Before I explore the three levels of the witch wound, I found a quote that sums up all three levels of deep racial wounding that we can look at the witch wound through:
Resmaa Menakem, MSW, LICSW, SEP had a quote that gets to the heart of generational trauma and how it shows up in our lives in his book, “My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies”:
“Trauma decontextualized in a person can look like personality. Trauma decontextualized in a family can look like family traits. Trauma in a people can look like culture.”
When looking at inherited trauma and genetics in a person, the witch wound is one that became encoded from either experiencing it from a bloodline that either actually did practice magic or didn’t, but was accused of it. It can also come from people living in the same village during a witch trial where the family saw what happened when someone was accused and tortured or killed after being accused of being a witch. It can also come from families who grew up near a witch trial or even spread across a country.
“If you or someone is a witch, you will be found out and punished” finds its way into one’s DNA similar to racial trauma. While racial trauma is much more widespread in America and deeply part of the healing the country needs to do, the witch wound is similar.
From what I seen with people’s shirts of “We are the daughters of the witches you couldn’t burn,” some view it as empowering to them which makes sense since the person wearing it either has worked to overcome their fear of being different, of being magical, and are stepping forward to make others feel that they can be their magical selves. Others might view it as being out of touch in America — other countries around the world have punished supposed witches in various ways such as burning at the stake (the most dramatic) or hung,
Even more horrifying than looking at generational trauma, the persecution of those believed to be witches is still ongoing in Africa, so the trauma isn’t just generational there, it’s an ongoing crime against innocents. To go into detail, I recommend “Hajia’s Story” from https://www.forb-learning.org/stories/hajias-story-witch-hunts-in-africa/
The link above explains how “the other” is still persecuted there — “Women whose appearance is ‘unappealing’ as a result of hunger, disease, disfigurement or a disability are the main targets, with most charges being made in rural villages. These women are considered a burden.” Even children and young women are being accused of witchcraft.
Even if someone is a devout person of the majority faith of the location they are in, accusing someone of witchcraft has been a powerful weapon against the innocent.
I imagine some woman rebuffing a man who made a pass at them generations ago being called a witch while another who might have, out of fear, allowed the pass to happen is accused a witch for leading a “godly man” astray. It was (and still is) a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation for women culturally.
And that culture of “don’t speak up, don’t make waves, don’t draw attention to yourself” is something that is more than just the persecution of witches — it still haunts our American culture as well as other countries to this day.
In many families, mothers have taught daughters how to be safe and not either attract too much attention and how to fly under the radar so they aren’t punished for someone else’s imagined entitlement.
While people of color and women have had to struggle with how to not cause waves or stay small for centuries in America and elsewhere, witches and those attracted to magic who want to live a magical life have a similar fear that’s a deep part of how we were brought up.
This generational trauma is passed down through families, including magical families. While I grew up only seeing my grandparents twice a year due to distance — living down in Georgia while my grandparents were up in New Hampshire — my cousins who lived in New England got to hear stories from my grandmother about her gifts and her mother’s gifts. It was something they were exposed to and, because of that, they felt safer within the family to acknowledge their gifts and potentially embrace them as being more natural.
In Atlanta, I didn’t get any generational healing for me to embrace my own gifts. While my parents allowed me to be me, I still didn’t have any such guidance. It also seems that my grandmother explained her stories about familial gifts to her granddaughters, but not necessarily her daughters or sons. So, my being into magic wasn’t something I was encouraged to explore (or that any gifts I might have shown were natural).
While my witch wound is something I’m still working on overcoming (hence these posts as I work through it), I know others have had it worse with religious upbringings that punished anything of the sort that was out of line. I’ll get into societal and familial more in my next post.
