Witch-hunts and the origins of capitalism

How demonizing Earth medicine enabled the control of bodies, reproductive labor, and land. Its recovery brings us back.

I finally finished reading Caliban and the Witch, after first learning about this book on the Book on Fire podcast. I highly recommend listening to their series, as they offer a more in-depth summary, analysis, and critique of this dense and now dated book by Silvia Federici, first published in 2004.

As we unravel the United States Empire, it feels helpful to locate the origins of what’s been normalized in Western schooling, economy, and religion.

So many power dynamics and systems of extraction are portrayed as natural in the canons of monotheism, agro-industrialization, and mechanization. The demonization of Earth medicine healers was a strategy enacted by an emergent coalition of wealthy elite men to suppress rebellion at the end of feudalism.

Deep-time December, 2021, natural pigment and gouache on board

Reclaiming Earth medicine ~ or the practices of collective healing in reciprocity and connection to the elements within and around us ~ dismantles Empire and restores balance in everyone’s bloodlines.

I thought that depicting wise women herbal healers (witches) as evil was purely a product of Christianity. In Caliban and the Witch we learn that it was an emergent state’s method to control the reproduction of labor power and dismantle communal lands and the societal threads wefting them. Feudal lords, merchants, bishops, and popes created capitalism to destroy peasant unrest against serfdom and feudal society, often led by women (Federici 21).