Theme: Magicians Reporting for Duty

Week 8: in which we swing from horror to elation until we settle on the mantra that can carry us through

Beautiful Magicians,

Well, well, well. What can anyone say about this past week. If you’re feeling a tad nauseous as your heart swings from horror to elation and back to horror, please know that you are not crazy. You are simply Aware. Noticing. Beginning to See what is begging to be seen. And realizing you are, at last, willing to not just see it, but to Name it.

I don’t have to reiterate the horrors, but did you, like me, feel a touch of elation poke through the horror as you watched the not-a-prince get arrested. Arrested! On his birthday no less.

The last time an English royal got arrested was King Charles 1 in 1647, who was not only arrested, he was executed for high treason. I wonder if the not-prince pulled himself away from abusing girls long enough to read some English history….

The look on Andrew’s face was priceless. If this were the burning times, we would be peeking from behind the curtains as the town’s loathsome inquisitioner was dragged away. That did happen at the end of the 350 years of horror. But only after a hundred thousand women (and some men and children) were tortured and executed in public.

Watching those executions—and people were ordered to go to the town square and watch—imprinted the absolute necessity to be silent, obedient, and compliant deep in women’s and children’s bodies.

Bodies that carried those fears right down to each one of us today through the transmission science calls epigenetics.

Don’t think that because the witch craze ended in the late 1700s that the harm to our bodies and our psyches ended. That flinch you feel reading even the tiniest snippet of the email conversations and pictures in the E files is a natural epigenetic response.

Your body remembers.

Dr Valerie Rein described this collective intergenerational trauma in her 2019 book, Patriarchy Stress Disorder: The Invisible Inner Barrier to Women’s Happiness and Fulfillment. I only learned about Dr Rein’s book and this syndrome reading Anke Richter today.

Anke Richter is an award-winning international journalist, author of Cult Trip and founding director of the Decult network.

In a facebook post today, Anke Richter, who has studied the harm done by cults, said that she was going to write an op-ed piece but gave up because she felt too deflated.

If a woman with her journalistic abilities and deep knowledge and commitment to use her voice for women is too stressed to work, then I think it’s OK for we mortals to feel unable to function too.

Anke wrote:

• “Since the E files dropped, I’m feeling the symptoms of PSD again (Patriarchy Stress Disorder—look it up).” (I did. That’s how I found Dr Rein.)

Anke quotes fellow researcher Amelia Gentleman in The Guardian:

• “For women these files offer an unprecedented chance to eavesdrop on conversations from which they are usually excluded.”

Anke describes slogging through the files as:

• “Tons of frozen feces slowly melting, releasing their sludge and stench into the world. It’s unbearable, nauseating and disturbing. It leaves me with rage and despair.”

She goes on to talk about Gisele Pelicot in France who was drugged by her husband night after night and abused by dozens of ordinary men,

• “leaving our sense of trust and safety with ‘normal men’ shaky.”

And then, she writes,

• “Last week’s exposure of the tech bros and billionaires, and intellectual and inspirational heavyweights like Chomsky and Chopra was even worse.” Because she realized, “These pillars of society are no better than incels on Telegram discussing their prey.”

In short, she writes,

• “It’s a brutal reality check.” And she says, “You can’t unsee the chummy emails full of p*ssy talk.”

It looks like she was just as horrified as I was when Chopra said,

• “God is a construct, cute girls are real.”
• She labeled it the #1 spiritual quote of 2026. I wonder if it will be on his tombstone.

Anke concludes:

• “PSD is real. The war on women is real. R*pe culture is real.”

I know this has been hard reading and I don’t want to leave you utterly depressed. This is not the time for that.

Because in this very same week of horror revelations and tantrums in the White House, a lot of radical and exciting cosmology happened.

It doesn’t seem possible but in the last seven days:

• Ramadan started—a month of introspection and prayer
• Lent started—a month of introspection and prayer
• The Fire Horse charged in to initiate a fiery Chinese New Year
• An Aquarius New Moon arrived with a Solar Eclipse
• And if that weren’t enough, on Friday, something happened that has not happened for six thousand years:

Saturn met Neptune in the first degree of the zodiac.

Here’s the very condensed Cliff Notes on this conjunction. With gratitude to astrologers including Damascena Tanis and holistic psychiatrist Dr Judy Tsafrir:

Saturn is Structure. Reality. Consequences. Discipline. Facts.

The last time Saturn and Neptune met, it was 1989. They met in Capricorn, which is an intense earth sign originally known as “grandmother wisdom,” and the Berlin Wall fell. No one saw that coming! This gives me such hope. Change can be instantaneous.

Neptune is Vision. Dreams. The Invisible. Mystical. Possible. Transcendent. Boundary dissolution.

Try to imagine what could happen when these two radically different energies converge. AND, they’re doing it at the birth spot of the entire Zodiac. The entire cosmic story.

Damascena writes:
“Saturn and Neptune in Aries ask the deepest questions about identity, sovereignty, and what you are willing to fight for. On the collective level, we see this already in the world: questions of national identify, and borders are inflamed everywhere. Who are we? Who belongs? Who has the right to be here? What are we willing to defend and at what cost.”

She goes on:
“On the personal level, this conjunction in Aries asks you something just as direct: What do you actually believe in, and are you living as if you believe it?”

We are at an end of a long six-thousand-year cycle. So it behooves us to ask:

What happened six thousand years ago?

It was the time of an epochal shift from tens of thousands of years of living in matrifocal, matrilineal, peaceful communities that revered women and all life. Matriarchal living didn’t end overnight, but Marija Gombutas’ research demonstrated clearly that around this time, violent tribes that worshiped disembodied sky gods swept into Eastern Europe. Those sky gods demanded to be the only god and commanded that women as embodiments of the Goddess and holders of ancient wisdom and knowledge, be silenced, overpowered, r*ped, and even murdered, if they continued to honor Mother Earth and Mother Goddess.

This was the beginning of Patriarchy and PSD.

Does all of this portend massive change? Change we have not experienced for millennia? Is this the moment that we, frightened and worried as we are, stand up and shout to the heavens the truth the Hopi elders gave us decades ago: We are the ones we have been waiting for.

It isn’t easy. And it won’t be fast. But I have hope. Joan of Arc, who experienced all the horror patriarchy and theocracy could throw at her said:

Je n’ai pas peur
I am not afraid. For this I was born.

I have repeated this phrase as a mantra, a prayer, from the first time I heard it. I asked Lori Sweet who painted Joan for my first witch event, The Return of the Witches in 2021, to include a banner with Joan’s precious words.

We need to remember this now. We must not be afraid. Because we were born to be a part of the fall of the wall of patriarchy. And the return of Her Garden of Reverence.

Life is Fragile, Handle with Reverence,

Janet

PS: If you didn't know me in 2021, here's the intensive The Return of the Witches: a Jeanne d'Arc Listening pilgrimage. Everything began here.

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