Sword and wordS

Once upon a time,
before the printing press:
blood at the tip of the Sword.

At the birth of the printing press:
blood at the spin into wordS.

Sword and wordS; each have killed.

Shortly after its invention in 1450,
the printing press
propagated propaganda
massively,
said here’s what a witch is

and here’s how to kill her:

Malleus Maleficarum, or The Hammer of Witches, published in 1486,

the Catholic Church’s official witch hunting guide for three hundred years,

classified witches as “women able to heal” and “take away injury.”

A healing ability presenting “greatest injury” to the Catholic Church,

because you see, these wise women,
with their abundant herbal remedies
tested by years of use,
were a threat

to the newest trend
of university-trained male physicians
who, under the Church’s support and approval
were practicing medicine
with guesswork,
not experience or medical study,
but Plato and Christian theology.

(So great was the witches’ knowledge that in 1527,
Paracelsus, the father of modern medicine,
burned his text on pharmaceuticals, confessing
he ‘had learned from the Sorceress all he knew.”[1])

And the Catholic Church fiercely declared,
“If a woman dare to cure without having studied
she is a witch and must die.”

And, of course coincidentally,
women weren’t allowed in university to study.

Systematically
thousands of women were murdered

for healing,
for loving and living
a wisdom independent of
“male expert” forceps
and thereby threatening
the establishment
of patriarchal dogma.

Wise women were deemed “evil”
unwelcome witches on the wrong side
of God and Law, that new establishment
built in women’s pools of blood,
pyres of bone and ash,

our grandmothers who knew things
murdered by sword and words,

murdered, not because they were witches
but because they were wise,

murdered

for living

truths rooted in bloodstone soil
births guided by hands of midwives
prayer grounded in mortar and pestle with
blue cohosh, elderberry, dandelion, digitalis.

And so it persisted, for too many years,
a calculated oppression of women,
a linear progression of wealthy old men, who,

from their gold encrusted stained glass balconies, 
from above their pounding sound of gavels, 
from behind the twisting of their forceps, 
and with sweeping gestures of their pens, 
made repeated declarations:

“Women have no right to an agency of any kind,
especially not over their reproductive lives.”

And today, there’s nothing
fiction or finished about that story:

A woman’s reproductive power is
still in the hands of wealthy men

bound

by a religious, medical, and political discourse
fueled by war metaphors and power-over paradigms.
Our government’s governed by man’s God and Law.

Men disproportionately dominate
the airwaves, the ivory hallways,
corporate media monopolies, and the healing profession:

still practicing medicine.

BUT
one difference between then and now:
y’know all those witches who were
hung, stabbed, drowned, and burned?

Well, we’ve returned,

with Sword transformed into wordS reborn
re-membered, re-written, re-visioned, re-formed:
lifetimes of stories,
of poems and songs,
our sacred texts
of voice and womb
word blood,
womb blood,
moon blood,
birth blood

our power
we share
with dignity.

Priests, presidents, and physicians,
release my uterus from your grip!
It is not yours to hold.

I grab the umbilical cord of generations,
swing through the lifetimes to find my roots,
to unlock the uterine blocks
and release the flow of blood and words,
dignity and power of our mothers and sisters,
creative process of giving birth.

Words birth
from the cervix of my throat and
slip through the canal
on my red river tongue.

I birth words
and watch them flow,
watch them grow a life their own:

We come

we come from

the grandmother placenta

Our umbilical cord is a lifeline,

snaking through the lifetimes,

spiraling

down

head

first

into

the

earth…

spiraling

like a lava serpent

entwining

its way to the crystal core

then cradling

the iron cauldron

that collects and holds our stories,

our words

bleeding from our womb in a flood

ruby words of pomegranate love

words bleeding from our womb

like sea stars that slip away

like seed memories

taking root.

---

[1] P 38, For Her Own Good, Ehrenreich and English.

--written by Diana Tigerlily