Old Magic, New Stories: Secret Histories of Witches

Old Magic, New Stories: Secret Histories of Witches

Video: WEBINAR: Secret History of the Witches with Max Dashu — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yg64hNciFFc

The category “witch” has long been a cultural cipher, being used to demonize, romanticize, and silence women whose knowledge and ritual agency fell outside authorised institutions. As such, for us to recover the histories of these women who have been pushed out, we require both archival examination and a comparative sensitivity. In her lecture with Advaya, Max Dashu, a feminist historian, discusses how gathering this history requires a comparison to other female-centered ritual traditions that mainstream narratives have marginalized.

Through decades of research in the Suppressed Histories Archives, she argues that many phenomena later labelled “witchcraft” are survivals or transformations of women’s ritual communities, healing practices, and prophetic roles rather than simple instances of diabolism (demon worship). Some of the most broadly utilised examples given by her include the original Russian name for a watch - “Vidma”, and other native language words for a witch, meaning herb carrier/ medicine carrier “lybbestre”, seer, prophet, among several others. Dashu emphasises this and also the social networks of women that predate and underlie early modern persecutions. 

The approach that Dashu takes challenges the mainstream teleological narratives that reduce witches to deviant outliers who live in relation to otherwise coherent religious systems. Instead, she reconstructs strands of female ritual continuity like the roles that midwives, seers, and household ritual specialists play. Many of these roles have moved on to be twisted in legal, esoteric, and ecclesiastical records later and are reframed as dangerous or demonic. This perspective is useful in complementing the revisionist histories of witch-hunting that situate the early modern persecutions within legal, political, and gendered transformations rather than as the simple eruption of irrational panic. This is not to say that there was no mass panic at all, but to clarify that organized, systemic elements perpetuated this persecution. 

An interesting parallel emerges when we start to place the histories of witches from the European setting beside that of the South Asian traditions. Here, many cultures explicitly valorise dangerous female power (examples include that of tantric and shakta forms centred around Devi/Kali worship). Shaktism’s ritual universe preserves sustained theological and liturgical frameworks where the feminine divine is both terrible and liberatory; here, transgressive rites and symbolic association with “danger” are integrated into sanctioned theologies. Where European witches were criminalised, certain Tantric/ Shakta practices institutionalised aspects of transgression as paths to insight and empowerment. 

Reconstruction of Kali/ Shakthi cults and other tantric practices helps to highlight rituals that deliberately invert social norms. Meaning that the rituals could include the consumption of taboo substances. As such, ritualized transgressive acts are framed within tantric philosophy rather than as sorcery or something outside of it. However, we should also note an undeniable pattern - any practices that outsiders label “magic” function within their cultures as disciplined techniques for power and knowledge transmission, often centred on a ritual pedagogy through female practitioners or goddesses (the yoginis). Recognising that dynamic helps us explain why the configuration of some transgressive or subaltern social structures in Europe (women’s healing networks, night-journeys, prophetic women) were sometimes interpreted as criminal deviance: the interpretive frame, not the embodied practice, was different. 

Bringing Dashu into conversation with tantric and shakta sources, therefore, does three things:

1. First, it historicizes how gendered ritual authority becomes contestable: what in one cultural matrix is institutionalized (Goddess cults, tantric lineages) becomes in another a mode of justifying suppression (witch trials). 

2. Second, it places women as carriers of ritual knowledge across household and liminal spaces (midwifery, prophecy, spirit work). This comprises a social substrate that historians like Dashu reconstruct through iconographic and fragmentary textual evidence. 

3. Third, it invites a more nuanced look at “witchcraft” that distinguishes between 

(a) criminalised popular practices, and

(b) institutionalised religious/theological transgressions (tantric / shakta worship)

Methodologically, a comparative analysis of the history of witchcraft would, by design, be interdisciplinary.  This analysis would be complemented by both legal records and inquisitorial texts alongside ritual manuals, temple practices, folklore, and women’s own testimonies. The lecture makes it clear how witch-hunts functioned in European legal and social landscapes, reminding us that the label “witch” often served administrative and ideological ends. This includes, but is not limited to, policing property, reinforcing confessional boundaries, and disciplining female autonomy. Placing Dashu’s recovery work within that framework clarifies both the contingency of witch-accusation and the resilience of underlying female ritual knowledge.

Dashu's contribution is a necessary intervention, taking the discussion beyond mere victim stories to that of cultural resistance and the preservation of women's sovereignty. If we follow her thinking, this  “history of witches” becomes a global story about suppressed female authority: from Europe’s wise-women who kept folk medicine and household rites alive, to India’s yoginis and priestesses who led practices devoted to Shakti. By tracing words, rituals, and social networks, Dashu restores dignity to these women and gives us a way to uncover other hidden traditions of female spiritual power. Remembering this past helps explain how patriarchy took shape and gives overdue respect to indigenous, women-centered spiritual practices.

Nitin S is a researcher at the Department of Sociology, Monk Prayogshala, India. His research focuses on intersectionality in labor and urban sustainability.