The Burning Times Never Ended:
Remembering Resistance & A Story of Disenchantment
familiar-level course
Course Info
This wildly popular course is part one of four intermediate courses featured in the Continuing Program.
It is strongly recommended that each course be taken in a self-organized group of 3-7 people. Groups may be affinity, collegial, coven, collective or some other form. This recommendation comes from years of observation and participant feedback.
Taking these courses in groups creates forms of support throughout the study, strengthens the likelihood of practice (as individuals or as groups), and enhances and amplifies learning and self-reflection.
and more…
The Spell
Our words are spells, here nestled in the holy dark. Dreaming of the supernova while turning the wheel in timespace. Our magic is real. Razing the barriers; resisting the impulses of annihilation.
Once upon a time and within a time we still inhabit, a great terror enveloped peoples and rippled/s through them and beyond them in terrible waves of shock and harm.
A ripple to and through Middle Ages Europe and those who dissented against domination, those still in relationship to the body, to magic, spirit, and land- named evermore as targets for the empire’s power. And the purveyors of a shift from earth-culture to deathphobic cult left those lands and spread like a virus, infecting those in opposition to it.
This story holds meaningful context for living in an extinction event created and perpetuated by the unhealed ancestral wounds of disenchantment from the world. Beset by estrangement, entitlement and enslavement; thus severance from the world song.
The foundation and firmament of this magical spellcasting meanders through the converging crises of our times, amnesia and re-membering, the power of story, historical trauma and disenchantment, repression then and the hex of now, movements for collective liberation, spiritual activism and systems thinking, the dimension of whole timespace, rewilding and unsettling today, and culminates in a beyond our lifetime vision for the ones to come.
Extinction, The Wheel, The Scythe, The Tree in the Machine, The Stake and Well, and the Devil anchor the spells, unfurl the dance.
Oppression cannot be dismantled solely through the intellect, it must be worked through the body’s portal of magic in the holy dark, among places.
Supremacism enforces hierarchies of worth, and The BTNE seeks to analyze, integrate meaning, and adapt to strategies of the intentional dis-connection from earth as source, spirit as ally, and lineages of wise and loving ancestors of resistance.
The winds of change, the fire of memory, the waters of grief and praise, the relentless earth, and the beloved mystery. All in the convergence of transformation.
Part historical scholarship of a disenchantment, part shadow spell-working, part mytho-poetic storytelling, this six week working encourages the participant to the re-membering, the blowing over the bones, and the rehydration of a lost part of our collective soul.
Course Content
This course examines Middle Ages Europe through the lens of Sylvia Federici’s book, Caliban and the Witch. This text argues that the construction of the feminized identity (women and other marginalized genders) contributed to the accumulation of power through private, political and religious entities.
This accumulation of power-over: labor, reproductive, and material wealth, was made possible through proto-capitalism. Capitalism required/s the phenomena of witch hunts, and other forms of repression and persecution in order to become and remain the dominant economic system predicated on impoverishment.
The anarcha-feminist, academic text Caliban and the Witch explains how the witch hunts and the emergence of capitalism are entwined. It illuminates some important tactics of patriarchy, white christian supremacism, and gives the broad strokes of a story still alive.
It is no mistake that once again, the worker, the body, the gender, the eroticism, the non-compliant, the access to power, the ‘other’, and the witch endure constant and intensifying repression.
Through her scholarship we learn about cultural patterns of iterative oppression: divide and conquer, enclosure, fear-mongering and scapegoating, disciplining of the body, and the erosion of autonomy and freedoms. We also learn about the powerful resilience of the ancestors and how the body is the terrain of resistance.
The magical context is one of an ‘ensorcellment’ or hex and our need to grasp it and untangle/unspell from it. Wounds holding vital life source have never evaporated from the inherited personal and collective psyche and body.
The course seeks to clarify and make accessible the content of Caliban and the Witch through diverse approaches and a choose-your-own-adventure learning style. Each chapter/session is assigned a symbol to help span and recall the material.
Beginning in Europe and concluding with the exportation of oppression into the Atlantic trade of enslaved peoples and the colonization of the Americas, it is a lead into Longing to Belong: an unsettling journey.
Expect grief, shadow-work, urgings for conscious self-care, revelations, and relationshifts. Expect consistent, kind reminders to contextualize this traumatic European history into the growing actualization of anti-supremacism solidarity. Face it, learn it, metabolize it, and act through the power released from it with support from wise ancestors, and ideally, your group.
This course uses presentation, personal ritual, trance, discussion questions, experiential activities, dreamwork, dance, crafting, and art to integrate the presentations of the material.
