For the last few years I have been on a deep and dark heroine's journey. Honing, healing, stripping away, lovingly tending to my shadow, to trauma, dropping deeper into my body, navigating the sacred and sometimes overwhelming transformational fires of perimenopause and accepting the call to name and claim my life's work; Healing the Witch Wound®.
So, what IS the Witch Wound? The Witch Wound is a personal, collective and cultural scar that stems from a 300 year period known as The Burning Times, an era of persecution and execution of mainly women (some men and children) wrongly accused of witchcraft. This era was an institutionalised femicide* started and endorsed by the Christian Church and estimates of how many women were wrongly killed range from 50,000 to over 2 million. The terror and mass killings spanned generations.
The Witch Wound is a past life scar, an ancestral wound and a collective trauma, a deep cellular memory carried down through generations and perpetuated in our patriarchal society.
Many of you know me from when I had a private practice in a doctor-led Integrative Medicine clinic in the UK (The Arcturus Clinic). It was there and in my global practice online that I observed thousands of women having past life/deep memory flashbacks reliving horrific events from the witch trials. As an energy intuitive mapping the pain bodies of women’s stored wounds I saw the Witch Wound in its energetic form held in particular places within the body, most notably in the throat and lower abdomen.
But here’s the thing….none of the women I worked with had flashbacks of being witches. Certainly not the evil stereotype or caricature version of a Witch we have been sold for generations, wearing pointy black hats and mixing potions in a cauldron.
And this is because the women who were killed weren’t evil Witches. They were women!
Women with red hair.
Women who owned a cat.
Women with money.
Women without money.
Women who stood up for themselves.
Women who committed the crime of walking along the street after sunset.
Women who were nurses and midwives.
Women in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Women seen reading or writing.
Women that others simply wanted out of the way.
Women others wanted revenge upon.
Women husbands wanted rid of so they could re-marry.
The list goes on.
It is a misconception to believe that the witch trials were all about magic, spirituality, intuition or witchcraft. They largely weren’t. Those things were used to justify the executions, but make no mistake, it was about destroying the Feminine so patriarchy could rule.
The witch hunts were the result of a patriarchal domination system of colonisation that had existed for thousands of years already, a system afraid of the uncontrollable power and unquantifiable nature of the Feminine.
The witch propaganda of the Burning Times was part of a 'political' campaign strategy, a competition between the Catholic and newly formed Protestant church to prove their ability to vanquish evil. The most successful would secure a larger congregation and more financial wealth. It was a dark PR agenda, to secure patriarchal power and to dominate and destroy anything pertaining to the Feminine, SHE was deemed a threat to the male-dominated control culture.
Sexuality, creativity, natural medicine, midwives, nurses, wise women, women’s gatherings, women’s income, women’s education, women’s right to speak, women recorded in the bible, historical references or ritual Pagan traditions of the Goddess and of mother nature that had existed for hundreds of thousands of years, were all now targeted as signs of evil. It was a misguided belief that served a specific agenda that was repeated so often, over and over, for hundreds of years and was spread so widely via the new mass produced but hand-printed pamphlets or 'Chapbooks' of the day (like today's tabloids or Twitter) that it became accepted as the truth and handed down through generations. And it is these beliefs, prejudices and inequalities that continue in various forms today, affecting every sex, gender and identity, but in particular those socialised as women.
In contrast to the thriving Chapbooks, generations of women's ancestral ‘receipt books’ were destroyed. These were precious hand-written records of remedies, recipes, local wisdom, foraging sites, household practices, natural cycles and seasons and family history and traditions, gathered and curated across lifetimes and handed down from mother to daughter. All burned. But not before the most potent healing knowledge was stolen and re-purposed for the new men-only medical schools!
Women’s stories and victories, inventions and greatness was deemed irrelevant and so not recorded in the HIStory books.
It was a profoundly traumatic period in history that has gone unrecognised for too long. Women didn’t matter so why would anyone care.
Fast forward to today and the trauma from those times has become so woven into us and our society that we can’t even see it. We have come to normalise symptoms of trauma and of the Witch Wound.
It has become what I call 'internalised patriarchy', showing up in how we hold ourselves back, shame ourselves, repress our intuition, stifle our desires and belittle our creativity.
The Witch Wound has also become somatised for many people, woven deep into the cells, flaring up as health issues. For me and my ancestors I believe it has shown up as depression, anxiety, chronic Fatigue, M.E., Fibromyalgia and female cancers.
The Witch Wound has led to a repression of our 'mediumicity', of our natural ability to connect with our inner world, with unseen spirit realms, and with our intuitive and creative gifts. This can lead to mental illness and forms of dementia. This is recognised by the widespread Spiritist Centres of North and South America where mental illness is treated as a symptom of spiritual sickness and intuitive/mediumistic suppression.
The widespread disbelief and fear of unseen realms and inner power, which resulted from the witch trials, has led to an underdeveloped ability to navigate those realms safely and to use our untapped natural gifts in a way that would serve us and the world. It has led to a mistrust and downright ridicule of the invisible 90% of our reality, unless of course it is framed as and validated by Quantum Physics.
I must just say that talking about the Witch Wound has become more popular recently. And I celebrate that. However, for me it isn’t a new age buzz phrase or the latest trend, ‘spiritual commodity’ or bandwagon to jump on. I have been quietly exploring the Witch Wound for much of my 50 years on this earth. I coined the term Witch Wound decades ago and have become accustomed to friends and peers quoting me back to me and not even realising it.
As a child I wrote about the Witch Wound in my diary, as a highly intuitive and psychic child I clearly saw its impact on my clairvoyant mother, grandmother and great grandmother. I wrote my first story about it when I was around 9 years old, a story of a woman walking through a misty graveyard at night and being visited by the spirits of women killed during the witch trails. This dark tale became a script for a rather unusual drama club production! I have done over 20,000 hours of deep 1:1 work with awakening women all over the world tending to the Witch Wound and seeing it clearly in their energy fields, helping them unweave it, reawaken their gifts and embody their true nature
I studied Quantum Activism with Quantum Physicist Dr Amit Goswami to understand the Feminine, the Witch Wound and the mastery of unseen realms from a different perspective. I have spoken on many podcasts, global summits and panels. I was guest lecturer at New York University on the Witch Wound as it relates to women’s mental health.
I created the Witch Wound Workbook and the free Healing the Witch Wound guided Shamanic meditation. I am working on my book on the topic. This is my life’s work and at the core of my purpose. I am deadly serious about protecting the integrity and legacy of this work. And…. I am always learning and growing. My understanding deepens with every passing year. I believe the Witch Wound sits tangled among the roots of our world's problems, the culmination of 3000 years of dominating and deleting the Feminine, central to how patriarchy has thrived and done so much harm and why humanity is so disconnected from itself.
The Witch Wound has led to our disconnection from ancient Feminine wisdom and the web of life, to the suppression of our unlimited potential and to the trauma programme keeping most of the planet disconnected from the infinite capacities of human consciousness.
In our full power we are a threat to existing harmful structures of control. It is in the interests of existing patriarchal domination paradigms to ensure we do not heal the witch wound, that we do not awaken and reconnect with our inherent magic and true unlimited sovereign potential.
And that just fires me up to do this work even more!
All writings are copyright Kimberley Jones 2004-2022
'Healing the Witch Wound' is a registered trademark.
Please credit all quotes to Kimberley Jones and link back to this blog post.
THANK YOU.
*Commenting on a TV3 documentary entitled 'Witches, the Big Lie', the Catalan president, Pere Aragonès, described the witch-hunts as “institutionalised femicide”. In January 2022 Catalonia pardoned up to 1000 people, mainly women, who were killed for witchcraft during the witch trails over 400 years ago.