witches

‘Tis the season of the perennial teenage supernatural romance.  New film Beautiful Creatures is a chicken-and-dumplings plate with a heapin’ helping of that angst-filled young love so common to tween fantasy, spiced with Flannery O’Conner-flavored Southern Gothic and topped off with a healthy side of Civil War history and folklore.

To me, witches are the quintessential ecofeminists.

“Witch” is a word that was sullied by various groups of long ago, but it's been reclaimed by herbalists like me. Witches and the word "witch" have many meanings in many cultures, but for the purposes of this post, I will touch on just one context, one dark moment of history: The suppression of witches—or healers who were mainly women—in medieval Europe that went on for centuries, and the themes behind those witch hunts that still appear in society today.