Why the Witch Hunts Are Not in the Past.
A journey through 21,000 years of history in the Dordogne Valley revealed the shocking truth about how we lost our connection to the sacred feminine—and why it matters more than ever today.
The croissants were still warm when I carried them back to our rental house that morning in the Dordogne, the French countryside stretching endlessly under a sky that seemed to hold centuries of stories. I had come to southwestern France ostensibly for family time, though truthfully, I was here on a mission. As a fantasy author writing a witchy trilogy about ancient immortals who orchestrate the witch hunts, I needed to understand what it would feel like to witness millennia of human history unfold in a single place.
I thought I was prepared for what I might discover. I was wrong.
The Dordogne Valley holds human history in layers. The river that gives the region its name has carved through limestone cliffs for millions of years, creating caves that became humanity’s first homes and canvases. This region holds some of Europe’s most significant archaeological sites, including evidence of early human habitation dating back over 400,000 years. Neanderthals left substantial traces of their presence throughout the valley, crossing paths with early Homo sapiens in a landscape that would witness the entire arc of human civilization.
Nothing prepared me for what I would feel when I encountered the devastating truth about how we moved from goddess worship to systematic torture in the span of human history.
When History Collides
After several days of exploring medieval villages and local markets with my family, we decided to visit one of the region’s most remarkable archaeological sites. The approach to Maison Forte de Reignac, known as The Cliff Chateau, is dramatic—this fortress carved directly into a limestone cliff face rises like something from a fairy tale. As we walked toward the entrance, I could see the medieval rooms carved into the living rock.
This extraordinary site represents one of the last cliff fortresses in France, inhabited continuously from prehistoric times through the medieval period. The castle rooms are carved directly into the rock face, creating a vertical fortress that protected its inhabitants for centuries. Walking through its chambers feels like stepping through a time machine, each level representing a different era, each era telling a different story about humanity’s relationship with the sacred feminine.
In the lower levels, among the prehistoric artifacts and displays, I found myself face-to-face with Venus figurines dating back to the Paleolithic era—those small, powerful sculptures archaeologists have found across Europe. These were real women’s bodies: full-breasted and wide-hipped. They’re sometimes called “grandmother goddesses,” and their abundance across prehistoric Europe tells us something profound about our ancestors’ worldview. These figurines, dating back 25,000 to 30,000 years, suggest that the feminine was revered. The female body, in all its natural forms, was considered sacred. Women’s capacity to create life, to nourish, to embody the cycles of nature, was seen as divine. This was worship made tangible.
Standing there, looking at these ancient tributes to feminine power, I felt a deep sense of recognition. Evidence of a time when women’s wisdom went unquestioned, when their connection to the cycles of life and death was celebrated rather than feared. But as I made my way up through the fortress, through the medieval sections, that sense of wonder began to curdle into something else entirely.
The Chamber of Horrors
The torture chamber was optional—tucked away behind the gift shop. For my research, I knew I had to enter. What I found there shattered something inside me that I’m still trying to piece back together.
“The creativity that went into devising ways to torture, humiliate, and destroy women was breathtaking in its scope and horrifying in its specificity.”
The medieval torture devices filled an entire room, each one more horrific than the last. What struck me with the force of a physical blow was this: the majority of these instruments were designed specifically for women. I know this because they targeted body parts that only women possess. The creativity that went into devising ways to torture, humiliate, and destroy women was breathtaking in its scope and horrifying in its specificity.
There were at least fifty different methods represented. Fifty different ways that human beings, mostly men, had conceived of to break women’s bodies and spirits. The infamous “ducking stool” and burning at the stake were only the beginning. There were devices designed to crush, pierce, stretch, and mutilate specifically female anatomy.
This was purposeful, organized, well-funded destruction of feminine power.
The witch hunts aimed to eliminate an entire way of being, an entire worldview that honored the feminine as sacred.
The Great Forgetting
The progression from the Venus figurines to the torture chamber represents one of the most devastating losses in human history—what we might call “The Great Forgetting.” Between those Paleolithic goddess figures and the medieval torture devices lies a chasm that we’re still trying to cross.
How did we get from worshipping the feminine to systematically destroying it? The witch hunts were the culmination of a much longer process of erasure that began with the rise of patriarchal religions and institutions.
The early Christian church, consolidating power across Europe, needed to eliminate competition. The old ways—the reverence for nature, the celebration of feminine cycles, the understanding that the divine could be found in the earth itself—posed a direct threat to a religious system that located all power in a single, male deity and his male representatives on earth.
The systematic destruction of feminine wisdom coincided with the rise of capitalism, the emergence of modern science, and the beginnings of industrialization. The wise women, the healers, midwives, herbalists, and keepers of ancient knowledge, represented a different relationship with the natural world. They worked with natural cycles, understood plant medicine, and saw themselves as part of nature rather than separate from it.
This worldview had to be destroyed for the new economic and social systems to take hold. Women who understood their own power, who trusted their intuition, who maintained their connection to natural cycles and plant wisdom, were incompatible with systems that required compliance, consumption, and disconnection from the natural world.
The Witch Hunts Never Ended
What became crystal clear to me in that torture chamber: the witch hunts didn’t end in 1750. They evolved.
“When a woman is called “crazy” for trusting her intuition about a dangerous situation, that’s the witch wound.”
The same impulse that drove medieval authorities to torture women for their healing knowledge drives modern systems that criminalize plant medicine, dismiss women’s intuition as “hysteria,” and pathologize female emotional complexity. The same fear of feminine power that led to the burning times now manifests as the systematic suppression of women’s voices in boardrooms, the dismissal of women’s pain in medical settings, and the cultural pressure on women to make themselves smaller, quieter, more palatable.
When a woman is called “crazy” for trusting her intuition about a dangerous situation, that’s the witch wound. When a woman apologizes for taking up space in a meeting before she’s even spoken, that’s the witch wound. When natural healing methods are dismissed as “woo-woo” while pharmaceutical companies profit from synthetic versions of the same plant compounds, that’s the witch wound.
The trauma lives in our collective nervous system. It surfaces every time a woman hesitates to speak her truth, every time she doubts her own knowing, every time she chooses to dim her light rather than risk being seen as “too much.”
The Lascaux Revelation
My experience at the Cliff Chateau had left me reeling, struggling to process the emotional weight of what I had witnessed. I took a few days to recover, spending time with my family in the gardens and visiting the famous Château des Milandes, where Josephine Baker once lived. Eventually, I felt ready to continue my research with a visit to one of the region’s most celebrated prehistoric sites.
The Lascaux Cave replica houses some of humanity’s oldest and most sophisticated artistic achievements. These cave paintings, created during the last Ice Age, offered another crucial piece of the puzzle I was trying to solve. The original cave, discovered in 1940, had to be sealed to preserve the paintings from damage caused by human breath and carbon dioxide. The replica, which took eleven years to create, allows visitors to experience these ancient masterpieces in stunning detail.
I found myself witnessing something that felt sacred. The guide explained that the people who created these masterpieces never lived in the caves. They came specifically to paint, to engage in what was clearly a sacred ritual of artistic creation. When human figures appear in these ancient galleries—which is rare—they’re almost always female, often represented through vulva symbols or goddess figures.
What struck me most profoundly was the reverence with which the animals were painted. The horses, bison, deer, and aurochs were honored with every brushstroke. Our ancestors saw themselves as part of the web of life, their understanding of themselves as part of, rather than apart from nature. They understood that the natural world was sacred, that animals possessed their own power and wisdom. Or at least, that’s how I interpreted it.
This visit cemented something that had been growing in my consciousness since I first saw those Venus figurines: there once was a different way of being in the world. A time when both the feminine and the natural world were revered, when art was prayer, when the divine was understood to be present in every living thing.
The Connection Between Feminine Erasure and Environmental Destruction
The destruction of feminine wisdom and the destruction of our natural world are two sides of the same coin. The worldview that could torture women for their plant knowledge is the same worldview that could see forests as resources to be exploited rather than sacred ecosystems to be protected.
When we lost our reverence for the feminine, we lost our reverence for the earth itself. The goddess traditions that the witch hunts destroyed centered on understanding the divine as immanent in nature, present in the cycles of growth and decay, embodied in the living world itself.
The rise of transcendent, sky-god religions that located the divine outside of nature rather than within it created the philosophical framework for environmental destruction. If the earth is not sacred, if nature is not divine, then it becomes acceptable to mine, clear-cut, pollute, and consume without limits. Indigenous cultures around the world, many of which maintained goddess traditions and earth-based spirituality, understood this connection. Colonial powers destroyed these cultures for their worldview, their way of seeing the earth as mother rather than resource.
A Global Tragedy Still Unfolding
While I was in that medieval torture chamber in France, grappling with the historical legacy of the European witch hunts, a sobering reality struck me: this violence against women accused of witchcraft never actually ended. It simply moved beyond Europe’s borders.
Today, across much of the developing world, women continue to be tortured and murdered for being accused of witchcraft. In Papua New Guinea, elderly women are burned alive after being blamed for deaths or misfortunes in their communities. In India, hundreds of women are killed each year—often widows or women who own property—after being labeled as witches. Throughout sub-Saharan Africa, from Ghana to Tanzania, women face brutal violence based on accusations that echo the same fears of feminine power that fueled the European burning times.
The United Nations estimates that thousands of people, predominantly women, are killed annually in witchcraft-related violence. These modern witch hunts target the same types of women who were persecuted in medieval Europe: healers, midwives, elderly women, those who challenge social norms, and often those whose property or independence threatens patriarchal structures. The psychological and spiritual wounds I encountered in that French torture chamber are still being inflicted daily around the world. The witch hunts never ended—they were exported, adapted, and continue to serve the same function they always have: the suppression of feminine power.
Why This Matters Now
Sitting on the porch of our rental house in France, processing what I had experienced, I realized why this research had affected me so deeply. We’re living in a time when the consequences of The Great Forgetting are becoming impossible to ignore. Climate change, environmental destruction, the mental health crisis, the epidemic of disconnection and loneliness… these are all symptoms of the same wound: our disconnection from the sacred feminine, from our own intuitive wisdom, from our understanding of ourselves as part of nature rather than separate from it.
The return to “the old ways” means survival. The wisdom that was destroyed during the witch hunts—the understanding of plant medicine, the respect for natural cycles, the honoring of intuition and embodied knowledge, the recognition of the divine in the natural world—these are exactly what we need to heal our relationship with the earth and with each other. When women trust their intuition, when they honor their connection to natural cycles, when they remember their own power and wisdom—that becomes planetary healing. The same qualities that made women dangerous to patriarchal systems—their refusal to be disconnected from nature, their insistence on honoring the body and its wisdom, their understanding of interconnection and cycles—are exactly the qualities we need to navigate the crises we’re facing.
Returning to the Sacred
I left France with a small Venus figurine in my pocket and a completely transformed understanding of my own work. The witchy fantasy trilogy I’m writing becomes an act of remembrance, a way of honoring the women who were tortured and killed for their wisdom, and a way of calling back the sacred feminine that our world desperately needs.
The torture chamber showed me the depths of the wound. The Venus figurines and the cave paintings showed me something else: the memory of another way of being. That memory lives in our bodies, in our dreams, in our deep longing for connection to something larger than ourselves.
We are not the first generation to face the choice between destruction and reverence, between domination and partnership, between extraction and reciprocity. But we may be the last generation with the power to choose differently. The witch hunts tried to erase the memory of feminine wisdom. That wisdom is still available, still calling to us. It lives in every woman who trusts her intuition, in every person who chooses connection over consumption, in every act of reverence for the natural world. The question remains whether we will choose to remember.
The earth is waiting.
The ancestors are waiting.
The future is waiting.
The choice, as always, is ours.
Hi ♥️, I’m Gisele Stein, author of feel-good novels with a little magic and places like characters, which i craft from my cosy cabin on Wadandi Boodja in Western Australia. Have a look at my books here. I’m also podcasting as The Earthy Writer, to document my rewilding year: Every new moon, I set a new rewilding intention for the month, and every full moon I share my learnings with you…
