My last post has struck a nerve for some of you, and I’m glad to know I’m far from alone in critically examining this word “witch” and trying to understand what it means in an original sense, rather than a pop culture, commercial, colonial, Christian or patriarchal sense (did I leave anybody out?)
I feel the need to explain why being called a witch is something that stopped me in my tracks. I have been proud to be a rebel or outsider all of my life, not being willing to be defined by any category or fit into the main stream ideas of what a woman is supposed to be. I have flaunted my independence, and happily yelled “THANKS!” when someone told me I was weird or different. However, unlike when a fellow yelled at me from his passing car, “DYKE!” in my buzz cut college phase (I was fine with that mistaken label), being called a “witch” felt too close to home, insidious, and brought up a sinking feeling of terror.
I couldn’t understand why I would feel that way in terms of my actual life. I have never identified myself as a witch, although in my spiritual practice I do some things that might raise the eyebrows of bible thumpers (such as meditation, using homeopathy and herbs to treat illness, and dowsing, a very useful skill I learned from an old woman in the mountains of North Carolina). Of course, my shamanic work could be classified as witchy were it not for its connections to the indigenous populations…or are they “witches”, too?
While I lived in the village where I was “identified as a public enemy” (before I knew anything about these behind-the-hand remarks about me) I had intuitive flashes in which an angry mob would come drag me out of my office, grab me by my hair and drag me down the street. The intuitive vision would stop there, not revealing the fate of the woman I seemed to be in the inner vision. But the feeling of cold stones weighing down the innards of my belly did not easily or soon cease.
This was not an entirely new sensation for me. Back in Asheville NC, where we lived for 7 years, I had multiple odd spontaneous awarenesses that involved flashes of me being disemboweled, drowned, or beheaded. One such instance was preceded by a physical break down of my right shoulder…for weeks it got more and more sore and incapacitated. After many attempts to have it corrected through chiropractic and massage work (and Advil), in a strange fit of inner knowing, I paused in the living room on my way to take some laundry upstairs and asked silently what my body was telling me.
Giving in to the motion, my body then took over…I began to move as if somebody much bigger than me was rearranging me like a puppet. My inner eye saw a lovely young woman with reddish blond curls and a long flowered dress being brought forcibly into a crowd of people. She must have been 18 or 19 years old. She was pretty, but had a gleam in her eye and a set to her jaw. My right arm went slammed tight behind my back, fist up behind my heart. I was forced down to my knees. My head was pushed down so that I was crouched over. In my mind’s eye, I saw a bloody stump of a tree, where I was now resting my chest. As my eyes looked down on red ground, I heard and felt a stalwart, “I will never let this happen to me again.” Then the “memory” faded, and miraculously, my right shoulder was completely cured. Never another pain.
I stood there in a bit of a daze. What the hell had just happened? Was that girl me? I wasn’t scared; more I had the feeling of knowing that my body had revealed something to me, and because I gave it permission, something had been released. It was a pivotal experience affirming my life philosophy, which I have incorporated deeply since, that our bodies are the key to so much wisdom.
Was what happened a playing-out of some kind of cellular or collective memory? Or did I actually live through that? When I was called “witch” in the tiny town in Colorado where I used to live, was it bringing forth another wave of memories that were asking to be acknowledged and released through me? If so, what did this mean to me personally? Why is this such a prominent and repeated feature in my life?
And that’s why I am asking these questions of all of you wise people, and why I feel the need to explore this line of thought. What is a witch, really? Where did the word come from, what are its origins? And when did it become a word for something that was evil, scary, and needing to be put to death?
And do any of you have these spontaneous memories or experiences? If so, I would be so honored to hear them.
See Part 3, Reclaiming the Word WITCH here https://liciaberry.com/2010/01/12/reclaiming-the-word-%E2%80%9Cwitch%E2%80%9D/
