The Restoration of The Sisterhood, Part II
By heeding a call to tend the ancestral wounds of the witch persecutions, Cali White forged a new path to collective healing.
This is the second in a two-part series of stories on Cali White’s work to integrate the legacy of Britain’s witch persecutions. You can read the first part here.
“There is witch in our blood. There is witch in our bones. And in the stillness of night, she is calling us home.” — from Unleash the Witches by Cali White.
Resonant World #19
In November, 2019, Cali White packed up her cottage in the English county of Sussex, took to her camper van, and began her commitment to hold 13 full moon ceremonies on a pilgrimage across Britain and Ireland to heal the legacy of the witch trials.
It was a moment of facing her deepest fears — as she let go of everything that had felt familiar, and provided a sense of safety. Could she really learn to trust that her ancestors would guide and support her? Not an easy step for somebody who’d struggled her whole life to ask for help.
To prepare, Cali took a medicine walk asking the question: “How do I hold a ceremony?” The first sign came on a country lane near her cottage, where she noticed something glinting in the middle of the road: A silver spoon — just like her grandmother’s special medicine spoon. The message seemed clear: Each woman to attend a ceremony would bring a silver spoon as an offering to her ancestors.
“Welcome To Join Us”
Having spent most of her savings, Cali framed her lack of money as an invitation to trust in the cycle of reciprocity. She would put the word out via women’s groups; offer her ceremonies on a donation basis; and donate the takings to the reforestation nonprofit Tree Sisters and the women’s rite of passage community Women in Power. Somehow, she always managed to have just what was needed, when it was required.
Cali explained:
“This was my experience of real magic. I think it’s when we’re in full alignment, when we’re attuned and in alignment with Self and Higher Self and purpose, then the right people; the right places; the right experiences come up to meet us, to support us. And that was very much my experience.”
Cali held the first ceremony near where she’d been living in West Sussex, and about 15 women she knew locally came — it felt good to start with some familiar faces. By the time of the next full moon, she’d driven north to visit her mother in Newcastle. On a freezing December day, the Winter Solstice, Cali and four other women made a pilgrimage to Northumberlandia — a local attraction where an artist had reshaped the landscape near an open cast coalmine into the figure of a green goddess — dubbed The Lady of the North.
Walking the paths that run the length of the giant sculpture’s body — and spiral up to viewing points atop her third eye, knees and ankles — the women moved toward the figure’s womb space. Cali played her drum — all the while wondering if the others were secretly thinking she was mad. In the blustery wind and rain it seemed to take forever to set up an altar and light a candle.
Cali recalled:
“I was so nervous and had asked my ancestors for nobody else to be there that day. Just as we were finally getting started this family appear: A woman with two daughters, a son and a husband, comes gushing up and says: “Oh, what are you doing? Are you witches?”
“I said: “Um, erm… We’re just going to have a little ceremony. We’re honouring our ancestors that were persecuted as witches. She said: “Oh wow, that sounds amazing!” I had an impulse to say: “You’re welcome to join us.”
While the father and son and younger daughter sheltered in the café, the woman and her older daughter stayed. Cali sensed that seven participants was somehow just the right number, and it felt like a powerful ceremony. It later transpired that the woman was from Australia, where she ran a radio show called “The Witching Hour.”
Weaving Threads
These kinds of unexpected connections gradually began to weave a field of resonance that drew in more and more women — until 70 participants gathered for the thirteenth and final full moon ceremony Cali held, in the Gloucestershire town of Stroud.
By the end of Cali’s pilgrimage year, some 600 women had taken part in the 13 ceremonies and 20 workshops she’d offered to honor those whose lives were torn apart in the Burning Times — the term coined by the ecofeminist author Starhawk in a 1990s documentary about the era of the witch hunts, when across Europe and particularly in Scotland, the bodies of executed witches were burned
“The resonance was really strong and more and more people came. I think what is happening is that there’s enough of us now in the past 20 or 30 years who have been doing our individual, personal, childhood work, that we’re now open and able enough to feel into, and want to do, the collective work.
“Somehow that made sense to me. I’d learned about the collective unconscious years before, but I couldn’t access it then. It made sense intellectually, but I didn’t really get this bigger system — this fishbowl that we’re all swimming in.”
As more women began to share their struggles in the circles she held through her Silver Spoons Collective, Cali observed how the shared act of honoring the memory of those accused of witchcraft cast present-day emotional wounds, blocks and insecurities into a new light.
So many women carried fractal expression of bigger patterns at work in the collective. A partial inventory would include trauma from all kinds of abuse; lifelong insecurities; patterns of self-sabotage and lack of self-worth; feeling silenced, creatively blocked, or struggling to speak up; patterns of competition, envy and never feeling good enough; being dominated, subjugated and controlled.
For many participants, the sense of safety and trust they experienced in these spaces allowed them to begin to release suppressed layers of grief, anger or fear. And as this healing process began to unfold, the women began to come into contact with forgotten gifts, creative impulses and new callings.
“Smashing Up”
As Cali’s pilgrimage year gathered pace, she developed a deeper sense of why the call to tend the ancestral wounds of the witch trials seemed to resonate so strongly.
In Cali’s reading, the start of the 300-year period of witch persecutions that began in the 15th century marked a watershed moment in the experience of being a woman.
For centuries, women had carried ancestral memories of the terror caused by the waves of violent invaders that had crashed over the British Isles — all the way back to the Celts, Romans and Vikings. But in those times, a woman at least knew that she would live or die in a close-knit community sharing the same fate.
Accusations of witchcraft cast that old certainty aside. Whispers that began within a woman’s village — perhaps even around her own hearth — could lead to her being imprisoned; tortured; put on trial and publicly hanged. The minority of men accused of witchcraft would fare little better.
In Cali’s view, the witch hunts would seed a belief — passed down through 20 generations — that it was no longer safe to be a woman.
And this traumatic imprint didn’t just colour the quality of being experienced by individual women — it ruptured relationships between women too. In England, most of the accusers, and those making written complaints against witches, were women.1
Cali explained:
“So the resonance in the field was that it’s not safe to be a woman — within my own family, within my own community. At any moment, for no reason, I can be accused of being a witch.
“I called it the ‘Smashing up of the Sisterhood.’ Our ancestors were forced to betray each other, under torture — because there was a belief that witches didn’t work alone. In those days the only other women you knew were either in your family or in your community. It sowed a big seed of mistrust and betrayal between women, which continues to play out, and with every generation it gets worse and worse and worse.”
Cali’s work aimed to knit this sisterhood back together — and before long she had a suitcase containing 501 silver spoons. Her ancestors guided her to use these offerings as part of a “collective, creative healing project.”
And so it was that the vision for an experiential exhibition was born, and 32 women would step in to make it happen.
Creative Voice
Caren Thompson found Cali’s work at about the time she had lost two women in her own maternal line. Born in the Ribble Valley in Lancashire, she had grown up with the story of the Pendle witch trials of 1612, which had taken place near where she lived.
It was one the best recorded witch trials in English history: Twelve people living around Pendle Hill had been accused of using witchcraft to commit 10 murders. One of the accused died in prison, and another was acquitted. The rest — eight women and two men — were convicted and hanged.
The main witness against a defendant named Elizabeth Device was her daughter Jennet, who was about nine years old. When Jennet was brought before the court, she testified that she had seen her mother ask a familiar — who appeared in the form of a brown dog — for help with various murders. As Device, who vehemently maintained her innocence, began screaming and cursing at her daughter, the judge ordered the defendant be removed from the courtroom. The trial lasted tow days. Device was hanged immediately afterwards along with other convicted witches at Gallows Hill.
Caren’s healing intention was clear:
“I am powerfully and fearlessly healing my maternal lineage and the witch wound of trauma, though connecting with my sisters and finding my creative voice.”
Working through ingrained patterns of self-doubt with the help of the group, Caren came up with an idea to create a Medicine Spoon Memorial, a collection of hand-created prayer flags, each one honouring the name of a woman persecuted as a witch from across the UK and Ireland.
This collaborative project would help Caren rewire her patterns of self-doubt and fear of judgment. More than 1,500 people from all over the world accepted her invitation to take part in stitching pieces of fabric to commemorate the 4,000 women whose names lay in the witch trial records. Though almost overwhelming, this show of support delighted Caren — and helped her transmute a deep-rooted experience of disconnection, and rediscover her creativity.
The Medicine Spoon Memorial formed one of the many contributions of art, music, poetry, sculpture and other creative works to emerge from the Silver Spoons Collective that would then be displayed at the the month-long I Am Witch exhibition that Cali and her collaborators staged at The Storey in Lancaster in January last year.
Caren’s vision had offered a tangible way for women to stitch back the bonds of sisterhood torn during the Burning Times.
Not Just The Witch
While Cali made plenty of space to tend to the pain the women carried, whatever its source, she wanted to support participants in the ceremonies to move beyond a sense of purely female victimhood to understand how the witch hunts might have affected society as a whole.
Cali explained:
“One of the most important things that I feel I’ve brought to women and their understanding of this — the Burning Times — is that it’s not just about the witch. It’s about the whole community — men women and children.”
Historians reckoned that about 150 people were needed to stage a witch trial — from judicial officials, to witnesses, and supporters of the accusers and accused.
“When women come with the ‘I was burned at the stake in a past life’ they are carrying the victim side. We aren’t just the victims here — we’re also the perpetrators, the women that gossiped and accused other women out of jealousy, anger, hatred even. This is the shadow work: We have to own that we carry both sides. We’ve all had ancestors that were the victims and the perpetrators. That patterning is in us.”
Cali had found that working with these ancestral wounds could serve as a powerful antidote to the kind of envy and competition, and tendency to keep each other small, that she had so often encountered in her previous life in the corporate world, and that could still derail communities dedicated to healing.
“That’s something that’s been passed down and down the generations: We stay small to stay safe; we don’t speak up; we don’t rock the boat; we avoid conflict. It’s like we’re the peacemakers in families. We put other people first. When women do step up and put their heads above the parapet and are successful, we’re jealous of them, we’re envious. We’re competitive, we compare.”
The kind of inner work Cali advocated, in community, aimed to heal the root traumas, aggravated by the portrayal of women in the media, and the pressures of social media, that left so many women at war with each other — and themselves.
“Misogyny is not just men that hate women: We hate ourselves. Misogyny exists within the hearts of women too — and sometimes more viciously than in men.”
Cali elaborated:
“We’ve been sold this lie that power is finite, that 95 percent of it belongs to the men, and five percent is left for us women — and we have to scrap over it.
“But actually power comes through authentic connection and it’s infinite. I can’t shine and live my full potential unless you do, and you can’t do that unless she does. The more we’re lifting each other up, the better life becomes for everyone.”
As Cali finished her tale, I was struck by the sheer scale of the impact she had achieved as a result of doing the intense personal work to clear a pathway to her ancestors (as described in the first part of this story in Resonant World #18). By first making that connection — and then heeding her ancestors’ call — she had embarked on a journey that had not only transformed her own life, but touched thousands of others, through her ceremonies and workshops — and the I Am Witch exhibition. I suspect the ripples generated far-reaching effects at subtler levels still.
“It gave people permission to feel things that maybe they hadn’t had permission to feel, to start to talk about things that they’ve never been able to talk about, and also showed people a way of how to heal this stuff.”
By creating a focal point for people to experientially engage with the Silver Spoons Collective, Cali had shown how collective healing can viscerally shift people’s experience of their present — and create new visions for their future.
“None of the 32 women who bravely shared their inner journeys would ever have thought in their lifetime they would be part of an exhibition like that, and feel so supported in their inner work, and in their creative work. We could never have predicted the incredible response from our visitors. It was a beautiful thing.”
And all that had occurred because Cali had learned to listen — and trust — her ancestors’ call.
Further Resources
Here are some links I came across while researching this series:
Practitioners: Cali White’s website and the Silver Spoons Collective. I AM WITCH: Tales from the Roundhouse, the Exhibition guidebook detailing the stories of the 32 women who contributed, is available for purchase here.
Campaign: In 2020, a campaign was launched in Scotland to pardon about 2,500 women who were executed for witchcraft, often after prolonged torture, and for a national memorial to be created.
Podcast: Witches of Scotland.
Map: Atlas of Witch Persecutions in Southern France.
Article: Why Europe was overrun by witch hunts in early modern history.
Books: In Defense of Witches: The legacy of the witch hunts and why women are still on trial.
I write Resonant World in my spare time from my job as an editor at DeSmog, a nonprofit news service investigating the vested interests holding up action on climate change. It’s hugely rewarding to me when readers engage with; share; comment or otherwise find value in my posts. And I appreciate everyone’s kind contributions — your support makes a material difference in enabling me to do this work. Thank you!
This is moving Matthew. I love hearing about Cali White and her inspiration, courage and determination. I have long been fascinated by the witch trials but was never so aware of how they divide society and thus weaken everyone. We see this played out today in U.S. politics.
BTW, I too am in TWT, US half. Good work. Thank you for it. Susan Singh
Wow this is wonderful, thank you for sharing Cali’s story.