True Magic & Real Witchcraft: Reverence, Reclamation & the Truth Beneath the Aesthetic
Share
We are living in times when performance is portrayed as presence, when what you see on the surface is rarely what you find beneath it. The misaligned use of social media and AI has become a kind of smoke-and-mirrors, blurring what is real and what is not into a fog of confusion. We falsely believe that what we see posted on someone's Instagram feed is real life, but it isn't always what it seems. It is very easy to cut out pictures from a magazine and create a collage that depicts something completely different than what the magazine itself conveyed. Looks can be deceiving.
And, as of late, I feel the call to step forth and speak to this distortion. With the hope of elevating beauty, honoring self-expression, and shining a light down the long, dark forested pathway toward something timeless, beyond trend, and older than projection.
Sometimes we need to step beyond the mundane, allow our imagination to become a doorway to self-discovery. To loosen the grip of old identities and open space for transformation. So long as we remember the doorway is not the destination. Pretending may catalyze the internal shift, but embodiment is what completes it.
I write for our collective reclamation, from a place of remembrance, and as an honest attempt to speak truthfully about how walking the path of a witch has crystallized my own life. While also holding the hard truth that the deeper roots of the Old Ways are often misunderstood when seen only from the surface, twisted by media, and outside historical context.
The Age of Aesthetic Witchcraft
I am a believer in adornment, artistic expression, and transformation made visible. Looking back through time immemorial, you will find that humans have always adorned themselves as part of their sacred rites and devotional practices. From ancient symbols like runes and sigils, to ritualistically crafted garments made of bark and animal skins, bejeweled with crystal and bone, the language of adornment is older than words, carved in stone.
In my own life, that devotion has taken form through the pieces my beloved and I co-create with leather, hand-dyed silk, and vintage findings, shaped into living ritual pieces rather than costume. Again and again, I've observed someone step into a piece of our wearable art and recognize themselves more fully. The art itself does not make them magical; rather, it helps them remember the magic already alive within them, waiting to be expressed and seen. Our magic, which is infused and expressed through our art, becomes an amplifier of their own natural magic.
The difference is not in what you wear, it is in whether you are wearing it to escape yourself or to more fully embody your own becoming.
In the past decade, I have watched something slowly shift.
The "costume of belonging," like Cottagecore and Witchcore, among others, has arrived on the scene. Curated images of mysticism based on appearance. A world where being a witch can appear as simple as adopting a new aesthetic for your living room or kitchen, or crafting the right visual atmosphere for how you share yourself on social platforms. It makes as much sense as calling yourself a mushroom hunter because you snatched up every 1970's Sears & Roebuck Painted Ceramic Mushroom you could find at the thrift store. And have decided that this decorative portrayal means you're somehow now knowledgeable enough to eat wild mushrooms. This does not translate well... or at all.
And I understand the longing beneath it. Many people are searching for something grounded, something real, something older than the modern world has to offer, something that touches the deep, soulful mystery of who they are beyond the surface of everyday life. We are literally drowning as a culture in mass-produced mediocrity dressed up as spiritual materialism. Our souls are gasping for a deep breath of something authentic, something actionable and tangible. The interconnected energetic living pulse of life itself and our part in it all.
AND real witchcraft is not a performance.
It is lived. It is the disciplined practice of listening to and tending the land we inhabit, conversing with spirit and elementals, and attuning to the quiet intelligence of life's cycles in real time. It is the slow work of tending gardens, crafting medicine, walking beside and through birth, death, and grief without applause. Without needing validation or attention for living from this place. Void of likes and outside commentary.
A Witch is not an adjective meant to decorate a personality or describe an aesthetic. A Witch is a verb, a living practice. It is the act of listening to land and body, of tending one's inner flame, of asking deeper questions than comfort prefers. To "Witch" is to move into a relationship with the seen and unseen, to shape and be shaped, to participate in the quiet alchemy of becoming. It is something one continually does, through a rhythm of devotion, awareness, and transformation unfolding in real time.
Adornment itself is not the problem. It's the disconnection that we experience when spiritual materialism is given an altar in place of our becoming. When art, self-expression, and ritual are rooted in lived devotion, it becomes sacred. When our identity is rooted only in appearance, something essential is lost, and our soulfulness is left behind. Adornment can open the door to reimagining ourselves, but embodiment is when we walk through the door into lived experience.
The Truth Beneath the Word “Witch”
When people approach me with fear around the word witch, I often realize they have inherited a story stripped of its complexity and historical context. The narrative most people carry was not born from truth! It was shaped by those who sought to silence women’s wisdom, women’s sovereignty, and our collective power that cannot be easily controlled as the birth givers and hearth tenders to the natural world.
The European witch hunts were not one-dimensional, but deeply troubling in their multifaceted complexity. They unfolded during a time when medicine was becoming centralized within male-dominated teaching institutions tied to Church authority, predominantly the Catholic Church. Women who carried generational knowledge of herbalism, midwifery, and healing- wisdom passed from grandmother to mother to daughter, rooted in earth and body- were increasingly seen as a threat to the authority of the patriarchal church and the newly established medical institutions.
Power over, which often stems from a place of fear and the need to control, shaped by religious dogma and reinforced by the belief that women were lesser, became the soil in which unspeakable atrocities took root.
America was no better than Europe, as Puritanical European settlers carried the same fear-driven narratives across the ocean, culminating in the horrors of Salem, Massachusetts. When I visited the Salem Witch Museum, I felt a deep-seated anger at how one-dimensional the story presented to the public seemed. What happened there has too often been reduced to a simplified caricature, stripped of its deeper historical and human complexity. Like most moments in history where humans turn against one another, the truth is rarely singular; it is layered, nuanced, and far more complicated than the versions we are often given.
Religious extremism, social tension, patriarchal control, and yes, the presence of ergot-contaminated grain, a factor scholars have explored as contributing to neurological symptoms and hysteria within an already volatile Puritan community. It became a convergence of environmental, spiritual, psychological, and political forces that fed the fear and chaos of the time, resulting in the tragic death of 25 innocent lives.
When layers of historical context are stripped away, the word "Witch" is reduced to a villain or a monster, severed from the truth that many of these individuals were wise elder women and earth-rooted healers living in deep relationship with the land and community.
I carry this word openly not to provoke, but to reclaim, reframe, and remember what came long before these atrocities. To honor the innocent lives that were lost to ignorance, power, and greed. The word witch was never meant to be a wound.
Once, it named those who listened- the keeper of thresholds, the tender of unseen gardens. From old tongues it rose: wicce, wicca- not a title of fear, but a verb of becoming. To bend gently with fate, to shape what is broken toward wholeness, to walk between root and star with reverence.
Long before the fires of misunderstanding, the witch was simply the one who practiced presence... hands in the soil, breath in the mystery, heart aligned with the living spell of the world.
You May Keep Him All to Yourself
One of the oldest and most tiresome stories projected onto witches is the idea that we worship "he who shall not be named"... and I don't mean Voldemort. I'm talking about a figure who was never part of our path to begin with. I say this gently, and with a touch of humor, because I know how deeply this narrative has shaped public imagination.
I’ll admit I hold a deep curiosity about mythology itself... the origins of stories, how they change over time, and what they reveal about the cultures that carry them. But curiosity is not devotion. This figure, often associated with witches, does not belong to my spiritual landscape, and I feel no pull toward that symbolism. It is not part of the path I walk.
For me, the image of a singular god above and a horned adversary below does not resonate as truth. What captures my imagination are older mythic currents, the descent and return of Persephone, the quiet sovereignty of Demeter, and the liminal thresholds held by Hades. These stories feel like mirrors of nature’s cycles rather than systems of judgment.
I do not subscribe to the cosmology of heaven or hell. Instead, we shape our own versions of these ideas, right here and now, through the ways we treat one another and the living world around us. What guides me is the rhythm of natural cycles, life’s metamorphic movement through birth, life, death, and rebirth. I see life as an ever-turning spiral moving in rhythm with the living earth.
Our shadow is not sin or evil, but an invitation to know ourselves more fully. It is akin to the dark moon, the compost that nourishes new growth, the passage of all things through time that makes renewal and new life possible. It is the ever-living cyclical nature of life itself, Mother Gaia in her infinite wisdom, revealing, season after season, the transitory way of all things. Shadow, within this understanding, is where transformation begins. It is the part of us that asks for honesty, healing, and integration. When we accept life’s cyclical, ever-changing nature as the only constant and hold it with reverence, fear begins to loosen its grip, and we become more present, more grounded, and more open to meeting the world with reverence.
My current self-care practice is not about denying my shadow, but about tending to it with compassion and intuition. I listen to what my shadow reveals, allowing those lessons to guide me back toward coherence, balance, and a deeper sense of presence. I do not reject my shadow or the darkness in me that asks for healing. Instead, I honor its place in the circle of my becoming, holding the lessons that arise from being in relationship with shadow as gifts of learning- lessons that humble me and gently return me to heart-centered awareness, inner peace, and a sense of wholeness.
What feels out of alignment for me is when the shadow is framed only through the language of sin or condemnation. That framework belongs to certain religious traditions, and I respect that it may hold meaning for others, but it does not reflect the way I experience growth or personal transformation. Shadow, to me, is growth... like a seed quietly germinating beneath dark soil until roots reach deep and sprouts reach toward the light. Becoming something strong and whole, like the magnificence of an Oak Tree born of the smallest acorn.
When false stories are projected, it can be painful and often feels as though empathy, compassion, and respect are missing. I stand on my own path rooted in balance, with reverence for nature, and a commitment to hold both light and shadow as parts of a living whole. For me, witchcraft is not about opposition; it is about integration, humility, staying true to my unique soul's journey, and walking gently with the mystery of being alive, and revealing the true face of what it means to be a witch.
Three Faces at the Threshold
My beloved and I are full-time nomadic artists. We are blessed to be able to travel all over the country, selling our creations at Renaissance Fairs and the like. This world we walk in and out of has become a kind of living mirror... a place where the word "Witch" reflects the many stories people carry within themselves.
I've never been in the broom closet, so to speak, and yet, I’ve also never been someone who loudly adopts an identity or a label. In truth, I tend to resist labels altogether. I don’t like feeling confined by something fixed when life itself is fluid and always shifting. I value giving myself the freedom to evolve in whatever way feels honest. I am naturally private, solitary in my spiritual practices, and I’ll admit that sharing this much of myself can feel vulnerable, even a little frightening.
At Fair, though, there is nowhere to hide, and it often stretches me beyond my comfort zone. Sometimes people step into our portal-like shop and immediately soften. I can see the attunement happen in the way they pause, in their thoughtful questions, compliments, and the genuine rapport that begins to form. I feel seen- not in a way that demands performance, but in a way that recognizes intention, the quiet devotion woven into everything we create. Those moments feel deeply life-affirming, that sense of recognition, soul meeting soul, and they remind me why I choose to carry this word publicly.
Others arrive carrying narratives shaped by religion and fear. One woman recently stood in my space and asked if I “identified as that,” unable to say the word printed clearly on my sign. When I understood, I answered gently:
“I don’t identify as a witch. I am one.”
She invited me to church. I remained grounded and kind, speaking about history, about wise women, and about the many layers behind the Burning Times- not to debate, but to offer another perspective, another possibility beyond whatever story she was carrying about the meaning of the word witch. I know I cannot change anyone’s mind, but I can choose to be a living example of what a witch is from the deepest, most integral place of my being.
And sometimes, people arrive wrapped in symbols of darkness, carrying their pain like armor, believing that witchcraft must be loud, abrasive, intense, and steeped in shadow to be real. I hold deep respect for shadow work, yet I feel a quiet concern when shadow becomes the only story someone allows themselves to inhabit. Shadow and light exist in a relationship, each offering contrast so the other can be more fully experienced. Real magic does not need to dominate a room to exist. It simply remains... steady, rooted, and quietly present.
There is No One True Path — Power Without Dominion
This path is deeply personal.
If everything you know about witches comes from television or movies, which, honestly, is true for much of our culture, it might appear as though witchcraft exists only in contrast to Christianity (why Sabrina, why?!). This has never reflected my lived experience or the fellow witches I have known.
Witchcraft, as I know it, is not defined by opposition. And yet history reveals that many of the Old Ways were co-opted, reframed, or absorbed into dominant religious structures, with seasonal celebrations renamed and sacred rhythms repackaged. Even so, the essence of the path cannot be contained by doctrine, ownership, or singular interpretation.
And not everyone who practices magic and calls themselves a witch is Wiccan, despite how often popular media has attempted to make it seem that way (why, Joss Whedon, why?!). When I attended Pantheacon for the first time in 2008, I was genuinely moved by how many paths existed and how expansive the community was. It reminded me that there is no single way to walk this road: a forest with many paths, some crossing, others walking parallel yet separate.
Some feel called toward shared ritual and structured traditions. Others, like me, walk quietly and alone, a solitary apprenticeship between self, spirit, and land. The beauty of it all is that many pathways exist, and you choose the ones that align. Many lineages exist if you feel called to follow a path forged by another. Practitioners of magic, teachers, and communities are available for your exploration. One of the most liberating aspects of this work is the understanding that you are not required to follow anything that does not resonate with your sovereign truth.
And like all humans, we are fallible. People carry wounds, foibles, and shadowed, imbalanced paths that invite our discernment. Choose to walk with integrity, remain aware of your actions, and do no harm. For me, this also means understanding that magic is never meant to become an instrument of domination. I have met people who approach this path carrying deep wounds, believing that a witch is about power over others, domination, superiority, self-righteousness, and control. It is a very human condition to fall into these mind traps, but real magic does not need to rule over anyone.
Shadow work is sacred. I honor it deeply, and yet shadow need not be mistaken for hatred, anger, or cruelty, nor sovereignty become a justification to dominate, coerce, or harm. For me, true power is something that unfolds from within... quiet, steady, grounded. It doesn’t ask for obedience or try to overpower others; it moves more like a presence, an energetic guide that steadies me as I walk my path.
This path cannot be forced into a single structure or identity, because it evolves with the person walking it. It asks for humility, responsibility, and an ongoing relationship with both light and shadow, not as opposing forces, but as parts of a living whole. Beyond rules and labels, the path unfolds in its own way, shaped by lived experience, guided by intuition, and held with a quiet respect for the mystery that continues to shape us.
The Green-Faced Caricature
There is an image I struggle to meet with ease, the green-faced hag with the hooked nose and twisted silhouette that resurfaces every Halloween as though it were harmless folklore.
While circling with the late elder Shekhinah Mountainwater, she spoke about this image in a way that stayed with me. She shared that what many people see as a cartoonish “green witch” carries the echo of something far older, painful, and deeply disturbing, a distorted remembrance of the wise woman, the healer, the midwife who endured unimaginable brutality during the burning times. A face turned green from torture, illness, and suffering, a nose broken by violence, a body pushed to the very edges of death before execution, transformed over centuries into a caricature meant to provoke laughter, reshaped into something meant to entertain rather than invite reflection. It feels like the ultimate dismissal, absent of reflection, remorse, or remembrance for the countless lives lost to the witch hunts of the world. We live in a culture that hangs this image up as though it means nothing.
Whether people recognize that lineage or not, that image carries weight. It turns centuries of lived trauma and human suffering into spectacle. It furthers the dehumanization of those women who held sacred knowledge... who were heinously murdered, into something grotesque and amusing.
Each October, I feel a profound ache at how easily history becomes misconstrued when context is forgotten, and I send quiet healing to all those lost to ignorance and cruelty. That green-faced witch is not an emblem of evil; she is a reminder that it could have been your great-grandmother, that she was someone's beloved daughter, and her death should not be made a mockery of. Every time you see her face this coming October, let it stand as a reminder that a woman's place in this world is still under siege.
Maiden • Mother • Queen • Crone
I have always honored the Triple Goddess archetype of Maiden, Mother, and Crone. It translated truthfully to my experience, until one day I realized it was incomplete. With the passage of time and growing older, I began to feel that something essential was missing. Within this triad, I could always locate myself, until one day I couldn't.
This aha moment revealed to me a missing threshold that is rarely named, and if acknowledged at all, it is often disempowering and fraught with complexity. This season of becoming does not fit neatly into youth or elderhood, and although it is linked to our motherhood era, it stands on its own. It is a chrysalis space that arrives after years of tending others, whether that tending took the form of children, community, creativity, or caretaking, and long before the full embodiment of Crone wisdom.
Our culture calls this peri-menopause or menopause- words that feel clinical and diminishing for what is, in truth, a profound energetic shift often foreshadowed by biological changes. The language we use to describe this season of a woman’s life is deeply insufficient to the depth it holds. What I am living does not feel like a pause, but a reclamation of myself.
I call this phase Queen.
The energy of the Maiden is one of self-discovery, the first flow of becoming, a time of awakening to possibility. She carries the profound potential to create life, and with it, the dawning awareness of responsibility. The passage into Mother shifts that current into action: the energy of actively bringing new life into the world, whether through children or through a heart project being conceived, birthed, and nurtured with devotion. Then, in walks the Queen, she who reclaims, owns, and integrates all the knowledge gathered along the path from Maiden to Mother. She converges every lesson into a deepening of self that is unmistakably rooted, unshakeable, fearless, and wise. This becoming is not sudden; it is walked for years, ripening slowly, until the arrival of Cronehood’s distillation.
The Queen is the woman who begins to gather her life force inward without apology. She has no more fucks to give when it comes to approval. Her attention is more aligned with what feels true. Fertility transforms... no longer measured solely by blood or birth, but by expression, vision, creativity, and the courage to breathe life into dreams long set aside. This phase is not decline, but refinement. It is the moment when a woman realizes she has always carried authority within her and no longer waits for it to be granted. She begins to speak with greater clarity. She sheds what no longer fits. She recognizes that tending herself is not selfish, but necessary.
And when the Crone finally arrives, she does not arrive as a woman hollowed and emptied by time’s passage; she arrives distilled. An embodiment of an archetype, softly holding the seasons of her life. Rooted in lived experience. Uninterested in performance. Aligned with essence. Each silver lock, every wrinkle, gifts of a well-lived life, etched upon her beautiful face.
To walk the path of a witch is to honor these thresholds within ourselves. To move with the rhythms of the body. To respect that every phase carries power, and that power evolves from Maiden to Mother, Queen to Crone, a spiral dancing back onto itself, never disappearing, only ever becoming.
Archetype, Deity & Devotional Relationship
If Maiden, Mother, Queen, and Crone are the seasons within us, then mythic archetypes are the mirrors around us. For me, archetype has always been about relationship and resonance. Archetype, as I live it, is devotional... an energetic dialogue between the seen and unseen.
Throughout history, across many traditions, and within witchcraft and neopagan paths, mythological gods and goddesses have been invoked. Hecate at the crossroads, Diana in the wild hunt, Brigid at the forge, and countless others carried forward through story and symbol. Practitioners of magic have long worked in relationship with deities, plant devas, spirits of land and lineage, and mythic figures who embody specific thresholds of transformation. Some approach these presences as literal beings. Others experience them as energetic archetypes or psychological mirrors. Still others encounter them as currents of consciousness that flow through story and symbol, speaking as a subtle resonance with our lived experience.
There have been moments when the liminal presence of Hecate or Baba Yaga feels palpable at a crossroads in my life where I need to be fierce and protective. Times when the descent and return of Persephone reflect my own movement through loss and reclamation, my own grief and anger held by the guidance of Demeter's wisdom. Moments when Brigid’s flame burns through creative paralysis and reminds me that tending the hearth, inner and outer, is my sacred work. I do not worship these figures; I walk beside them in conversation.
Sometimes that dialogue arrives through a mythic figure or an archetype whose stories echo my own transformation. Other times it arrives through the land itself, the unwavering intelligence of the forest, the whisper of secrets from a river, the medicine carried by plants, the subtle presence of what I experience as devas and fae. Ancestral whispers carried on the wind of memory. These devotional relationships invite us into deep listening, into discernment, into a quality of attention that is both grounded and receptive. In tending to them, we consciously participate in reshaping our lived experience, allowing the guidance of story, symbol, and subtle presence to expand our perspective and gently reorient how we move through the world. We are not escaping our human experience; we are deepening it.
There are many paths through this terrain. Some are shared in ritual circles and communal gatherings. Others unfold in solitude. In gardens, in kitchens, in quiet dawn conversations with the unseen. There is no single right way, only the way that calls you into deeper integrity. When engaged with humility and discernment, myth does not diminish sovereignty; it clarifies and strengthens it. It offers language for experiences that feel larger than words, and in doing so, reminds us that transformation has always been woven into the human story.
And through this practice, we remain devoted to remembering that we are part of something vast, cyclical, alive, and liminal, forever moving between what has been and what is becoming.
Your Word is Your Wand
For all the talk of archetype and myth, of thresholds and unseen currents, there is a truth at the heart of my practice that is profoundly simple.
Be your word. Truly. If you don't have your word to fall back on, what do you have?
Magic, for me, is the quiet, steady alignment between what I say and how I live. Some call it the Threefold law or Rule of Three path, the understanding that what we send into the world returns multiplied. Others call it Karma. For me, it is simple: treat people with kindness, respect their autonomy, and stand by the integrity of what you speak.
Our words shape reality, for better or worse, so speak with intention. Make a practice of saying what you "Do" want, rather than what you "Don't" want, as every word is a spell cast forward in time. Every promise carries weight. Every story we repeat becomes architecture for how we experience the world. To speak carelessly is to scatter energy without intention and may cause harm. To speak with clarity is to plant seeds, foster growth, and create connection. Manifestation is not separate from this. When we can visualize what we are calling into being, speak it with grounded intention, and feel the truth of it in our bodies, we participate consciously in shaping our lives in real time.
Your word is your wand. Be your word. This does not mean perfection. We are human. We falter. We misstep. We learn. And if life happens and things change and you can no longer uphold what you said you would do, then show up with integrity. Acknowledge that you broke your word, own it responsibly, apologize, and ask how you can make it right. Do the work. If you struggle with this, ask yourself how often you agree to do things you don't want to do. Only do what is a Fuck Yes; don't agree to the Fuck No's, and invite the word NO into your life like a sacred chant. When we honor our own boundaries, it is easy to align them with integrity, and it is more kind to both ourselves and the other person.
I don't know who needs to hear this, but I'll say it anyway: magic is not an ego trip. You are not more special than anyone else, and neither am I. Magic is a responsibility to speak truth without cruelty (kind, but firm), to hold boundaries with care (honor your sacred no), and to create from the heart in service of something greater than the self. What we send into the world does not vanish; it reverberates. In the end, the most powerful magic I know is the daily practice of living in a way that allows light and shadow to coexist without fracture. It is the discipline of becoming someone whose presence feels whole. And through our own growth and healing, we send a ripple outward that changes the world.
Only the Mountains Remember My Name
Memory is a strange and layered thing.
My mother tells stories of me as a small child that I do not remember, and yet memories out of time arise from the wellspring of my soul, leaving the heaviness of smoke and the acrid taste of ash upon my tongue.
There is a knowing that defies this time, this place, and any ideology designed to explain it away.
I have walked this path before.
Outside the rational lives a bone-deep, cellular knowing that sets my pulse racing with a fury I have never known in this current lifetime.
A blinding heat that rises... until I feel flushed and overcome... a burning that announces itself only when I speak about the archaic horrors of those times.
And through it all, their lives' resolute acceptance... and a steadiness that settles in my spine when I say the word - Witch - aloud.
A refusal, somewhere beneath the fertile ash-laden ground, to shrink away.
If this is the word that once took my life, then let me own its meaning.
This time, let the lick of fire that now lives in my bones decide my own fate.
Let.
Me.
Be.
There, live memories older than the name I can no longer remember.
Standing before pure darkness disguised as power, demanding silence for refusing to abandon what I knew to be sacred.
Elemental Flame- abused as a language of fear.
For not kneeling upon the altar of lies set before me like a trap.
Real witchcraft- survived by fire, distortion, and centuries of monsters attempting to define it into something small enough to control- was never fragile.
And still...
I return to unfinished gardens that weep in gratitude for my presence.
Wet soil offering to hold my pain awhile.
Beauty re-seeding my being.
Time's slow fading away.
Healing catalyzed through art, through ritual, my hands remembering what the earth has always known:
This becoming is my soul's medicine.
Sometimes it arrives as an image.
Majestic mountains rising in the distance.
They say the wind moves differently there.
It threads through stone alleys... an inaudible whisper longing to become words.
Tired houses lean toward one another, keeping their secrets.
The mountains rise behind the tiny village- ancient sentinels, like old witnesses, who have seen too much.
If only their voice could have been heard.
Breadcrumbs foolishly followed.
Until no longer.
Hollow bellies growing
Fat with fear.
Bodies curving with the sharpened edges
of hunger’s infernal search.
And so it began...
With murmurs.
Side glances.
Whispering eyes of accusation.
“She looks at the sky for too long.”
“She smells of herbs no one taught her.”
“She keeps to herself.”
“She will not avert her eyes.”
Accusation spreading like a blinding mist...
quiet, enveloping,
impossible to gasp as it settles in the lungs,
dense as pea soup.
Seven women ripped away from humble, quiet lives... forsaken by hysteria.
Always healers.
Many poor.
Some were taken simply for convenience.
Damp stone walls echo names now lost to time.
Rooms that swallowed light.
Confessions extracted like rotten teeth...
pulled from the innocent the way roots are torn from soil...
violently, unyielding, raw earth left overturned.
7 women.
7 witches named.
7 daughters of the mountains.
Those mountains forever call the forgotten names of those lost daughters.
History fractures it all... contradictions,
lies retold again and again,
silence breeding more fear to take root.
But grief does not fracture.
If you walk there now, you can feel it...
an ache braided into the mortar.
Haunted by memories that refuse to dissolve.
Fear becomes a wildfire
that consumes what it cannot understand.
And yet ...
Every time a woman trusts her knowing, we honor their sacrifice.
Every time curiosity is chosen over certainty, we honor their lives.
Every time the wind moves through those ancient stone corridors
and does not carry accusation...
The spell breaks a little more.
The word did not begin as a costume.
It did not begin as a caricature.
It began as a sacred relationship...
With land.
By water.
With body.
By blood.
With the turning of seasons and the wheel of time.
Let sacred Fire burn the establishment of all power
that threatens our homes,
our families,
and the lives of women.
Let us never forget by honoring,
respecting, and holding a safe space
for the healers, midwives, dissenters, and earth-centered souls
living outside sanctioned authority, in this timeline, right now.
This current of truth survived through grandmothers who kept recipes hidden.
Through hands that continued planting by moonlight.
Through whispered prayers that did not sound like sanctioned liturgy.
Through stories told in kitchens instead of cathedrals.
It survives distortion.
It survives mockery.
It survives misunderstanding.
It survives even when turned into a trend.
It lives wherever someone kneels in soil and listens.
Wherever someone chooses integrity over domination.
Wherever a woman reclaims her authority in the threshold years and refuses to disappear.
Wherever shadow is integrated instead of weaponized.
Wherever devotion is practiced without spectacle.
Because something in me awakened through fire.
Because rising is not a metaphor, it is a memory.
Because sovereignty, once ignited, does not ask permission to exist.
If the mountains remember anything,
It is the daughters it lost so long ago.
I don't seek permission.
No validation.
I do not need to prove my soul's knowing.
I am here to live my truth.
By remembrance.
By embodying that which I am and have always been.
I carry the voice of the unnamed Witch... without apology.