Ruby Reed (advaya) So, to bring us back to today’s topic, The Secret History of the Witches, I'm thrilled to be joined by pioneering researcher of women's history, Max Dashu. Max is the founder of the Suppressed Histories Archives (since 1970), where she has been researching and documenting women’s history on a global scale, from ancient times to the present. Max is an expert in iconography and macro-cultures, through which she explores the stories of medicine women, witches, and powerful female figures, revealing the impacts of patriarchy and domination. She’s written many books and built a collection of over 50,000 images, 100 visual presentations, articles, photo essays, and videos, all contributing to a deeper understanding of cultural heritages that have been suppressed. More about Max’s work can be found on her website, and we’ll paste the link in the chat now, including many links to open-access articles she’s written. There's a wealth of knowledge there that I invite you to explore.
To start, Max, I’d love to invite you to share some of your research on the authentic heritage or true history of the witch. Who was she? Where did the concept originate? And what is the relationship between the Oracle, wise women, and the witch?
Max Dashu Well, you know, we have to first clear through a whole thicket of misinformation and demonization—the idea of the witch as an evildoer. There’s a whole patriarchal narrative about women of vision and power that has been saturated throughout Western civilization and European-dominated colonial societies as well. So, to really understand this, we have to look into the ethnic folk traditions. For people of European descent, this involves ancestral recovery—finding out what tribal European culture was really like and what forms of spiritual leadership women fulfilled within those societies.
One of the things I’ve done is investigate the names for "witch" in different languages. What we see is that the words don’t imply harm; they mean things like knower, seer, dreamer, diviner, prophetess, healer, herbalist, shape-shifter, spirit journeyer. These attributes are shared by women all over the planet—like Siberian female shamans or African isangoma. To uncover this, we must go through an interdisciplinary process, looking at the cultural record, oral traditions, and the stories passed down by the common people. We also need to examine how witches were connected to seasonal festivals, especially pagan ones. The early testimonies we find are from priestly literature, which was written to stamp out pagan ways, and which often describes "witches" in terms of activities like offering light before fountains or administering contraceptive drinks. They also talk a lot about offerings, land veneration, and reverence for the earth, water, stones, and trees—all of which are connected to the witch.
The irony is that much of this written record comes from white male sources.
For example, the word witch itself comes from an Anglo-Saxon root meaning life force or knowing. And this is true not only in English but in Russian, Vietnamese, and other languages as well. The interesting thing about the written records from the time is that they often depict witches as involved in divination—scrying into water, casting lots, brewing in cauldrons—and as healers. The witch, in these contexts, is more of a counselor, a wise woman carrying cultural wisdom. Against a wall of priestly opposition, which argued that only men could be spiritual authorities, this folk culture survived, often conforming on the surface to avoid persecution, but keeping the tradition alive underneath. We see this in the proverbs about women spinning by the hearth, in ceremonies of the hearth, and in the offerings made before gathering herbs. This is all part of a body of culture that was stubbornly preserved by common people, which is where the core tradition lies.
Ruby Reed (advaya) Thank you, Max. To clarify a bit: something that comes to mind when you’re talking is this idea of a multiplicity of worldviews and ways of being, and how there’s been a dominant story passed down by priestly cultures and those in power. When you’re talking about folk culture, how much of the culture around the witch and the wise woman was the lived experience of people at the time, rather than an exceptional moment?
Max Dashu Yes, this is something we really need to look at. The orator—what was passed down through folklore—provides us with the best source of authentic testimony from these cultures. The Grimms and other folklorists collected these traditions, though sometimes they superimposed their own perspectives. Still, these sources give us important insights into the customs and practices carried out by people. Even after Christianization, many of these practices continued, and we see continuity from the pagan period through the Roman Empire, state religion, and the persecution of so-called paganism, which was really just the old ethnic religions and their natural philosophies. The witch hunts that followed, lasting for over a thousand years, were part of this long effort to suppress these traditions, but many of these folk practices persisted, sometimes covertly, even under harsh persecution.
Max Dashu This painting by a Finnish artist from the 1800s depicts the old witch, Mother Ilmatar, who is so powerful that she can bring her son back to life by gathering his body parts and calling vitality down from the sun. It’s a beautiful image of healing through stones and other symbols.
The course we’re proposing will cover several sections, including legendary and historic witches. For example, in Norse tradition, serious women, or seers, would go from house to house, entering trance and prophecy as figures of cultural authority. In Ireland, Móinfhinn is said to have been a living witch, but now exists as a spirit. On Samhain (the holiday we celebrate as Halloween), women would petition her. This connection between witchcraft and the common people runs deep.
In Czech tradition, there are three witch sisters—Le Bucha, Kazi, and Teka—who represent the roles of prophetess, herbalist, and priestess. In the Slavic world, birch is sacred, and Kazi is a prophetess who is said to have founded Prague. These examples, and many others, show us that women were historically considered spiritual leaders and sources of wisdom, especially when connected to land and nature.
Ruby Reed (advaya) Thank you, Max. When you shared those slides and images, and the insight into the spiritual and cultural heritage of the witch and the wise woman, I was moved by the powerful role they played in their communities. It’s also deeply saddening to reflect on the subsequent persecutions and the trauma they caused over the last millennium. I’m also thinking about the time of year we’re in, with Halloween approaching. Before the call, we were talking about the romanticization and eroticization of the witch. It’s a strange irony, isn’t it? This double persecution—the original one, and then the more recent one, in literature and popular culture. When we think about reclaiming the witch, how do you think we should engage with this concept properly, with reverence and respect, as the wise women you describe?
Max Dashu Yes, it's a double irony. The witch was originally demonized, and now she’s been romanticized and commodified. In reclaiming the witch, it’s essential to honor her as a cultural authority, a keeper of wisdom, and a representative of connection to the earth and nature. Reclaiming her isn’t just about embracing a fun, magical figure—it’s about understanding and respecting the ancient traditions and spiritual roles that these women played in their communities, and the depth of their wisdom. We must reclaim the witch as a figure of spiritual power and resistance to patriarchal authority. When we engage with this concept, we must do so with reverence for the cultural contexts and the struggles that witches and wise women have faced over centuries.
I think it's really crucial to understand how land-based all of this was—this very strong connection with nature, with sanctuaries of nature.
We can see that even in the narratives that the priesthood constructed about witches. But it's really about digging back into this, which is what I try to do in my book Witches and Pagans: uncovering whatever I could from the written record or from folk orature—oral traditions that speak to these issues, to individual cultures, and their ideas about witches. For example, in Italy, Czechoslovakia, or any of these places, we can see how the idea of witches was constructed.
You often see an overlap between witches, goddesses, and fairies, and the whole thing about the fairy faith. Evans Wentz did an amazing book on this, I think it’s called The Fairy Faith in Celtic Lands, and he shows that this was actually ancestor veneration. The fairies were seen as the spirits of the dead. This is a very important aspect, and he documents this, not just through his own theory, but through quotes from people he interviewed in Scotland, the Isle of Man, and Britannia. So there are a lot of connections between witches and goddesses, or the female divine, which are really important.
Of course, this gets distorted through the pens and mouths of the priesthood, who try to make Diana into the devil. They use Diana as a catch-all term, interpreting everything through Latin. But in Germany, you have Paula and Persta; in Scotland, you have the queen of Elphame; in Ireland, you have figures like Anya, who is associated with the Midsummer Eve processions, carrying the clears and torches. These folk religions and rituals are at the core of these traditions, and we need to reconnect the seers and women of vision with that.
Thinking about the old woman as a cultural authority—because they were, the ones who knew. And this knowledge was passed down generationally. Sometimes the names change, as these traditions are being pursued by the confessors, priests, ministers, and inquisitors. So the names for the goddesses shape-shift. For instance, in Italy, they couldn’t say Diana anymore, so they started calling the witches’ goddess "La Signora del Gioco," the Lady of Play. There were all these pseudonyms circulating around them.
I don’t know if I totally lost touch with the question you were asking, but there are so many directions to explore. We could look, for example, at folk rituals of divination—things done on Samhain Eve, or what was later called All Hallows’ Eve. In Scotland, women would sow yarrow seeds and say a charm while looking over their shoulder to see who their future husband would be. Of course, marriage was seen as the most indicative aspect of what a woman’s life would be like in patriarchal societies. I want to clarify that these weren’t matriarchal societies, but there were elements of matriculture that held respect for the knowledge of uneducated old women. They were at the bottom of the social order—the common peasant woman—but they still held on to knowledge passed down from their great-great-grandmothers.
There’s a whole connection between spinning and weaving, and I talk about this in my book Witchcraft. For example, in Norse culture, women would spin while chanting incantations. This would bring things about. The witch was very much tied to the image of fate, or weird, as they would say in English tradition. There are words for all of this in different languages.
The witch goddess is an important piece, and we need to disentangle that from the demonization that took place through the Inquisition and the witch trials that followed. Another angle is the sexual politics of the witch. Early on in the penitential books, we see the priesthood calling these women "baby killers" because they were giving women diabolical drinks to prevent them from conceiving. According to these theologians, women’s only purpose on earth was to have babies. So how dare they have control over their own reproduction? This starts as early as the fifth century, with Cæsarius of Arles, a bishop in southern France, calling it homicide for women to cause their blood to flow, to give women drinks that would prevent pregnancy. Women might already have nine children and can’t afford to feed more, so this was a matter of survival.
These early codes evolved over centuries into the myth of the witch as a baby killer, and this idea became part of the blood libel that was later applied to Jews, accusing them of killing a Gentile child. It was then exported to Native peoples, who were charged with cannibalism because they were considered "savages." So we see a lot of connections to the repression of ethnic folk cultures in Europe during the Christianization process and the persecution of women who were primary authorities in those traditions—the witches, the priestesses, the oracles, the dreamers.
These persecutions eventually resulted in an ideology of devil worship, which was then applied to African, Native American, and Pacific Islander religions. This became an excuse to enslave these people and seize their lands. There’s a lot to unpack in these connections.
Ruby Reed (advaya) When you speak about the witch and her connection to working with natural forces, land, and medicine, you mention a sense of autonomy and leadership that she held—sovereignty over her body and the bodies of those she worked with, as well as the land. You frame this as a threat to the patriarchy or dominant forces of the time. But when we think about witch persecutions, we often associate them with the early modern period—around the 1600s and 1700s. However, from your research, it seems these persecutions originated much earlier. Could you share a bit about the history of these persecutions and how they arose?
Max Dashu Yes, so in the early Middle Ages, there were witch-burning laws that went on the books in Spain, France, and England, between about 500 and 1100. We don’t have court records from that time, so we can only see the laws themselves. In some cases, they used ordeals, like having women walk on hot iron, to determine whether they were guilty of witchcraft. This was part of the laws in Spain and various Germanic kingdoms.
I try to document early witch burnings in my book Witches and Pagans, because in academia, there was some resistance to the idea that witch hunts happened in the Middle Ages. There’s some validity to that, as the main persecution—the witch hunting terror—really took off after 1400. But there were still persecutions in the 1100s. We have records of women being drowned from witchcraft in London in the 11th century, and burnings happening in Germany. There were also other forms of persecution—brandings, exiles, fines, shunning—lower-level forms of persecution were going on.
What we see happening is that with the foundation of the Inquisition in the early 1200s, judicial torture was reauthorized, which had been part of Roman and even Greek law. This escalated things dramatically. They would force people to denounce others—"Who were the witches with you at the witches' gathering?" Some women were so courageous that they endured these tortures, but others, as human beings, just couldn’t take it and would name others to stop the pain. This is when the mass purges really began.
An important piece to understand is the way the theologians evolved their understanding of witches. In the early medieval period, witches were seen as worshipping devils, especially female devils like Diana. But over time, the idea of witches shifted to a demonological ideology. Theologians like Thomas Aquinas developed ideas about succubi, and witches were increasingly thought to fly abroad on pagan holidays, first with the goddess and later, in the minds of male theologians, with the devil—because the goddess was, to them, the devil.
This mythology of witches having secret gatherings, bonfires, feasts, and dances—basically resembling pagan folk festivals—was created by the persecutors.
For example, witches in Scotland were believed to gather with the old crone goddess, Nick Nevin, on the highest peaks. In Italy, witches were said to gather at the tree of Benevento in Campania. The tree itself, a sacred site for witches since about the year 700, continued to be a central figure in witch trials centuries later.
The mythology created by the persecutors mixed these invented diabolical fantasies with elements of the authentic folk tradition. But of course, the persecution was also political. It was about misogyny—the idea that women’s power was illegitimate. The Malleus Maleficarum, for example, claimed that women were naturally inferior and carnal. There was also a body of mythology about witches having sex with the devil, and women in the torture chambers were forced to repeat these stories.
The interrogators often took pleasure in this. And, as we see in modern times, these themes of bondage, dungeons, and tying women up are reflections of historic trauma—legacies of deeply patriarchal narratives that have never been addressed, much less overturned.
Ruby Reed (advaya) Thank you, Max, for making those connections so clear. It’s chilling. When you speak about your research and the documents you're looking at, so much of that is misinformation or propaganda. How do you carry out your research and manage to amass such a vast archive of images and information?
Yes, it's a double irony. The witch was originally demonized, and now she’s been romanticized and commodified. In reclaiming the witch, it’s essential to honor her as a cultural authority, a keeper of wisdom, and a representative of connection to the earth and nature. Reclaiming her isn’t just about embracing a fun, magical figure—it’s about understanding and respecting the ancient traditions and spiritual roles that these women played in their communities, and the depth of their wisdom. We must reclaim the witch as a figure of spiritual power and resistance to patriarchal authority. When we engage with this concept, we must do so with reverence for the cultural contexts and the struggles that witches and wise women have faced over centuries.
Max Dashu Yeah. I think it’s really crucial to understand how land-based all of this was, this very strong connection with nature and with sanctuaries of nature. We can see that even in the narratives that the priesthood constructed about the witches. But it's really about digging back into this. This is what I try to do in my book Witches and Pagans—to uncover whatever I could from the written record or from folk orature, the oral tradition that spoke to these issues, that spoke to individual cultures. Whether they were talking in Italy, in Czechoslovakia, or in any of these places, about their ideas about witches. And you often see an overlap between witches, goddesses, and fairies. The whole thing about the fairy faith is important here. If you look at Evans-Wentz's amazing book The Fairy Faith in Celtic Lands, he shows that this was actually ancestor veneration; they saw the fairies as the spirits of the dead. This is a very important aspect of it, and he documents it not just by his own theory, but through quotes from people he interviewed in Scotland, the Isle of Man, and Britannia. So, there are a lot of connections between the witch and the goddess or the female divine.
These connections are very important. And this, of course, gets distorted through the pens and mouths of the priesthood, who try to turn Diana into the devil. They use Diana as a catch-all term, interpreting everything through Latin. But, you know, in Germany, you have Percht and Persta, and in Scotland, you have the Queen of Elphame, and in Ireland, for example, Anya is associated with the midsummer eve processions, where they carry the cleas, and you have these torches. These folk religions, these folk rituals, are very much the core tradition.
So we have to reconnect the seers and the women of vision with all of that. We need to think about the old woman as a cultural authority, which she was. They were the ones who knew, and you have this generational passing on.
Sometimes the names change because they are in flight, being pursued by confessors, priests, ministers, and inquisitors. And so the names for the goddesses shift. For example, in Italy, they can’t say Diana anymore, so they start to call the witches’ goddess La Signora del Gioco, the lady of play. There are all these pseudonyms that begin to circulate around them.
I don’t know if I’ve totally lost touch with the question you were asking—there are so many directions to explore in this. But, you know, we could look, for example, at folk rituals of divination. The kinds of things that were done, for example, on Samhain, or All Hallows Eve as it was Christianized, such as Scottish women sowing yarrow seeds. As they sow them, they say a charm and then look over their shoulder to find out who their future husband will be. Marriage was considered the most indicative of what a woman’s fate would be in patriarchal societies.
I want to say these are not matriarchal societies, but they are matricultural. There are elements of nature culture that still retain an esteem for the knowledge of uneducated old women. These women were looked down upon—they were at the bottom of the social order, the common peasant women—and yet they held very faithfully to practices that their great-great-grandmothers had done, whether it was ceremonies of spinning or weaving. There’s a whole connection between spinning and weaving that I talk about in my book Witchcraft. In the Norse world, for example, women would spin while chanting an incantation. This was believed to bring things about. It was very much the witch in the image of the fate or weird, as they would say in English tradition. And there are words for all of this in different languages.
So the witches’ goddess is an important piece, and we have to disentangle that from all the demonization that took place through the Inquisition and the witch trials that followed.
Another angle to this is the sexual politics of the witch. At a very early period in the penitential books, we have the priesthood saying, "These terrible women, they’re committing homicide because they’re giving women diabolical drinks that prevent them from conceiving." According to these theologians, a woman’s entire purpose on earth is to be a baby machine. And how dare you have control over your own regeneration, right?
This idea began in the fifth century with Cæsarius of Arles, a bishop in southern France, calling it homicide for women to use potions that would make them unable to carry a pregnancy—especially if they already had many children. This became a real issue, especially in times of starvation. Those old ideas were then evolved by theologians over hundreds of years into the meme of the witch as a baby killer. This also connects to the blood libel accusations against Jews, where it was claimed they performed terrible rituals, like killing a Gentile boy. These same accusations were later applied to Native people in charges of cannibalism, all because they were seen as “savages.”
There are a lot of connections to be drawn between the repression directed against the ethnic folk cultures of Europe during Christianization and the repression of women who were primary authorities in those traditions—the witches, or whatever name we want to call them: the priestesses, the oracles, the dreamers. These persecutions eventually gave rise to the exportation of an ideology of devil worship, which then became associated with all American, African, and Pacific Island religions as "devil worship." This idea provided an excuse for the papal bull and the Doctrine of Discovery, which gave European powers a mandate to enslave and seize the lands of these peoples. So there are many layers of connection here that we must understand. Thanks.
Ruby Reed (advaya) When you speak about the witch, and the way that the witch was working with natural forces, land, and medicine, there’s a sense of autonomy and leadership that she held sovereignty over her body, and the bodies of the people she worked with, and the land she worked with. You frame it as though this was the threat to the patriarchy, or the dominant forces at the time. When we think about witch persecution, it’s often associated with the early modern period—like the 1600s or 1700s. But from your research, it seems this originated much earlier. I’d love for you to share a bit about the history of the persecutions and how they arose, and what happened with that history.
Max Dashu Right, so, in the early Middle Ages, there were witch-burning laws that went on the books in Spain, France, and England, between about 500 and 1100. But we don’t have any records from those periods. There are no court records or trial records. We can only see the laws. In some cases, they used ordeals, like making women walk on or carry hot iron to determine whether or not they were guilty of witchcraft. This was in the Spanish fueros, and the laws of various Germanic kings. We also see examples of women being thrown off London Bridge in the 11th century, or being drowned for witchcraft. In Germany, burnings were happening by city authorities, and sometimes not only burnings, but brandings, exiles, fines, shunning—all kinds of lower-level persecution were also going on.
What we see happening is that with the foundation of the Inquisition in the early 1200s, judicial torture was reauthorized. This was something from Roman law and even Greek law before that. This really escalated things, because they started forcing people to denounce others. For example, they’d ask, "Who were the witches that were with you at the witches’ gathering?" Some women were incredibly courageous and were able to withstand the horrific tortures. Others, unfortunately, gave in and provided the denunciations that were sought. And this caused the whole thing to spiral out of control. That’s when we get the mass hunts.
But the very important piece that I think is crucial to understanding all of this is the shift in how theologians framed witches—from early medieval ideas of witches worshipping devils (especially female devils like Diana) to the development of demonological ideology. This is what we see in Thomas Aquinas’s work and his theories about succubi, as well as the earlier accounts where they talk about women going out at night with Diana.
Over time, there was a mythology built up around witches. They were believed to fly to pagan festivals, celebrate holidays like Samhain, and hold bonfires, feasts, and dances. This mythology was rooted in real folk traditions, but it became distorted by the Inquisitors. For example, in Scotland, witches were thought to travel with Nic Nevin, the old crone goddess, to sacred sites like the highest peak in Scotland. In Italy, witches were believed to ride to the Tree of Benevento in Campania. This tree had been a center of pagan worship for centuries. So, there’s this odd mixture of real traditions and completely fabricated diabolical fantasies by the persecutors.
Of course, the political aspect is also crucial—the misogyny. The idea that women’s power was illegitimate. The authors of the Malleus Maleficarum said that women were naturally inferior, carnal, and prone to evil. There was a whole mythology about witches having sex with the devil, which women were forced to confess under torture. The Max Dashu That's right. And piecing it together is a good way to describe it because it's like taking a mosaic—this piece, this piece, and this piece—and figuring out how they relate to each other. There's an element of pattern recognition. There's another element of being able to decipher through the bias of our sources and see what underlies it. You know, they're all calling it devil worship, so we already know that bias is there. But then we see, for example, there's a woman healer, Bellezza Orsini, who was tried by the Inquisition in mid-16th-century Italy. In the torture chamber, she's saying, "No, no, no, I'm a healer. I take olive oil and I put into it chopped flowers and leaves from all kinds of flowering plants, and I cure this. It's a flower oil of mine that I use to cure every type of disease and injury." This is something that Italian women were really into—olive oil ointments and salves—and they would gather the ingredients on Ascension Day. So there are Catholicized elements to it, but the Inquisitors are trying to force her to say that she's in league with the devil. She withstands three rounds of torture, where they tie your arms behind your back and hoist you up, then drop you down, dislocating your shoulders. It's agonizing. She finally realizes that they're never going to stop until she gives them what they want. She tries to keep her integrity, saying, "Yes, the devil tries to control the witches, but we're really in the service of the goddess, and the goddess helps us resist the devil." So she's constructing her own defense in the torture chamber, but she knows they will never believe her. In the end, she kills herself in the prison cell. That's an example of resistance that comes through to us from the Inquisitors' own transcript of the interrogation.
So you can see that the goddess they're invoking is associated with the goddess Fauna, a deity linked to the Feast of the Epiphany. In the Italian folk tradition, they have this female deity as their protector, the one they're invoking for healing and guidance. We have to read through the biases of the sources. Sometimes you only get a few facts, like a date, a place, and the details of a story, but it often gets all mixed up with accusations of terrible crimes, like making ointments from babies’ fat or causing disease with witchcraft. Yet, sometimes these sources—whether from chroniclers, theologians, or judges—are also telling us real things, things we can piece together. For example, the Tree of Benevento, which the witches are said to gather around in Italy, is mentioned even in some of these records.
So my research is about synthesizing from disparate sources—trying to see where they come together, where they affirm each other. We see the bias of the priesthood, but we also see that they’re telling us real details. For example, they write about the traditions of the Tree of Benevento, the same tree that became a symbol of witchcraft during the trials. It's this process of sifting through all of this material over time, and sometimes you have to go through materials that aren't even available in English. There's a vast body of Italian scholarship on the witches’ goddess and folk practices. For example, they tell of the ancient goddess of the Sabines, Sapientia, the goddess of wisdom, who teaches seekers who go to her cave in the Apennine Mountains.
There’s also a wealth of research from the Balkans. One author, Ava Porter, has written extensively on the Fairy Faith in the Balkan world, showing its connection to the witches, their ceremonies, and the holidays they observed. What I’m trying to illustrate is that it's a process of synthesis, pulling together a lot of different sources, and trying to see where they overlap and where they confirm each other.
Ruby Reed (advaya) Thank you, Max. If someone wanted to explore some of the practices associated with witches or wise women, how could they go about it? Do you cover this in your books or on your website? Could you share a little more about the types of practices the witch was engaged in?
Max Dashu Yes, I do describe many of these practices, especially in the context of the early Middle Ages, which is the focus of my book. One example is something called "waking the well." This doesn’t mean waking up the well; it means staying awake all night beside a spring or fountain, keeping vigil. There’s an account from an Anglo-Saxon war epic from the 11th century, where a man describes seeing women leave their house in the middle of the night and go down to the water. He follows them and observes them sitting there, holding dialogues with the spirit of the fountain. They’re asking questions and listening for answers. This is all in Latin, but it’s a sidebar to the main story about a warrior’s life. The women’s ritual is just mentioned briefly, but it’s a vivid description of what they’re doing—engaging in a spiritual practice at the well.
Another example is a French poem from the 12th or 13th century that talks about these three sisters, often referred to as the Three Fates or the Three Fairies, who come during the night. People would lay out offerings for them—plates of food and three knives—to gain their favor. These rituals were tied to birth and were considered extremely important. The Malleus Maleficarum (the primary text used to target witches) describes midwives as especially vulnerable to witchcraft accusations, which shows the connection between witchcraft and women’s roles in childbirth.
Before Christianity, the bathing and blessing of newborns was done by midwives, and the priesthood saw this as a theft of the baby’s soul, which should have been "saved" through baptism. This practice of blessing the child, singing over them, and bathing them is all part of the folk tradition that predated Christianity, but over time, it was demonized. We see evidence of these rituals even in the 19th century in places like Normandy, France, where these customs were still practiced.
In Scandinavian traditions, for example, women would chant to Freya at births, invoking the goddess for protection during this dangerous passage from the spiritual world into material form. These practices were viewed with suspicion by the Church, who associated them with witchcraft and the devil.
The Inquisition was particularly focused on these rituals—anything they could associate with the devil was deemed witchcraft. They created a narrative that linked women’s ancient rites with demonic worship, but many of these practices were simply folk customs, like the bathing and blessing of children, or invoking deities for protection. And over time, these accusations would grow. People were told that witches were causing harm by cursing babies, making fields barren, or causing accidents like horses breaking their legs. In a time of high infant mortality and disease, people turned to scapegoating, blaming women, midwives, and healers for things beyond their control.
We can still see this dynamic in the present day—how scapegoating works, how it motivates people to act against their own interests. This was true of the Inquisition and the witch trials, and it’s a theme that repeats throughout history. There was a point in the western Alps, in the 1400s, when common people rose up against the Inquisition, rejecting the witch hunts and protesting the injustice. But in the end, the people were disempowered, and the witch hunts continued, turning women into scapegoats for everything that went wrong.
Ruby Reed (advaya) Thank you, Max. It’s such a privilege and an honor to hear you speak. I’m really excited for the course we’re going to put together, and I’m so grateful for everyone who’s joined us live—250 people on the call right now, and 2000 signed up! That’s a great start. Tonight feels like the perfect time to think about how we can reclaim the concept of the witch and venerate the idea of the wise woman within our culture, our lives, and our communities.
Thank you for your 50 years of work with the Suppressed Histories Archives, and thank you for collaborating with us at Advaya. Thank you to everyone who joined the call. Obviously, we didn’t get to all of the group’s questions, but we hope you’ll join the course for a much deeper experience with Max and have the opportunity to ask those questions directly. Some of the questions were specifically about further reading and resources, so we’ll include links to Max’s website and more in a follow-up email.
Thank you again, Max, and to everyone here. We’ll send out the link to sign up for the course for those who are interested, and you can always contact us for more information.
