We Are the Descendants of the Witches They Couldn't Burn

(And other things they forgot to mention in history class.)

You've been watching the news for months.

Names. Files. Institutions. Men in positions of power doing what men in positions of power have apparently always done — while the world looked the other way, shuffled the paperwork, and quietly made sure the women involved had no credible voice left by the time anyone started asking questions.

Maybe you're furious. Maybe you're exhausted. Maybe you've moved past both of those into something colder and more settled — a grim, bone-deep recognition that this isn't a scandal. It's a pattern. And patterns don't appear out of nowhere and I've known this for years.

Not the names. Not the specific files. The pattern underneath all of it — the one that stretches back so far it predates written history. The one that says: women's power is dangerous, women's knowledge is suspicious, women's autonomy is a problem that needs solving.

I wrote about it in my book. And I want to share some of it with you here. Because I think you deserve the full picture. Not just the headlines — the history.

It Started Before Eve. It Started With Lilith.

Most of us know Eve. Naked in the garden, apple in hand, blamed for the fall of humanity because she got curious. For thousands of years that story has been used to justify why women shouldn't think too much, want too much, or question the rules too loudly.

But Eve wasn't even the first woman in the story.

That was Lilith.

In older Jewish mythology, Lilith was Adam's first partner — and unlike Eve, she wasn't made from his rib. She was made from the same earth. Equal. Whole. Sovereign.

When Adam told her to submit, she said "no". Not aggressively. Not hysterically. Just: "No. That's not how this works. We're equal."

And for that — for that single act of refusing to be diminished — she was deleted from the story. Rewritten as a demoness. A monster. A cautionary tale about what happens to women who won't stay in their place. Eve's crime was curiosity. Lilith's crime was autonomy. And the patriarchy couldn't tolerate either.

So the first script was written: Obedient = good. Curious = dangerous. Sovereign = monstrous.

Sound familiar? It should. We're still living inside that script.

Aspasia and the Art of the Character Assassination

Fast forward a few thousand years to Ancient Athens — the so-called birthplace of democracy, philosophy, and Western civilization. Democracy for men, obviously. Women weren't allowed in public spaces, couldn't own property, couldn't participate in the intellectual and political life of the city they lived in. Enter Aspasia of Miletus.

She wasn't Athenian by birth, which gave her just enough loophole status to live slightly outside the rules. And she used every inch of that loophole. She ran one of the most celebrated intellectual salons in Athens. She debated publicly with Socrates. She is widely believed to have written speeches for Pericles — the most powerful man in the city.

She wasn't in the room. She was the room.

So what did Athens do with a woman who was clearly smarter and more influential than most of the men around her? They called her a prostitute.

Not because there was evidence. But because it was the most efficient way to discredit her. If her influence came from her body rather than her brain, then her ideas didn't count. Her voice didn't count. Her power could be explained away as something men had given her, rather than something she had claimed herself.

The historians who recorded her story made sure of it. She survived — she was too prominent to erase completely — but she survived as a footnote. A scandal. A woman whose legacy was defined by her relationship to a powerful man rather than her own formidable mind.

This is the template that has been used on powerful women ever since. Can't silence her? Sexualize her. Can't erase her? Reframe her. Can't control her? Make sure history remembers her as someone's mistress rather than someone's equal.

It wasn't accidental. It was policy.

When Midlife Was a Coronation

Here's something they really didn't teach you in school.

Before the script was fully written — before Christianity moved north and rewrote everything — there was a culture where women didn't dread getting older. Where maturity wasn't something to Botox away. Where the older a woman became, the more power she held.

Viking age Scandinavia.

I know. Bear with me.

This was not a gentle culture. But it was, in many ways, a surprisingly equal one — at least compared to what came before and what came after. Women could own land. Inherit wealth. Initiate divorce. Run entire estates. When their husbands died, widows gained full legal autonomy. No male guardian required. Just a wool cloak, a full keyring — the symbol of authority over the household — and sovereignty over their own lives.

And then there was the Völva.

The Völva was the spiritual and intellectual powerhouse of her community. Older. Seasoned. Respected — sometimes feared. She carried a staff, wore ritual cloaks, and practiced seidr — the most potent form of Norse sorcery. She walked between worlds. She gave counsel to kings and warriors. She interpreted the forces that others couldn't see. She wasn't the "crazy old witch" that later centuries would make her. She was the wisest person in the room. And everyone knew it.

Age wasn't a problem to be solved. It was a credential. The older the woman became, the more she had seen, the more she knew, the more authority she commanded.

You weren't past your prime. You were the prime.

And then Christianity arrived. And it came not to coexist but to conquer. And the first thing it targeted — the most urgent threat to the new order — was her.

The Völva became a witch. Her knowledge became heresy. Her power became evidence of a pact with the devil. Her community's respect became a reason to burn her.

The Witch Was Never Just a Witch

Between the 15th and 18th centuries, somewhere between 40,000 and 100,000 people — mostly women — were executed as witches across Europe and colonial America.

We need to talk about who they actually were.

Midwives. Herbalists. Widows. Women who owned land without a husband. Women who healed with plants and knowledge passed down through generations. Women who lived independently on the edges of their communities and didn't need male permission to exist.

They were the original community leaders. They birthed the babies, brewed the medicine, kept the knowledge, and didn't ask anyone for a hall pass.

And here's the detail that tells you everything about how this works:

The classic "witch" image — pointy hat, broomstick, cauldron, black cat — is a caricature of a female brewer.

In medieval Europe, women were the original brewers of ale. They wore tall pointed hats so they could be seen above the crowd in markets. They hung brooms over their doors as advertising signs. They kept cauldrons for production and cats to protect their grain from mice.

They were entrepreneurs. Successful, independent, economically active women.

And so the patriarchy — the Church, the local authorities, the men who wanted their land and their income and their influence — took that image and turned it sinister. Turned the businesswoman into the demon. Turned the hat into a mark of evil and the broomstick into something she flew on to meet the devil.

The witch hunt wasn't random hysteria. It was a targeted economic and social campaign to eliminate women who had too much knowledge, too much independence, and too little interest in male oversight.

We have been living with the cultural hangover of that campaign ever since.

So When You Watch the News...

When you watch the files being opened and the names coming out and the institutions crumbling under the weight of what they've been protecting — this is what you're watching.

The same pattern. Different century. Different technology. Same fundamental terror of women who know things, own things, say things, and refuse to be managed.

The men in those files didn't invent this. They inherited it. A system so old it has its own mythology, its own theology, its own legal and cultural architecture — all of it designed to ensure that women's power stays contained, controlled, and if necessary, destroyed.

That's not an excuse. It's a diagnosis.

And here's what I know from twenty years of working with people who are trying to break destructive patterns: you cannot change what you cannot name. You cannot escape a script you don't know you're reading. That's why I wrote the chapter. That's why I wrote the book.

Not to make you angrier — though anger is appropriate and useful. But to show you the full map. To say: this is the architecture of the cage. Because once you can see the architecture, you can find the door.

We Are the Descendants of the Witches They Couldn't Burn

That line isn't poetry. It's literally true.

The women they burned were the knowledgeable ones, the independent ones, the ones who refused to be controlled. The ones who survived were — by definition — the ones who learned to stay quiet enough, small enough, compliant enough to avoid the fire.

And they passed that survival strategy down to their daughters. And their daughters passed it down to theirs. And somewhere along the way it stopped feeling like a survival strategy and started feeling like just... who women are. Quiet. Accommodating. Not too much.

But the knowledge didn't disappear. The power didn't disappear. It went underground. Into intuition. Into the way women read rooms and protect each other and know things without being able to explain how they know them. Into the healing that happens in kitchens and stables and group chats at midnight. It's still there. It never left.

And right now — in this cultural moment, with the files open and the names exposed and women everywhere feeling that cold, clarifying rage — it's rising.

You are not too much. You are remembering.

You are not starting over. You are coming back.

The script they handed you was never yours. It was written before you were born by people who were afraid of what you'd do if you knew the truth.

Now you know.

Screw the Script: The Gen X Woman's Guide to Midlife Magic is out in March 2026.

It's not a self-help book. It's a reclamation.

Pre-order details coming soon — watch this space.

And if this resonated — if you felt something shift while reading it — share it with a woman who needs it. You know who she is.