems in this elegant debut collection manifest the ways in which faith is "a legacy // of echoes-every echo / a reflection of voice." Her crisp yet open-ended explorations of coming of age find poetic intersections between the sacred texts and such matters as womanhood, sexuality, family, and the 1947 Partition that separated Pakistan from India.

The speaker's faith invites difficult understandings, as when she speaks of "the formless // God my father never joins me / in believing" and of his difficulty with her wearing a veil (he calls her "brainwashed"). But with the ravenousness of one searching for truth and meaning ("Often I confuse theophany and theophagy "), she dares to probe the boundaries between the sacred and the human. "Like God, I'll create in my image," she writes, and the complicated honesty of a young person learning the ways of desire and love leads her to describe a first lover as both Adam and a god: "I was penitent, / but not before he entered again, / and again, the Lord / I briefly believed, his body / above me an eclipse."

"I generated faces of people that didn't exist," Tracy Fuad writes, "and found that I already loved them." The one beloved person that the speaker generates, like the wormlike figure of a sonogram, is her soon-to-be-born baby, and the "portal" of the title is both birth itself and the liminal spaces where true meaning is born: in the roots of words ("Worm, from the hypothetical root wer-, to turn, to bend"), in the accidental things of this world (the roses of Cape Cod arriving from a shipwreck), in the linguistic otherness of an Anglophone visitor to Berlin, and in the existential doubt that one must undergo ("the seeds of a nihilism with which I was once well acquainted") to attain sense and value.

The method is often propulsive but blithely concatenated and sometimes uproariously amusing, as in the poem "Business," which moves from a grandfather's garbage company, American Refuse Systems (ARS), to the fact that "arse" was "once considered a polite term for buttocks" to a view of Neanderthals in the Neander Valley. That the reader imagines Fuad telling these stories to her future child inclines the book from the familiar intellectual atrophy of our era ("I could barely think / if I couldn't also Google") to the vaster, sacral perceptions she finds, at last, in the birth portal itself: "And the unbowing was there. / And the ecstatic, a humming. / And a great sorrow was there."

"We live a life with no margin of error and an open vein as a safety net," writes Cyrée Jarelle Johnson in "psychedelia," the visionary prose centerpiece of Watchnight, winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. The open vein refers to the injections of testosterone ("T") that the speaker and his transmasculine community need in order to become the body that they "claim," the one "named otherwise everywhere else." While evoking the lived-in specificity of "the weird, fraternal world of trans guy friendship" and the speaker's work at "the Red, Blaq & Greens Urban Farm," Johnson's vision constructs a wider "culture that mirrors what we lost," an America devastated by inequality, plague, and climate change: "Our we fragmented, atomized, and blown away."

Johnson's versatility is evident as well in his shorter poems, which engage with forms like the sestina and the Brownian duplex. As with another new collection I can recommend, V. Penelope Pelizzon's A Gaze Hound That Hunteth by the Eye (University of Pittsburgh Press), previewed by Rebecca Morgan Frank in our January Literary Hub piece, Watchnight restores some of the circulation to the occasionally bloodless wing of American poetry inspired by traditional meter and rhyme.

"To think we can eat a sunset," Laux writes joyously of a peach. Composed as she turned 70, these poems seek to "accept joy, those unbidden / moments of surcease," strangely inseparable from the cessations of death. In vivid memories of departed loved ones, especially a free-spirited, alcoholic mother and a drug-addicted sister, she employs a direct, colloquial storytelling structured through the volatile cadences of metaphor. The mother's shoe presses the treadle of her Singer sewing machine, revealing the word "SIN." The sister, taken away by the police, is "naked / as a jaybird, screaming /like a banshee, cursing / like a sailor," as if only the cardinal poetic sin of the cliché could do justice to the mortification of the memory.

If Laux admits some indifference to such sophisticated poets as John Ashbery, Zbigniew Herbert, and Anne Carson, she knows how much our cultural assessments are limited by our own cosmic telescopes, for which "we can't grind a lens big enough to see." Like most poets, she prefers these poets when they write in modes most like her own, subtly enjoining us to gaze receptively in her direction. What we see when we do: a movingly repetitive lyric about environmental collapse ("The birds are going, the bees are almost gone"), a piquant vision of French toast as a paean to her Acadian ancestors, a lived-in description of working-class drudgery ("Waitress"), and a wise, disillusioned piece about her 70th birthday: "I want to die bent // to the tide, lifting a shell to my ear."

If "spectral evidence" was a witness's nightmares that were admissible as proof of the devil's presence among the accused witches at the Salem trials, Pardlo employs the term to trace how otherness is demonized, not only in the "via negativa" of Black people's bodies or the "excited delirium" that presages death by police taser but in the fears, instilled by a patriarchal upbringing, that thwart a man's understanding of himself and others: "For what could I do but fear when // life's theater is full of ghosts and mirrors and baleful /peacock feathers?" This collection, Pardlo's first since the Pulitzer-winning Digest, seeks to wrench these false specters into the light of openness and authenticity.

Guided by such figures as Tituba in her crafty deflections of her Salem accusers, Piero's austere Madonna del parto, and an Upper East Side therapist whom he calls Teresa Ávila, the speaker questions the ways in which he has become a man, as when he vividly recalls a mortifying incident where his father came upon him during an act of auto-eroticism that left him demonizing himself: "My macho cowardice would not let me / recognize that boy as me." If there is so "much to unlearn: old selves and my /toxic attachments to them," this book shows how the work of learning, unfettered, erudite, can initiate the process of remaking the self and the world.

" I do believe in grief," writes the British poet Abigail Parry in her second collection, " and grief as aperture, and aperture / as how we see ourselves see each other / and it's late." An allegiance to this belated aperture of grief may underlie her poetic vision, but a mind attuned to "each mental irk and imp" lifts her poetry into an ironic bliss, like the earworm pop song of the title, which can read as a "unicursal not-quite-circuit" about a very young couple escaping to a trysting place for the dubious pleasure of finding something gestural and performative, their true aloneness.

If Parry's territory is "a strip of dark I recognise / with the crackshot, eyeless knowing of the nerves," it holds the nervy, unnerving recognitions that make melancholia something apperceptive and beautiful, like the way in which an atlas of the rat's brain contains no "rat-thoughts," just " isthmuses and commissures, and junctions and rhombomeres, / all jigsawed into place" or how a knot's "turnabout, intrinsicate/ dark world" summons "the stopstart jig of how and when to want, / when to resist, / when to let go."

In a meditation on California fog, Peterson writes, "It was made of water, but not helpfully, / a stag walked inside," which a car might crash into. With an unadorned clarity of phrasing, she holds the elusive substance up to the light and registers what it means for the matter of the world both to evade and model human perception and intercept the numinous: "It's like God-it disappears. / It wants us to see ourselves. / Its absence is clear." The speaker traces these evanescent qualities-the fog and smoke of our emotions and judgments-in an American landscape beset with drought and wildfire, in a fictional account of the affair between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, in the self-expressive beauty of a spider web ("the tension / in the web, the focused / light"), and in her love for her family.

With ramifying concision, she shows how the differences that marriage summons can combine two people into a graceful unity. "You climbed the mountain with me, a recovering / moralist," the speaker says, addressing her husband. "You wanted to stay / on the path, I wanted to find it." And with the daily wisdom that a sensitive, loving parent uncovers, she finds the life lesson in teaching the alphabet to her young daughter: "it was fundamental / to the alphabet that a person could be wrong. / It was buried deep in the activity, / like the idea of virginity."

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Faith, Witches, Grief, and Smoke: New Poetry Books to Read in February

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"I want children," insists the transmasculine speaker in Cyrée Jarelle Johnson's Watchnight, "wise black children / who are close to their mother, the black earth." Representing several generations...

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Thank you, Jennifer, for your amazing art. We love and miss you.

All other art work is from Unsplash or attributed in the credits.

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Interview with Celeste Larsen, author of Heal the Witch Wound

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Interview with Celeste Larsen, author of Heal the Witch Wound

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Healing the Witch Wound & Practicing Everyday Magic 🔮 Coffee Talk with Author Celeste Larsen

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Here you can read about how trauma can be passed down from generation to generation.

"A growing body of research suggests that trauma (like from childhood abuse, family violence, or food insecurity, among many other things) can be passed from one generation to the next.

"Here’s how: Trauma can leave a chemical mark on a person’s genes, which can then be passed down to future generations. This mark doesn’t cause a genetic mutation, but it does alter the mechanism by which the gene is expressed. This alteration is not genetic, but epigenetic."

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Can Trauma Be Passed Down From One Generation to the Next?

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Can parental trauma—like extreme stress from the impact of the novel coronavirus—change a child’s biology? The evidence for intergenerational trauma, while not conclusive, is growing. Here’s what researchers have to say.

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It’s possible to feel the effects of trauma even without living through a traumatic event yourself. Enter: ancestral trauma. Here’s what you need to know about it.

"One of the most well-researched examples of ancestral trauma is regarding Holocaust survivors and their families. Aside from the Holocaust, other major historical events that have been studied and shown to result in intergenerational trauma include The Holodomor (or “great famine”) in Ukraine and The Civil War."

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When you think about genetics and inherited traits, you probably think about things like hair color, eye color, and skin color. But did you know that trauma, in a sense, can be inherited, too? This is known as ancestral trauma, also referred to as intergenerational or generational trauma.

All of these phrases refer to inherited trauma -- trauma that someone may feel although they did not experience it themselves firsthand.

It might be simple to understand the concept of having a trauma response to a traumatic event that happened directly to you during your lifetime. But it can be a bit more difficult to grasp the fact that even if you haven't experienced trauma yourself, the trauma that your ancestors endured can have an effect on your life.

If you feel like you have symptoms related to trauma without being a trauma survivor yourself, read on.

What is ancestral trauma or intergenerational trauma?

Unlike some trauma-related mental health conditions like post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or acute stress disorder (ASD), ancestral trauma is not a formal diagnosis. However, the body of research surrounding ancestral trauma is growing, and we are learning more and more about it -- showing us that the impact of intergenerational trauma is serious.

So, can you inherit trauma from your ancestors? Long story short, yes.

Essentially, the concept is that you can feel the impact and effects of trauma even if you did not personally experience it. So, if your parents or ancestors lived through traumatic events, that means you could personally still feel the repercussions of that family trauma.

While the ramifications of generational trauma have been around for, well, generations, the term itself didn't gain traction until 1966, when a psychiatrist named Dr. Vivian M. Rakoff published a study about the mental health of the offspring of Holocaust survivors, noting profound negative mental health effects on the children even though they themselves were not part of the Holocaust. Since then, further studies have been conducted looking into other groups of people who might be more prone to experience ancestral trauma. There are plenty of families out there who could be dealing with intergenerational trauma without being aware of it.

Ancestral trauma can be attributed to both internal and external factors -- internal factors meaning genetics and external factors meaning environments, behaviors, or situations someone was subjected to.

Genetically, understanding ancestral trauma is linked to an area of research known as epigenetics, which studies how people's environments and behaviors can affect and change how their genes work. The changes affect what is known as "gene expression" rather than the actual DNA sequences. Nonetheless, these changes can be passed on from one generation to another. This is known as epigenetic inheritance. Research in this field is growing and epigenetics experts are working to learn more about exactly how and when these changes occur.

When it comes to external factors, there may be learned behaviors that become status quo within a family. One example of this is intergenerational abuse where a cycle of abuse continues from one generation to the next. For instance, perhaps a woman was abused as a child, and then she went on to abuse her child when she had a kid, and so on. In less severe situations, there might be some examples of behaviors that are passed down - such as if a man was taught by his father that men should not show emotions and that people shouldn't talk about their feelings, and then this man could pass along the same mentality to his kids, and they could pass it along to their kids.

Ancestral trauma can be due to many different scenarios, and everybody is unique -- but there's no denying that family trauma and unhealthy behaviors in families can impact you.

What are some causes of ancestral trauma?

In some situations, if you know your cultural and family history, there can be some pretty clear hints that your family could be dealing with some ancestral trauma.

One of the most well-researched examples of ancestral trauma is regarding Holocaust survivors and their families. Aside from the Holocaust, other major historical events that have been studied and shown to result in intergenerational trauma include The Holodomor (or "great famine") in Ukraine and The Civil War.

Major oppression and discrimination, and marginalization in general can also result in intergenerational trauma. This is common in certain groups who experienced collective trauma such as:

Native American people who have ancestors who were affected by the tragic deaths associated with colonization and the implementation of "American Indian residential schools."

African American people who have ancestors who were victims of slavery, violence, and ongoing racial discrimination.

Asian American people who have ancestors who were refugees and/or exposed to genocides or wars.

Latin American people who have ancestors who were subjected to colonization, violence, and stressors related to migration.

In these cases, it may be obvious that your ancestors faced these ongoing and tragic struggles that can still affect you and your family today, hinting at the presence of intergenerational trauma.

Outside of historical events, oppression, and discrimination, some more personal traumatic events such as adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) can also lead to inherited trauma for offspring. Several examples of ACEs are:

Being a victim of abuse, neglect, or violence

Witnessing violence

Living in a household where a family member abuses substances such as alcohol or drugs

Living in a household where a family member has mental health problems

Losing access to a parent due to separation

Losing access to a family member who is in prison or jail

Having a family member who attempts suicide or dies by suicide

Depending on how open your family members like your parents or grandparents are about their past and childhood trauma, you may or may not be aware that any of these traumatic events took place. Sadly, though, ACEs are very common. The CDC reports that 61% of adults say they experienced at least one adverse childhood experience growing up. Of these respondents, one-sixth of them said they experienced at least four ACEs.

Traumatic experiences in childhood aren't the only contributing factors. Trauma later in life can still play a role in intergenerational trauma.

How do you know if you personally are affected by ancestral trauma?

Ancestral trauma does not necessarily have a specific set of symptoms, since it is not a diagnosis. However, people affected by ancestral trauma may experience symptoms related to trauma responses or symptoms similar to PTSD symptoms. Some examples of trauma-related symptoms include:

Feeling emotions like anger, guilt, sadness, or shame

Feeling hopeless or numb

Experiencing feelings of anxiety or depression

Having otherwise unexplained physical symptoms like headaches, fatigue, or nausea

Hyperarousal or being easily startled

Wanting to withdraw or isolate from loved ones

Having difficulty concentrating

Having trouble sleeping

However, unlike people who have lived through a traumatic event firsthand, people experiencing intergenerational trauma may not experience PTSD symptoms such as distressing memories about the specific events or intense vivid flashbacks.

Additionally, research shows that among people who experience ancestral trauma, there are higher rates of mental health conditions such as:

If you experience a combination of any of these symptoms and/or have one of the above mental health conditions, it is possible that ancestral trauma may be to blame -- or at the very least, it could be a contributing factor as to why you feel the way you do. By understanding the connection between ancestral trauma and your present-day symptoms, you can take the reins on having a better understanding of the phenomenon, seek treatment for your own mental health symptoms, and work towards breaking generational trauma.

Charlie Health can help.

How do you break ancestral trauma?

While we certainly cannot take back traumatic events of the past and take away the pain that your parents, grandparents, and ancestors endured, you can make an active effort to break the cycle of ancestral trauma and improve the mental health experience for future generations to come.

There is not an easy quick fix or one-size-fits-all approach to breaking generational trauma. It will take ongoing active effort from you and other family members.

If you are a parent or caregiver who wants to stop the cycle and promote healing for the future generation, here are some things you can do:

Ensure that open communication and healthy displays of emotions are encouraged in the family

Work through your own personal unresolved trauma (such as any traumatic events linked to ACEs or later-in-life trauma) with a trauma-informed therapist, and encourage other caregivers to do so, as well

Work through your own mental health struggles, and encourage other caregivers to seek help too

Identify unhealthy behaviors or communication patterns that have been ongoing in your family

Educate yourself and your family about ancestral trauma and how it can affect you and future generations

Go to family therapy with your parents and/or children

If you believe the effects of ancestral trauma are harming you personally, it is so important to take care of yourself and seek help. By taking care of your own mental health and addressing your past trauma, you will improve your mental health and improve the chances of breaking the cycle of generational trauma. Even if you don't plan on having children, you can still seek mental health treatment for any inherited trauma that is affecting your quality of life.

Seeing a mental health therapist can help you dive into your past and present, helping to better understand what could be the cause of your symptoms. From there, you can learn how to cope with your emotions in a healthy way, discover new ways of thinking, and even grow from trauma.

How can Charlie Health help?

Are you a teen or young adult experiencing troubling mental health symptoms? If so, ancestral trauma could be a contributing factor. Regardless of the cause of your symptoms, Charlie Health may be able to help.

Our personalized intensive outpatient program (IOP) offers mental health treatment for teens, young adults, and families who are dealing with a variety of mental health struggles, including trauma, anxiety, depression, and more.

In our program, you will get matched with a therapist who meets your personal needs, and get connected with a group of peers who face similar struggles to help you remember you are not alone.

Coping with ancestral trauma and any other mental health conditions can be difficult, but with treatment, you can push forward, feel better, and work towards breaking ancestral trauma. Get started on your healing journey now.

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Ancestral trauma or intergenerational trauma refers to trauma that's passed down from generation to generation and affects the family's mental health.

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3 min: What parts of yourself - and what gifts of yours - have you hidden from the world because it does not feel safe to show them?

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3 min: What parts of yourself - and what gifts of yours - have you hidden from the world because it does not feel safe to show them?

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This prompt can take the form of a list or a freewrite whereby you put your pen to the page and write without interruption, just keep your pen moving. Or just a few jotted down ideas. Don't edit or overthink! What parts of yourself - and what gifts of yours - have you hidden from the world because it does not feel safe to show them?

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10 min: Explore your personal associations with the witch wound or further explore the part of you that is bigger than you are.

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10 min: Explore your personal associations with the witch wound or further explore the part of you that is bigger than you are.

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"Does speaking your truth feel deeply unsafe? Does being authentically seen by others feel threatening? Do you dim your own light, shrink yourself, and hide your gifts? Do you doubt and diminish your emotions and intuition? Do you often feel like you are both “too much” and “not enough” for society?

You may carry the age-old spiritual trauma known as the Witch Wound.

“...People who supported their communities with help from spirit and the earth were labeled as evil witches and burned. They were banned from and even killed for supporting their communities and being supported by their communities. No wonder I and others like me have struggled to find their way into being a valued part of community through sharing our gifts to support others.” - from "The Witch Wound: What It Is & How to Heal" at the end of this Padlet (see resource section)

Exercise 2 (10 min):

Now that you know a bit more about the witch wound, what personal associations do you have with the term? Think about your family history, a personal connection or (childhood) fascination with witch stories or history, images from dreams, visions, books you have read on the topic, games you played as a child, synchronicities you have experienced, practice of anything relating to Wicca (white or positive magic), your natural connection to nature or inclination to make up rituals, your feeling that something is missing in how you are "supposed" to show up in the world (and how do you really want to show up?), unexplainable affinities with the subject, or other connections you may have. What does the witch wound mean to you personally? Explore in freewriting.

If you have none, keep making associations with the earlier question: What parts of you do you not show and why? What is it about those parts of yourself that make you want to hide them? Is there a part of you that is a bit magical, that can manifest things you want, that knows things you cannot possibly know, that is bigger than just your small self? Tell us about it!

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The infamous Salem witch trials began during the spring of 1692, after a group of young girls in Salem Village, Massachusetts, claimed to be possessed by the devil and accused several local women of witchcraft. As a wave of hysteria spread throughout colonial Massachusetts, a special court convened in Salem to hear the cases; the first convicted witch, Bridget Bishop, was hanged that June. Eighteen others followed Bishop to Salem’s Gallows Hill, while some 150 more men, women and children were accused over the next several months.

By September 1692, the hysteria had begun to abate and public opinion turned against the trials. Though the Massachusetts General Court later annulled guilty verdicts against accused witches and granted indemnities to their families, bitterness lingered in the community, and the painful legacy of the Salem witch trials would endure for centuries.

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Table of Contents

1. What Caused the Salem Witch Trials?: Context & Origins

2. Salem Witch Trial Victims: How the Hysteria Spread

3. Salem Witch Trials: Conclusion and Legacy

The infamous Salem witch trials began during the spring of 1692, after a group of young girls in Salem Village, Massachusetts, claimed to be possessed by the devil and accused several local women of witchcraft. As a wave of hysteria spread throughout colonial Massachusetts, a special court convened in Salem to hear the cases; the first convicted witch, Bridget Bishop, was hanged that June. Eighteen others followed Bishop to Salem's Gallows Hill, while some 150 more men, women and children were accused over the next several months.

By September 1692, the hysteria had begun to abate and public opinion turned against the trials. Though the Massachusetts General Court later annulled guilty verdicts against accused witches and granted indemnities to their families, bitterness lingered in the community, and the painful legacy of the Salem witch trials would endure for centuries.

What Caused the Salem Witch Trials?: Context & Origins

Belief in the supernatural-and specifically in the devil's practice of giving certain humans (witches) the power to harm others in return for their loyalty-had emerged in Europe as early as the 14th century, and was widespread in colonial New England. In addition, the harsh realities of life in the rural Puritan community of Salem Village (present-day Danvers, Massachusetts) at the time included the after-effects of a British war with France in the American colonies in 1689, a recent smallpox epidemic, fears of attacks from neighboring Native American tribes and a longstanding rivalry with the more affluent community of Salem Town (present-day Salem).

Amid these simmering tensions, the Salem witch trials would be fueled by residents' suspicions of and resentment toward their neighbors, as well as their fear of outsiders.

Did you know? In an effort to explain by scientific means the strange afflictions suffered by those "bewitched" Salem residents in 1692, a study published in Science magazine in 1976 cited the fungus ergot (found in rye, wheat and other cereals), which toxicologists say can cause symptoms such as delusions, vomiting and muscle spasms.

In January 1692, 9-year-old Elizabeth (Betty) Parris and 11-year-old Abigail Williams (the daughter and niece of Samuel Parris, minister of Salem Village) began having fits, including violent contortions and uncontrollable outbursts of screaming. After a local doctor, William Griggs, diagnosed bewitchment, other young girls in the community began to exhibit similar symptoms, including Ann Putnam Jr., Mercy Lewis, Elizabeth Hubbard, Mary Walcott and Mary Warren.

In late February, arrest warrants were issued for the Parris' Caribbean slave, Tituba, along with two other women-the homeless beggar Sarah Good and the poor, elderly Sarah Osborn-whom the girls accused of bewitching them.

Salem Witch Trial Victims: How the Hysteria Spread

The three accused witches were brought before the magistrates Jonathan Corwin and John Hathorne and questioned, even as their accusers appeared in the courtroom in a grand display of spasms, contortions, screaming and writhing. Though Good and Osborn denied their guilt, Tituba confessed. Likely seeking to save herself from certain conviction by acting as an informer, she claimed there were other witches acting alongside her in service of the devil against the Puritans.

As hysteria spread through the community and beyond into the rest of Massachusetts, a number of others were accused, including Martha Corey and Rebecca Nurse-both regarded as upstanding members of church and community-and the four-year-old daughter of Sarah Good.

Like Tituba, several accused "witches" confessed and named still others, and the trials soon began to overwhelm the local justice system. In May 1692, the newly appointed governor of Massachusetts, William Phips, ordered the establishment of a special Court of Oyer (to hear) and Terminer (to decide) on witchcraft cases for Suffolk, Essex and Middlesex counties.

Presided over by judges including Hathorne, Samuel Sewall and William Stoughton, the court handed down its first conviction, against Bridget Bishop, on June 2; she was hanged eight days later on what would become known as Gallows Hill in Salem Town. Five more people were hanged that July; five in August and eight more in September. In addition, seven other accused witches died in jail, while the elderly Giles Corey (Martha's husband) was pressed to death by stones after he refused to enter a plea at his arraignment.

Salem Witch Trials: Conclusion and Legacy

Though the respected minister Cotton Mather had warned of the dubious value of spectral evidence (or testimony about dreams and visions), his concerns went largely unheeded during the Salem witch trials. Increase Mather, president of Harvard College (and Cotton's father) later joined his son in urging that the standards of evidence for witchcraft must be equal to those for any other crime, concluding that "It would better that ten suspected witches may escape than one innocent person be condemned."

Amid waning public support for the trials, Governor Phips dissolved the Court of Oyer and Terminer in October and mandated that its successor disregard spectral evidence. Trials continued with dwindling intensity until early 1693, and by that May Phips had pardoned and released all those in prison on witchcraft charges.

In January 1697, the Massachusetts General Court declared a day of fasting for the tragedy of the Salem witch trials; the court later deemed the trials unlawful, and the leading justice Samuel Sewall publicly apologized for his role in the process. The damage to the community lingered, however, even after Massachusetts Colony passed legislation restoring the good names of the condemned and providing financial restitution to their heirs in 1711.

Indeed, the vivid and painful legacy of the Salem witch trials endured well into the 20th century, when Arthur Miller dramatized the events of 1692 in his play "The Crucible" (1953), using them as an allegory for the anti-Communist "witch hunts" led by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. A memorial to the victims of the Salem witch trials was dedicated on August 5, 1992 by author and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel.

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Salem Witch Trials - Events, Facts & Victims | HISTORY

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The infamous Salem witch trials were a series of prosecutions for witchcraft starting in 1692 in Salem Village, Massachusetts. Learn about what led to the allegations and the hundreds of people who were were accused.

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Read more on the Library of Congress site here.

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People persecuted were often female but could be of any gender. However, the majority of those persecuted were female. You could say that witch trials had something to do with misogyny and fear of women's independence and power. If a woman was considered threatening, too outspoken, too independent, or too different, she was vulnerable to accusation.

The reasons for persecution were many, and not necessarily any practice of paganism or Wicca or witchcraft in any form, nor even that the people concerned were healers. Sometimes those persecuted were simply too outspoken, too beautiful, too plain, too magical, too transformational or radical, in someone's way, too unusual or different, too empowered, or simply an easy scapegoat for community wrath, a collective shadow, or collective guilt.

Persecutions simply had to do with fear of the "other," fear of illness or attack or any breaks with existing orders and safeties, and more. Othering is at the root of the persecution of individuals for witchcraft.

Some general history about witches from History.com

Witches were perceived as evil beings by early Christians in Europe, inspiring the iconic Halloween figure.

Images of witches have appeared in various forms throughout history—from evil, wart-nosed women huddling over a cauldron of boiling liquid to hag-faced, cackling beings riding through the sky on brooms wearing pointy hats. In pop culture, the witch has been portrayed as a benevolent, nose-twitching suburban housewife; an awkward teenager learning to control her powers and a trio of charmed sisters battling the forces of evil. The real history of witches, however, is dark and, often for the witches, deadly.

The Origin of Witches

Early witches were people who practiced witchcraft, using magic spells and calling upon spirits for help or to bring about change. Most witches were thought to be pagans doing the Devil’s work. Many, however, were simply natural healers or so-called “wise women” whose choice of profession was misunderstood.

It’s unclear exactly when witches came on the historical scene, but one of the earliest records of a witch is in the Bible in the book of 1 Samuel, thought be written between 931 B.C. and 721 B.C. It tells the story of when King Saul sought the Witch of Endor to summon the dead prophet Samuel’s spirit to help him defeat the Philistine army.

The witch roused Samuel, who then prophesied the death of Saul and his sons. The next day, according to the Bible, Saul’s sons died in battle, and Saul committed suicide.

Other Old Testament verses condemn witches, such as the oft-cited Exodus 22:18, which says, “thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” Additional Biblical passages caution against divination, chanting or using witches to contact the dead.

'Malleus Maleficarum'

Witch hysteria really took hold in Europe during the mid-1400s, when many accused witches confessed, often under torture, to a variety of wicked behaviors. Within a century, witch hunts were common and most of the accused were executed by burning at the stake or hanging. Single women, widows and other women on the margins of society were especially targeted.

Between the years 1500 and 1660, up to 80,000 suspected witches were put to death in Europe. Around 80 percent of them were women thought to be in cahoots with the Devil and filled with lust. Germany had the highest witchcraft execution rate, while Ireland had the lowest.

The publication of “Malleus Maleficarum”—written by two well-respected German Dominicans in 1486—likely spurred witch mania to go viral. The book, usually translated as “The Hammer of Witches,” was essentially a guide on how to identify, hunt and interrogate witches.

"Malleus Maleficarum" labeled witchcraft as heresy, and quickly became the authority for Protestants and Catholics trying to flush out witches living among them. For more than 100 years, the book sold more copies of any other book in Europe except the Bible.

[...]

Are Witches Real?

One of the most famous witches in Virginia’s history is Grace Sherwood, whose neighbors alleged she killed their pigs and hexed their cotton. Other accusations followed and Sherwood was brought to trial in 1706.

The court decided to use a controversial water test to determine her guilt or innocence. Sherwood’s arms and legs were bound and she was thrown into a body of water. It was thought if she sank, she was innocent; if she floated, she was guilty. Sherwood didn’t sink and was convicted of being a witch. She wasn’t killed but put in prison and for eight years.

A satirical article (supposedly written by Benjamin Franklin) about a witch trial in New Jersey was published in 1730 in the Pennsylvania Gazette. It brought to light the ridiculousness of some witchcraft accusations. It wasn’t long before witch mania died down in the New World and laws were passed to help protect people from being wrongly accused and convicted.

Book of Shadows

Modern-day witches of the Western World still struggle to shake their historical stereotype. Most practice Wicca, an official religion in the United States and Canada.

Wiccans avoid evil and the appearance of evil at all costs. Their motto is to “harm none,” and they strive to live a peaceful, tolerant and balanced life in tune with nature and humanity.

Many modern-day witches still perform witchcraft, but there’s seldom anything sinister about it. Their spells and incantations are often derived from their Book of Shadows, a 20th-century collection of wisdom and witchcraft, and can be compared to the act of prayer in other religions. A modern-day witchcraft potion is more likely to be an herbal remedy for the flu instead of a hex to harm someone.

Today’s witchcraft spells are usually used to stop someone from doing evil or harming themselves. Ironically, while it’s probable some historical witches used witchcraft for evil purposes, many may have embraced it for healing or protection against the immorality they were accused of.

But witches—whether actual or accused—still face persecution and death. Several men and women suspected of using witchcraft have been beaten and killed in Papua New Guinea since 2010, including a young mother who was burned alive. Similar episodes of violence against people accused of being witches have occurred in Africa, South America, the Middle East and in immigrant communities in Europe and the United States.

Sources

About Wicca. The Celtic Connection.
Case Study: The European Witch Hunts, c. 1450-1750 and Witch Hunts Today. Gendercide Watch.
The Salem Witch Trials. Oxford Research Encyclopedias.
Witchcraft: Creation of the “evil other.” Susan Moulton, Sonoma State University.
Witchcraft in Colonial Virginia. Encyclopedia of Virginia.
Witchcraft: The Beginnings. University of Chicago.
Witches and Witchcraft: The First Person Executed in the Colonies. State of Connecticut Judicial Branch Law Library Services.
Demonology: The Malleus Maleficarum—Proliferating Witch Hysteria. Mount Holyoke College.
The Persecution of Witches, 21st-Century Style. The New York Times.
Women and Witches: Patterns of Analysis. The University of Chicago Press.

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Witches were perceived as evil beings by early Christians in Europe, inspiring the iconic Halloween figure.

Images of witches have appeared in various forms throughout history-from evil, wart-nosed women huddling over a cauldron of boiling liquid to hag-faced, cackling beings riding through the sky on brooms wearing pointy hats. In pop culture, the witch has been portrayed as a benevolent, nose-twitching suburban housewife; an awkward teenager learning to control her powers and a trio of charmed sisters battling the forces of evil. The real history of witches, however, is dark and, often for the witches, deadly.

The Origin of Witches

Early witches were people who practiced witchcraft, using magic spells and calling upon spirits for help or to bring about change. Most witches were thought to be pagans doing the Devil's work. Many, however, were simply natural healers or so-called "wise women" whose choice of profession was misunderstood.

It's unclear exactly when witches came on the historical scene, but one of the earliest records of a witch is in the Bible in the book of 1 Samuel, thought be written between 931 B.C. and 721 B.C. It tells the story of when King Saul sought the Witch of Endor to summon the dead prophet Samuel's spirit to help him defeat the Philistine army.

The witch roused Samuel, who then prophesied the death of Saul and his sons. The next day, according to the Bible, Saul's sons died in battle, and Saul committed suicide.

Other Old Testament verses condemn witches, such as the oft-cited Exodus 22:18, which says, "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." Additional Biblical passages caution against divination, chanting or using witches to contact the dead.

'Malleus Maleficarum'

Witch hysteria really took hold in Europe during the mid-1400s, when many accused witches confessed, often under torture, to a variety of wicked behaviors. Within a century, witch hunts were common and most of the accused were executed by burning at the stake or hanging. Single women, widows and other women on the margins of society were especially targeted.

Between the years 1500 and 1660, up to 80,000 suspected witches were put to death in Europe. Around 80 percent of them were women thought to be in cahoots with the Devil and filled with lust. Germany had the highest witchcraft execution rate, while Ireland had the lowest.

The publication of "Malleus Maleficarum"-written by two well-respected German Dominicans in 1486-likely spurred witch mania to go viral. The book, usually translated as "The Hammer of Witches," was essentially a guide on how to identify, hunt and interrogate witches.

"Malleus Maleficarum" labeled witchcraft as heresy, and quickly became the authority for Protestants and Catholics trying to flush out witches living among them. For more than 100 years, the book sold more copies of any other book in Europe except the Bible.

Salem Witch Trials

As witch hysteria decreased in Europe, it grew in the New World, which was reeling from wars between the French and British, a smallpox epidemic and the ongoing fear of attacks from neighboring native American tribes. The tense atmosphere was ripe for finding scapegoats. Probably the best-known witch trials took place in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692.

The Salem witch trials began when 9-year-old Elizabeth Parris and 11-year-old Abigail Williams began suffering from fits, body contortions and uncontrolled screaming (today, it is believed that they were poisoned by a fungus that caused spasms and delusions). As more young women began to exhibit symptoms, mass hysteria ensued, and three women were accused of witchcraft: Sarah Good, Sarah Osborn and Tituba, an enslaved woman owned by Parris's father. Tituba confessed to being a witch and began accusing others of using black magic. On June 10, Bridget Bishop became the first accused witch to be put to death during the Salem Witch Trials when she was hanged at the Salem gallows. Ultimately, around 150 people were accused and 18 were put to death. Women weren't the only victims of the Salem Witch Trials; six men were also convicted and executed.

Massachusetts wasn't the first of the 13 colonies to obsess about witches, though. In Windsor, Connecticut in 1647, Alse Young was the first person in America executed for witchcraft. Before Connecticut's final witch trial took place in 1697, forty-six people were accused of witchcraft in that state and 11 were put to death for the crime.

In Virginia, people were less frantic about witches. In fact, in Lower Norfolk County in 1655, a law was passed making it a crime to falsely accuse someone of witchcraft. Still, witchcraft was a concern. About two-dozen witch trials (mostly of women) took place in Virginia between 1626 and 1730. None of the accused were executed.

Are Witches Real?

One of the most famous witches in Virginia's history is Grace Sherwood, whose neighbors alleged she killed their pigs and hexed their cotton. Other accusations followed and Sherwood was brought to trial in 1706.

The court decided to use a controversial water test to determine her guilt or innocence. Sherwood's arms and legs were bound and she was thrown into a body of water. It was thought if she sank, she was innocent; if she floated, she was guilty. Sherwood didn't sink and was convicted of being a witch. She wasn't killed but put in prison and for eight years.

A satirical article (supposedly written by Benjamin Franklin) about a witch trial in New Jersey was published in 1730 in the Pennsylvania Gazette. It brought to light the ridiculousness of some witchcraft accusations. It wasn't long before witch mania died down in the New World and laws were passed to help protect people from being wrongly accused and convicted.

Book of Shadows

Modern-day witches of the Western World still struggle to shake their historical stereotype. Most practice Wicca, an official religion in the United States and Canada.

Wiccans avoid evil and the appearance of evil at all costs. Their motto is to "harm none," and they strive to live a peaceful, tolerant and balanced life in tune with nature and humanity.

Many modern-day witches still perform witchcraft, but there's seldom anything sinister about it. Their spells and incantations are often derived from their Book of Shadows, a 20th-century collection of wisdom and witchcraft, and can be compared to the act of prayer in other religions. A modern-day witchcraft potion is more likely to be an herbal remedy for the flu instead of a hex to harm someone.

Today's witchcraft spells are usually used to stop someone from doing evil or harming themselves. Ironically, while it's probable some historical witches used witchcraft for evil purposes, many may have embraced it for healing or protection against the immorality they were accused of.

But witches-whether actual or accused-still face persecution and death. Several men and women suspected of using witchcraft have been beaten and killed in Papua New Guinea since 2010, including a young mother who was burned alive. Similar episodes of violence against people accused of being witches have occurred in Africa, South America, the Middle East and in immigrant communities in Europe and the United States.

Sources

About Wicca. The Celtic Connection.
Case Study: The European Witch Hunts, c. 1450-1750 and Witch Hunts Today. Gendercide Watch.
The Salem Witch Trials. Oxford Research Encyclopedias.
Witchcraft: Creation of the "evil other." Susan Moulton, Sonoma State University.
Witchcraft in Colonial Virginia. Encyclopedia of Virginia.
Witchcraft: The Beginnings. University of Chicago.
Witches and Witchcraft: The First Person Executed in the Colonies. State of Connecticut Judicial Branch Law Library Services.
Demonology: The Malleus Maleficarum-Proliferating Witch Hysteria. Mount Holyoke College.
The Persecution of Witches, 21st-Century Style. The New York Times.
Women and Witches: Patterns of Analysis. The University of Chicago Press.

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Witches were perceived as evil beings by early Christians in Europe, inspiring the iconic Halloween figure.

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Here you can read about 17th Century English Witch Craft Trials on the website of the Library of Congress.

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Some stories of Witch craft in The Netherlands

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Some stories of Witch craft in The Netherlands

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Witch Trials in The Netherlands - Wikipedia

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What fears hold you back in being aligned with the part of you that is bigger than your ego, that knows more than you consciously do, that is magical, that can manifest things, that trusts your own power, that is aligned with earth and nature and the cosmos and that gives you inner peace and trust and joy? Make a list of your fears.

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5 min: Make a list of your strengths, gifts, your magic, your super powers.

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5 min: Make a list of your strengths, gifts, your magic, your super powers.

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What inner strengths and super powers do you have that perhaps hardly anyone knows about - things you secretly dream about sharing with your community at some point in your life, even if it is just a dream right now? Write them down as a list or a jotting of ideas. Your list does not have to sound coherent - this is just for YOU. Admit things you might not have felt safe admitting to yourself before: What are your gifts that you don’t tell anyone about? What is your magic? What are your greatest strengths you have not yet stepped into? What are your gifts and super powers and what do you want to align with in this life?

Add in: How do you relate to the earth and nature? And to intuition, feeling, spirituality?

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5 min: Share the gifts you have for your community.

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5 min: Share the gifts you have for your community.

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"Our DNA, bodies, nervous systems tell us IT IS NOT SAFE to share our gifts."

What gifts do you have for your community? Make a list or jot down your ideas. It can be as raw and/or unformed as it feels inside, just begin somewhere.

Holding safe space for your gifts and your authentic true voice and calling is revolutionary and is breaking centuries of persecution we carry with us in our bones.

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3 min: Reflection - How do your fears connect to the fears of your ancestors?

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3 min: Reflection - How do your fears connect to the fears of your ancestors?

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If you have any idea about your ancestry or even just family members you know and have lived with, how do your fears relate to theirs? Step through the portal into their stories for a moment and jot down some thoughts. If you are not sure, what do you imagine about their fears and how your fears may relate to theirs?

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3 min: Reflection - What were the dreams, the magic, the gifts, the strengths and superpowers of your ancestors?

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3 min: Reflection - What were the dreams, the magic, the gifts, the strengths and superpowers of your ancestors?

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Reflect for a moment on the gifts, strengths, magic, superpowers and dreams of your ancestors. What might they have been? If you don't know, imagine.

Also reflect on your relationship to the earth and nature, intuition, feeling, and spirituality.

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5 min: What do you need in order to feel safe?

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5 min: What do you need in order to feel safe?

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Write down a list of things you need to feel safe. Your answers don't have to make sense, they can be as quirky and strange as they come up in your mind. Don't censor your heart and mind as you write!

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5 min: What do you most desire to receive?

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5 min: What do you most desire to receive?

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Write a list of what you most desire to receive. What would help you feel in your power to connect to a bigger Self than just your ego? What would help you connect back to your magic, to a sense of flow and alignment with the world around you and the universe and your personal gifts?

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3 min: Reflection - Observe your fears objectively. Are they true and real? 

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3 min: Reflection - Observe your fears objectively. Are they true and real? 

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You know the story of a snake in a dark space. If you flick on the light, you might suddenly see that the snake is a rope, and not a snake at all.

Observe your own fears honestly and as objectively as you can. Are they true and real? Examine them carefully. Are they a realistic assessment? Why or why not? Jot down a brief reflection on your own fears. Try to look at them with the most expansive and objective perspective you can muster.

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3 min: Reflection - What holds you back from stepping into your gifts, superpowers, or realizing your magic and dreams?

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3 min: Reflection - What holds you back from stepping into your gifts, superpowers, or realizing your magic and dreams?

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Reflect for a moment on what holds you back from stepping into your power and owning your superpowers. What holds you back from realizing your dreams and embodying your magic? What disconnects you from earth and nature, from your own intuition and feeling, from your spirituality?

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5 min: Imagine or envision yourself as a self-empowered person sharing your gifts with the world.

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5 min: Imagine or envision yourself as a self-empowered person sharing your gifts with the world.

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You don't have to necessarily write for these five minutes. You can also close your eyes and visualize what it would look like if you were to step into your power and embody your own gifts, your superpowers, your magic, and if you were to realize your dreams and share your gifts with your community. Jot down details if you are writing this down, or imagine details and specificity if you are doing this as a visualization exercise without words. Don't leave any detail out!

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Reflection -How has the journey of working with the witch wound changed you?

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Reflection -How has the journey of working with the witch wound changed you?

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A reflection at the end: How has this journey of working with the witch wound changed you? What aspects of yourself, or what gifts or powers or dreams, did you not fully own within yourself while now you realize you want to claim these aspects, gifts, powers, and dreams and make them part of your daily routine and focus?

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Make a list of possible rituals for yourself to reconnect you to the divine feminine, to nature, to the earth, to your own gifts and dreams. 

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Make a list of possible rituals for yourself to reconnect you to the divine feminine, to nature, to the earth, to your own gifts and dreams. 

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Make Lists of Rituals

Make a list of rituals you love that you can do to remind yourself of your own power and gifts and magic on a regular basis - these can be small things, or bigger things: simple tea ceremonies, burning a candle now and then, making an altar or shrine, writing down your dreams and posting them in a prominent place, journaling often about your thoughts on these topics, regular reflections about how much room you are making for yourself and your gifts, and more.

Connect to Community & Ancestors

If this is something that helps you, you can also ask for help from beyond you: from dear friends and family, from nature, or from spirit guides and helpers you are connected to - whether for you spirit guides means love, the divine, one spirit guide, many guides, your higher self, or anything else.

Journal about your Dreams and Gifts

It can be very helpful to journal and ask something beyond yourself for insights, clarity, next steps and support with bringing the energy of this giving and receiving into form. Having a clear intention is the first step! What do you want to manifest and be, and what steps do you want to take to create your dreams and bring your gifts to the world?

Reconnect to Nature

Also highly recommended: Take walks and spend time in nature. Our Knowing the Unknowable panelists all recommended this as a way to connect to intuition. You can also make up rituals to reconnect to the natural world, which holds so much power for us. Sit against a tree and meditate or watch the world and listen to your breath. Let the power of the tree come into your body. Watch the moon at night, or a field full of fireflies. Become nature outside of you. Breathe nature into your body. Build little shrines to your creativity and connection to nature, then let nature disintegrate them. Draw poetry in sand. Watch the stars and run with them through the expanse of universe. Ponder the rain.

Meditate & Reflect

Choose a practice of meditation that you feel at home with that connects you to a more transcendental part of yourself that is larger than your ego, a deep peace within, and/or a space beyond the treadmill of thoughts that our minds can often be. Where is your inner sanctuary of peace? What is your way to reach it? Is it Transcendental Meditation (the technique we practice at MIU), breath work, mindfulness, yoga, or something else? Turning inward and getting quiet enough to listen to yourself may be the first ritual part of your day to reconnect you to your inner center and self-trust and your visions and dreams and gifts.

Make a list of your own ideas for rituals you can do outside or in your home to reconnect yourself to your higher self, the divine feminine, the earth, nature, your community, and especially your own gifts and dreams.

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Documentary: The Burning Times - an Overview of the Witch Hunts from Europe to Colonized Nations and Continents including the US

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Documentary: The Burning Times - an Overview of the Witch Hunts from Europe to Colonized Nations and Continents including the US

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The documentary The Burning Times takes an in-depth look at the witch hunts that swept Europe just a few hundred years ago. False accusations and trials led to massive torture and burnings at the stake and ultimately to the destruction of an organic way of life. The film questions whether the widespread violence against women and the neglect of our environment today can be traced back to those times. It is part two of a series of three films on women and spirituality, which also includes Goddess Remembered and Full Circle. Directed by Donna Read - 1990.

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2 min: Reflection - Do you know why you are hiding these parts of yourself and these gifts?

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2 min: Reflection - Do you know why you are hiding these parts of yourself and these gifts?

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Reflect for a moment on why you might be hiding these parts of yourself and these gifts.

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Write a list of affirmations for self-support and empowerment.

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Write a list of affirmations for self-support and empowerment.

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It is easy to lose connection with your own empowerment and self-trust that your gifts and voice matter in this world - a belief that it is OK and safe to be, to be heard, to show up, to take up space, to share your gifts, to show your power and speak your truth, to follow your dreams, to trust yourself, to believe in yourself, to offer what you most deeply want to share. To trust that you will be well-received if you follow your own truths.

Here some affirmation ideas you can play with, if you like affirmations:

I am connected to myself and my own truth and power.

It is safe for me to speak my truth and offer my gifts.

I am supported to offer my gifts and share my truth with the world.

I am worthy of receiving gifts in exchange for offering my gifts to the world.

I am powerful and I speak my truth.

I embody my magic self in the world.

Other people honor and support my magic and my gifts.

I put my gifts and my truth in service of good for the healing of mankind and our world.

Now feel free to write your own!

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Pegan and indigenous religious or healing practices or celebrations of earth and cosmos were often dubbed "witch craft" by colonial settlers from Europe who invaded large parts of Africa and Latin America, spreading their Christian religious doctrine at the expense of original cultural and religious beliefs and practices. The resulting loss and the accompanying terror took a deeply traumatic toll on colonized indigenous peoples and the cultural heritage of colonized nations. Indigenous practices tend to be in tune with earth and cosmos, herbal healing knowledge, natural ways of assisting with childbirth and death. The persecution of those seeking to continue their indigenous practices created a disconnect from female empowerment, community, the earth, the body, and tribal cultural roots. It also cost many innocent people their lives.

Here you can read about colonial witch hunts in South America.

Here you can read about colonial witch hunts in Modern Africa and early Modern Europe.

The history of witch craft in Africa.

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The Witch Wound: What is it, and How Do We Heal It?

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The Witch Wound: What is it, and How Do We Heal It?

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Does speaking your truth feel deeply unsafe? Does being authentically seen by others feel threatening? Do you dim your own light, shrink yourself, and hide your gifts? Do you doubt and diminish your emotions and intuition? Do you often feel like you are both “too much” and “not enough” for society?

You may carry the age-old spiritual trauma known as the Witch Wound.

What Is the Witch Wound?

The Witch Wound is an inherited, collective trauma that is rooted in the dark history of the Burning Times, and that manifests as a fear of being seen, speaking up, and stepping into your full magic and power.

During the Burning Times, tens of thousands [if not hundreds of thousands] of innocent women and men were imprisoned, tortured, and executed in the most inhuman and brutal of ways: burning, beheading, drowning, hanging.

Those accused who escaped execution were exiled from their communities, stripped of their status, and pushed out of their vocations.

Some of these victims were healers, midwives, wise women and men, and diviners who served their communities; others were simply people who were too outspoken, too old, too rich, too poor, too beautiful, or too ugly.

All of them were victims of patriarchy, capitalism, imperialism, and religious tyranny.

Our ancestors who survived these dark times carried the memory of these events not just in their minds, but also in their bodies.

Their fear, their shame, their grief, their survival instincts have been passed down through the ages, and now live on in our blood and bones.

This is the legacy of the Witch Wound. It exists on both a soul level and a DNA level. Yet it also exists on a societal and cultural level.

Even today, the toxic binds of patriarchy, capitalism, imperialism, and religious tyranny restrict self-expression. These oppressive systems dictate which lifestyles,

professions, hobbies, interests, bodies, clothes, and hairstyles are “acceptable” and “worthy,” and which are not.

They favor those in power and attempt to shame those who fall into the category of “The Other.”

Witches, of course, have always been the ultimate Other.

Witches — those who claim their Earth-given birthrights of spirituality and magic, and who use their power to create change in their inner and outer worlds — have never been the ones we should fear.

It has always been the men wielding the torches. It is time for witches to stop hiding their magic and reclaim their power.

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Does speaking your truth feel deeply unsafe? Does being authentically seen by others feel threatening? Do you dim your own light, shrink yourself, and hide your gifts? Do you doubt and diminish your emotions and intuition? Do you often feel like you are both "too much" and "not enough" for society?

You may carry the age-old spiritual trauma known as the Witch Wound.

What Is the Witch Wound?

The Witch Wound is an inherited, collective trauma that is rooted in the dark history of the Burning Times, and that manifests as a fear of being seen, speaking up, and stepping into your full magic and power.

During the Burning Times, tens of thousands of innocent women and men were imprisoned, tortured, and executed in the most inhuman and brutal of ways: burning, beheading, drowning, hanging.

Those accused who escaped execution were exiled from their communities, stripped of their status, and pushed out of their vocations.

Some of these victims were healers, midwives, wise women and men, and diviners who served their communities; others were simply people who were too outspoken, too old, too rich, too poor, too beautiful, or too ugly.

All of them were victims of patriarchy, capitalism, imperialism, and religious tyranny.

Our ancestors who survived these dark times carried the memory of these events not just in their minds, but also in their bodies.

Their fear, their shame, their grief, their survival instincts have been passed down through the ages, and now live on in our blood and bones.

This is the legacy of the Witch Wound.

It exists on both a soul level and a DNA level.

Yet it also exists on a societal and cultural level.

Even today, the toxic binds of patriarchy, capitalism, imperialism, and religious tyranny restrict self-expression.

These oppressive systems dictate which lifestyles, professions, hobbies, interests, bodies, clothes, and hairstyles are "acceptable" and "worthy," and which are not.

They favor those in power and attempt to shame those who fall into the category of "The Other."

Witches, of course, have always been the ultimate Other.

Witches - those who claim their Earth-given birthrights of spirituality and magic, and who use their power to create change in their inner and outer worlds - have never been the ones we should fear.

It has always been the men wielding the torches.

It is time for witches to stop hiding their magic and reclaim their power.

"Heal the Witch Wound" Book

Healing the Witch Wound

Learn more about the Witch Wound at these links:
Blog Posts Videos

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The Witch Wound: What It Is & How to Heal | Mage By Moonlight

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The witch wound is a psychic, inherited trauma that manifests as a fear of being seen, speaking up, and stepping into your full power.

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To the Left: Prompts and Rituals for your Journey with the Witch Wound.

To your Right: Resources to learn more about the witch wound and its history, plus the effects of this wound in our culture and on our bodies.

Caveat: What this Workshop Is Not

Please understand that some emotions can come up when you process or write about anything personal. Please note that the facilitator is not a therapist. If you are in need of some professional support to help you with experiences that come up in this workshop, we recommend you seek help of a licensed psychologist or counselor in your community! Students, we can help you set up professional support during the semester. Just reach out to me at npassi@miu.edu and I'll help you set it up.

What This Workshop Is: A Safe, Generative Space

This class is purely a generative space, not a master class, and the aim is to process, write, say the unsayable, and heal - not to workshop, critique, or revise. It's also not a space to debate what the witch wound is or isn't or to mull over the history of witch hunts beyond a brief introduction. The concept of the witch wound can mean different things to different people. Critical words have no place in this inner process space, so let's leave them at the door. We welcome reflections of each writer's work (favorite lines, likes, loves).

This class Padlet includes the following:

1. Class description.

2. A series of prompts and reflections to take you on a journey of inner discovery. The prompts are numbered 1 - 9 with reflections in between.

3. A ritual and possible affirmations to help you reconnect to your gifts and your self-trust in your own voice and abilities.

4. A series of resources, such as a documentary and historical information, about witches and witch hunts and trials, plus a working definition of the witch wound.

5. Information on generational trauma and how it is stored in the body.

6. Some literary resources on witch wounds and possible recommendations for further reading.

Welcome to our festival space! I am so happy you joined us!

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Witch craft accusations of Indigenous peoples on what is now known as the North American continent

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Witch craft accusations of Indigenous peoples on what is now known as the North American continent

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All of the colonization of indigenous cultures comes from a similar mentality of control with power, division, and destruction - of culture, of religious beliefs, of traditions, of community, and also of livelihood and connection to earth, land, water, and sovereignty over self and community. There are a few very specific examples of indigenous people and tribes being accused of witch craft by the settlers who took over their lands. Here some examples:

Here you can read about Witchcraft and the Colonization of Algonquian and Iroquois Cultures (JStor) if you log in.

The story of Tituba, an indigenous survivor of the Salem Witch trials.

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From The Marginalian by Maria Popover

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"Words belong to each other," Virginia Woolf's melodious voice unspools in the only surviving recording of her speech - a 1937 love letter to language. "In each word, all words," the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot writes a generation later as he considers the dual power of language to conceal and to reveal. But because language is our primary sieve of perception, our mightiest means of describing what we apprehend and thus comprehending it, words also belong to that which they describe - or, rather, they are the conduit of belonging between us and the world we perceive. As the bryologist and Native American storyteller Robin Wall Kimmerer observed in her poetic meditation on moss, "finding the words is another step in learning to see." Losing the words, then, is ceasing to see - a peculiar and pervasive form of blindness that dulls the shimmer of the world, a disability particularly dangerous to the young imagination just learning to apprehend the world through language.

In early 2015, when the 10,000-entry Oxford children's dictionary dropped around fifty words related to nature - words like fern, willow, and starling - in favor of terms like broadband and cut and paste, some of the world's most prominent authors composed an open letter of protest and alarm at this impoverishment of children's vocabulary and its consequent diminishment of children's belonging to and with the natural world. Among them was one of the great nature writers of our time: Robert Macfarlane - a rare descendent from the lyrical tradition of Rachel Carson and Henry Beston, and the visionary who rediscovered and brought to life the stunning forgotten writings of the Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd.

Troubled by this loss of vital and vitalizing language, MacFarlane teamed up with illustrator and children's book author Jackie Morris, who had reached out to him to write an introduction for a sort of "wild dictionary" she wanted to create as a counterpoint to Oxford's erasure. Instead, Macfarlane envisioned something greater. The Lost Words: A Spell Book (public library) was born - an uncommonly wondrous and beguiling act of resistance to the severance of our relationship with the rest of nature, a rerooting into this living world in which, in the words of the great naturalist John Muir, "when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe," just as each word is hitched to all words and to the entire web of being.

While children's experience is at the heart of this quiet masterpiece, MacFarlane and Morris intended the large, lavishly illustrated book for "children aged 3 to 100" - a book "to conjure back the common words and species that are steadily disappearing from everyday life - and especially from children's stories and dreams," a book "to catch at the beauty and wonder - but also the eeriness and otherness - of the natural world." What emerges is a lyrical encyclopedia of enchantments, radiating the sensibility of classical natural history illustration but illustrating a more natural future for the generations ahead.

Each word occupies three lavishly illustrated spreads: a poetic "summoning spell" in the form of an acrostic to conjure back the lost word in a rhythmic incantation composed to be read aloud, a wordless visual eulogy for its vanishment, and a typographic botany of letters spelling it "back into language, hearts, minds and landscape."

Half a century after Rachel Carson painted in the opening of her epoch-making book Silent Spring a dystopian future bereft of birdsong, Macfarlane opens with an image of a world - this world - bereft of the words for birds (and plants, and other beings), and thus bereft of the regard for and concern with them:

Once upon a time, words began to vanish from the language of children. They disappeared so quietly that at first almost no one noticed - fading away like water on stone. The words were those that children used to name the natural world around them: acorn, adder, bluebell, bramble, conker - gone! Fern, heather, kingfisher, otter, raven, willow, wren... all of them gone! The words were becoming lost: no longer vivid in children's voices, no longer alive in their stories.

You hold in your hands a spellbook for conjuring back these lost words. To read it you will need to seek, find and speak. It deals in things that are missing and things that are hidden, in absences and in appearances. It is told in gold - the gold of the goldfinches that flit through its pages in charms - and it holds not poems but spells of many kinds that might just, by the old, strong magic of being spoken aloud, unfold dreams and songs, and summon lost words back into the mouth and the mind's eye.

Complement The Lost Words, the splendor and enchantment of which no digital screen can convey, with Susan Sontag on the conscience of words and Walt Whitman on the wisdom of trees, then revisit the lovely Lost in Translation - an illustrated dictionary of beautifully untranslatable words from around the world.

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The Lost Words: An Illustrated Dictionary of Poetic Spells Reclaiming the Language of Nature

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From acorn to wren, a vibrant encyclopedia of enchantments reweaving our broken web of belonging with the rest of nature.

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I was pleasantly surprised by the relevance of Nynke Passi's Healing the Witch Wound to my perpetual obsession with politics and journalism. As much as I appreciated the sequence and nuance of the questions for personal metacognition and self-direction, I found the social lens even more compelling given cultural currents of conflicts the past few years and what some social psychologists call witch hunts. The interplay between self and other, intrapersonal and interpersonal dynamics in the themes and questions, suggest a greater potential for individual, within a group, and between groups.

On a personal level, I was struck by the honesty required and epiphanies generated. It's not a matter of dishonesty to oneself, but a matter of the busy day to day narrative drowning out the quiet "Why?"s of oneself.

As I delve into research on leadership and peak performing teams, Passi's skill in unfolding individual potential and creating learning communities is becoming less opaque as more elements of those crafts become more visible and no less magical. Kegan and Lahey's research suggests that there are distinct developmental stages of adult development, including the Socialized Mind, Self-Authoring Mind, and Self-Transforming Mind. Workshops like Healing the Witch Wound seem to target development of these stages of complexity, arguably the most valuable education for the 21st century.

-M. B. (course participant)

Nynke's workshop gave me so much material to expand on. This is the most I've written so far in a session since the beginning of the festival. There is so much, to use a word Nynke often uses, whimsy, but also heartbreak and profound spirituality and also thoughts of lifetimes I may not remember but feel. Or at least the feeling of the collective humanity throughout time. Thank you, Nynke. Your ability to create space and curiosity with twists and turns is what being a teacher is all about.

-B.L (course participant)

Mothering Each Other: Healing the Witch Wound opened a rich vein of healing, of connection and coherence for me, there is a new dimension of healing for both me and the ancestors and I can't really think of a sweeter side quest than this. A lot has begun to shift since this workshop, continuing to think on the topics we covered and exploring some we didn't. I always feel like when we take that step on the path, the universe reaches out in invitation.

-A.R. (course participant)

Nynke's workshop drew things out of me that I had forgotten. The prompts affected me more in a personal sense than a writing sense, they struck at things I have buried (we all have these things of course). And therein lies one of Nynke's (many) magical abilities. As a creative process one of the things we are often encouraged to do is become more ourselves. There's this part of facing our grief and wounds, here the witch wound, that is a critical piece of it. Nynke is so good at drawing this out of us and guiding and bringing these little delicate things that are also delicacies in their own way, into the light.

-T.R. (course participant)

Nynke, your workshop on Healing the Witch Wound was really thought provoking.  I loved all the exercises.

-S.S. (course participant)

This was such an amazing gathering of souls willing to share such painful corners of our shared reality. Truly a support group. With Nynke at the helm it reminded me so much of the classes I had with her in my undergrad. Really sweet and heartwarming.

-C.V. (course participant)

Mothering Each Other Home: Healing the Witch Wound, by Nynke Passi, was entirely healing and in service to connection with our true selves, whole selves, each self.

The feeling in the room was palpable. Felt thrice, times each participant, squared, and then multiplied.

Ancestor was present there. Here.

I review the writing exercise. Do them all over again. The model, the inquiry Nynke has for us is a fully engaged inquiry for the self, in relation with an ugliness - a grotesque past - of pain, injury, harm, carnage, and forgetting. A banishing. What part of myself have I banished, so in order to have done so before anyone else could banish me. My ness. The ripening. the courage. the strength. the insight. the direct revelation from goddess. The is-ness

The writing exercises showed me to myself. As if they were a magic portal into a realm where all facades were pealed away, and all that was left, was me, and ancestor - auntie, mum, gramma, sister, fems, brothers.

I see the part that went into hiding. has sought refuge in the woods, to never return to society. She has felt a sense of safety there for sometime. Yet, is learning that the only way she will truly be safe - is to come out.

-E.J.B. (course participant)

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"Ancient moon priestesses were called virgins. “Virgin” meant not married, not belonging to a man—a woman who was “one-in-herself.” The very word derives from a Latin root meaning strength, force, skill; and was later applied to men: virile.

Ishtar, Diana, Astarte, Isis were all called virgin, which did not refer to sexual chastity, but sexual independence. And all great culture heroes of the past, mythic or historic, were said to be born of virgin mothers: Marduk, Gilgamesh, Buddha, Osiris, Dionysus, Genghis Khan, Jesus—they were all affirmed as sons of the Great Mother, of the Original One, their worldly power deriving from her. When the Hebrews used the word, and in the original Aramaic, it meant “maiden” or “young woman,” with no connotations of sexual chastity.

But later Christian translators could not conceive of the “Virgin Mary” as a woman of independent sexuality, needless to say; they distorted the meaning into sexually pure, chaste, never touched. When Joan of Arc, with her witch coven associations, was called La Pucelle—“the Maiden,” “the Virgin”—the word retained some of its original Pagan sense of a strong and independent woman."

- The Great Cosmic Mother, Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor -