I first saw it when looking at their faces while showing The Burning Times in class — the blank stares, the pained expressions, the tears, the looking away. The scenes and sounds of women tortured and burned alive touched something… Read More ›
Witchcraft
Women of Power: the Pendle Witches
Twelve years ago, I published my novel Daughters of the Witching Hill, drawn from the true story of the Pendle Witches of 1612. The story of these wisewomen and healers still haunts and enchants me to this day. Currently the… Read More ›
A Visionary History of Women: Part 3
The Pendle Witches As a spiritual person, I am fascinated with women’s experience of the sacred. We women, for the past five-thousand years of patriarchy, have been side-lined and marginalized by every established religion in the world. But in every… Read More ›
Carol P. Christ’s Legacy: “THE OLD RELIGION” OR A “NEW CREATIVE SYNTHESIS”?
Moderator’s Note: Carol Christ died from cancer in July, 2021. Her work continues through her non-profit foundation, the Ariadne Institute for the Study of Myth and Ritual and the Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete. This blog was originally posted June 30, 2014. You can read… Read More ›
Mother Demdike, Ancestor of My Heart, Part 2 by Mary Sharratt
Continued from Part 1. As I sought to uncover the bones of the cunning woman Mother Demdike’s story, I was drawn into a new world of mystery and magic. It was as though Pendle Hill had opened up like an… Read More ›
The Pendle Witches and Their Magic by Mary Sharratt
In 1612, in one of the most meticulously documented witch trials in English history, seven women and two men from Pendle Forest in Lancashire, Northern England were executed at Lancaster Castle. In court clerk Thomas Potts’s account of the proceedings,… Read More ›
“THE OLD RELIGION” OR A “NEW CREATIVE SYNTHESIS”? by Carol P. Christ
Is Goddess feminism an old religion or a new creative synthesis? Can it be both? Goddess feminism draws on the feminist affirmation of women’s experiences, women’s bodies, and women’s connection to nature; the feminist critique of transcendent male monotheism as… Read More ›