Kush: Ancient Sudan. Made this open access for Women's history month, even though every month is #WHM. From Khartoum Neolithic to female icons at Kadruka & el-Kadada to the Kerma culture. Black-on-red pots, a pattern shared with late neolithic Egypt. >
Ivory hippo women, with the same curved knife and crocodile teeth as Kemetic Taweret. Egyptian New Kingdom conquest, and Nubian tribute scenes in murals, with this lady in ostrich feather mega-crown, and captive commoners. The Napatan realm & founders of Egyptian 25th dynasty >

The Sexual Politics of Witchcraft Studies (2001). My response to academic claims that the witch hunts did not involve repression of pagan culture or of women, the denial of medieval hunts and the urge to minimize the scale of witch persecution. >
suppressedhistories.net/secrethistory/… Where we burn one man, we burn maybe ten women.” —von Kaiserback, Die Emeis, early 1500s. The scapegoating of women was a major dynamic in the persecutions. They were the majority of those burned, however you want to slice it: averaging eight females to one male. >

His book, like other Irish penitentials condemning contraception and abortion, indicate that women were using herbal potions to regulate their child-bearing. Magic was part of the birth control arsenal, to such an extent that “The penitentials interpreted magic specifically /10 as abortifacients or love potions.” Later sources repeatedly refer to them as herbal drinks. Shown in OP, commonly used contraceptive herbs: tansy, queen anne's lace (wild carrot seeds), rue, and pennyroyal, clockwise from upper left. facebook.com/333661528320/p…

Herbs, Knots & Contraception: "Early medieval writers show that women used herbal medicine + witchcraft to control their own fertility + childbearing. Bishops in France, Spain, Ireland, England, Germany set canons forbidding women to use potions or ceremony for birth control. /1 Augustine, John Chrysostom & other church patriarchs opposed contraception and abortion. Augustinian doctrine equated sexual pleasure with sin, demanding that couples have sex for procreation only. These theologians established “the classic Christian hostility to contraception /2

A splitting of Gnostic goddess images was underway, subordinating the creative female Wisdom to “the Father.” Christian authors disparaged a goddess not firmly partnered to a male god. Their altered Gnostic aretalogies reflect an emerging concept of a “fallen” goddess. /6 Though Sophia was prominent in Gnostic creation accounts, she was being stripped of the radiant holiness the Egyptians attributed to Isis, and the Hebrews to Khokhmah. The very meaning of her name, Wisdom, was in the process of being abrogated + reversed to a "foolish Sophia." /7

Double disd dvd exploring the rich cultural record of medicine women, seers, oracles, healers, trance-dancers, shapeshifters, and dreamers, around the world. To experience the beauty, power and wisdom of these cultural legacies is medicine for the spirit. A second trailer for Woman Shaman: the Ancients, surveying the cultural record—in rock art, sculpture, ceramics, seals, bronzes, codices. Medicine women, oracles, healers, trance-dancers and shape-shifters, the drummers and dreamers.

Anasyrma—skirt-lifting—has a long international history of female defiance before patriarchal power. Many cultures believed in the vulva's sacred powers. Attackers would flee rather than face its primordial force. Thread. suppressedhistories.net/sacravulva/war… Greeks called it Anasyrma, “skirt-lifting.” Hellenic art on armor, temples, and this Etruscan chariot showed Gorgons baring their vulvas and sticking out their tongues as a way of warding off danger and enemies.