Once Upon a Stake...

Peasant Woman Cooking by a Fireplace ~ Vincent van Gogh

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The figure of the witch has long lived in the corners of our imagination—not just as a story to frighten children or justify cruel history, but as something deeper.

Something that lingers.

A whisper passed down in stories.

A foreboding shape in the woods.

She doesn’t go away, because we haven’t yet made peace with what she holds.

The word alone carries centuries of unease.

Power that’s not sanctioned.

Knowledge that didn’t come from a man.

A woman who didn’t ask permission.

She’s been cast out, burned, shunned, ridiculed—but also longed for, reclaimed, and remembered. You see her everywhere: in the old tales, in half-remembered dreams, in the woman who knows too much and says too little.

Psychoanalysis gives us a way to look more closely.

Carl Jung spoke of archetypes—deep symbols that live in all of us. The witch is one of these. A shadow figure, full of all the qualities we’re taught to repress: rage, desire, instinct, defiance.

Melanie Klein, more concerned with our earliest relationships, suggested that we build mental images of others—what she called ‘internal objects’—as we try to make sense of love, loss, and need.

The witch, through this lens, becomes a distorted version of the mother:

The one who doesn’t come when we cry.

The one who feeds others first.

The one who takes instead of gives.

We split the world when we’re small.

Good and bad.

Safe and dangerous.

And sometimes, that badness gets projected far beyond the nursery.

The women who were accused of witchcraft weren’t strange at all, really.

They were widows.

Healers.

Midwives.

Women who lived outside the fold.

Women who knew the names of herbs and when to harvest by the moon.

Women who didn’t smile when they were supposed to.

They bore the weight of a collective fear—a need to cast something out so the rest could feel safer from their own darkness.

Once upon a time, they’d have tied me to a stake too and called it justice.

Over time, the witch became folded into stories meant to guide children. She was the stepmother, the crone in the woods, the trickster who tested the weak-hearted. In films, she’s shifted again—from grotesque monster to teenage rebel to misunderstood loner.

But always, she remains on the edge.

And yet, many women now turn toward her, rather than away.

They wear her symbol as an act of remembrance.

They learn old ways again.

Not to cast spells or turn princes into frogs—but to come back to something quieter.

The knowing in your gut.

The rhythm of the seasons.

The healing in your hands.

There is power here, but not the kind that conquers.

A different kind.

Older.

Softer.

The witch doesn’t haunt us because she’s evil. She stays with us because she holds what we’ve forgotten: the connection between mystery and matter. The space where care and danger touch. The truth that power, when unacknowledged, turns bitter. But when honoured, becomes healing.

So many of us carry her now, whether we realise it or not.

In our resistance.

In our sensitivity.

In the way we trust the feeling before the facts.

She walks beside the woman who says no without explaining.

She lives in the silence after you leave what no longer fits.

She is not a costume or a trope.

She’s a mirror, held up to show you what you’ve buried.

To live with her is not to curse or conjure, but to listen.

To remember.

To feel your feet on the soil and know that,

long before you were told who to be,

you already knew.