Witch: Unleashed. Untamed. Unapologetic.

by Lisa Lister

A witch is an unapologetic woman. She alchemizes experiences and emotions. She’s a woman with power, agency and sovereignty… and she has it on HER terms.

Being a witch is being a woman in her power. It’s being someone who trusts her inner authority, and doesn’t look outside herself for validation and/or approval. It’s being someone who uses her own personal magic to navigate and negotiate the environment she currently finds herself in.

And in pushing down the scream, you’ll go one of two ways. You’ll either become despondent and submissive to life, or you’ll become aggressive and/or hardened – taking on predominantly masculine traits to survive.

I totally disconnected from my female body. I lived my life from the neck up, operating and making decisions from my head. I lived life like a dude because that option seemed much easier than having to deal with being a woman who was never seen or heard.

But like ‘witch’, ‘bitch’, ‘cunt’ and ‘menstruation’, ‘power’ is NOT the dirty word we’ve been taught that it is.

The Tower card in the tarot is associated with change. It’s like the goddess Kali Ma: it represents burning down what’s no longer necessary. Are you ready to walk into the fire? Again? Witch work means that you have to burn over and over. All the bloody time. It means having to burn up the stories you’ve been told in order to keep you tame and compliant.

might feel that there’s so much work to do; but actually, it’s the only work there is to do. So many of us spend our entire lives wondering, ‘What’s our passion? What’s our purpose? What do we have to do?’ What we have to do is THIS. Witch work. FYI: that’s the work you know you’re here to do.

Let the feminine parts of yourself lead the masculine. Don’t get rid of the masculine (you’ll need it!), but let the wild nature and chaos and softness of the feminine inform the harder edges.

‘A witch is a wise woman aligned with the Earth, a healer. It’s a word that demands destigmatization at this crucial time in the planet’s history when we desperately need the medicine of the feminine to rise and rebalance humanity and the Earth.’ – SARAH DURHAM WILSON

Essentially, I’m a witch of the old ways. And when I say ‘old ways’, I mean The REALLY old ways – back when witchcraft was wiccecraeft (also spelled wiccecraefte, wicchecrafte, witchcraft). That word literally meant the Craft – as in the art or skill of the wicce (pronounced wit-cha).

She trusted and worshipped source, the Goddess, SHE – and she knew that she herself was a direct reflection of SHE.

Celtic paths are some of the more popular traditions amongst Pagans in the British Isles. They work with the elements, the Ancient Ones and nature. Followers are usually healers who work with plants, stones, flowers, trees, the elemental people, the gnomes and the fairies.

Dianic witchcraft is a mixture of different traditions. Its primary focus is the Goddess, who is worshiped in her three aspects of Maiden, Mother and Crone.

Dianic witchcraft is a ‘divine feminine tradition’, so its covens are for women only. To an outside observer, it may appear as a single tradition, but actually it’s really an intertwined group of traditions that have influenced each other over the centuries and millennia.

Most Dianic covens worship the Goddess exclusively (Diana and Artemis are the most common manifestations), and most today are still women-only. Dianic rituals are eclectic: some are derived from the Gardnerian tradition, while others have been created anew. They emphasize rediscovering and reclaiming female power and divinity, consciousness-raising and combining politics with spirituality. Z Budapest, badass witch, declared Dianic Witchcraft to be ‘Wimmin’s Religion’. She found...

Eclectic witchcraft is an approach for individuals who want to pick and choose from many different traditions to create a personalized form of witchcraft that meets their individual needs and abilities.

Practitioners’ minds remain open and receptive to the knowledge, ideas, beliefs and methods that others practise. They adapt well to different situations, and create their own paths based on what they believe to be true and right at that time in their life.

The Wiccan Rede: this states, ‘An Ye Harm None, Do What Ye Will’. This means a Wiccan is free to use her magic as long as it doesn’t harm anyone. The Threefold Law: this states that any good you do will return to you threefold in this lifetime. Likewise, any harm you do will return to you threefold as well.

For the most part, witchcraft – regardless of specific tradition – is the traditional folk magic/healing/medicine of the indigenous people; and a witch is the wise person/healer/medicine woman who shares it.

Every woman is a witch, regardless of whether she knows it or not. Why? Because she’s cyclic, she’s powerful and she can embrace nature to heal herself AND her community. In other words: she IS magic.

Being a witch isn’t about what you do. It’s not spells, rituals and ceremony: it’s the stance you take in life.

‘I am a witch, by which I mean that I am somebody who believes that the Earth is sacred; and that women and women’s bodies are an expression of that sacred being.’ – STARHAWK

I’m a witch who can call up power from the Earth, and call down power from the moon.

I’m a witch who has been burned with shame, who burns with passion, and who – at another time, in another place – would have been burned at the stake.

Witchcraft today is being built upon the idea that the Western world has lost, buried, suppressed and corrupted the old traditions of those who have gone before. Women like you and me are now waking up, remembering and attempting to rediscover those traditions and make them relevant again in the world we currently live in.

Honour and cherish the power of stillness. You don’t have to label it as meditation or mindfulness: just literally be quiet and let yourself, your mind and your nervous system be still. Drop below the chatter and doing-ness of life, and begin to understand who you are, who you really are.

Pick up a crystal, or an item of jewellery or clothing. Does your energy go up, or does it go down? Start to practise this with people, places and items. Tune in to each thing, and then tell yourself the truth.

The truly powerful people in the world are kind, but they’re not self-sacrificing. They see what’s beautiful and wondrous, both within themselves and within others. You can’t be supportive of others if you’re not supportive of yourself.

Witchcraft takes us back to the most natural, vibrant and raw parts of our soul; so find what feels good to you and then move towards it.

Know that all you need is already within you.

The White Spring is found in the womb of Glastonbury Tor: a beautiful hill with St Michael’s tower sitting proudly on top, overlooking what many believe to be Avalon.

I didn’t burn. I didn’t drown. I didn’t suffocate. I DID die though. I died to who and what I no longer was. But with EVERY initiation, I was also reborn a little bit more powerful than the time before.

In much the same way as healer and wise woman, the term witch was used to describe the woman who’d completed her bleeding years – the years where she’d gathered her wisdom with each and every menstrual cycle. Having completed those years, she’d arrived in the seat of her power, and people from the community would then come to sit at her feet and seek her wisdom and counsel. The same applies to the word hag. It was once a reference to a women who refused to do what she was told, or bow to patriarchal ideas and systems. Hags were/are badasses.

historically, the very things that made these women powerful – the ability to speak up for themselves, to share knowledge and wisdom, to be badasses – were not qualities that the men in positions of power could ‘control’. How could they keep us compliant if we challenged and refused to conform?

Malta, a small cluster of islands in the Mediterranean sea, was an epicentre for SHE. Full-bodied, 10-foot-tall statues of bountiful, abundant women representing Mother Earth proudly stood outside the temples there.

For thousands of years, people from all over the world worshipped a mother god: the Great Mother. She was nature and nurture, death and rebirth, fierce and loving, light and dark. She was the polarities and all the mystery that lies in between them. This creatrix of all that is was known as both male and female; and a divine, sacred and devotional relationship with her was our guide.

For women, these patriarchal constructs are far-reaching, and the list is never-ending. Some examples of how they look today (because yes, we’ve come a long way, but oh my goddess, there’s still a LONG way to go) include mansplaining, the gender pay gap, revenge porn, porn in general, hair removal, violence… Insert your own way that Patriarchy wants you to think you’re broken and need fixing here.

Ishtar, Diana, Astarte and Isis were all called Virgin too, but that didn’t mean ‘sexually chaste’ as Christianity has had us believe. Instead, it meant ‘sexually independent’. A woman unto herself. Basically, badass. Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor outline in their book The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth that virgins were literally ‘free women’. They were women who were ‘one in themselves’, i.e. not yet legally owned by their husbands. In fact, the very word ‘virgin’ derives from a Latin root meaning strength, force and skill.

Witch hunts happened predominantly to women – but there were ‘unsuitable’ men who perished too. Gay men, vagrants, male Gypsies, Jews and foreigners/‘strangers’ were all persecuted – albeit in far fewer numbers than women.

It started in 1484 with Pope Innocent VIII. Based on the Bible statement ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’ (Exodus 22:18), which outlines and describes the ‘supposed’ activities of witches, he gave the Church authority to find witches and kill them, denying them all rights to a fair trial. And a ‘witch’, for the Church, was any strong woman.

The patriarchal institution wanted to break down and destroy the strong, powerful women who threatened them. They wanted women to fear them – and each other – so that they never knew, or experienced, the magic and power that they had within them.

The truth that women became stronger in belonging was broken. Persecutors encouraged sisters to turn on each other in order to save themselves, and entire matrilineal chains were torn apart.

the witch hunts introduced a system of terror to ALL women. And from that system emerged a new, much more acceptable model of femininity to which women would have to conform in order to be socially accepted in the developing capitalist society.

The more we fear the witch, the more we fear our own power – which was, and still is, exactly the point of patriarchal propaganda.

Modern day patriarchy keeps us compliant by pitting us against each other, exploiting our guilt and making us fear and mistrust each other.

industries do whatever they can to make us question ourselves and feel guilty for how we look and feel, and despite whatever self-help/care bow they choose to tie it in, their aim is to keep us feeling broken and thinking that we need to be fixed.

Generations of women have been disconnected from the power that lies between their thighs – their lady landscape, their womb and their menstrual cycle. They’ve lost connection with their ability to create life (and everything else) in their wombs, which means their minds can be easily manipulated and indoctrinated by Patriarchy.

We live in a cultural climate that makes women feel perpetually guilty for simply being women. This is the modern-day equivalent of the Inquisition. Only, instead of terrorizing us with accusations, torture and public executions, Patriarchy has made us torture ourselves. We put ourselves on trial every time we look in the mirror – and before the trial begins, we already know that we’re guilty.

Our deepest wounds, our fears, are what we need to teach and share the most.

Here’s what I’ve had to learn every time I say yes to doing a podcast, a TV or radio interview or speaking on a big stage, when what I really wanted to do was say ‘no’ and stay in my PJs: In order to share our powerful SHE medicine, our magic, our unique-to-us-flavour in the world, we have to be seen AND heard.