The True History of Witches: Reclaiming the Healers, Midwives, and Keepers of Wisdom

As the nights grow long and the veil thins between seen and unseen worlds, we find ourselves surrounded by the imagery of witches — black hats, broomsticks, bubbling cauldrons. Halloween has turned them into symbols of mystery and mischief, but beneath the caricature lies a much deeper, older truth. Before “witch” became a word of fear, it was a name for the women who healed, nurtured, and knew.

The Wise Women of the Village

Long before hospitals or pharmacies, villages relied on women who understood the rhythms of the body and the earth. They were herbalists, midwives, and healers. They learned by watching nature, passing knowledge through generations of mothers, daughters, and apprentices. They knew which plants soothed fevers, which herbs aided childbirth, which roots restored vitality after winter. Their healing wasn’t just physical — it was spiritual, intuitive, and connected to the cycles of moon and season.

In many places, they were called cunning women, wise women, or folk healers. Their homes were sanctuaries — spaces where people came not only for medicine but for comfort, guidance, and ritual. They were bridges between the human and natural worlds, practicing a form of medicine that honored both the body and the soul.

Across Celtic lands, this wisdom was shared by Druids and wise women of the old ways, keepers of herbal lore and guardians of sacred rites tied to the earth’s cycles. They celebrated the turning of the seasons — the solstices, the equinoxes, and Samhain, the ancient festival marking the new year when the veil between worlds grew thin. In those times, healing, spirituality, and nature were one and the same. The boundary between medicine and magic did not yet exist.

When Knowledge Became Threatening

But as Europe moved into the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, power began to shift. Male-dominated institutions — both the Church and emerging “scientific” medicine — grew uneasy with knowledge they could not control. The Church preached salvation through priests, not through herbs or intuition. Universities, closed to women, began defining what counted as “real” medicine. The wisdom of women — experiential, oral, embodied — was suddenly labeled dangerous.

By the 14th century, fear and superstition merged with political control. Manuals like the Malleus Maleficarum (1486) taught communities how to identify and punish “witches.” Between the 1400s and 1700s, tens of thousands of women were tortured and killed across Europe and the Americas — most of them healers, widows, midwives, or women living outside male authority.

The witch hunts were not random outbreaks of hysteria; they were deliberate acts of social control.They targeted women’s bodies, women’s sexuality, and women’s knowledge. The systematic destruction of these traditions was, in many ways, the first great silencing of women’s wisdom in the Western world.

The Echoes We Still Hear

Though the witch hunts have ended, their echoes remain. Even today, women are shamed for their intuition, dismissed as “too emotional,” or judged for choosing to live, love, and lead outside prescribed norms. Modern systems still often disconnect us from our cycles, our bodies, our inner knowing — the same wisdom those women once honored in moonlight and soil. To reclaim the witch is to recognize how those old fears still whisper through our culture — and to refuse them. When we honor our intuition, when we trust the quiet voice within, when we tend to our bodies as sacred, we participate in a profound act of remembrance.

The Sacred Feminine in Yoga: Remembering Shakti

The women once labeled as witches were deeply connected to their feminine power — attuned to cycles of moon and season, trusting their intuition, and working in harmony with nature’s energy. Their healing was not just physical; it was a sacred dance with the unseen, a relationship with the life force itself.

In yogic philosophy, this very energy has a name: Shakti — the divine feminine principle of creation, intuition, and transformation that animates all life. Shakti is not a concept to be worshiped from afar; she is the pulse of awareness moving through every breath, every heartbeat, every instinct to heal or nurture. Whereas patriarchal traditions often sought to control power, the yogic path invites us to embody it — to remember that true strength flows from harmony, not domination. When we practice yoga, we are not merely moving our bodies; we are reawakening the same current of Shakti that once guided those wise women — the intuitive intelligence of the Earth herself. Each inhale becomes a remembering: that we are not separate from nature, that intuition is intelligence, that softness is strength.

Honoring the Lineage of the “Witch”

This Halloween, rather than seeing witches as frightening figures or caricatures, we can see them as ancestors — women who walked the path of devotion to nature, to community, and to the sacred within the ordinary. We can honor them by lighting candles, tending herbs, trusting our inner knowing, or simply by speaking truth in a world that still fears it.

To live as they once did — in rhythm, in reverence, in wholeness — is to practice Shraddha: faith not as belief, but as living alignment with what we know to be true.

So tonight, as the air turns crisp and the night grows long, may we remember the women who once healed the world with their hands, their herbs, and their hearts.And may we continue their legacy — not as witches to be feared, but as women awakening the sacred feminine within us all.