May 21, 2024
Burning Witches Pt. 1
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Understanding Witch Trials Through History and Personal Journey
In this episode of 'Practically Magick,' host Courtney Pearl, a pagan witch, card reader, healer, sorcerer, spiritualist, Celtic priestess, teacher, artist, and mystic seeker, explores the title and respect associated with being a witch. She begins by sharing her personal journey into paganism, the complexities of owning the title of a witch, and her preparation to discuss witch trials. Starting with a symbolic Witch’s Wisdom Tarot card pulling, Courtney reflects on her connections with folklore, mythology, and paganism. She delves into a detailed recount of the witch trials, particularly focusing on the Salem Witch Trials and her personal belief of being a reincarnation of Alice Parker, one of the women executed during the trials. The episode covers the socio-economic, political, and religious climates that fueled witch trials across history, from early European instances to the Salem Witch Trials in America. Courtney discusses the implications of identifying as a witch in contemporary times, touching on the challenges and internal conflicts surrounding the title. She also hints at a deeper discussion on why women have been historically targeted in witchcraft accusations, promising a continuation of the topic in the next episode. Throughout, Courtney interweaves her personal narrative, offering a unique perspective on her spiritual path and witch identity.
00:00 Welcome to Practically Magic: A Witch's Introduction
00:31 Exploring the Title and History of Witches
01:11 Tarot Insights: The Card of Love and Its Significance
04:55 Personal Journey: From Energy Healing to Witchcraft
07:26 Reincarnation and the Salem Witch Trials: A Personal Connection
16:49 Embracing the Witch Within: Challenges and Identity
19:22 Witchcraft and Women: Unpacking Historical Persecutions
19:29 Witch Trials Through History: A Global Perspective
35:18 Looking Ahead: Magic in Everyday Life and Upcoming Events
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Hello witches and wizards and welcome to Practically Magic.
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This is Courtney Pearl.
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I am a pagan witch.
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I'm a card reader, healer, sorcerer.
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Spiritualist, Celtic priestess, teacher, artist, and mystic seeker.
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I am discovering magic and I would like to share it with you.
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Today's episode, we are going to specifically focus on the title of witch.
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Now, I personally call myself a folk witch because I love folklore and I love mythology and I love to tie that into paganism, but I am a lot of things and one thing I would like to bring forward today in today's episode is the respect and title of what it means to be a witch.
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And I'm going to do it justice, hopefully, by talking about witch trials.
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I have been preparing Endlessly for this episode, and I am so excited to share what I have learned with you and hopefully I can do it justice, but I'm going to start by pulling a card and by no other deck would today's episode be, but the Witch's Wisdom Tarot deck.
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And that is the one I'm going to pull a card from today to help us with today's episode, to be a.
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theme for today's episode and what it is we're going to bring to the table.
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All right, so today's card that I have pulled, oh my gosh, this is amazing.
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If only you could see it.
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I'm going to show it on the video for those who are able to see the video.
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It is the card of love.
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And that almost makes me tear up when I look at it because of all of the research that I've done this week and all of the contemplating that I have done about what it truly means to call oneself a witch.
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To own that title and to allow myself permission to lean into that, this card feels so appropriate because it's the image of a young girl and she is petting a fox.
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And he's looking at her lovingly, and she's looking at him lovingly, and it's almost like they're having this moment where they're going to touch noses or give each other a little kiss, and they're surrounded by dandelion flowers and other, um, kind of prickly flowers.
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I'm not an herb.
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Which, so I cannot name all of these plants and herbs and flowers that I can see in the picture, but I know they're significant because I have a feeling like the dandelion weed, we have cast it out from society.
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We've told each other and the dandelion that it's not welcome, and we've called it a weed and we've produced chemical weed killers that are to get rid of it.
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And for those who understand and know a little bit about the dandelion, it's actually a very healing herb, and it's, um, a wonderful pollinator for bees.
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It's actually a, an incredibly helpful plant if we allow it to be, um, of course, I live in Daybreak.
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We have an HOA.
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We have.
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No room for dandelions.
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You will get an HOA fine and a letter if you have dandelions all over your yard.
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It's the reality of the world we live in right now, but this poor.
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flower, weed, whatever you want to call it, has really been an outcast in a society that has deemed it unworthy or inappropriate, and not allowed to flourish, and not allowed to be, and not even allowed to help in the herbal medicine way that it can, that it's actually making dandelion tea is incredibly healing and useful.
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And that does not even come close to all of the theme of today's episode, what it's going to be about.
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I've donned my witch's gear.
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I am dressed and ready for the occasion.
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I cannot even begin to tell you how excited I am to talk about this subject, but I need to start with a little personal story.
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So, uh, A few years ago, I was just in the beginning of my energy healing awakening.
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Um, I, I dare say that I've always been someone who was seeking something my entire life.
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So I cannot definitively say when my journey started into the world of magic, energy, Whatever it is that, that you want to call being a spiritualist, being, being pagan, being a healer, but I was in the beginning of kind of my awareness of this type of work and I went to a Reiki healer locally here in Daybreak, um, and she is my Reiki master, my mentor, and she, um, I had not had a Reiki session before, but I knew that this was something that I was very interested in and something that I would probably want to learn how to do myself one day.
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So it was kind of in the beginning of that curiosity and wanting to seek this out and to make this a regular thing for me, not just a, um, a nice, Relaxing session, but also kind of a, I need to know what this is.
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I need to fill this out and I need to know if this is the right path for me to take.
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And I went to this Reiki healer and she, um, was doing a Reiki session with me and it was incredibly profound in that I felt the energy very strongly.
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I was, um, I was almost a little bit surprised at how much I was able to feel it even without.
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It was, you know, the unseen forces of the energy work going on.
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Um, my logical brain was having a little bit of a hard time with it.
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You know, my imaginative brain, my creative brain was very much on board.
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It's like, yes, I believe that this is real.
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I believe that this is happening.
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I know what's what this is about.
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And, um, I'm equally left and right brain.
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So my left brain was going, um, We can't actually prove or see what's happening, so let me just, let me just think about this for a little bit.
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And um, my Reiki healer, she just happens to be also a medium and um, she also now does and includes past life regression in her work, uh, which I very much plan to take part in eventually.
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But in this session, she told me, I can see you in many of your past lives.
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And at this point in my life, I wasn't even sure if I believed in reincarnation or if that was something that I you know, falls into my belief system, but I was sort of open to it.
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And she said, I can see you in many lifetimes that you are a person who people came to for answers.
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You were a person with a lot of wisdom.
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You were not always necessarily included or accepted in mainstream society.
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Sometimes you had to live on the outskirts, and I can see you living in maybe a little cottage on the, on the hill or in, on the cliffs by the ocean, um, a little bit outcast from society, but still someone people sought out for answers, for help.
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You had knowledge that, you know, in herbal medicines or in different things that people sought you out to, to attain.
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And, and I was kind of like, Oh, okay.
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Yeah, that feels good to me.
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Um, I would like to be a person that can help other people.
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I would like to be a person that people saw as helpful or useful.
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Um, I love sharing what I know and I love teaching and I love, um, speaking to crowds or to people who are interested in what I have to say.
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So this feels right to me.
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Um, then she went on to say, I Know that you were one of the women who were accused and tried and executed.
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In the Salem Witch Trials.
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And I do believe that you were in the last wave of executions.
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And I want you to go look up the names because I feel strongly that you will recognize your name when you see it.
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Now, this is a little bit more specific and a little bit shocking to me, but I was like, Oh, wow.
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Okay.
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Um, that's.
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kind of cool and kind of sad and interesting and, um, and I was a little bit of excited to try it out.
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I mean, I was still kind of in that skeptical, uh, place where I'm like, okay, I mean, Wouldn't it be kind of cool if everybody could go around saying like, oh, yes, I was one of the Salem Witch.
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I was one of them, you know, I'm a witch.
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And so, therefore, I was one of the Salem Witches.
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Um, little too convenient, you know, for me, but.
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But I thought, okay, I will, I will go check this out.
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I will see what I, what I feel about this.
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And this at the time, a lot of the seeking that I was doing, a lot of the, the introspection I was going through was because I was going through a really hard time, which is very common for people who are going through the dark night of the soul and coming through it with, Um, new understandings and new seeking and wanting to find what is more truthful and more, um, aligned with their belief systems.
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And, um, at the time my husband was in recovery and struggling with addiction.
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Um, he was, is an alcoholic and he was always, um, you know, kind of.
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Searching for that answer on how to, uh, recover from this addiction and how to, um, you know, really beat it, I guess.
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And we were going through a lot at the time, and I was in a very, very dark place, kind of wondering what was going to happen to us.
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What was our future going to be like? How were we going to, how was our marriage going to survive this? Because, you know, I was really in a place where I knew that my marriage could not survive it if it didn't happen.
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continued the way that it was.
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And I love my husband so much and I would always love him, but I needed to kind of figure peace out.
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And it was, um, you know, seeking alternative methods of healing like Reiki was part of that journey.
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And so, um, I did go home and I started looking into what, what were the names of the witches that were, you know, Condemned and convicted and hanged and who was in the last wave of it, right? Because the Stalingrad trials only lasted for two years and, um, or between two years.
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And so, uh, there was just a few names at the very end of those trials that were tried and convicted.
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And I.
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Looked at the names, the list of names, and there was one name that stood out to me very, very BAM.
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I don't know any other way to explain it.
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Just that my intuition saw this name and said, that's it.
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That's you.
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This is who you were.
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And when I had that feeling, it was kind of, um, BAM.
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Validating, I guess, in just being able to say, Listen, anyone else in the whole world can say that's not real.
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You don't know.
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How can you prove that? Well, I can't.
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It's totally my story.
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And I'm the one who gets to tell it.
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So I'm here telling you this story.
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And my name was Alice Parker.
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Alice Parker, as I looked into it a little bit further, she was the wife of John Parker, who was a fisherman.
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He was a lot of times out to sea and she was left alone with the children in a house that they rented, um, in Salem town.
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And Um, she was accused by Mary Warren, who was a servant girl in the Proctor house and Mary Warren at one point, Mary Warren's father, um, was asked by Alice Parker to help cut down the hay so they could feed their horses.
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She probably was alone and she probably needed his help in cutting the hay down and, um.
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He denied help.
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He did not go help her.
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And so Alice Parker, being kind of a strong willed woman that she was, went to the home, the Warren home, and basically yelled at them for, and condemned them and said, how dare you not help me when I need it.
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And it was right after that that they, uh, that Mary Warren's mother and sister became sick.
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And Um, her mother died and her sister was, um, was left deaf from the illness.
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And so Mary had a reason not to like Alice Parker.
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So at the end, um, as, as they were coming to the end of these, um, witch trials and everyone was accusing so and so and every, you know, the girls were accusing everyone that they had ever had any encounter with.
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And then some of them were accused and then they would name names and it went on and on like this for all this time.
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Um, she accused Alice Parker and the stories told about Alice, uh, one was that she was found once, um, in the snow, uh, kind of, uh, like she was dead, she wasn't moving, she was stiff and she, um, they thought she was dead, but she popped up and she was fine.
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Um, some, say that it's possible that she had a disease, um, catalepsy, uh, which would be kind of like an epilepsy type of illness where sometimes she would, um, go unconscious from time to time.
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So it's possible that she had this and that's why she was found every once in a while kind of unconscious.
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Um, But some of my favorite stories about her is that, uh, a man named John Westgate, uh, told a story about how her husband, John Parker, was in the tavern at Sam Beetle's Tavern and in comes storming in Alice Parker to yell at her husband and tell him he needs to get his drunk A home.
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And, um, and as she was yelling at her husband to, to get on home from the tavern.
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Um, John Westgate tried to, uh, calm her down and she told him to mind his own business.
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Now, if there was a story that made me think, yes, I have found her.
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This is me.
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This is Courtney.
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This is Courtney reincarnated.
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Uh, a reincarnated Alice Parker.
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That story was it.
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That was the clincher.
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And so.
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In diving into these stories and history of witch trials, I take a very personal note to this subject.
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Not only because I do believe myself to be the reincarnated Alice Parker, but also because I have a little bit of trouble, as some women still do, with claiming the title of witch.
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When I first started this podcast, it was, um, I was introduced to people in the community as this is Courtney Pearl.
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She's, she's our local witch.
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Um, and that was exciting and funny and fun.
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And there was also a very strong hesitation for me to be able to claim that title.
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I think of myself as an emotional and energy healer.
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I think of myself as a Reiki practitioner.
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I think of myself as, um, as a priestess because my, um, my sort of way that I show up in the world is that I like to help guide people through their important milestones of life, walking people through the portals and milestones through ritual and, and blessing and as a service to my community.
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And that is who I want to be.
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I want to be someone who uses my gifts and talents and knowledge as service.
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But then when I start thinking about that and I think, but then what is a witch? And it's not necessarily Wiccan because I know a lot of people that are going to, um, associate the claim to being a witch as I must be a Wiccan.
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Now Wiccan is its own religious organization.
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They have their own practices, their own belief system, their own deities, their own higher power, their own doctrine, and they don't own the word witch.
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They derive their religion from being a witch, so calling it Wiccan.
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But I am not a Wiccan, and I do not subscribe to any very rigid doctrine or, or belief system.
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But what is it about women? And witches throughout history that have been accused and tried, Alice Parker most likely was not a witch.
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Here I am in this lifetime talking about being a witch, and there is something inside me that goes, Ooh, don't be too loud about that.
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Don't actually say it.
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There's a little bit of fear there, a witch's wound, if you will.
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So why, why women, why are women accused of witchcraft and being witches? Why witchcraft? And to understand that you'd have to understand a lot of the socioeconomic, political, and religious climate of every place in time that witch trials have happened.
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I'm not going to go into detail on all of that, but I'm going to provide resources if you're interested.
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Um, in my blog, I will.
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I will post everything that I did to research for this topic today.
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Just understand that no witch trial is the same.
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That everything happened because of the circumstances and the climate around what was going on at the time that it happened.
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And that no witch trial Exists in a vacuum.
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It didn't just pop up and just happen, right? It wasn't just that those girls at the Salem Witch Trials, if you've read The Crucible, or if you know the notorious story of the Salem Witch Trials, you know that it kind of was kicked off or sparked by young girls claiming that they were being pinched and slapped and cursed by women of the village and that it was their spirit form that would show up and do these harmful things.
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And then there was this whole story about a devil's book.
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And we'll get into that a little bit later.
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But as I'm doing this research, what kind of sparked my interest in doing an episode about this was that I was doing the research and presenting things for Beltane.
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You know that on May 1st, we had, um, what is celebrated in the pagan societies as May 1st or Beltane.
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It is May Day, right? Well, my producer Blane was like, Oh, if you're going to talk about Beltane, you have to talk about Wild Purgus Night.
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I may or may not be saying that correctly, so I apologize if my German does not sound very good.
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But in the 8th century, there was a saint's day of, uh, Saint Walpurga.
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So she was an English nun who traveled to Germany on a mission to convert the populace to Christianity.
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Remember, this is way back in the 8th century.
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I mean, this is a really, really long time ago, okay? But this is Revival of the Christian.
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I say revival.
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I mean, um, the widespreadness of Christian Church all over Europe.
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So she had become an Abbess there in Germany and she was sainted for ridding the Of pests of whooping cough and illness and witchcraft.
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So she's as associated with Beltane or mayday celebrations in Sweden, Norway, Germany, Austria, Denmark, lots of places in the, in, in the kind of those countries, because it is rumored that she had her canonization on, uh, May 1st in 1870.
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So.
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It's interesting that she is sainted for ridding the world of witchcraft and she would be known for lighting bonfires.
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Bonfires were lit, uh, for many, many centuries after this to rid the world of witches and rid the world of evil spirits, um, or at least protect their towns.
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Um, what's interesting about this is that over time, it's sort of merged in with the pagan.
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Festivals of May Day.
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And so now it's kind of like a witch's night.
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Um, it's almost like the pagans decided we're taking it back.
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So now it's, uh, Valpurgisnet, which means the Eve of St.
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Valpurgis.
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And It means, um, the night before.
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So it is celebrated on April 30th every year.
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They light the bonfires, which are already, as I mentioned in the Belting episode, already, um, a symbol of cleansing for May and for the start of summer.
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But that is a really early indication of when witches were sort of in people's mind.
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I mean, that's way back in the 8th century.
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We're talking about, like, the beginning of Christianity here in, in spreading in the world, and they're already saying, let's rid the world of witchcraft.
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What that means to me is witchcraft equals or equates to paganism.
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Um, religious beliefs based on the earth and the land and the gods of the land.
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Um, that when we want to purge the world of that, it would be the same as witches, which is my favorite definition of which is because all I really am is a pagan.
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I'm a person who celebrates and, um, gives gratitude and energy and love back to the earth in appreciation and gratitude for what the earth does for us.
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So.
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There were witch trials going on in France and Switzerland around 1428, all the way up until 1447.
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And then we have this really interesting story where King James, the 1st of.
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England.
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This is the, um, the King who inherited the throne after Elizabeth the first.
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And so, as you know, during the Tudors, there was the whole reformation of the, of the Church of England.
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Um, so King Henry VIII started the Church of England and Queen Elizabeth reformed the Church of England.
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And it was sort of this whole battle between, um, are we going to be a Catholic nation or are we going to be a Protestant nation? And then during this time, it was sort of a birth of Puritan culture.
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So there was sort of the Protestants or the Church of England that were kind of like, Hey, this is how we're going to practice our religion.
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And The Puritans were kind of like, yeah, that sounds great, except it doesn't go far enough.
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We need it to be stricter.
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We need to really, really double down on fighting the devil because the devil's everywhere.
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And witches who are in Congress with the devil are everywhere.
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And we're really going to work on purifying the earth.
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So that was kind of like the Puritan culture was born.
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I love the story of King James the first, because he goes on a boat to go get his Dutch princess and marry her.
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Well, on.
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The way back, he meets some stormy seas and someone on the boat, I don't know who it was, but this guy, he's a problem because he says to King James the first, Whoa, these stormy seas are pretty terrible.
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It must be a witch on board.
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And that sparked something in King James that ignites a fire under him that says, okay, then witches are bad.
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Witches are around.
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They're here.
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We need to get rid of them.
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And As we know, witch trials and witch hunters in England, Scotland, it goes a little nuts after that.
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So around the 1597 all the way through the 1600s into the late 1600s, you have the great witch hunt in 1597 in Scotland.
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There were 400 people dead in England and there were 4, 000 to 6, 000 on trial and executed in Scotland.
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So we have witch trials and executions happening by the thousands all over Europe.
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One of my favorite and also saddest stories is the witch trials happening in Sweden in 1674 to 1675.
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This is the largest witch hunt and execution in Europe or anywhere.
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So we often hear about Salem witch trials, but this Was epic and super duper sad.
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So I think the story with a little bit of distance and space can be seen as kind of funny, but when looked at on a human perspective, it's incredibly sad.
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Here's what happened.
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It was Torksaker, Sweden.
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It was on an island, um, a little bit remote island.
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So off, uh, away from sea.
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Some of the other, um, society of that time, you have this minister and because of certain events that had happened before this, a girl had gotten sick and they had to, um, Find the witch that was making her sick and execute her.
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And this sort of sparked this whole outrage of looking for witches.
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And this minister, what he did is he picked two boys, two young boys from his, um, parishioners, and he had them stand outside the church.
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On either side of the door, and they claim to be able to see the devil's mark on the forehead of people as they were coming in.
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So they would let the minister know who had the mark of the devil.
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And then the minister would, um, move forward with arresting them.
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Now, this went on.
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For a while, for, for a good long time, it, uh, it sort of hit its peak when they, uh, named the minister's wife.
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One of the boys claimed that they could see the devil's mark on the minister's wife's forehead.
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Um, the minister slapped the boy and the boy went, Oh, just kidding.
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Uh, the sun was in my eyes.
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That wasn't true.
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Um, your wife is fine and we're all good.
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And that just goes to prove to you that this was all just a bunch of politics, but.
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What ended up happening was there were 71 people accused of being witches in this one moment in time.
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65 of them were female and they were all beheaded on a single day in a mass grave on the hill.
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65 women and 71 people all beheaded at once.
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In 1677 in Sweden, the king ordered ministers to declare once and for all that witches are gone.
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Okay.
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We did it.
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We found them all.
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They're all dead.
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We can stop now.
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And that was the end of that in Sweden.
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But it sure wasn't the end of it everywhere else because then we go into the new world.
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The fascinating story is that I have uncovered this week in my research.
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There was Mary Moore in New Jersey, in Edison Park.
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She was killed for being a witch, but then she had to be buried in several different places.
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Because they were too afraid she might come back to life or something.
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One of my favorite stories in the 1600s is in Hadley, Massachusetts.
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You have Mary Webster.
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The story of Mary Webster is fascinating, and I will post links to the full stories on my blog.
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But the summary of it is that a man named Philip Smith was sick and the townspeople blamed Mary.
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Mary was, Old, um, difficult.
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She was an oddball.
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Um, you know, any number of reasons why she might have been the one picked, but for whatever reason, they thought, okay, if Philip can't get better, and every time we knock on Mary's door, Philip feels better, we can deduce that Mary is cursing him.
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And that is where we need to go.
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To get justice.
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So Mary was, um, you know, the townspeople decided to take this into their own hands and they decided they were just going to go ahead and go hang Mary.
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Just, you know, no trial, nothing.
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Just let's get rid of Mary because Philip is sick and we need to save Philip's life.
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So let's go hang Mary.
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And they did.
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They hung her from a tree.
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And when they got back, um, to Philip's house, uh, Philip died.
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For Um, it's very sad, sad for Phillip, but here's the good news.
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Um, Mary, although she was hung from a tree, she survived.
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She survived the hanging and she actually ended up living another 11 to 14 years.
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Records are a little bit, um, a little bit fuzzy on that.
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Some say 11 years and some say, um, that she lived another 14 years.
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And, um, here's, what's so funny about Mary.
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She was She was like 70, 70 years old when she finally died.
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So she lived quite a few years after this whole incident.
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And one of her descendants, the poet Mary Atwood actually made a poem about her and it's called the Half Hanged Mary.
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And if you read the entire poem, I'm going to also post a link to that.
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It's incredible.
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It's an incredible account from Mary's perspective of what it was like the night that she was accused of witchcraft, hung, and then survived.
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But I'm going to read you my favorite stanza, the part at the end when they actually come and cut the rope and Mary had survived.
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I'm going to read this to you.
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It says, 8 a.
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m.
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When they came to harvest my corpse, Open your mouth, close your eyes, Cut my body from the rope.
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Surprise, surprise, I am still alive.
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Tough luck, folks.
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I know the law.
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You can't execute me twice for the same thing.
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How nice.
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I fell to the clover, breathed it in, and bared my teeth at them in a filthy grin.
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You can imagine how that went over.
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Now I only need to look out at them through my sky blue eyes.
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They see their own ill will staring them in the forehead and turn tail.
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Before I was not a witch, but now I am one.
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Well done, Margaret Atwood.
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That is an incredible stanza.
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My favorite, favorite.
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This is where we're going to end this part one, two part episode about witch trials.
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I have only just begun and there's so much more juicy tales to tell.
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But for now, We're going to end it there, and next week talk a little bit more about the Salem Witch Trials, and about what is it like to be accused of witchcraft in these witch trials, generally.
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We're also going to talk a little bit about cultures that did not necessarily have which trials the way that they happened in a lot of other countries in Europe and in New England and the Americas.
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We're going to talk a little bit more about why.
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What is overall theme of why females specifically are targeted when something like this comes up.
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Why witchcraft? Why women? And we're going to get to the heart of what I believe is the reason.
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So, witches and wizards, and all of you magical creatures out there listening.
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Stay tuned for next week where we continue this discussion and get more in depth.
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I cannot wait.
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It's going to be so much fun.
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I want you to use magic in your everyday lives to help yourself, to strengthen your relationships, to heal, to grow, to prosper, to thrive.
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And I would like to invite you to find me on my website, prism healing.
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com.
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There you can find a list of services that I offer and provide.
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If you're looking for a little witchcraft in your life, a little healing work, a little cursing someone, just kidding.
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I definitely charge extra if you want me to curse someone.
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I can also be found on Instagram at Prism Healing Facebook.
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Courtney Pearl or my Facebook page? Courtney Pearl's Prism Healing.
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That's Prism as in P-R-I-S-M, not pri as in going to the next step after jail.
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That's not for me.
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Um.
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Take a look at my upcoming events coming up, Healing Through Art and the HeartSmart Art Workshop for kids and parents to help raise emotionally intelligent human beings.
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And I would like to invite you to also find me on TikTok at Prism Healing.
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Sometimes my TikTok is a little bit more of the raw and silly me, but you get a little bit more of my personality when the real witch comes out.
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So take a look, find me on any social media and Please PM me or DM me or slip into my DMs or whatever it is that people do and ask me questions if you have any questions on magic or healing or any of the topics and subjects that we discuss on this podcast here.
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I would love to help you answer your questions or offer you some guidance and pointing you in the right direction.
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So until next time, where we finish this discussion, I'll see you next week.
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Witches and wizards go make magic.
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Hello witches and wizards and welcome to Practically Magic.
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This is Courtney Pearl.
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I am a pagan witch.
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I'm a card reader, healer, sorcerer.
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Spiritualist, Celtic priestess, teacher, artist, and mystic seeker.
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I am discovering magic and I would like to share it with you.
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Today's episode, we are going to specifically focus on the title of witch.
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Now, I personally call myself a folk witch because I love folklore and I love mythology and I love to tie that into paganism, but I am a lot of things and one thing I would like to bring forward today in today's episode is the respect and title of what it means to be a witch.
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And I'm going to do it justice, hopefully, by talking about witch trials.
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I have been preparing Endlessly for this episode, and I am so excited to share what I have learned with you and hopefully I can do it justice, but I'm going to start by pulling a card and by no other deck would today's episode be, but the Witch's Wisdom Tarot deck.
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And that is the one I'm going to pull a card from today to help us with today's episode, to be a.
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theme for today's episode and what it is we're going to bring to the table.
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All right, so today's card that I have pulled, oh my gosh, this is amazing.
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If only you could see it.
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I'm going to show it on the video for those who are able to see the video.
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It is the card of love.
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And that almost makes me tear up when I look at it because of all of the research that I've done this week and all of the contemplating that I have done about what it truly means to call oneself a witch.
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To own that title and to allow myself permission to lean into that, this card feels so appropriate because it's the image of a young girl and she is petting a fox.
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And he's looking at her lovingly, and she's looking at him lovingly, and it's almost like they're having this moment where they're going to touch noses or give each other a little kiss, and they're surrounded by dandelion flowers and other, um, kind of prickly flowers.
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I'm not an herb.
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Which, so I cannot name all of these plants and herbs and flowers that I can see in the picture, but I know they're significant because I have a feeling like the dandelion weed, we have cast it out from society.
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We've told each other and the dandelion that it's not welcome, and we've called it a weed and we've produced chemical weed killers that are to get rid of it.
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And for those who understand and know a little bit about the dandelion, it's actually a very healing herb, and it's, um, a wonderful pollinator for bees.
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It's actually a, an incredibly helpful plant if we allow it to be, um, of course, I live in Daybreak.
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We have an HOA.
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We have.
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No room for dandelions.
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You will get an HOA fine and a letter if you have dandelions all over your yard.
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It's the reality of the world we live in right now, but this poor.
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flower, weed, whatever you want to call it, has really been an outcast in a society that has deemed it unworthy or inappropriate, and not allowed to flourish, and not allowed to be, and not even allowed to help in the herbal medicine way that it can, that it's actually making dandelion tea is incredibly healing and useful.
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And that does not even come close to all of the theme of today's episode, what it's going to be about.
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I've donned my witch's gear.
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I am dressed and ready for the occasion.
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I cannot even begin to tell you how excited I am to talk about this subject, but I need to start with a little personal story.
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So, uh, A few years ago, I was just in the beginning of my energy healing awakening.
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Um, I, I dare say that I've always been someone who was seeking something my entire life.
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So I cannot definitively say when my journey started into the world of magic, energy, Whatever it is that, that you want to call being a spiritualist, being, being pagan, being a healer, but I was in the beginning of kind of my awareness of this type of work and I went to a Reiki healer locally here in Daybreak, um, and she is my Reiki master, my mentor, and she, um, I had not had a Reiki session before, but I knew that this was something that I was very interested in and something that I would probably want to learn how to do myself one day.
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So it was kind of in the beginning of that curiosity and wanting to seek this out and to make this a regular thing for me, not just a, um, a nice, Relaxing session, but also kind of a, I need to know what this is.
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I need to fill this out and I need to know if this is the right path for me to take.
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And I went to this Reiki healer and she, um, was doing a Reiki session with me and it was incredibly profound in that I felt the energy very strongly.
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I was, um, I was almost a little bit surprised at how much I was able to feel it even without.
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It was, you know, the unseen forces of the energy work going on.
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Um, my logical brain was having a little bit of a hard time with it.
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You know, my imaginative brain, my creative brain was very much on board.
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It's like, yes, I believe that this is real.
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I believe that this is happening.
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I know what's what this is about.
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And, um, I'm equally left and right brain.
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So my left brain was going, um, We can't actually prove or see what's happening, so let me just, let me just think about this for a little bit.
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And um, my Reiki healer, she just happens to be also a medium and um, she also now does and includes past life regression in her work, uh, which I very much plan to take part in eventually.
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But in this session, she told me, I can see you in many of your past lives.
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And at this point in my life, I wasn't even sure if I believed in reincarnation or if that was something that I you know, falls into my belief system, but I was sort of open to it.
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And she said, I can see you in many lifetimes that you are a person who people came to for answers.
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You were a person with a lot of wisdom.
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You were not always necessarily included or accepted in mainstream society.
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Sometimes you had to live on the outskirts, and I can see you living in maybe a little cottage on the, on the hill or in, on the cliffs by the ocean, um, a little bit outcast from society, but still someone people sought out for answers, for help.
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You had knowledge that, you know, in herbal medicines or in different things that people sought you out to, to attain.
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And, and I was kind of like, Oh, okay.
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Yeah, that feels good to me.
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Um, I would like to be a person that can help other people.
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I would like to be a person that people saw as helpful or useful.
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Um, I love sharing what I know and I love teaching and I love, um, speaking to crowds or to people who are interested in what I have to say.
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So this feels right to me.
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Um, then she went on to say, I Know that you were one of the women who were accused and tried and executed.
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In the Salem Witch Trials.
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And I do believe that you were in the last wave of executions.
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And I want you to go look up the names because I feel strongly that you will recognize your name when you see it.
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Now, this is a little bit more specific and a little bit shocking to me, but I was like, Oh, wow.
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Okay.
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Um, that's.
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kind of cool and kind of sad and interesting and, um, and I was a little bit of excited to try it out.
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I mean, I was still kind of in that skeptical, uh, place where I'm like, okay, I mean, Wouldn't it be kind of cool if everybody could go around saying like, oh, yes, I was one of the Salem Witch.
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I was one of them, you know, I'm a witch.
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And so, therefore, I was one of the Salem Witches.
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Um, little too convenient, you know, for me, but.
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But I thought, okay, I will, I will go check this out.
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I will see what I, what I feel about this.
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And this at the time, a lot of the seeking that I was doing, a lot of the, the introspection I was going through was because I was going through a really hard time, which is very common for people who are going through the dark night of the soul and coming through it with, Um, new understandings and new seeking and wanting to find what is more truthful and more, um, aligned with their belief systems.
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And, um, at the time my husband was in recovery and struggling with addiction.
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Um, he was, is an alcoholic and he was always, um, you know, kind of.
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Searching for that answer on how to, uh, recover from this addiction and how to, um, you know, really beat it, I guess.
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And we were going through a lot at the time, and I was in a very, very dark place, kind of wondering what was going to happen to us.
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What was our future going to be like? How were we going to, how was our marriage going to survive this? Because, you know, I was really in a place where I knew that my marriage could not survive it if it didn't happen.
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continued the way that it was.
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And I love my husband so much and I would always love him, but I needed to kind of figure peace out.
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And it was, um, you know, seeking alternative methods of healing like Reiki was part of that journey.
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And so, um, I did go home and I started looking into what, what were the names of the witches that were, you know, Condemned and convicted and hanged and who was in the last wave of it, right? Because the Stalingrad trials only lasted for two years and, um, or between two years.
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And so, uh, there was just a few names at the very end of those trials that were tried and convicted.
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And I.
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Looked at the names, the list of names, and there was one name that stood out to me very, very BAM.
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I don't know any other way to explain it.
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Just that my intuition saw this name and said, that's it.
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That's you.
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This is who you were.
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And when I had that feeling, it was kind of, um, BAM.
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Validating, I guess, in just being able to say, Listen, anyone else in the whole world can say that's not real.
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You don't know.
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How can you prove that? Well, I can't.
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It's totally my story.
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And I'm the one who gets to tell it.
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So I'm here telling you this story.
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And my name was Alice Parker.
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Alice Parker, as I looked into it a little bit further, she was the wife of John Parker, who was a fisherman.
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He was a lot of times out to sea and she was left alone with the children in a house that they rented, um, in Salem town.
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And Um, she was accused by Mary Warren, who was a servant girl in the Proctor house and Mary Warren at one point, Mary Warren's father, um, was asked by Alice Parker to help cut down the hay so they could feed their horses.
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She probably was alone and she probably needed his help in cutting the hay down and, um.
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He denied help.
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He did not go help her.
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And so Alice Parker, being kind of a strong willed woman that she was, went to the home, the Warren home, and basically yelled at them for, and condemned them and said, how dare you not help me when I need it.
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And it was right after that that they, uh, that Mary Warren's mother and sister became sick.
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And Um, her mother died and her sister was, um, was left deaf from the illness.
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And so Mary had a reason not to like Alice Parker.
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So at the end, um, as, as they were coming to the end of these, um, witch trials and everyone was accusing so and so and every, you know, the girls were accusing everyone that they had ever had any encounter with.
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And then some of them were accused and then they would name names and it went on and on like this for all this time.
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Um, she accused Alice Parker and the stories told about Alice, uh, one was that she was found once, um, in the snow, uh, kind of, uh, like she was dead, she wasn't moving, she was stiff and she, um, they thought she was dead, but she popped up and she was fine.
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Um, some, say that it's possible that she had a disease, um, catalepsy, uh, which would be kind of like an epilepsy type of illness where sometimes she would, um, go unconscious from time to time.
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So it's possible that she had this and that's why she was found every once in a while kind of unconscious.
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Um, But some of my favorite stories about her is that, uh, a man named John Westgate, uh, told a story about how her husband, John Parker, was in the tavern at Sam Beetle's Tavern and in comes storming in Alice Parker to yell at her husband and tell him he needs to get his drunk A home.
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And, um, and as she was yelling at her husband to, to get on home from the tavern.
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Um, John Westgate tried to, uh, calm her down and she told him to mind his own business.
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Now, if there was a story that made me think, yes, I have found her.
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This is me.
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This is Courtney.
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This is Courtney reincarnated.
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Uh, a reincarnated Alice Parker.
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That story was it.
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That was the clincher.
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And so.
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In diving into these stories and history of witch trials, I take a very personal note to this subject.
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Not only because I do believe myself to be the reincarnated Alice Parker, but also because I have a little bit of trouble, as some women still do, with claiming the title of witch.
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When I first started this podcast, it was, um, I was introduced to people in the community as this is Courtney Pearl.
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She's, she's our local witch.
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Um, and that was exciting and funny and fun.
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And there was also a very strong hesitation for me to be able to claim that title.
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I think of myself as an emotional and energy healer.
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I think of myself as a Reiki practitioner.
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I think of myself as, um, as a priestess because my, um, my sort of way that I show up in the world is that I like to help guide people through their important milestones of life, walking people through the portals and milestones through ritual and, and blessing and as a service to my community.
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And that is who I want to be.
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I want to be someone who uses my gifts and talents and knowledge as service.
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But then when I start thinking about that and I think, but then what is a witch? And it's not necessarily Wiccan because I know a lot of people that are going to, um, associate the claim to being a witch as I must be a Wiccan.
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Now Wiccan is its own religious organization.
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They have their own practices, their own belief system, their own deities, their own higher power, their own doctrine, and they don't own the word witch.
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They derive their religion from being a witch, so calling it Wiccan.
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But I am not a Wiccan, and I do not subscribe to any very rigid doctrine or, or belief system.
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But what is it about women? And witches throughout history that have been accused and tried, Alice Parker most likely was not a witch.
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Here I am in this lifetime talking about being a witch, and there is something inside me that goes, Ooh, don't be too loud about that.
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Don't actually say it.
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There's a little bit of fear there, a witch's wound, if you will.
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So why, why women, why are women accused of witchcraft and being witches? Why witchcraft? And to understand that you'd have to understand a lot of the socioeconomic, political, and religious climate of every place in time that witch trials have happened.
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I'm not going to go into detail on all of that, but I'm going to provide resources if you're interested.
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Um, in my blog, I will.
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I will post everything that I did to research for this topic today.
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Just understand that no witch trial is the same.
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That everything happened because of the circumstances and the climate around what was going on at the time that it happened.
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And that no witch trial Exists in a vacuum.
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It didn't just pop up and just happen, right? It wasn't just that those girls at the Salem Witch Trials, if you've read The Crucible, or if you know the notorious story of the Salem Witch Trials, you know that it kind of was kicked off or sparked by young girls claiming that they were being pinched and slapped and cursed by women of the village and that it was their spirit form that would show up and do these harmful things.
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And then there was this whole story about a devil's book.
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And we'll get into that a little bit later.
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But as I'm doing this research, what kind of sparked my interest in doing an episode about this was that I was doing the research and presenting things for Beltane.
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You know that on May 1st, we had, um, what is celebrated in the pagan societies as May 1st or Beltane.
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It is May Day, right? Well, my producer Blane was like, Oh, if you're going to talk about Beltane, you have to talk about Wild Purgus Night.
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I may or may not be saying that correctly, so I apologize if my German does not sound very good.
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But in the 8th century, there was a saint's day of, uh, Saint Walpurga.
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So she was an English nun who traveled to Germany on a mission to convert the populace to Christianity.
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Remember, this is way back in the 8th century.
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I mean, this is a really, really long time ago, okay? But this is Revival of the Christian.
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I say revival.
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I mean, um, the widespreadness of Christian Church all over Europe.
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So she had become an Abbess there in Germany and she was sainted for ridding the Of pests of whooping cough and illness and witchcraft.
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So she's as associated with Beltane or mayday celebrations in Sweden, Norway, Germany, Austria, Denmark, lots of places in the, in, in the kind of those countries, because it is rumored that she had her canonization on, uh, May 1st in 1870.
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So.
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It's interesting that she is sainted for ridding the world of witchcraft and she would be known for lighting bonfires.
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Bonfires were lit, uh, for many, many centuries after this to rid the world of witches and rid the world of evil spirits, um, or at least protect their towns.
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Um, what's interesting about this is that over time, it's sort of merged in with the pagan.
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Festivals of May Day.
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And so now it's kind of like a witch's night.
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Um, it's almost like the pagans decided we're taking it back.
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So now it's, uh, Valpurgisnet, which means the Eve of St.
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Valpurgis.
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And It means, um, the night before.
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So it is celebrated on April 30th every year.
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They light the bonfires, which are already, as I mentioned in the Belting episode, already, um, a symbol of cleansing for May and for the start of summer.
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But that is a really early indication of when witches were sort of in people's mind.
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I mean, that's way back in the 8th century.
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We're talking about, like, the beginning of Christianity here in, in spreading in the world, and they're already saying, let's rid the world of witchcraft.
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What that means to me is witchcraft equals or equates to paganism.
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Um, religious beliefs based on the earth and the land and the gods of the land.
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Um, that when we want to purge the world of that, it would be the same as witches, which is my favorite definition of which is because all I really am is a pagan.
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I'm a person who celebrates and, um, gives gratitude and energy and love back to the earth in appreciation and gratitude for what the earth does for us.
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So.
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There were witch trials going on in France and Switzerland around 1428, all the way up until 1447.
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And then we have this really interesting story where King James, the 1st of.
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England.
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This is the, um, the King who inherited the throne after Elizabeth the first.
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And so, as you know, during the Tudors, there was the whole reformation of the, of the Church of England.
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Um, so King Henry VIII started the Church of England and Queen Elizabeth reformed the Church of England.
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And it was sort of this whole battle between, um, are we going to be a Catholic nation or are we going to be a Protestant nation? And then during this time, it was sort of a birth of Puritan culture.
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So there was sort of the Protestants or the Church of England that were kind of like, Hey, this is how we're going to practice our religion.
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And The Puritans were kind of like, yeah, that sounds great, except it doesn't go far enough.
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We need it to be stricter.
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We need to really, really double down on fighting the devil because the devil's everywhere.
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And witches who are in Congress with the devil are everywhere.
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And we're really going to work on purifying the earth.
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So that was kind of like the Puritan culture was born.
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I love the story of King James the first, because he goes on a boat to go get his Dutch princess and marry her.
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Well, on.
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The way back, he meets some stormy seas and someone on the boat, I don't know who it was, but this guy, he's a problem because he says to King James the first, Whoa, these stormy seas are pretty terrible.
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It must be a witch on board.
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And that sparked something in King James that ignites a fire under him that says, okay, then witches are bad.
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Witches are around.
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They're here.
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We need to get rid of them.
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And As we know, witch trials and witch hunters in England, Scotland, it goes a little nuts after that.
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So around the 1597 all the way through the 1600s into the late 1600s, you have the great witch hunt in 1597 in Scotland.
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There were 400 people dead in England and there were 4, 000 to 6, 000 on trial and executed in Scotland.
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So we have witch trials and executions happening by the thousands all over Europe.
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One of my favorite and also saddest stories is the witch trials happening in Sweden in 1674 to 1675.
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This is the largest witch hunt and execution in Europe or anywhere.
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So we often hear about Salem witch trials, but this Was epic and super duper sad.
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So I think the story with a little bit of distance and space can be seen as kind of funny, but when looked at on a human perspective, it's incredibly sad.
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Here's what happened.
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It was Torksaker, Sweden.
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It was on an island, um, a little bit remote island.
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So off, uh, away from sea.
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Some of the other, um, society of that time, you have this minister and because of certain events that had happened before this, a girl had gotten sick and they had to, um, Find the witch that was making her sick and execute her.
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And this sort of sparked this whole outrage of looking for witches.
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And this minister, what he did is he picked two boys, two young boys from his, um, parishioners, and he had them stand outside the church.
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On either side of the door, and they claim to be able to see the devil's mark on the forehead of people as they were coming in.
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So they would let the minister know who had the mark of the devil.
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And then the minister would, um, move forward with arresting them.
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Now, this went on.
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For a while, for, for a good long time, it, uh, it sort of hit its peak when they, uh, named the minister's wife.
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One of the boys claimed that they could see the devil's mark on the minister's wife's forehead.
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Um, the minister slapped the boy and the boy went, Oh, just kidding.
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Uh, the sun was in my eyes.
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That wasn't true.
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Um, your wife is fine and we're all good.
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And that just goes to prove to you that this was all just a bunch of politics, but.
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What ended up happening was there were 71 people accused of being witches in this one moment in time.
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65 of them were female and they were all beheaded on a single day in a mass grave on the hill.
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65 women and 71 people all beheaded at once.
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In 1677 in Sweden, the king ordered ministers to declare once and for all that witches are gone.
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Okay.
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We did it.
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We found them all.
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They're all dead.
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We can stop now.
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And that was the end of that in Sweden.
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But it sure wasn't the end of it everywhere else because then we go into the new world.
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The fascinating story is that I have uncovered this week in my research.
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There was Mary Moore in New Jersey, in Edison Park.
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She was killed for being a witch, but then she had to be buried in several different places.
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Because they were too afraid she might come back to life or something.
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One of my favorite stories in the 1600s is in Hadley, Massachusetts.
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You have Mary Webster.
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The story of Mary Webster is fascinating, and I will post links to the full stories on my blog.
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But the summary of it is that a man named Philip Smith was sick and the townspeople blamed Mary.
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Mary was, Old, um, difficult.
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She was an oddball.
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Um, you know, any number of reasons why she might have been the one picked, but for whatever reason, they thought, okay, if Philip can't get better, and every time we knock on Mary's door, Philip feels better, we can deduce that Mary is cursing him.
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And that is where we need to go.
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To get justice.
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So Mary was, um, you know, the townspeople decided to take this into their own hands and they decided they were just going to go ahead and go hang Mary.
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Just, you know, no trial, nothing.
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Just let's get rid of Mary because Philip is sick and we need to save Philip's life.
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So let's go hang Mary.
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And they did.
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They hung her from a tree.
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And when they got back, um, to Philip's house, uh, Philip died.
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For Um, it's very sad, sad for Phillip, but here's the good news.
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Um, Mary, although she was hung from a tree, she survived.
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She survived the hanging and she actually ended up living another 11 to 14 years.
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Records are a little bit, um, a little bit fuzzy on that.
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Some say 11 years and some say, um, that she lived another 14 years.
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And, um, here's, what's so funny about Mary.
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She was She was like 70, 70 years old when she finally died.
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So she lived quite a few years after this whole incident.
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And one of her descendants, the poet Mary Atwood actually made a poem about her and it's called the Half Hanged Mary.
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And if you read the entire poem, I'm going to also post a link to that.
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It's incredible.
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It's an incredible account from Mary's perspective of what it was like the night that she was accused of witchcraft, hung, and then survived.
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But I'm going to read you my favorite stanza, the part at the end when they actually come and cut the rope and Mary had survived.
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I'm going to read this to you.
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It says, 8 a.
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m.
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When they came to harvest my corpse, Open your mouth, close your eyes, Cut my body from the rope.
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Surprise, surprise, I am still alive.
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Tough luck, folks.
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I know the law.
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You can't execute me twice for the same thing.
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How nice.
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I fell to the clover, breathed it in, and bared my teeth at them in a filthy grin.
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You can imagine how that went over.
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Now I only need to look out at them through my sky blue eyes.
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They see their own ill will staring them in the forehead and turn tail.
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Before I was not a witch, but now I am one.
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Well done, Margaret Atwood.
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That is an incredible stanza.
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My favorite, favorite.
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This is where we're going to end this part one, two part episode about witch trials.
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I have only just begun and there's so much more juicy tales to tell.
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But for now, We're going to end it there, and next week talk a little bit more about the Salem Witch Trials, and about what is it like to be accused of witchcraft in these witch trials, generally.
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We're also going to talk a little bit about cultures that did not necessarily have which trials the way that they happened in a lot of other countries in Europe and in New England and the Americas.
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We're going to talk a little bit more about why.
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What is overall theme of why females specifically are targeted when something like this comes up.
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Why witchcraft? Why women? And we're going to get to the heart of what I believe is the reason.
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So, witches and wizards, and all of you magical creatures out there listening.
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Stay tuned for next week where we continue this discussion and get more in depth.
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I cannot wait.
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It's going to be so much fun.
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I want you to use magic in your everyday lives to help yourself, to strengthen your relationships, to heal, to grow, to prosper, to thrive.
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And I would like to invite you to find me on my website, prism healing.
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com.
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There you can find a list of services that I offer and provide.
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If you're looking for a little witchcraft in your life, a little healing work, a little cursing someone, just kidding.
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I definitely charge extra if you want me to curse someone.
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I can also be found on Instagram at Prism Healing Facebook.
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Courtney Pearl or my Facebook page? Courtney Pearl's Prism Healing.
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That's Prism as in P-R-I-S-M, not pri as in going to the next step after jail.
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That's not for me.
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Um.
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Take a look at my upcoming events coming up, Healing Through Art and the HeartSmart Art Workshop for kids and parents to help raise emotionally intelligent human beings.
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And I would like to invite you to also find me on TikTok at Prism Healing.
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Sometimes my TikTok is a little bit more of the raw and silly me, but you get a little bit more of my personality when the real witch comes out.
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So take a look, find me on any social media and Please PM me or DM me or slip into my DMs or whatever it is that people do and ask me questions if you have any questions on magic or healing or any of the topics and subjects that we discuss on this podcast here.
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I would love to help you answer your questions or offer you some guidance and pointing you in the right direction.
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So until next time, where we finish this discussion, I'll see you next week.
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Witches and wizards go make magic.
