Truths We Were Not Taught

Dec 17

Written By Jenelle .

No matter what we grew up believing, there is a truth that needs to be told.

Revisited, reclaimed, and remembered clearly.

The Truth Beneath the Story

It was not witches who burned.

It was women.

Women whose presence could not be contained.

Women whose bodies, voices, and knowing did not conform.

Women who were considered too beautiful.

Women who spoke plainly.

Women who carried knowledge — of plants, of birth, of the land.

Women with marks on their skin.

Women with red in their hair.

Women who sang.

Women who danced.

Women who lived in relationship with nature and were listened to in return.

And sometimes, it was simply women who stood out.

Or women who would not disappear.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, any woman could be at risk.

What followed was not justice.

It was fear made into law.

When Fear Became Law

These persecutions emerged during years of famine, religious war, and collective collapse. When societies are destabilized, anxiety seeks direction. And when lessons are not learned, history does not end — it adapts. Those in control move to contain uncertainty, not by restoring balance, but by narrowing freedom. Fear becomes a tool. Control becomes the priority. An enemy is created so the people do not turn on the structures that failed them.

The church of the time provided that enemy.

Witches, demons, and the devil were declared real — and women were named as their doorway. In places like Sweden, when the Bible became law, anything that existed outside sanctioned doctrine became punishable by death. What was framed as moral order was, in truth, social containment.

We like to believe this thinking belongs to the past.

But history does not require repetition to rhyme.

Today, the mechanisms are quieter, more refined, more profitable. Women have gained visibility and autonomy — and yet remain heavily sexualized, diminished, and framed as objects of consumption. Even the youngest generations are drawn into systems that reward self-objectification for attention and validation. When a culture has not learned its lesson, it simply changes the language.

The Logic of Erasure

The trials were not symbolic.

They were brutally physical.

Women were submerged in water.

If they floated, they were declared guilty and executed.

If they sank and drowned, they were declared innocent.

Pause here.

Consider the logic.

If a woman floated and survived, she lived long enough to tell what had been done to her. She could speak. She could remember. She could name those who accused her, bound her, lowered her into the water.

If she sank and drowned, she was innocent — but silenced.

In either outcome, the system remained intact.

No testimony survived.

Truth was not the objective.

Erasure was.

The ritual was not designed to discover guilt.

It was designed to ensure that no woman lived long enough to disrupt the story being told about her.

Children were tortured into false confessions.

Some were subjected to mock executions.

Sisters were forced to testify against one another under threat to their infants.

Women were buried in the ground, thrown from cliffs, burned, erased.

This Was Not Long Ago

And this is not ancient history.

The last known execution by burning in Sweden occurred only 170 years ago.

A woman was taken for a man’s sexual use.

When she was no longer needed —

when silence could no longer be assured —

she was burned.

Not for witchcraft.

Not for heresy.

But because a woman’s body had been treated as disposable, and her voice as dangerous.

What followed did not end with fire.

It continued through language.

How the Story Was Rewritten

The word witch itself became a spell — crafted to collapse womanhood into something suspect, dangerous, and other. Over generations, stories were rewritten. Softened. Distorted. Mythologized. What was lived became legend. What was done to women became folklore, costume, caricature.

This is how systems learned to desensitize truth.

It was no longer necessary to destroy the body if the narrative could be altered. Through repetition, omission, and fabrication, ancestral memory was fractured. Authenticity was splintered. Women learned to doubt their intuition, mistrust their perception, and police their own knowing — without always remembering why.

These were not accidents of language.

They were crafted.

Words were used as containment.

Stories as spells.

Silence as enforcement.

What was feared most was never magic.

It was female power — especially female sexuality, intuition, and embodied relationship to the natural world. Across cultures and continents, the same pattern repeated: the body of the woman became the battleground.

And while we may no longer be burned at the stake, many of these mechanisms remain.

Not as spectacle.

Not as alarm.

But as conditioning.

When History Learns to Disguise Itself

The mechanisms reappear when women are reduced to images rather than honored as beings.

When intuition is dismissed but sexual availability is rewarded.

When visibility is offered without sovereignty.

When attention replaces attunement.

Yet memory has not been erased.

It lives in the body.

In breath.

In movement.

In the quiet return to land.

Where the Remembering Lives

There are moments — often simple ones — when remembrance rises without effort. A woman moving through forest or jungle, breath steady, feet meeting earth, nervous system settling into rhythm. In those moments, something older than words surfaces. Not fear. Not prophecy. Just recognition.

The knowing of why she is here.

The sense of what she came to untangle.

The clarity that ancestral fractures are not carried forever — they are resolved through presence.

And sometimes, that clarity comes with a cost. But the reward is great.

The Cost of Remaining Intact

When a woman begins to align with her truth, she reconnects with her inner sovereign.

Not through rebellion or separation, but through clarity.

She recognizes that the stories she was given, or have even told herself to reinforce them, they no longer match the truth moving through her body. That the inner tension she feels is not confusion, but discernment asking to be honored. What once felt like unrest reveals itself as knowing.

This remembering is not abstract. It is lived.

It asks her to trust her own perception.

To rely on intuition over inherited narratives.

To choose alignment over familiarity.

From this clarity, sovereignty forms naturally — not as a role to perform, but as a state of coherence.

A woman no longer divided against herself

A woman standing in her truth.

All this makes the cost sustainable, but nevertheless, at times, heartbreaking. And it requires an inner strength to cultivate.

Not because one has failed, our love has failed, but because truth does not always allow what is familiar to remain unchanged. When alignment becomes the guide, attachments built on distortion or compromise begin to loosen on their own.

Yes, this can feel lonely. Yes, it can ache. But the peace and freedom that comes in the release…

When one choses truth over fables. Alignment over attachment. Coherence over comfort.

This is not punishment. It is not failure.

It is the honest cost of remaining intact.

Across lineages — European, Indigenous, Native — women have carried land-based knowing that could not be assimilated. Different histories, different wounds, the same attempted severing from nature, body, and memory. And yet the remembering continues, not through force, but through return.

This is why rerouting back to nature matters.

Grounding into earth, body, breath, and rhythm is not escape — it is coherence. It is how we step outside inherited word spells and reclaim what was never meant to be lost.

And this brings us back to the beginning.

Returning to What Matters

No matter what we grew up believing, it is our work in this lifetime to remember. To set aside the labels that were used to fracture us. To release the word witch and look instead through the lens of womanhood — human, embodied, intuitive, whole.

Not myth.

Not fantasy.

Not fear.

Just women, remembering who we are.

When we restore history, we restore lineage.

When we remember clearly, we become whole.

This is ancestral repair.