A reflection on the history of witches, women’s wisdom, and the modern reawakening of the sacred feminine inspired by the mission of Womanspace.
By Denise Colin
From Condemnation to Celebration
At Womanspace, we gather in community, meditate, celebrate creativity, and listen for the wisdom that lives in silence. We tend gardens and honor the earth. We trust intuition as a kind of truth. Centuries ago, these same acts — connecting with nature, practicing natural healing methods, listening inward — could have branded a woman a witch.
The word still conjures feelings of mystery, danger, and power. But behind the myths and stereotypical portraits lies a deeper story based on fear and misunderstanding. Women once called witches were often simply women who knew things, like how to heal, comfort, or live close to the rhythms of the earth.
At a time when spiritual authority was tightly controlled, such knowledge made these women dangerous. Their independence, their insight, and their ability to nurture life outside the sanctioned boundaries of church and state became reasons to condemn them.
Today, many of the same practices that once drew suspicion are celebrated as paths to wholeness and connection. We call them mindfulness, holistic healing, yoga, energy work, or simply spirituality. How did we move from fear to reverence? And what can remembering this history teach us about the sacred feminine today?
The Roots of the “Witch:” Women, Power, and Fear
The story of witches begins long before the witch hunts. The earliest meanings of the word wicce or wicca in Old English simply referred to a “wise woman” or “one who shapes.” She was the midwife, the herbalist, or the storyteller. Her knowledge of the earth, birth, and death connected her to the mysteries of life itself.
But wisdom, especially women’s wisdom, has often been treated with suspicion. As Christianity spread through Europe, the old folk traditions like honoring earth, moon, and seasons were gradually pushed to the margins. Women who continued to practice them were viewed as threats to the new order.
Beneath the myths and accusations lay a struggle over power: who was allowed to hold it, name it, and use it. A woman whose authority came from intuition and experience, rather than the pulpit or the throne, represented a kind of freedom the world wasn’t ready to allow.
The Witch Hunts: Europe to America
By the late 15th century, fear of witches had hardened into a system of control. Across Europe, tens of thousands of people, mostly women, were accused, tortured, and executed. Those targeted were often widows, midwives, herbalists, or women who simply lived beyond society’s expectations.
The witch hunts arose from a convergence of power and fear. The Church provided the framework, defining witchcraft as heresy and linking it to sin and female weakness. The state supplied the enforcement through courts, prisons, and executions that carried out the punishments. And society provided the fuel, as neighbors and villages, grappling with plague, famine, and loss, sought someone to blame.
In times of upheaval, accusing someone of witchcraft offered a terrible kind of order. It was a way to name fear and burn it away.
When this mindset crossed the Atlantic with European settlers, it found new soil in the Puritan colonies of North America. In 1692, Salem, Massachusetts became the most famous example. However, it was part of a much larger inheritance — the suspicion of women’s independence, intellect, and influence.
Behind every accusation was a story: a midwife whose patient died in childbirth, a woman whose herbs healed too many, a female neighbor who owned property, or spoke her mind too freely. These were not women who worshiped dark forces; they were women who stood fully in their own power.
The witch hunts became a centuries-long attempt to silence what could not be controlled: women’s wisdom, their connection to the natural world, and their faith in something beyond the sanctioned institutions of the day.
The Quiet Survival of Women’s Wisdom
Despite centuries of persecution, the wisdom of these so-called witches never truly disappeared. It simply went underground. It was carried in whispered stories, in gardens behind cottages, in the hands of healers who passed their knowledge from mother to daughter, mentor to apprentice.
Herbal remedies, midwifery, and seasonal rituals survived in fragments of folklore and household practice. Though the world silenced their voices, women kept listening. They tended herbs for healing, honored the changing seasons, and carried forward an understanding that the sacred could still be felt in the living earth. Even in silence, women kept tending the sacred.
Through every era, there were those who remembered that healing could be an act of love, that intuition was a kind of truth, that the divine could be found in earth and water and breath. These quiet preservations formed a lineage of care and connection that would one day be called the reawakening of the sacred feminine.
The Return of the Sacred Feminine
Women’s Wisdom Across Cultures and Time
While the witch hunts largely suppressed women’s power and what they stood for, their wisdom was never completely lost. Some of it continued living quietly in the West, passed down through family lines of women who kept the old ways alive — midwives, healers, and caregivers who trusted the rhythms of nature. And in other parts of the world, that same wisdom remained central to health, balance, and spiritual life.
In Native American cultures, for example, women continued to serve as healers, dreamers, and keepers of natural medicine. In Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, herbalism, energy work, and spiritual ceremony remained vital parts of community life. Even in the West, where such wisdom was suppressed, traces endured in kitchen gardens, home remedies, and the intuition passed from mother to daughter.
The Sacred Feminine Reawakens
By the late 19th and 20th centuries, a reawakening began. The feminist movement questioned old hierarchies of power and belief, while psychology and holistic medicine started recognizing the unity of body, mind, and spirit. Practices once dismissed as superstition found new validation in science and wellness. Midwifery reemerged as a respected healthcare field.
At the same time, the West began looking East for spiritual depth beyond materialism and dogma. Buddhism and Taoism offered paths of mindfulness and balance; Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine revealed systems of healing rooted in harmony rather than dominance. Women, in particular, were drawn to these traditions because they offered something both radical and familiar. They encouraged spiritual authority grounded in direct experience rather than external permission.
The sacred feminine was rising again, expressed through many cultures and languages. But they carried the same essence of intuition, compassion, interconnectedness, and care for all living things.
Tending to the Sacred Feminine Today
At Womanspace, we see this reawakening every day. In yoga classes, women breathe into stillness. In meditation circles, people of all genders discover the wisdom that arises in silence. In creative and spiritual workshops, we honor the many expressions of the divine, within ourselves, each other, and the natural world.
This reawakening reminds us that the world has long been shaped by imbalance. For centuries, masculine energy, with its drive to build, reason, and control, has dominated our institutions and our understanding of power. These qualities have brought progress, yet without the tempering feminine presence of compassion, empathy, and connection, we lose our harmony. The return of the sacred feminine invites us not to replace one with the other, but to restore balance between them.
To reclaim the word “witch” is not to summon the past’s pain but to honor its courage. The witch was never evil; she was simply free. She was a woman who knew that her connection to the sacred did not need permission.
Reflection: Healing the Ancestral Wound
When we look back on the centuries of fear and persecution, it’s tempting to distance ourselves from that history and to consider it as a relic of darker times. But the echoes remain. Many women still learn to quiet their intuition, to doubt their wisdom, to make themselves smaller so others feel safe. The witch hunts may have ended, but their shadow lingers in subtle expectations and unspoken fears.
Healing that wound begins with remembering. Remembering the women who were silenced — their courage, their connection to nature, and their insistence that the sacred could live within ordinary life. When we honor their stories, we begin to release the fear that once bound them and that sometimes still binds us.
Each time we listen to our inner knowing, share in community, or find the divine in the natural world, we participate in that healing. We reclaim our birthright: the freedom to be fully ourselves, body and spirit, wise and whole.
Closing: A Call to Remember
The history of witches also conveys a story of women’s spiritual resilience. What was once condemned as dangerous has become recognized as divine. The sacred feminine endures, rising again and again wherever compassion, creativity, and courage are welcomed.
At Womanspace, that remembrance takes living form. Here, we honor the wisdom of the body, the beauty of the earth, and the light of the spirit. We gather not to hide what makes us powerful, but to celebrate it in community, in stillness, and in joy.
If this history stirs something in you, we invite you to explore Womanspace’s classes and programs. Discover what helps you feel fully yourself, without judgment, in a space where your inner knowing is not only welcome, but cherished.
Because we who were witches are, and always have been, keepers of our own truth.
