In Europe from the 15th till the 18th century thousands, if not millions of human beings, mainly women, were burnt at the stakes. On our continent it constituted the last, unfortunately very efficient act of destroying the old knowledge and spiritual tradition based on relationship with the Mother Earth and her healing power, which was acknowledged as the work of satan and hence cursed and rejected. “Wise women”, healers and midwives, also called “witches”, were accused of witchcraft and tortured in an unconceivably cruel and humiliating manner in order to confess “guilty”, i.e. “working with the devil”. This way the knowledge and spiritual legacy of our wise ancestresses vanished. Since then the word “witch”, once an honourable term, has been marked with contempt. It has become a synonym of “a hag” and firmly associated with evil and rejection.

That story was shoved aside to the shadow sphere; those mass murders have never been acknowledged as genocide, there has been no mourning, the curse has never been removed.
Even schools do not teach about those crimes in history classes as if it was some marginal, unimportant historical event. We all know that if you turn your back on something, it, instead of disappearing, gains power. A banished story still lives in our unconsciousness, in our common feminine soul, in our dreams, in our bodies, in our uncontrolled reflexive reactions. It robs us of our strengh and self-trust as well as trust in feminine wisdom which we are ashamed of, and hence we strive to be like men and copy their manner of acting in the world. In order to regain access to feminine power we have to consciously return to what was, and still is, rejected and held in contempt. We have to return in order to accept it as our own spiritual legacy which continuously influences us and will never be healed if WE do not do it with love and respect it deserves.

This was the intention of the Ceremony, to which I invited women from the three workshop groups I conduct. We needed many years of work on a deep, spiritual level in order to fearlessly enter this most difficult and most rejected sphere of the collective feminine psyche. We needed mutual trust, knowledge and skills we have elaborated over the years, as well as clear conscioussness to deal together with the story, older and bigger than each one of us.

For seven days we prayed, sang, danced, worked with the feelings of shame, fear, guilt, helplessness, acute pain of loneliness and all other emotions which had accumulated in this rejected and unwanted place. We also invited all spirits of our Ancestresses who, accused of witchcraft, were drowned, tortured and burnt. We recited names of women and men who were convicted of witchcraft in Poland: “I, the granddaughter, bring back the memory and restore respect to my ancestress Zofia Pankowa from Nieszawa, who was accused of witchcraft ‘because staring at the ground, she walked like a witch’; Katarzyna Paszkowa, who was accused of healing with menstrual blood; Zofia Papierniczka, who was accused of playing music on Łysa Mountain; Zofia Sinowczanka, who was accused by her neighbour of having, unlike him, milk cows; Regina Sokołowska, a midwife who was sentenced to infamy and to burn at the stake for procuring an abortion …”

It was a real Funeral Ceremony; we revived the memory of our Ancestresses, mourned, felt and expressed their unexpressed, disrespected and rejected pain. We apologized to fire and water for having been used as means of such cruel killing. We put the ash from the transformative fire which we burned day and night, symbolically the witches’ ashes, into a common grave in order to enable them to come back to the Earth.

The ashes returned to the Earth and we, living women, returned to our everyday lives with clear awareness that we can no longer hide this witch – wise woman – healer who lives in every one of us. This is the only way for the word ”witch” to cease to be an insult and “woman’s wisdom” an embarassing ailment. We hope that shame and fear of rejection, i.e. the heritage from the times of burning stakes will not paralize us any more. We accepted, experienced and released them during that extraordinary week. For us they are now merely old memories we let go. The Ceremony for our Ancestresses was completed in the night of new moon when we created a Living Spiral of Passing from our bodies in order to let the enormous pain of the old story written with violence find its end and pass away and in order to deny it access to our daughters and granddaughters, so that no girl becoming a woman would be burdened with this dreary heritage.

I thank all the women who found courage to accept what was rejected. Thank you for the trust you had in me and for letting me lead you into the very heart of pain, thank you for our common effort, for night vigils by the fire, for the awakened serpent power and the Cow’s Song which opens all closed doors, for the incomparable joy of being one body and mind, and for the inexhaustible power of healing that flows from this unity. These seven days and nights spent together, when the transformative fire was burning, were for me one of the strongest and most beautiful experiences of my entire life.
Anija

A precious source of bringing memory and reality of Polish “witches” to us was, among others, a book by Małgorzata Pilaszek Witch Trials in Poland from the 15th till the 18th Century, Universitas, Cracow 2008

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