The Real Story of the Witch

Wild Belonging

I have just come out of the 4th Annual Samhain Gathering, Wild Belonging, held in a sacred forested sanctuary, where women gathered beneath ancient trees to reclaim our ancestral connections, to grieve, and to call in the light as we circled and wove a deep belonging with one another and with the Earth herself.

As the fires burned and the veil thinned, I felt the presence of the women who came before us, the ones who carried the songs, the herbs, the knowing. The ones who were silenced, burned, or forgotten. The one’s who are our ancestors.

Their stories are in our bones.

Their memory lives in our breath.

The Forgotten History

Between 1500 and 1660, across Europe, men whose mission was to hunt “witches” rode from village to village. More than 80% of those accused, tortured, and executed were women, most of them over forty. Women in their wisdom years. Women with knowledge, influence, and independence that threatened the patriarchal order.

They were not “witches” as popular culture portrays them. They were healers, midwives, wise women, those who tended the sick, birthed the babies, gathered the herbs, sang over the dying, and counselled the grieving. Their persecution was not random hysteria; it was a calculated campaign of control, led by church and state, to silence women’s power and sever female lineages of wisdom.

This truth lies buried in the collective unconscious of women. It is rarely spoken of. It is not taught in schools. And yet, it still shapes us. Psychologically. Sexually. Socially. Politically. Spiritually.

The Shadow That Remains

That reign of terror planted a deep and enduring fear of female power, a fear that still lives in us.

From girlhood, we learn to make ourselves smaller, softer, quieter. We learn not to be “too much.” Too assertive. Too sensual. Too intuitive. Too outspoken.

The witch hunts also destroyed women’s knowledge traditions; the herbalists, the midwives, the keepers of the Earth’s medicine, erasing generations of embodied wisdom and replacing it with institutional authority.

They created the blueprint for control over women’s bodies and voices; the policing of sexuality, the limiting of reproductive rights, the shaming of emotion, the punishment of women who speak truth to power.

And beneath it all lingers ancestral trauma, a wound in the feminine soul. Many women still carry the inherited fear of visibility; the fear of standing out, of being seen, of being burned again.

The witch hunts never ended. They evolved. They now appear as public shaming, online harassment, gendered violence, and digital witch hunts. Across the world, women are still accused of witchcraft and murdered for it.

Bridget Cleary — The Last Witch in Ireland

In 1895, long after Europe claimed to be enlightened, Bridget Cleary was burned to death in Tipperary, Ireland.

She was child-free, literate, and financially independent; everything her patriarchal community found threatening. When she fell ill, her husband and male relatives decided she had been taken by fairies and replaced by a changeling.

What followed was a week of escalating torture: forced potions, imprisonment, humiliation, and finally fire. Her husband set her alight before witnesses, insisting that the “real Bridget” would soon return.

Her charred body was buried in a shallow grave. Her killers received lenient sentences. Her grave remains unmarked.

Her story is not myth. It is proof of how fiercely patriarchal rage can burn when women dare to live freely.

Lilias Adie — The Witch Who Refused

In 1704, in a Scottish village, Lilias Adie was accused of “fornicating with the devil.” She was 64 years old.

Imprisoned and tortured, she eventually confessed but refused to name other women. She told her captors that the ones she saw at the gatherings were masked like gentlewomen.

She died in prison before her public burning, likely by suicide. Villagers buried her beneath a heavy stone in the tidal flats to ensure she could never rise again.

Centuries later, her skull was unearthed. Scientists reconstructed her face. She was not a monster. She was an ordinary woman; intelligent, steadfast, human.

The Modern Witch

And still, every October, the Witch returns, not as sacred memory, but as mockery. Green-skinned. Crooked-nosed and wild-eyed. A Halloween prop, sold by the very culture that once burned her.

But this grotesque image is not fantasy, it is a distorted memory.

The crowds who watched real women burn saw the bruised, broken faces of those tortured beyond recognition. That was the origin of the “evil witch.” A beaten woman, paraded before a jeering crowd, her humanity erased and turned into the demon they needed her to be.

This is the image we still carry. A patriarchal caricature used to sell candy and silence truth. The truth that men of power tortured, drowned, and burned women alive and were never held accountable.

Reclaiming the Witch

But she is rising.

The Witch, that eternal archetype of woman’s wild wisdom, is awakening through us. She is the voice that says No when silence is demanded. She is the one who remembers the herbs, the moon cycles, the prayers whispered to the trees. She is every woman who refuses to be silenced or shamed.

To reclaim the Witch is to reclaim ourselves; our bodies, our intuition, our belonging to the Earth, and our right to stand unafraid in our power.

This Samhain, we light candles for those who came before and for those yet to come. We weep. We sing. We call their names into the forest night.

We claim the history — HERstory — that was stolen from us, buried in our collective memory, stripped of truth.

The Witch is not gone. She walks among us, within us; in our circles, our laughter, our healing, our courage.

May we remember. May we rise. May we teach this HERstory to our children. May we never again be silenced.

Image by Rebecca Nathan

Grandmother Wisdom:

Art by Dasha Bobkova

Child, there comes a time when you must stop apologizing for the ways you don’t fit.The Wild Woman inside you has waited long enough.

She is not here to be tamed, she is here to remember.

She is the Witch within; the one who knows the old ways, who speaks to trees and listens to stones, who remembers how to heal with song and salt and fire.

She carries the lineage of those who could not be silenced, whose wisdom once threatened the fearful.

Through you, she breathes again.

She remembers the scent of rain on soil, the pulse of the moon in her blood, the language of birds and roots.

She knows how to howl, how to weep, how to make beauty from what others discard.

She is the one who will lead you back to your truth.

Do not mistake her fire for anger or her solitude for sadness.

She is freedom embodied; the ancient knowing that cannot be bought, managed, or silenced.

Let her move through you. Let her speak. Let her dance barefoot on the edge of your old fears.

When you claim her, you claim the Witch within and when you let her live, the world begins to heal.