Life Still Shaped by the Witch Hunts? by Eline Kieft

In this article I reframe my understanding of feminism through the lens of Mona Chollet’s In Defence of Witches, and reflect on how my psyche as a woman today is still deeply influenced by the effects of the witch hunts in mediaeval times. 

Personal Trail

I grew up in the Netherlands, a country with one of the lowest teen pregnancies rates worldwide, where abortion has been legal since 1984, and home-birthing is the norm. My mum was one of the activists who helped make this happen in the 1970s and 1980s. She campaigned pro anti-conception and abortion rights, for the right to be ‘boss in our own belly’ before and all the way through a pregnancy, and raised awareness of HIV and aids. She was a working mom and loved her job. 

As I girl, I enjoyed playing with Lego, and developed a good spatial awareness. My dad taught me how to navigate by natural orientation and compass, so I also have a keen sense of direction. These are often considered masculine qualities, but for me they’ve always been a natural part of who I am, including my identity as a woman. 

As a teen, I received clear and heart-centred sex-education, had a good knowledge of my female anatomy and menstrual cycle. I never considered myself less on behalf of my sex. I grew up with the view that I could do anything I wanted, be anyone I wanted, and certainly could do equally well as boys or men.

I always felt privileged to harvest the fruits of my mum’s activism that became the norm in the Netherlands, but feminism wasn’t really on my radar, and I certainly never thought of myself as a feminist. 

It was my colleague Amanda Williamson who first described my work as feminist, because I critiqued academic methodologies derived from patriarchic worldviews, and instead called for a more inclusive life-trail approach that recognises and celebrates the body, senses, unfinished-ness, and not-knowing as qualities that enhance, instead of limit, our life and our work.*)

Of course, I am aware of ongoing inequality in the ways that men and women can live their lives: an ongoing discrepancy in being hired, differences in salaries, challenges in career progress and the glass ceiling, derogatory views on the female boss, sexual harassment, and male authority over what happens in our wombs. I know that there are still countless things to address, but I never felt that my personal choices were in limited or dictated by the fact that I’m a woman. Or were they?

In Defence of Witches**)

I always knew I was a witch, but In Defence of Witches by Mona Chollet made me wonder if I’ve secretly been a feminist too! Chollet is a French journalist who describes the witch as a symbol of female strength outside the limitations of society, past and present. She considers how the witch hunts are more than a historic phenomenon. They seeped into our collective unconscious and continue to influence the perception of women and womanhood today, and how we dare (or daren’t) be as women. This includes aspects like:

• our struggle with wild, unruly, sexual, creative, menopausal, and ageing bodies;
• fears of having a different body because anomalies like scars and birth marks would be hunted by the ‘witch prickers’ (p.12);
• repression of visionary, dreaming, intuitive, and healing skills;
• confinement to or over-identification with a role as nurturer or carer;
• fears of speaking our mind;
• challenges to living lives independent of men, patriarchy, and church.

These characteristics can be traced back to the dangers our ancestors faced. Don’t speak up, don’t be different, do what you’re told, keep your mouth shut, or else… Or else, you’d be raped, tortured, drowned, burned, or quartered. No wonder it’s such a struggle to step up, come out, shake off the chains and live a life of our choosing. 

Chollet pays most attention to France, UK, and the USA. The Netherlands seems to be 20 to 50 years ahead in terms of inclusive attitude. Growing up with two awesome parents in such a forward society, I realise I haven’t truly understood the general feminist agenda until now. I was shocked, of course, about recent misogynist politicians and anti-abortion laws in the USA but had no idea how tenacious negative views on women continue to undermine so many lives.

Do you recognise this?

Describing the The Witches of Eastwick, Chollet neatly summarises the ongoing effects of the witch hunts: “the women have been constantly holding back, restraining themselves, pretending to be ‘half of what they are’ and conforming to the rules of a patriarchal and puritanical society” (p.69). 

I wondered how my life has unconsciously been shaped by them too. Is my psyche free of the fears they induced? Have I been truly able to choose and create the life I want, as I always believed? I think not. I now recognise two major ways in which the above dynamic played out in my own life. 

The first one is the value I placed in obtaining degrees and diplomas that give a sense of recognition and apparent safety. When insecure, my default mode used to be ‘train in another modality’ or ‘get another degree’. I believed this would build my credibility and give me a ground for speaking up. Although valuable in certain ways, these degrees mostly emerged from masculine ways of seeing, perceiving and valuing the world. They can stifle the creative fire for developing our own unique views and processes, and capacity to think outside of the prevailing frameworks and offered solutions.

The second one was the fear of aligning my work with spirituality. Having trained in anthropology, a usually open-minded academic discipline, talking about soul and spirituality as a personal experience was taboo. It could be studied from the outside as an intriguing, ‘exotic’ phenomenon, but admitting to one’s own spirituality would endanger the objective quality of our scholarship. 

Reading Chollet, I wondered if this fear is so deeply ingrained in the fabric of our collective unconscious that any woman who thinks outside of the box, sings her own tune, yearns for independence, is not as domesticated as those around her, is still frightened into submission because she fears ‘this never again’.

Although my concerns are of course much less severe than those around chances on the job market, abortion choices, or sexual harassment, they nevertheless had a strong impact on my self-actualisation, and on daring to bring my talents and skills to fruition. 

I know I’m not alone. When will we dare to truly follow our own path, and learn to support each other in the choices that feel right for us – even though we might not always understand them? This exploration and support is at the heart of my Art of Thriving Network. Any and all genders welcome!

*) Referring to my contribution “Soul Loss and Retrieval: restoring wholeness through dance”, Kieft, E. 2017, pp. 180-206, in Williamson, A. & Sellers-Young, B. (eds.) Spiritual Herstories: Soulful research in dance studies. Intellect.

**) Mona Chollet: In Defence of Witches, The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial.

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Bio

She completed her PhD in dance anthropology at Roehampton University, trained in depth with the Scandinavian Centre for Shamanic Studies and the School of Movement Medicine. Eline worked at the Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE) at Coventry University for five years, where she created a Somatics Toolkit for Ethnographers, and pioneered soulful academic pedagogy. Her recent book Dancing in the Muddy Temple: A Moving Spirituality of Land and Body was well received as a unique blend of theory and practice and a medicine for our times. 

She is now a full-time change-maker and facilitates deep transformation through coaching and courses both online and in person. Her approach The Way of the Wild Soul offers a set of embodied, creative, and spiritual tools to re-connect with inner strength and navigate life’s challenges with confidence. 

Website: https://www.elinekieft.com Also on Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | LinkedIn