A Time For Burning
If You're a Woman In Election Despair, Read This
There are times in life you feel powerless. When forces outside your control create such horror and despair it’s basically a sedative. Exhaustion takes over. A full-body weakness caused by a parasite that won’t. stop. taking.
When you feel this hopeless all you can manage is automation—going through the motions of your life as an outsider—watching yourself cross off a to-do list of responsibilities just to grant permission to collapse on the couch and disassociate. We make ourselves numb to do it again tomorrow.
You are not alone in this robotic response. It’s a survival strategy and a damn good one. If everyone in a crisis became bedridden nobody would solve it. Doctors need to keep showing up for patients just like teachers do for students—our drudgery goes on, but I can’t be alone in that gut punch of an election. The cruel reality of who we are and where we are headed as a nation.
No doubt, these are stressful times. We watch wildfires from our decks and floodwaters rise to our doorsteps; praying we’re not the town in the news this week. We distract ourselves from the climate crisis with the fear of losing our democracy. We distract ourselves from the fear of losing our democracy with the fear of losing our agency. And we succumb to that dread because we feel powerless to stop it.
Women reading this right now, listen when I say this:
You have been taught your entire life that you aren’t powerful. This is a lie.
Men are taught they are powerful. Even in our lonely modern society, desperate men understand that if they follow a leader, they can be strong—an army or a union, a force for change. But us women have been trained since birth to submit. The smaller, younger, prettier, quieter, and more submissive the better. And even if you weren’t taught that at home, the rest of the world made sure you got the message.
So what the hell are we supposed to do about it?
Witchcraft.
You need to practice some fucking witchcraft.
The Practice of Magic
I started studying witchcraft at 17 and have been practicing ever since. If you are picturing me chanting in the dark in front of a candle with some tarot cards and it’s making you roll your eyes, want to click away, or possibly uneasy; hold that thought, darling. It’s important you remember exactly how reading that first sentence felt.
I am telling you upfront a disciplined magic(k)al practice is the only way an endeavor such as Cold Antler could exist. I’ll explain everything, but be warned witchcraft isn’t as sexy or spooky as it sounds. Real magic has nothing to do with spells in movies, or fantasy novels, demons, or satan (or any other mythology). Witchcraft isn’t that complicated and it certainly isn’t evil. It’s just magic.
Witchcraft is the practice of natural magic. Magic is believing you already possess the power to change your life and lives around you.
That’s it. That’s all magic ever was.
Boil, Toil and Trouble
The reason we are taught to fear witches is because we’re trained in a thousand subtle (and unsubtle) ways to judge any grown woman without a husband, children, employer, state, or god as incorrect. There are some that would even say she’s immoral. What could be more against the traditional mindset than a woman that doesn’t need to submit to anyone but herself?
Witchcraft is spooky shit but only to assholes and the uneducated. Not because women are conjuring demons or making deals with the devil, but because there are people who believe it’s demonic to believe woman deserve power at all.
It’s not the fearful’s fault. It’s been a smear campaign of centuries convincing “good” women that believing in your own agency is an affront to god. That you were created to serve, not lead. You have been taught this by men in front of congregations, governments, and communities for thousands of years, based on a book written by other men hundreds of years after the death of their human/deity hybrid, explaining to women they are born inferior and sinful and are destined to a life of submission. And if we do as we are told like good little girls we will certainly be rewarded
after. we. die.
By the way, if that’s the life you want to live, I completely support it. Whatever your faith dictates is your business, not mine. America currently has freedom of religion:
The First Amendment states:. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;
but if these people get what they want the only religious freedom you’ll have is choosing which church you want to attend. The far-right thinks their preferred religion is right for all Americans. Directly against the founding ideals of this nation.
We’re heading into a theocratic shitstorm that is aggressively trying to force more women into traditional roles through the power of the state. Taking away choices about what happens to our bodies, who we can love, when we can become mothers, make it harder to leave an abusive marriage, and that’s just the start. There are men that feel the world is growing dangerous and chaotic without women back in their place. This is, unfortunately, nothing new.
But these conditions are exactly why magic exists.
Blood Rituals & Golden Chalices
I was raised with high-ritual magic every Sunday growing up. I watched men in flamboyant robes holding golden chalices explaining in sing-song Latin they turned a rice wafer into the body of a dead Palestinian from the bronze age. There were gory statues of this dying man all over the place, blood coming out of joints, torso, and head. We even had miniature versions of this dying man around the house, even in my childhood bedroom. This was considered normal and good. Me reading about stones and herbs from British folklore was considered deviant. It is amazing what we consider normal because it is common*.
Pertaining to those weekend blood rituals, no one in the congregation (to my knowledge) actually believed the wine turned to blood, but we all respected the ceremony because we were taught it was special. Ritual makes the mundane holy. Everyone understands the robes and bells create sanctity... However, the actual magic happening wasn’t turning a wafer into meat, it was convincing the people in the pews that the man in the dress had spiritual authority over them.
People that study witchcraft don’t think they are Hermione Granger, making things levitate or transfigure. We are not casting spells in foreign languages, that’s a Catholic mass. But do you understand how storybook witchcraft is a metaphor for female empowerment?
The fact little girls reading Harry Potter know Hermione is the smartest and most capable character is the magic, not the silly spells in the book.
That’s the reason witches are usually portrayed as evil. Because women that can’t be controlled are labeled difficult, dangerous, or eccentric outcasts because of our lack of compliance.
You think those men were burning monsters? They were burning us.
Herbs and Candles
Witchcraft has traditionally been practiced by women because we’re the ones that needed it. We had to secretly and symbolically cultivate our power, because unlike men, we weren’t trained to think we were born with it.
The reason magic is always portrayed as rituals with locks of hair, poppets, and eye of newt is because the idea a women were formidable was laughable. She must know some secret lore from dark forces if she possess any influence or competence at all.
Years ago, when we were traded like livestock and chess pieces, it was inconceivable we could choose our futures. So when you see witchcraft in movies practiced with herbs, gem stones, and symbols scratched in candles; baby that’s just furniture and theatre kid shit. Leftovers from times in history women felt so helpless they needed to believe “special ingredients” were necessary to grant their own buried abilities.
That magic was like following a recipe. You’ve seen this a million times, from Shakespeare to Hocus Pocus to the spell books at Barnes & Noble. That kind of witchcraft is obsessive-compulsive folklore, the needing to believe a specific herb or moon phase is what gives you permission to be more.
Here’s how to give yourself that permission:
Practical Magic
My practice is simple. If I am feeling terrified or hopeless or lost, I will find a time before dawn or after dusk when the world is quieter. Not because I am doing something secret in the shadows, but because it’s easier to focus when it’s not the middle of the day and you have a thousand things to do.
I turn off the lights and sit in meditation. I’ll light one candle—not because the candle has any special properties—but because it reminds me that in darkness a single flame makes enough light to cast shadows, to see what’s actually going on.
Next to that candle I will set something that reminds me of what I have accomplished with my power before: like my half-marathon medal, or a picture of me on horseback - any object that symbolizes something hard I achieved with my own merit. If I was a mother, there would be a picture of my child because what is more powerful than bringing life into this world?
And sitting quietly before that candle and object, those symbols of hope and accomplishment, the only things I can see in the light. I calm down from the low hum of anxiety that’s become the norm. I breath. I let all the chaos in my head swirl until it settles like leaves after a whirlwind. Once I am no longer in the same place as doom scrolling or bill pacing - I can actually remember who I am.
And in that silence, in that holy space I decided was holy, that I claimed as sacred when I need sanctity—not when I was told I could receive it—I start focusing on what I need.
If I am worried about money I spend that time thinking of ways I can earn it and believe I will. I remind myself that I have managed to live here 15 years and never once gave up on myself. I remind myself I’ve always had the ability to do this. I always had the power to dictate my own choices, faith, and future. I remind myself I am everything I need.
When I said Cold Antler Farm isn’t possible without magic, that is what I meant. That every time I feel helpless and can’t possibly keep going, it’s been these traditions handed down from generations of strong women that taught me what I am capable of.
Do you remember how that sentence up top saying I do witchcraft made you feel? Did you think I was some flake or sinner? Whatever you’re first thought was, I bet it wasn’t great. Do you understand now that you have been conditioned to think a woman creating power is ridiculous? Do you understand the fear was meant to keep you from trying?
All I am doing with my magic is getting my life still enough to solve problems and keep my independence. And that is why witchcraft is, and always will be, considered evil. Magic gives power to women without the permission of men or god. We will be seen as evil until more women reclaim who they always were.
Do you think I would have attempted this life had I not already believed I could create it? To see the beautiful, idealistic, and impossible as inevitable? No. Of course not. But I wasn’t some 27-year-old idiot buying a farm. I was a woman owning her power. I was only in a position to even buy a farm because I had spent years writing and sharing my story about my dream, and other people found me, encouraged me, and helped make it happen. The luck, threats, contributions, customers, and clients all came from people who found me because of what I put out into the world. Love me or hate me, that is the power you’re giving me. It’s time to take up the craft and start doing it for yourself.
I draw from this energy every morning. It’s in me but it’s also in the women I admire and surround myself with. It’s our everyday lives steering us towards a better world. It’s in every laugh that makes it hard to breath and every sob that makes me want to die. The energy that is me, a powerful force that gets to live on this planet a few more decades if I’m lucky, creating her own destiny in the darkness of despair.
And I am not more exceptional or clever than anyone else who can read. I just started believing I had power when I was a teenager, and never relinquished it without leaving claw marks. And I have books about folkways and long-dead puritans to thank for that. Women taught me.
Powerful Women
I was a 17-year-old girl when I learned that the world was bigger than America, men, and Catholicism. That in a better age women ruled kingdoms and lead armies—that our ancestors who created philosophy, democracy, and civilization bowed before goddesses. My practice is understanding that I descend from such women. So do you.
I am a very powerful woman. I don’t mean affluent or popular or influential. I am not ever using the term power to mean control. When I say power I mean my capacity, my endurance, my refusal to relent.
Do you have any idea how rare it is through history for a woman to be self-employed on her own farm without a husband or family, even today? To be a published author and openly queer!? To choose what gives me meaning, joy, reverence, and pleasure and never again including men or motherhood? You don’t need to throw in demons or any other imaginary friends to see how women like me will always be seen as a threat. Especially to men that could never accomplish what I have.
I am powerful. It isn’t something that can be taken from me, it is me. I am talking about my sense of self. I am talking about my confidence. I am talking about knowing exactly who I am, what I have accomplished, what I believe and practice, and how I wish to live. I am not concerned about the how. I am the how. I am concerned about being remembered. I am concerned about being of use. And I am deeply concerned other women will die thinking they didn’t deserve the potential they already have.
This coming administration wants less witches. The vice-president elect disdains what he calls “childless cat ladies” [read: women without a husband and family at the center of their lives]. They are still trying to make you believe a woman’s power is illegitimate. They are terrified of us. Why do you think they’re doing this?
I’ll tell you what, JD. Let’s have you and Taylor Swift walk into different ends of an airport and see which one of you has the more power? We all know that he might draw some attention, sure, but the airport would have to shut down if she was just flying commercial. And when a man sells his soul to billionaires and a petty tyrant to belly-crawl all the way to the office of Vice President and an unmarried childless woman with three cats spent the last two years selling out stadiums, writing about her feelings… It must sting. She made her power from scratch like every other witch.
A Time For Burning
If we’re heading into The Burning Times again, this time it won’t be us. Let it not be our bodies but our collective rage that burns down injustice, sexism, racism, and patriarchy under duress. Do not let them convince you to be dim when your rights are being taken away. This is a time for burning.
We need more witches. We need more magic. We need more women to understand no-one else controls your destiny. You’re going to see new laws that will make it harder to be a woman in this country, And why? Because men forgot how to be wanted when they were no longer needed*.
Magic is one of the countless reasons I love women. We are so powerful that even during historic periods of oppression, slavery, and trafficking to expand mens’ wealth and property - we still found a way to sneak off into the woods and find our power and we always will.
You have been trained to forget. Magic is the practice of finding it again.
You aren’t weak. You’re incredible. You are a creator, mother, lover, warrior, and poet. You are the bedrock of civilization and the answered prayer at the end of desire. Of course men want to control that, but you have to be complicit. And only women that feel powerless, either by divine mandate or years of abuse, will let them. It doesn’t have to be this way. We are not out of time. We are all in this together.
Light a candle in the dark and accept your power.
The things you were taught to fear will save you.
Well done ❤️
Outstanding, Jenna! Preach! I wish I was closer to NY so I could give you a giant hug! I feel encouraged that the sisterhood will go on despite all efforts to keep us subservient.