Hi Friend,

Hallowe'en - All Hallow's Eve; the night before All Saints Day; Sawhain - the Witches' New Year; the time when the veil between this world and that world are thin - just keeps growing in popularity in the United States (and, so far as I can tell, much of the world). In the U.S., spending on the holiday is expected to increase 13% from 2024 to $13.1 billion... on costumes, decorations, and candy.

Apparently, Americans just love dressing up. And this (rare?) excuse to go to our neighbor's houses. And building plastic altars on our lawns. And eating sugar. As well as the spooky, the corny, the weird, the creepy, and the bizarre.

The recent rise of the political right, with its accompanying right-wing Christian nationalism, including a faction that does not approve of this "pagan" holiday that celebrates witches, has by and large not influenced the holiday's popularity. (Although I hear that political costumes of certain orange-haired men have vaulted in popularity).

I always find it amusing: even in some of the more conservative Christian neighborhoods that I've wandered through, witches (some of whom look quite respectful) adorn porches and driveways and garage doors.

Is this evidence of some kind of sub-conscious desire to become fully animist? To lean into their own witchyness? To connect with their not-only-Christian/Jewish/Muslim/scientific ancestry?

To connect with that which their own culture has buried? Not only as "spooky" and strange - but as cool, erotic, fascinating, powerful, and potent? As wyrd.....

Of course, when I think of this mighty time of Hallow's Eve, I think of my ancestors, including those who were accused of witch-craft (as well as those ancestors who did the accusing).

And of the time before that time.

Which is part of why I'm so excited to bring to you this new podcast episode with the amazing feminist historian Max Dashu.

I first met Max when we were co-teaching at the Land Justice Futures' Motherhouse Starter Series. I was immediately impressed with her incredible, multi-decade archival work on illuminating suppressed histories: interweaving the histories of patriarchy and the histories of matriarchy.

During our experience co-teaching, we both focused on the histories of the witchhunts and the long history of violence against women. This is critically important history, and its connection larger histories of colonization are especially significant. It's a significant component of what I keep teaching on. And I learned even more from Max.

When we put together this episode, I decided that this would be a great opportunity to inquire into something else: the histories of the divine feminine before the witch-burnings (etc.).

It's probably one of the questions I talk with my students about the most: what else is there besides these colonial and Christianized histories, and how can we/I connect with them? These are questions of exploring spiritual (and biological) connections of our montherline.

We also wanted to take the conversation outside of just focusing on Europe - because Max is one of those rare scholars who can rattle off concrete scholarship on about 10 different cultures around the world at any time and do so with a level of depth, substance, and cultural awareness that too many superficial world-history-of-religion inquiries never get to.

I found the conversation inspiring, uplifting, and encouraging, without overstepping violence, and being upfront about some of the challenges in the questions themselves. We are talking about our collective history here - I hope a lot of you who might not identify as women will enjoy it just as much as I did!

Hopefully, a future version of this episode will include a lot of images - we might get that done by March - but this one is basically all audio (we decided to not to do a visual record of us talking.) As she says, this material is a lot richer when you can look at the images, and I do encourage folks to check out her Suppressed History Archives.

Enjoy!

- Sara Jolena

ps - I am going to be hosting another Mythos Moment where I will be retelling a Myth on different points of the 8 Fires Calendar system, probably around 12 noon est on Oct 31. Sign up sheet for that coming next week. :-)