The Great Hunt
June was such a lovely month, with lovely astrology! Change is stirred, following peaceful No Kings protests, and I'm feeling a growing hum of hope in the world. But first, back to witch history...
Let's briefly rewind to 1487, the year the infamous Malleus Maleficarum was published. (Quick refresh: this was the misogynistic playbook that systematically radicalized the belief that witches were willing agents of the Devil, explicitly stating that women, being "weak” and “lustful," were more susceptible to demonic trickery.) Thanks to the newly invented printing press, these toxic words spread far and wide (second only to the Bible in readership), landing in a world already reeling from upheaval. The Church was in crisis, the plague had decimated villages, wars raged, and the Little Ice Age brought a new layer to the suffering.
Quite the opposite of our current unfolding global climate catastrophe, this was an era of profound cooling, roughly from the 14th to the 19th century. It ushered in colder, longer winters and shorter, wetter summers. As you can imagine, crops failed. Repeatedly. Whatever paltry yields did survive weren't enough to sustain communities through the brutal, extended winters. Widespread famine ensued, crippling economies already ravaged by war and disease. The people, already primed to seek scapegoats for their misfortunes, increasingly blamed "witches" for the devastating bad weather and ruined harvests.
The religious tensions and conflicts that erupted after the splintering of the Catholic Church further polarized society. Both Catholic and Protestant authorities, desperate to establish doctrinal purity and eliminate perceived threats, viewed witchcraft as a direct assault by the Devil. This led to an intensification of "witch" persecution in the both churches’ renewed focus on battling evil and heresy.
Prior to this period, many legal systems were "accusatorial," meaning someone had to formally accuse another, and the accuser faced penalties if the accusation turned out to be false. But in this era of small fiefdoms with little oversight, judges and magistrates shifted to the "inquisitorial" system, which empowered them to initiate investigations based on mere rumor or suspicion. This essentially eliminated disincentives for false accusers, who were no longer personally liable, and opened the floodgates for baseless accusations.
And while torture certainly wasn't new, it had a new face. Described in great detail in the Malleus Maleficarum, torture of possible witches was carried out zealously against a whole new deviant: women.
"Confessions," often extracted under unimaginable duress, topped evidentiary charts. These confessions often implicated others, which led to more accusations and more trials. And because witchcraft was considered a crimen exceptum (an exceptional crime), normal legal protections were often suspended for “witches”, which led to even more extreme interrogation methods.
In some areas, particularly in the later trials, "spectral evidence" – testimony from victims claiming an accused witch's spirit or "specter" had harmed them – was admitted in court. This type of evidence was highly subjective and utterly impossible to refute, making it terrifyingly easy to convict innocent individuals.
I’ve already noted the printing press's critical role in propagating Malleus Maleficarum, but there was so much more bullshit and terror this technology spread far and wide. Demonological treatises, sensational pamphlets, and detailed accounts of trials created a feedback loop of terror: published fears fueled public anxiety, which encouraged more accusations and trials, the accounts of which reinforced the narrative of devil-inspired witchcraft causing all the world’s ills.
It was like a modern day wildfire, spreading uncontrollably over terrain vanquished by war, disease, famine and suffering that demanded a reckoning. And a villain. Starting with the publication of the Malleus Maleficarum and followed by the Churches’ focus on fighting the devil, a theoretical and theological framework was born that put witch hunts into practice. With devastating consequences.
Then and now.
We still suffer reverberations today. Throughout the collective unconscious is a witch wound, a woman wound, an attack on feminine power that’s never fully recovered. Generations of unhealed wounds still haunt a modern world that recoils from the feminine half to our whole.
Imagine what our world could look like if we could all heal our witch wound, our woman wound, each and every one of us. When we begin to re-marry our yin and our yang, and become the whole of our masculine and feminine, we will become whole. And through that healing, our heart-centered leadership will emerge. And prevail.
I'll pick up on the devastating consequences of the witch hunts next time. In the meantime, the Sun is shining bright in nurturing Cancer, right next to lucky Jupiter, so I hope you’re soaking up lots of abundance and love and family and friends.
This is the time to connect deeply with our homes and loved ones and our own self-care. Create comfort, cherish those who make you feel safe and loved and answer for yourself, what does "home" mean to you right now?
It’s a good weekend to celebrate with friends, family and whatever home means to you because there are some big retrogrades and changes in the planets coming next week that you want to be ready for!