Join Moon Body creator Miriam Ropschitz for a 4-hour journey through history, circle and somatics centred on the Witch as a symbol of dark feminine power.

This is an online event.
Recordings are available.

Remembering the witches

It is often said that women are natural spiritual adepts as we are initiated organically via embodied rites of passage: menarche, fertility, birth, pregnancy release, menopause.

I’ve always been fascinated by the way that the church has attempted to invert these embodied initiations. It claimed that, instead of them being sacred manifestations of the mirror between woman’s body, the earth and the goddess body, that they were dirty, vulgar and base. We see these same ideas repeated in the propaganda of the European Witch Hunts.

The Malleus Maleficarum says over and over again that it is woman’s “carnality” – ie the way that women are so undeniably of the body – that made them vulnerable to the Devil’s temptations.  And yet since the beginning of humanity, it was the sacred mirroring between woman’s body and the earth body which our ancient ancestors reached for, like children reaching for the mother’s breast. 

Remembering these truths with other women is what I’m here to do...

This is what we'll be doing at Witch.

Who is 'Witch' for?

Witch is for women.... women whose lives revolve around embodiment, magick and a love of the land. For us, restoring the Witch as a sacred feminine archetype and learning why she was persecuted throughout the centuries is key to understanding our own womanhood. Knowing the true story of the Witch Hunts and the way their horrors have impacted the feminine psyche is one of the ways we can locate the origin story of our own disembodiment, disconnection from our magick and severance from the land. Armed with this information we can work to repair these wounds and in the process we can remember the Witch as a totem of wild feminine power, bringing her out of the shadows to restore her as an archetype of the sacred feminine.

Samhain pronounced 'Sah-win' is a Gaelic word for the Celtic festival which marks the descent into the darker half of the year.  Samhain is celebrated from the sunset of  October 31st until the sunrise of November 1st – falling roughly half-way between Autumn Equinox & Winter Solstice. This time is marked with gatherings, feasts & story telling.  Several Neolithic passage tombs in Ireland (such as Dumha na nGiall, in the Tara-Skryne Valley in County Meath, Ireland) were built so that sunlight shines through the central passage on the morning of Samhain. It was said that over Samhain, the tombs – seen as portals into the otherworld – were open and the boundaries between the world of the living and the spirits, porous, allowing the souls of the Aos Sí (the 'spirits' or 'fairies') to move amongst the living. 

Wise woman, healer, herbalist, trouble-maker, edge walker, midwife, elder, soothsayer, crone – however we define the Witch, the charge she holds is undeniable.

it features:

Talks on the History of Women and the Witch Trials; Female Sexuality; Reclaiming Voice & Body; Healing the Witch Wound and Restoring Feminine Magick.
Somatic Practices around reclaiming the voice + the root.
Sharing Circle, Song + Story.

This workshop is a celebration of the Witch, Samhain and magickal women craving a coven.

In the time known as the Early Modern period many converging factors set the scene for the Witch Hunts in Europe. Land privatisation, the advent of capitalism, and the Enlightenment are just some of them. Women were (at least) 80% of the Witch Hunts' victims and it is impossible not to consider these times as a war on women; an attempt to create a new kind of woman by way of fear: meek, servile and well-behaved. In today's strange times, the Witch holds an undeniable allure for wild women. She is a repository of our feelings about what it means to be undomesticated and free.