Missing Witches

Missing Witches – Urduja: You Are Kapwa, Kin, Connected To Everything

We live in a global era characterized by PTSD. Maybe in your own life you’re familiar with how post traumatic stress disorder works. Traumatic violence distorts memories, and the way we experience time, making violence repeat on a loop like a record skipping. Changing how we see and talk about ourse

Amy Torok

Mar 31, 2019

2 min read

Podcast, Witch History, Indigenous Witchcraft, Black Witchcraft

We live in a global era characterized by PTSD. Maybe in your own life you’re familiar with how post-traumatic stress disorder works. Traumatic violence distorts memories, and the way we experience time, making violence repeat on a loop like a record skipping. Changing how we see and talk about ourselves.

The witch hunts were a trauma against women and against the earth, and against a worldview that saw holiness and spirituality as the birthright of every being. They were also a weapon in the global violence of colonialism. As we work to disrupt androcentrism – the mind frame that sees masculinity as normal and all else as Other – with feminist history... and to heal from the violence of colonialism… and to resist the worst of earth-eating capitalism however the fuck we can... it’s useful to go looking for places outside of Europe and the americas where women were and are called witches.

One of the many places this happened is in the Philippines and investigating this branch of witch history draws us back, back before the colonial trauma, to honour the women folk therapists, priestesses, warriors, healers, storytellers called Babaylan, and forward, to honour the badass feminists who carry the Babaylan spirit today.