Here Is Why the Witch Always Comes Back Stronger
They Tried to Silence Her Every Election Year
Every few years, the volume rises.
And suddenly, women who speak clearly, who organize, who gather herbs and children and neighbors into something resembling community, are told to be silent. To quiet down. To wait. To be reasonable.
History knows this rhythm.
In times of political upheaval, the first bodies targeted are often those who remember how to heal. The first voices threatened are those who speak in the language of land, blood, birth, and collective care.
During the witch trials in early modern Europe, thousands of women were executed under charges of sorcery, many of them midwives, herbalists, widows, land holders. In places like Salem and across parts of Germany and Scotland, accusations surged during periods of famine, war, religious fracture, and economic instability. Fear needed a body. Power needed a scapegoat. And the women who carried knowledge outside institutional control were convenient.
This pattern is older than broomsticks.
When empires wobble, they clamp down. When systems crack, they seek someone to blame. The independent woman becomes dangerous. The woman who cannot be shamed becomes intolerable. The woman who gathers others becomes a threat.
Election years amplify this pressure. The narrative grows loud: be afraid, be divided, be suspicious of your neighbor.
But here is the quiet truth the old ones knew:
Fear is a spell. And it only works if we agree to carry it.
To practice visible magic in an election year is not to float above politics in some untouchable haze. It is to remain embodied. It is to refuse the seduction of helplessness. It is to organize the pantry, check on your neighbor, plant the garlic anyway.
Visible magic looks like community meetings.
It looks like voter registration drives hosted in living rooms.
It looks like teaching children critical thinking instead of rehearsed allegiance.
It looks like midwives continuing to catch babies even when legislation tightens around their wrists.
The witch in an election year does not retreat into aesthetic spirituality. She studies policy the way she studies soil. She understands that both governance and gardens respond to stewardship or neglect.
Our lineage includes women who were burned, yes. But it also includes women who survived by adapting, by encoding their knowledge into recipes, lullabies, and seasonal rituals. Folk practices across Ireland and Italy carried pre-Christian cosmologies inside kitchen traditions long after official doctrine attempted to erase them. Suppression rarely eliminates magic. It drives it underground where it grows roots.
We are living in a time when suppression often arrives disguised as distraction. Endless information. Endless outrage. Endless spectacle. A nervous system too flooded to act meaningfully.
So the revolutionary act becomes steadiness.
It becomes asking:
What is actually happening in my town? Who is on the ballot locally? Who is funding what? Who benefits from my fear?
Grounded action dismantles fear narratives.
Volunteer.
Run for school board.
Support local mutual aid.
Teach your children media literacy alongside moon phases.
This is visible magic.
The witch in an election year does not deny the stakes. She understands them intimately. She also understands that despair is politically useful to those in power. A hopeless population is easier to manipulate than an organized one.
So she cultivates hope as a discipline.
If you want to support this work as a one time offering, I’d love a cup of coffee.
Thank you!
Hope keeps the body regulated enough to act. It keeps the mind clear enough to discern truth from propaganda. It keeps communities intact when rhetoric tries to split them apart.
There will always be those who label powerful women as irrational, hysterical, dangerous. That vocabulary is ancient. It has been used to dismiss abolitionists, suffragists, civil rights organizers, environmental defenders.
But the lineage continues.
If you feel the pressure this year, know that it is evidence of your potency. Systems do not attempt to silence what is insignificant.
Practice visible magic.
Host the gathering.
Make the call.
Plant the seeds.
Study the policy.
Rest deliberately.
Let your spirituality be embodied enough to knock on doors. Let your rituals fortify you for civic engagement. Let your altar remind you that governance and earth are not separate conversations.
The witch in an election year is a strategist.
A historian.
A mother.
A teacher.
A citizen who understands that tending democracy is not so different from tending soil.
And she knows that when the noise swells, the most radical thing she can do is remain rooted, visible, and unafraid.
In Root & Ritual,
Ayana
If you feel called to know yourself more deeply, a natal chart can offer profound clarity and if you want a forecast for the year check out my Cosmic Weather Reading.
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Thanks for sharing :) Interesting historical pattern. In times of instability, societies often turn against people who hold knowledge outside formal institutions - midwives, healers, organizers. The “witch” becomes a symbol for that fear of independent voices. It’s fascinating how that archetype keeps being suppressed and then reclaimed again.