In considering Tituba for an episode of the Missing Witches podcast, we came upon another paradox – the kind that our non-binary universe of magic is known (and unknown) for. Tituba, like magic itself, is both known and unknown. She is perhaps the most famous name of the Salem Witch Trials, but at the same…
Category: Missing Witches
These are research and storytelling episodes of the podcast, each one introducing you to a Witch from history.
EP 105 MW Hildegarde of Bingen – Dare to Declare Who YOU Are
This episode was hard to write. Hildegarde’s work seems to go on and on and I want to go deeper and deeper into the visions she shared, and swim with her in all directions – into the cosmos and into the earth. But I also keep pulling back and asking why a witch history spends…
EP 103 MW Genesis P-Orridge – Try To Altar Everything
Genesis P-Orridge isn’t easy to write about. An extremely prolific, variously pronoun-ed, transmedia artist and philosopher who, by design, changed course at will, projects expanding, contracting, abandoned when they got too popular. It’s hard to boil down a life like Gen’s, and I think that’s what Gen would have wanted. To exit the ‘cheap flesh…
EP 101 MW Lucille Clifton – We Take What We Want With Invisible Fingers
Lucille Clifton was a twelve-fingered, two-headed woman – her mother and daughter too – and she stepped into a house in Baltimore and began to hear the voices of her ancestors. She was the first poet to have two books up for the Pulitzer at the same time. Her grandmother was a child when she…
EP 99 MW LOZEN – This Power Is Mine
In this story we push past the settler faces dynamited into sacred ground to get to the missing history of real American heroes. Real Witches whose names aren’t told in school, but whose magic has shifted the culture we inhabit. Hidden, moving in shadows and behind the scenes. Today we’ll meet Lozen, a warrior, healer…
EP 90 MW Scott Cunningham – There Can Be No Monopoly On Wisdom
This one goes out to the queer, and to the lonely. For so many of us who deviated down the occult aisles, Scott Cunningham was our first. We likely didn’t know he was gay, that wasn’t part of what he shared, but he made this other crucial choice that opened a magic and unexpected door…
EP 88 Mayumi Oda – I Opened The Gate, Laughing
In this episode, Amy paints a picture of Goddess Artist, Anti-nuclear/Anti-War Activist, Shinto Buddhist, Gardener Mayumi Oda.Through Mayumi’s lens we’ll connect the Garden to the Land, war and nukes to paint and silks, art to activism, Hindu Gods to Buddhist monks, birth to death, and in death we return to the garden. mayumioda.net Referenced books…
EP 86 MW Cecile Fatiman and the Haitian Revolution – Vodou: The Leavening Agent for Liberation
This episode is about how – at the heart of a revolution unlike any other the world has ever seen – there is a story that became a seed at the heart of a national identity… a story of a secret ritual, and a priestess of the Lwa. And it’s about how our rituals, our…
EP 84 MW Terry Tempest Williams – A Pencil Is A Wand And A Weapon
“Language and landscape are my inspiration.”So said Terry Tempest Williams in her Personal Topography of America’s national parks: The Hour of Land, and I think this rings true for most Witches. We are Language and Landscape. Amy guides listeners through the work of this author, activist, seeker of social and environmental justice, this bird-lover of…
EP 82 MW – Diane di Prima: The War Is The War For The Human Imagination
In this episode Risa falls in love with Diane di Prima and explores a “secret history of intellectual and spiritual evolution as essentially aimed at human liberation” with “anarchism, gender equality, communal property and sexual freedom” interlinked and nestled at the heart of this project. (Calonne 639) And she reads a lot of Diane’s poetry…