Tending the Witch Wound

The term “witch wound,” coined by Kimberly Jones, gives name to the ongoing impacts of European and other persecutions as they are carried on through families and culture. The witch wound describes a legacy of ancestral trauma passed down through not only through ancestors of blood, but also deep cultural rupture. The trials helped establish lasting norms about who gets to hold knowledge and authority, and how those norms are absorbed over centuries.

The witch wound may be felt through experiences like:

Fear of being seen. Anxiety about speaking up, standing out, or sharing your gifts publicly, as if visibility is categorically dangerous.

Distrust of your own knowing. Second-guessing your intuition, bodily wisdom, or spiritual experience, and always deferring to outside authority.

Mistrust between women or marginalized people. Wariness of others suffering under the same system can echo a time when neighbors and kin accused and betrayed one another.

Disconnection from land, ritual, and folk healing. A sense that something old, Earth-connected, and necessary was lost or a tenacious sense of being outside or other. 

Shame around the body and pleasure. Inherited habits of hiding, controlling, or distrusting embodied life, joy, and pleasure.

…other expressions of patriarchal, religious, and colonialist harm that narrow the full range of human expression.

Europe is also not the only place where historical or ongoing scapegoating in the form of witch persecutions occur, but the witch trials of early modern Europe are the historical anchor for this specific offering. You don’t need to identify as a witch or have known ancestral connection to the European witch trials to join; the course is open to people of all ancestries, genders, and origin places. Most people alive today have no traceable link to an accused person, judge, or inquisitor, but nevertheless, these wounds are alive and well in the culture the trials helped build and the spread of this culture throughout the Earth.