Witch?

Expert testing, reviews and advice.

Pan - the devishly, sexually fluid God of wild nature 

Dear You,

I have been possessed and consumed by the writing of this letter to you. If words are spells may this be one. Read it with caution. Whether you identify as a man, woman, witch, ism, ist, chasm, idiom or are non binary. This letter might touch a deeply buried nerve, or a strangled one. You may pass this by unscathed, unaffected, untouched. Perhaps this depends on my writing or on your genetics, or your empathic nature…and the great decision to read on.

During this intense period of focused letter writing, I had an accident that resulted in cutting my knee with a scalpel…literally slicing that deeply buried nerve I mentioned earlier. As I sat in the waiting room of the minor injuries clinic I read the book I brought to pass time, TechGnosis by Erik Davis. I was looking forward to this undisturbed reading time in the waiting room. Surprisingly, the queue to be seen wasn’t long enough for a worthy reading session. But I did make a synchronous connection between the name of my doctors surgery ‘St. Augustine’s’, that I’d just written on the sign-in form, and Augustianism, the subject I found myself reading about in the pages of TechGnosis. I discovered that ‘Augustianism’ is a branch of Christianity and St Augustine was the man in the 4th century who decided to really push the idea of Original Sin* onto the good Christian people. Misogynistic, Augustine is named as one of the forefathers of the patriarchy. Holy Mary Mother of God, If I could go back in time Augustine, I’d put a spell on you. Mwaaa Ha ha! I’ve always liked those time-traveling films where you can go back and change the course of history.

This letter as you might find out, if you continue reading, has been partly inspired by my attempt to understand why women over thousands of years have been and are witch hunted and used as scapegoats for the woes of human existence. I’d already been writing about Original Sin, and now I had discovered one of the Saints who wanted people to fearfully believe in it. According to Augustianism, with her irrational female mind, the almost original temptress (full respect to Lilith for fleeing the garden of subservience), Eve was to blame for leading innocent Adam astray, away from God and into a world of sin, war and greed.

Look too much into this biblical story and the history around it, and it will do your head in. I feel about the same amount of clarity and enthusiasm as I did when they tried to sell me the story of Adam & Eve at primary school.

I was conditioned growing up into a white and male dominant world. Taught via the lens of religion or science. Through discernment and intuition, and some guidance from free thinking philosophical parents and their creative friends, I am open to what instinctively is truth to me. Maybe unlearning is the greatest form of learning?

What feels true is that the period of the witch trials marked a time of an increasing systemic suppression of the feminine principle 1*. A growing misogynistic culture was violently pushing forward, literally strangling and choking the voices of the women and men who held the knowledge of our indigenous healing practices. Could it be seen as a sort of ‘civil colonisation’? Where the State suppressed the indigenous knowledge of its own people, for political power and material gain. I’d like to think, that somehow those people in power truly believed it was for the betterment of humanity, but I don’t. We only need to look at the World today, and how easily humans are corrupted, how they will wreak genocide on a people for resources and land, and use religion to justify it.

Science and Religion are belief systems that use method to make sense, meaning and order in the chaotic world. Religion can give us a moral compass, and science provides evidence based processes that help us to understand the makeup of the universe. We construct doctrines and data that under magnification have blurry shape-shifting edges. This marriage of religion and science, as I understand it, started their affair, during the reformation, around the time of the beginning of the so called ‘witch’ trials. During the start of the reformation in 1517, that led to a split in western Christianity, people started to seek answers based on scientific study. The Augustianist view of the concept of Original Sin was formalised as part of Roman Catholic doctrine, an attempt to hold onto its power, by the Councils of Trent in the 16th Century. But Augustine also believed that women were not powerful enough to have the supernatural abilities of a witch, without the permission of God. Now they believed it was possible by making a pact with the Devil. Along with these bizarre scapegoating ideas about women, they also began to believe that humans could only understand the truth of God through Science, and Original Sin could only be redeemed through this new way of understanding the world. The mystery was to be conquered and man was to dominate nature through inspection, research and calculations. Perhaps to control the unbearable chaos of famine, plague, storms and floods, man was motivated to understand and commandeer everything…to be the right hand man to God, to be the voice of God. The goal seemed, and seems to be a complete domination of nature, of the wild mysterious feminine, the creator and destroyer.

Man and Woman are religiously and scientifically presented as the default sacred/biological union, and that anything different is a (natural) deviation. Within this rather limiting heteronormative, nuclear family default, man uses the structure of religion to create sin , and this sin according to the Bible is the fault of the woman, for her seductive, enchanting nature, her wild sexuality and her biology to give and take life. Woman under the eyes of the Christian God must be punished; Witches! Whores! Sluts! Heathens! Hags!

Yesterday I discovered that on the 28th October 2025 the Israeli Ambassador to the UN called the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine a ‘witch’ and her report a ‘book of spells’. It is fascinating how this man in a position of power would describe a woman this way, it’s as if we’ve rewound time 300 years. I am bemused this trope persists. There is conflict here, between the UN Rapporteur who wants to honour the fundamental right to life, and with the Israeli Ambassador who believes he is entitled to choose who dies.

What is it that women possess that some men fear so much? Do they really have magical abilities? Are their words spells used to tantalize, tempt and trick? What is hidden in the energetics of attraction - a simple hormonal chemical reaction? A bewitching spell? A cosmic collision of souls? Perhaps this biological magnetism is cruel trickery designed to seduce a man powerless? Is rejection worthy of a witch hunt, an Incel would say so.

I think it’s important we address how this current paradigm treats amd blames powerful women, and the women who do not conform to societal norms, if we are to move beyond a world of dominant, destructive power structures. If women are the most powerful tools in upholding capitalism, perhaps this is also true of its downfall.

Before I go on, I just want to say i love hearing your male perspective. I know you won’t be rolling your eyes and labeling this letter ‘a feminist rant’. You really get it. I am so deeply grateful to have met a man like you. You are a rarity. I’ve desired this shared understanding with a man my whole life. You said the masculine only awakens when it can trust the uncontained femine flow, without fear. Your choice to see beyond the ‘power over’ paradigm allows me to trust the potential of our future. You know that the power women hold, that is so feared is the power to give and take life.

But where are the men’s voices? Where are the men? Are they harboring a shame, guilt and complicity through their silence? It would explain why we hear from so very little from men on this subject.

This subject is so complex and so ingrained in the collective unconscious it has been quite an undertaking to try to write it into this short letter to you.

I think about the haunting similarity of the way women were murdered by strangulation during the executions of the so called witch trials and the creeping normality of unwanted sexual strangulation that has become ‘popular’ and expected today, according to statistics. This literal and sexually violent silencing of women’s voices echoes the past, and gives me the chills. A recent murder of a young women in my local community, committed by her boyfriend brings this culture of violence against women into sharp focus. There is a deeply set problem, ingrained misogyny. Where did man learn to fear and despise women so much? Where and why did they learn to manipulate and use their power over to dominate the very sex who birthed them into this world?

I still don’t have any answers or conclusions.

Only that you said once: Hurt people, hurt people.

I got a feeling, a deep knowing in my bones that in my lineage, my ancestors were directly affected, about 14 generations back, to one of the areas in Scotland where the so called witch trials and executions took place. Do we intrinsically gravitate toward the land where we have genetic history, a sense of coming home? Do the ancestors call us back? Do we retrace the footsteps of our unknown loved ones who made it possible for our existence, who despite and against all odds survived?

A few years ago I was invited by a friend to spend a month at a castle in Scotland. I discovered when I returned home that my Great Grandad was born in the exact area where we stayed, an area where the witch trails took place, brute force. I have a knowing that somewhere encoded in my DNA is a memory of this time, perhaps it’s held in the waters.

Joan Wytte - No Longer Abused . Ellen Hayward - The Path of the Just is as the Shining Light

Over the years women have called to me from the grave to remember and learn their stories. Joan Whyte, the fighting fairy who’s now finally buried in Boscastle, after her skeleton was used in parlour games and as an exhibit in the Witch Museum, where I lived next door in my twenties, I never liked the vibe of the museum. It seemed to focus heavily on torture instruments and 19th Century Occultism, and adopted ancient pentagram and pentacle symbols. Old Ellen whose grave I looked for after visiting the sacred spring in the Forest of Dean, I learned was a healer and a herbalist, the last woman to be trialed in the forest for witchcraft in 1905. And the 22 women of Forfar in Scotland, who were killed by strangulation and then burned at the stake, who are remembered by a modern mural in the town’s car park, of which I stumbled across as if I were meant to find it.

Mad to think I stayed in the gatehouse of the castle owned by the same family who back in 1662 condemned Janet Walker to death for being a witch .

I leave you with a little spell, passed down orally by my great grandfathers, great grandmothers, great uncles, aunts, grandmothers, mother. Who lived somewhere near Forfar, close to Dundee.

Bi wind and sāe

Mary’s beans do findeth me

Fram distant shores

Love dēþ unbind thee,

Hurt people, hurt people

So soften ye heart

Syng in the light

till death us depart.

“I mean, if indeed it is a power over paradigm in which one must overcome another in order to have what you need to live, that pretty much demands that you’re going to overcome someone else, whether they give you consent, or not. And by and large, they’re probably not going to give you consent. Right? So that’s where the violence of this paradigm is deeply rooted.” Pat McCabe

Here’s to moving into a paradigm of ‘power with’.

Solstice Blessings. Enter the Light.

I remain most humbly

in service to the cosmic mother

Erin

peccatum originale

* I reserve the right for my opinions, viewpoints and scribblings to be altered , expanded and revised in the future…

Appendix*

1. This was written in stone, in cuneiform text, from the Middle Assyrian Laws, dating to approximately the 12th century BCE (about 3200 years ago - ‘Unless it is forbidden in the tablets, a man may strike his wife, pull her hair, her ear he may bruise or pierce. He commits no misdeed thereby’ .

   Misogyny and societally accepted violence against women is ancient.

2. Move over Original Sin… we got a new sin in town…Enacting Empathy. Read Erik Davis’ latest Substack - Empathy Boxed In (author of TechGnosis, the book mentioned above)

   God help us!