Missing Witches - September 30, 2018


Missing Witches - Ipsita Roy Chakraverti： ＂Every Strong Woman Is A Witch And All Are Hunted＂

Missing Witches： Witches Found - Divination With Reeta Missing Witches： Witches Found - Self Care with Beisha

Episode Stats


Length

38 minutes

Words per minute

138.76

Word count

5,342

Sentence count

239

Harmful content

Misogyny

22

sentences flagged

Toxicity

25

sentences flagged

Hate speech

34

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Warning. The podcast you are about to hear contains coarse language and tells stories of
00:00:08.640 witches. Unfortunately, this history occasionally involves oppression, victimization, physical and
00:00:16.020 sexual violence, and even torture. We at Missing Witches will always concentrate on these women's 0.92
00:00:21.560 power, legacies, victories, and magic, but we can't overlook their struggles or shelter ourselves
00:00:28.580 from reality. We promise never to dwell or be graphic. Email us at missingwitches at gmail.com
00:00:35.420 if you want to be heard. And blessed be. Our story begins in 1960s Montreal.
00:00:44.060 A 10-year-old Indian girl, Ipsida Roy Chakravarti from West Bengal, is about to have the first in
00:00:51.920 a lifelong series of encounters with the supernatural, leading her like breadcrumbs
00:00:57.640 to a life of witchcraft.
00:01:00.280 She'll go on to spend her teenage years 1.00
00:01:02.380 in a secret women's school 1.00
00:01:03.980 devoted to ancient mystery studies
00:01:05.940 in the Laurentians, north of Montreal.
00:01:09.280 Publicly declare herself a witch
00:01:11.160 in India's national press, 1.00
00:01:13.200 and she'll dedicate her life
00:01:14.540 to protecting women from the rape and torture
00:01:16.840 of the modern witch hunt,
00:01:18.880 with an Elvis Presley detour along the way. 1.00
00:01:22.440 You aren't being a proper woman, 1.00
00:01:23.900 therefore you must be a witch. 1.00
00:01:25.120 Be a witch. 1.00
00:01:26.480 Be a witch. 1.00
00:01:26.900 Be a witch.
00:01:27.640 Welcome to episode two of the Missing Witches podcast, where we go looking for the stories 0.94
00:01:36.320 of some of the real, historically badass women who have practiced magic, in the hopes of 0.58
00:01:41.360 not fucking it up too much, of learning something, and finding our way to some of these witches 0.97
00:01:46.720 we've been missing. 0.81
00:01:48.880 Chakraverdi was born on November 3rd, 1950, to diplomat De Babrata Chakraverdi and Romacen,
00:01:56.560 a descendant of blue blood royals. Chakraverti spent much of her early life in Montreal where 0.97
00:02:03.540 her father was stationed as India's permanent representative on the council of the International
00:02:08.360 Civil Aviation Organization. When she was little she read books on Indian mysticism and as an only
00:02:14.600 child of a privileged family she was supported in all her interests and in her independence in a way
00:02:20.700 still out of reach for many of us. She says her mother was a kind of feminist and maybe even a
00:02:27.660 witch in the sense that all strong women are witches. This belief shapes her life and is
00:02:35.380 her message to a world that was and is still profoundly unequal. 2,290 people, mostly women,
00:02:45.580 were killed in India between 2001 and 2014 for witchcraft.
00:02:57.560 It's land and property disputes, the rejection of sexual advances and sexual violence,
00:03:03.920 and family feuds that recur as motivating factors in calling a witch.
00:03:09.440 And infuriatingly, it's often a male witch doctor who gets to make the conviction,
00:03:14.040 cementing his power in precarious times. Witch hunters rape, physically torture and disfigure 0.94
00:03:22.020 women's bodies in contemporary witch hunts and not just in India. Author Dr. Shashank Shekar 0.69
00:03:30.400 Sinha and others describe how this gendered violence increases in a complex relationship
00:03:35.060 to poverty and capitalism and colonialism and nationalism and when famine in West Bengal
00:03:41.740 brings it all to a head again in the 1980s,
00:03:44.480 the witch hunt changes the course of Chakravarti's life,
00:03:47.580 or maybe nudges her onto a path she was always fated for.
00:03:53.860 Back to 1960 Montreal, her family hosts this dinner party
00:03:57.420 with India's leading nuclear physicist, Dr. Homi Baba,
00:04:01.640 an icon in Indian history who had both pushed for India to develop nuclear weapons
00:04:06.460 and then driven development of India's peaceful use of nuclear power.
00:04:11.740 At the dinner, little 10-year-old Depesita doesn't really know who this big deal scientist is, but she feels his power in the room.
00:04:20.120 She stares at his face as he speaks, and suddenly she sees another face, transposed, and she hears another name.
00:04:29.720 In an interview, she said of this moment,
00:04:31.420 I described this as best I could to Dr. Baba. It turned out that I had seen Heinrich Hertz
00:04:37.260 and that he was a German physicist, an early pioneer in establishing the existence of
00:04:43.420 electromagnetic radiation. She sees Heinrich Hertz working with arcing light as a snowstorm
00:04:51.180 howls outside. I thought how strange it was that a man of orthodox science should have had this
00:04:58.080 experience with the mystical should have understood it accepted it and explained it to a child
00:05:04.420 and how strange that so much of her magical thoughts throughout her book beloved witch
00:05:10.680 returns to questions about the energy and power in nature and how we through magic and the magic
00:05:18.840 that would later be called science interact with it early in her book chakra verdi writes
00:05:25.680 I have gleaned wisdom from the old trees on Mount Royal, from the megaliths of Brittany,
00:05:31.960 and from the mysterious rocks of the temple of Konark at Orisa. I know for a fact that other
00:05:39.400 dimensions exist, that we have other senses which are in constant communication with higher planes
00:05:47.560 of knowledge and being. The inanimate lives. The dead do not die. We are immortal.
00:05:57.720 At 15, Ipacita encounters this group of women, a group of about 75 members, she says, which dates
00:06:04.600 back about 80 years, who meet in drawing rooms across North America and Europe. Mental Amazons, 0.99
00:06:12.500 she calls them, including a famous Broadway actress and a widely respected Egyptologist
00:06:17.840 and many more whose identity she keeps secret.
00:06:21.560 This mysterious school, she reveals the name, the Society for the Study of Ancient Cultures
00:06:27.300 and Civilizations, gets talked about a lot in articles about Chakraverde.
00:06:31.980 But even before her acceptance into this secret order or study group or coven, she visits
00:06:39.420 the Kanawake Reservation outside of Montreal.
00:06:42.500 She stays with a First Nations family and is given insight into another tradition,
00:06:48.080 another window into the complex power in the natural world.
00:06:53.100 She writes,
00:06:54.360 One evening we talked of power, what it meant, true power, sources of power and how to find them,
00:07:03.680 and objects which could be made and used to draw in power.
00:07:07.240 my friend mini's grandfather went into the cabin and brought out things he had made or which had
00:07:13.620 been given to him by his ancestors understand them for yourself he told me your mind must
00:07:19.500 always be free as ikai the eagle experience from your own heart wisdom comes from within
00:07:27.340 he held out a long white eagle feather which gave out sparks of light in the dark
00:07:34.920 and in a copper box there lay two or three of the loveliest crystals I have ever seen.
00:07:41.680 Minnie's grandfather smiled. I'm glad you like the gems of yellow woman.
00:07:48.120 These are used to ward off her bad temper. She's whimsical like a storm in the desert sands. 0.97
00:07:56.480 To the native North American Cochiti tribe, she is a predator, a force which devours, 1.00
00:08:02.220 but to some people, yellow woman may show a smiling face 1.00
00:08:06.000 and be a bride, a benefactor, or a heroine.
00:08:11.580 To the Keres, she signifies the total woman.
00:08:16.280 I picked them up one night near Punished Woman's Lake in South Dakota 0.90
00:08:20.600 after a screaming coyote storm. 0.97
00:08:25.240 Yellow woman came in the form of lightning and gave them power,
00:08:28.320 and I have given them power by saying the chants of Father Sky and Mother Earth over them. 0.98
00:08:35.280 They can heal or they can destroy, but then power always has two faces, does it not?
00:08:45.560 In a clearing shaped like a teepee or a cone of power in the woods,
00:08:50.940 Ipsida learns a sun dance, drawing energy from the earth,
00:08:55.520 renewing her cells and breath and sinews.
00:09:00.700 Her great-grandmother had also prayed to the sun god,
00:09:04.660 speaking a prayer not given to women,
00:09:07.500 but taken by her in the healing river waters on that day,
00:09:12.140 generations before Ipaceta learned the sun prayers of another tradition.
00:09:19.820 Part of her repeated message in her book and in her life 0.75
00:09:23.200 is that strength and even arrogance in women brings them close to the goddess or to their 0.59
00:09:28.760 own goddess being and sets them free, claiming a place for ourselves and our daughters and
00:09:36.640 grandmothers in the sun. There are secret spots around the world where once the great chief
00:09:43.220 stanced for power. Stand on a spot where you feel the spirit resides, then crouch and dash
00:09:49.960 your two arms behind you, expelling your breath. Draw energy up from the earth as you breathe in.
00:09:55.620 Close your eyes and steal that energy. In your mind's eye, see a yellow coil of fire ascending.
00:10:03.780 That is what the wolves guard, and it must be stolen.
00:10:09.740 When she returns to the city that summer, she is summoned to officially join the Society for the
00:10:15.040 study of ancient cultures and civilizations, not just to study about the incredible and the unknown,
00:10:20.660 but to live it, to experiment with it, to become it. She writes, the studies, the discipline,
00:10:28.040 the explorations into the tangible and the intangible set free the mind into the limitless.
00:10:33.560 The universe opened out timeless and ageless. And in the final analysis, I think that is how
00:10:40.620 we should lead our many lives as players and scholars. And so she consents to go
00:10:48.600 to a house of wood and stone and crumbling stucco tucked in the birches and maples and
00:10:56.360 rolling foothills of the Laurentians mountains, which I have to say sounded so much like my house
00:11:02.480 in that brief description. I laughed out loud when I read this part. So it seems like time
00:11:08.060 for a small personal aside. Because one of the principles of magic you'll hear echoed over and
00:11:14.260 over again is, as above, so below. As within, so without. This comes from the Emerald Tablet,
00:11:22.620 a fifth or sixth century document that is the origin of hermetic philosophy.
00:11:27.520 Newton spent a lot of time thinking about this text, and his translation goes like this.
00:11:33.100 Number one, tis true without lying certain and most true. Number two, that which is below is like
00:11:42.420 that which is above and that which is above is like that which is below to do the miracles of
00:11:47.700 one only thing. Three, and as all things have been and arose from one by the mediation of one,
00:11:56.300 so all things have their birth from this one thing by adaptation.
00:12:02.340 Four, the sun is its father, the moon its mother, the wind hath carried it in its belly,
00:12:09.420 the earth is its nurse. Five, the father of all perfection in the whole world is here.
00:12:17.340 Six, its force or power is entire if it be converted into earth.
00:12:23.000 seven separate thou the earth from the fire the subtle from the gross sweetly with great industry
00:12:32.700 eight it ascends from the earth to the heaven and again it descends to the earth and receives
00:12:40.280 the force of things superior and inferior nine by this means you shall have the glory of the
00:12:47.560 whole world. Ten, and thereby all obscurity shall fly from you. Eleven, its force is above all force,
00:12:56.380 for it vanquishes every subtle thing and penetrates every solid thing. Twelve, so was the world
00:13:04.060 created. Thirteen, from this are and do come admirable adaptations whereof the means or process
00:13:13.320 is here in this. Hence I am called Hermes Trismegist, having the three parts of the
00:13:20.500 philosophy of the whole world. Fourteen, that which I have said of the operation of the sun
00:13:27.860 is accomplished and ended.
00:13:32.840 Some have claimed this is a recipe to transmute lead into gold.
00:13:37.920 Some have spent their lives and lost their sanity working this text.
00:13:43.320 but one tiny and delightful piece of understanding around it is that as all things arose from the
00:13:49.540 mediation of one and have their birth from this one thing by adaptation in our fractal multiverse
00:13:56.560 one of the ways non-linear meaning makes itself known and one of the ways magic works and winks
00:14:02.800 to us of its working is through synchronicity all this to say if you are at all witchy-minded
00:14:10.400 it's encouraging to take pleasure in the ways the universe sometimes seems to randomly and
00:14:16.520 unexpectedly rhyme so here's me i go looking for real life historic witches whose stories i can
00:14:23.520 tell and i find ipicita roy chakravarti telling stories of growing up in my hometown she says i
00:14:30.620 went to school in montreal with its apple orchards near snowden and those apple orchards were on the
00:14:36.320 grounds of my high school, you guys. An all-girls school full of witches of the very best kind.
00:14:43.480 And she studies in a house in the Laurentians with crumbling stucco. And the lake house I bought 0.77
00:14:49.660 with my mom last year, tucked in the foothills of the same small mountain range, is as we speak
00:14:55.140 literally a dust heap of crumbled stucco. We had to knock down a room because the stucco was all
00:15:01.060 rotten inside. Maybe discovering the rot is part of the metaphor here too. Chakraverde's lake house
00:15:08.540 had six gables and in the center an exquisite rose window with tracery, suggesting maybe it
00:15:14.620 was built with a rosy cross connection. Maybe the non-sectarian, non-religious version of rosy cross
00:15:21.700 that predated Christianity and the secret brotherhoods of the Rosicrucians. A rosy cross
00:15:29.280 where the cross represents the human body and the rose represents the individual's unfolding
00:15:35.540 consciousness. Inside there are rooms for study and ritual and one room with a thousand crystals
00:15:45.180 where Carlotta, their leader, gives Chakraverde a crystal skull and an introduction to the
00:15:51.280 crisscrossed histories and mythologies of the 13 crystal skulls. These crystal skulls are curious
00:15:58.620 enough for another quick detour. Chakravarti writes, I believe that long ago, a few women 0.94
00:16:07.700 in the Laurentians knew much more about the science of crystals than do the most specialized
00:16:12.160 instruments today. She describes a quote, red Indian legend of 13 ancient crystal skulls,
00:16:20.280 the size of human skulls, with movable jaws, which store knowledge of the origin,
00:16:26.520 purpose and destiny of mankind. All 13 skulls will one day be rediscovered and brought together.
00:16:33.500 Some legends habit that there are 12 planets in the cosmos inhabited by humans and there
00:16:38.200 is one skull for each. The 13th is a kind of a key. She tells the story of crystal skulls coming
00:16:47.300 to light from the skull at Luobantan discovered by Mitchell Hedges to the Aztec skull in the
00:16:53.760 British Museum of Mankind to one in the collection of a private family that has a large ornate crystal
00:16:59.300 and gold reliquary cross fused to its head, altered from its original state to show the
00:17:06.420 dominance of the church. Some believe there is a crystal skull in the vaults of the Vatican.
00:17:13.080 Some of these crystal skulls are rumored to move on their own, some to heal and bring wealth,
00:17:19.020 others to destroy the lives of their collectors
00:17:22.600 I love the story of a sacred 0.93
00:17:27.900 secret interplanetary knowledge as much as the next gal 1.00
00:17:31.980 but I'm looking for the real stuff
00:17:35.040 so we can't be afraid of a little debunking along the way
00:17:38.680 right? With almost 20 years hindsight
00:17:42.420 since Chakravarti's beloved witch book
00:17:44.780 more research has been done on these skulls that supposedly
00:17:48.300 mysteriously appeared in collections in the 19th century and on the myth makers who spun their
00:17:54.300 stories. National Geographic describes a handful of these rather macabre objects that have fueled
00:18:02.940 intense interest and controversy among archaeologists, scientists, spiritualists,
00:18:07.980 and museum officials for more than a century. Many believe these skulls were carved thousands
00:18:13.600 or even tens of thousands of years ago by an ancient Mesoamerican civilization.
00:18:18.560 Others think they may be relics from the legendary island of Atlantis,
00:18:23.200 or proof that extraterrestrials visited the Aztec sometime before the Spanish conquest.
00:18:30.480 But recent electron microscope analyses of skulls by the British Museum and the Smithsonian
00:18:35.840 Institution revealed markings that could only have been made with modern carving implements.
00:18:41.480 Both museums estimate that their skulls date to sometime in the mid to late 1800s,
00:18:47.220 a time when public interest in ancient cultures was high and museums were eager for pieces to display.
00:18:55.660 The British Museum study, in fact, pinpointed the manufacture of most of the skulls
00:19:00.240 to a specific area in Germany famous for manufacturing intricate quartz and crystal designs in the late 19th century.
00:19:08.200 The crystal is said to have been found in either Brazil or Madagascar
00:19:12.200 and was thus inaccessible to pre-Columbian indigenous civilizations.
00:19:17.240 These examinations and the fact that no skull has ever been uncovered
00:19:21.120 at an official archaeological excavation have led the British Museum
00:19:25.220 to extrapolate that all of the famed crystal skulls are likely fakes.
00:19:30.160 Not to mention, one of the prominently quoted sources for the legend of the skulls
00:19:35.140 is one Claude Harley Swiftier Reagan,
00:19:38.360 who aside from being a notorious teller of tall tales
00:19:43.020 is putting it kindly,
00:19:45.040 is, according to the Cherokee Nation,
00:19:47.300 not Native American.
00:19:49.980 In fact, Cherokee Chief Wilma Mankiller
00:19:52.640 has apparently considered suing Reagan
00:19:54.880 for slandering the Cherokee Nation
00:19:56.660 with his comments about Cherokee firewomen.
00:19:59.780 And the complaints that circulate online 1.00
00:20:02.180 about his $1,200 a session Cherokee sex therapy at his new age cult are downright fucking creepy. 0.98
00:20:12.740 So I'm ready to leave the skulls aside. Although I could easily go down a rabbit hole researching 0.99
00:20:18.840 this area of Germany in the late 19th century and its possible ties to all kinds of occult stuff
00:20:25.080 that emerges from Germany around the same time.
00:20:27.360 But for now, I just kind of want to tie these spinning skulls
00:20:33.400 and their mythology to an idea about sleight of hand
00:20:36.220 and magic and capital M magic, witch magic, element magic,
00:20:42.840 whatever that turns out to be.
00:20:47.640 Chakravarti describes a life of seeking,
00:20:50.020 and any scientist or spiritualist who is mining new veins of thought potential 0.95
00:20:54.100 is going to strike the occasional seam of fool's gold.
00:20:58.240 But if the progress of the tarot tells us anything, 0.99
00:21:01.520 it's that we're lucky to play the fool, sometimes. 0.95
00:21:05.260 Heading out, hopefully, towards new horizons. 0.79
00:21:09.960 And I also come back to that sweet myth from our last episode
00:21:13.460 about the Egyptian mystery schools
00:21:15.420 hiding their knowledge in a card game, in the tarot,
00:21:19.700 because it would be safer in a game of chance
00:21:22.260 than in the hands of virtuous men.
00:21:26.140 Sometimes a scam hides a truth. 0.97
00:21:29.800 And Chakraverde includes sleight of hand in the Wiccan toolbox. 0.99
00:21:32.920 She says, conjuring, sleight of hand, ritual, magical objects, 0.96
00:21:37.200 flowing robes, ambiance, these were all tools of the trade at one time.
00:21:40.760 And they were used to aid people who came for help to the Magi
00:21:45.240 to alter consciousness.
00:21:47.920 Sometimes they shocked, like an electric jolt.
00:21:52.260 to regain lost mental balance. Often they provided an anchor for the insecure that served to calm
00:21:59.220 before the actual wicked and treatment began. I don't think I want to suggest that Chakravarti's
00:22:05.260 interest in the skulls wasn't genuine. I just wonder if sometimes we go down detours like this
00:22:10.900 to jolt ourselves towards new ideas. Like maybe it takes ornate crystal skulls for us to think
00:22:18.120 about the energy and even consciousness in regular hunks of stone. It turns out that as
00:22:24.820 traditional attempts to explain consciousness continue to fail, a panpsychist view is being
00:22:30.800 taken seriously by credible philosophers, neuroscientists, and physicists, including
00:22:36.720 figures like neuroscientist Christoph Koch and physicist Roger Penrose. One interpretation of
00:22:44.900 panpsychism suggests that any system is conscious rocks spoons will be conscious
00:22:52.540 the earth itself is conscious any kind of aggregation gives you consciousness
00:23:00.580 physicists suggesting everything has consciousness could conceivably lead centuries of animist
00:23:09.640 religions across hundreds of different cultures to be kind of like, yeah, duh. Even Marie Kondo,
00:23:18.140 trendy goddess guru of getting rid of things, asks that you thank objects for their service
00:23:23.540 before you send them on their way. Episcito learns to love and thank and receive energy from trees
00:23:30.980 as a student in the Laurentians, and we can deaf relate to this. My co-producer Amy tells me that
00:23:38.700 Since moving to the woods, where we're recording now, she's surprisingly never lonely.
00:23:45.860 In a real way, the trees have become her friends.
00:23:49.300 And we are both unabashed and literal tree huggers.
00:23:54.960 Plus, there's that thing you know about animals when you are young.
00:23:59.400 That they see you and know they are loved by you.
00:24:03.440 Do you remember this?
00:24:05.520 We have an instinct for what Chakraverde and other witches call familiars when we're little, I think.
00:24:11.360 And we can see castle forts and shipwrecks where others see blankets and beds.
00:24:18.160 Maybe we can share a more direct, imagined, emotional kind of consciousness.
00:24:25.140 Chakraverde writes that according to Egyptians and Celts, stone and wood have thoughts and a certain kind of comprehension.
00:24:31.900 and she describes experiences in the Grand Canyon and at the Sun Temple at Konark in Orisa
00:24:38.240 where the mundane world thins. With help from meditation or collective song and something
00:24:45.460 special in the rock or sea or geometry of the spot, the electricity in the air changes.
00:24:51.420 Maybe something that's always there can reach you for a second. Maybe the consciousness that's
00:24:56.920 out there can sometimes recognize that we are recognizing it. Culturally, we've used stories
00:25:03.040 about the supernatural to wrap our industrialized egos around the unaccountable otherness in the
00:25:08.280 natural world. Maybe we're fascinated by aliens and mermaids and centaurs and unicorns as we try
00:25:15.600 to grasp the magic in mind wholly other to the ways we understand our own in the animals we've
00:25:21.800 mostly lost from our daily lives, or even the ones we keep close. Terriers, coyotes, and pigeons,
00:25:29.280 peacocks, and elk. But if stories can help us approach and love the unknown, they definitely
00:25:35.240 do the opposite as well. Stories get used by power seekers to demonize and capitalize,
00:25:41.820 and Chakravarti runs right into this in West Metengale.
00:25:46.780 In certain society circles throughout the 80s, Chakravarti becomes known as a Wiccan.
00:25:51.800 and some genuinely tortured people come to her for healing, while others come with less pure
00:25:56.860 ends in sight. She gets sick of seeing this side of human nature. I hated to be confused with a
00:26:03.940 miracle-peddling godwoman or guru I felt contaminated. My power had been given me by
00:26:10.380 a source which did not stoop to doling out favors to the greedy or ignorant. So she stops her 0.75
00:26:16.280 sessions and decides to go to the villages of Bengal and Orissa, the interiors which most city
00:26:22.480 dwellers choose to read about, not to visit. The summer I went to Purulia, the sun blazed down and
00:26:29.860 the temperature soared to 48 Celsius in the shade. That summer was a grueling one. A social welfare
00:26:37.360 organization had asked me to accompany them to the rural areas of Bengal where there had been some
00:26:42.380 cases of alleged witch hunting. I was asked to talk to the women accused or to their nearest
00:26:48.260 kin. My job was mainly one of counselor, an investigator. She builds trust with the women
00:26:56.000 in the community until they finally begin to tell of women who have gone missing.
00:27:02.060 Witch accusations against women who rejected sexual advances or who were widows finally
00:27:07.920 able to own their own land. Accused, raped, and disappeared, their lands are now owned by their 0.88
00:27:15.120 accusers. It's infuriating and blatant. And it blatantly repeats the patterns that fueled the
00:27:23.620 European witch hunts of the 15th century, where a dominant culture is taking control not just of
00:27:29.380 land, but of definitions of who is human. A grasping, violent, accusing nature characterizes
00:27:36.460 the movement of the state as it consumes and colonizes new lands, justifies slavery, and
00:27:42.520 whips misogynist hysteria to a fever pitch. And individuals echo and enact this pattern in waves
00:27:49.880 across small communities and onto individual women's bodies. Dr. Shashank Shikhar Sinha
00:27:58.400 writes that in India, witch hunting was closely linked to the colonial administration's effort
00:28:04.240 to extend political and juridical domain, the missionaries' zeal to civilize the pagan,
00:28:11.540 and ethnographers and anthropologists' ardor to primitivize the adivastes, the indigenous.
00:28:17.560 The compilation and documentation of the folklore related to witchcraft by the administrators,
00:28:23.060 ethnographers, and missionaries, and its frequent reproduction in gazetteers, administrative
00:28:28.440 reports, and official literature, gave a formal definition and structure to what otherwise
00:28:33.980 constituted a scattered set of beliefs. She ties re-emergence of this greedy, sexualized violence 0.94
00:28:41.700 to the dislocation and poverty among Adivasi indigenous people in the vast tea farming 0.95
00:28:48.440 industry that perpetuates a cycle of cascading disempowerment which still plays out today.
00:28:55.060 in an environment where witch hunting is actually violently happening
00:29:02.260 chakravarti takes the fairly badass stance of going to national press and declaring herself
00:29:09.480 a witch she gives herself over to the public eye and explains what wicca is where she learned it
00:29:18.880 And she gives insights in countless interviews into her goddess-oriented beliefs and practices.
00:29:26.640 By the 1990s, she is publicly, directly addressing India's witchcraft-related violence problem
00:29:33.040 and the reality of women being branded to ayans or witches. 0.95
00:29:38.640 She's protected by her class and her wealth, and she knows it, 1.00
00:29:42.100 and she uses her position to force a conversation.
00:29:44.580 in an essay for the hindustan times she writes wicca and witchcraft are the key to liberation
00:29:52.920 india is very patriarchal even today when they saw me standing up for those they were trying
00:30:00.140 to brand and destroy and saw that i was helping these women by calling myself a witch these
00:30:06.620 lobbies erupted with fury these were vested interests which could not tolerate me because
00:30:11.880 I was saying that a woman who was an individual had her own rights. She ties herself to vulnerable 0.79
00:30:17.900 women and then ties them together to an ideal of female power that transcends borders.
00:30:25.900 I follow a tradition which encompasses the goddesses of all cultures, east and west,
00:30:30.640 she writes. After all, the Wiccan tradition spans something which is beyond barriers of land and
00:30:36.580 people. We follow the goddess culture. We acknowledge the Indian goddesses Durga for
00:30:42.200 strength, Kali for detachment and power, and Saraswati for learning in the quest for knowledge.
00:30:48.700 All these goddesses seem to have western counterparts. Hence, we look upon the goddess
00:30:53.640 power as one, whose manifestations are many. As all manifestations of the goddess are one,
00:31:01.060 all women are one in Chakravarti's vision. She writes and repeats, every strong woman is a witch 0.99
00:31:08.320 and all are hunted. History somehow always repeats itself, or perhaps it is that the 0.56
00:31:17.120 basest in human nature lives on. The men who tortured and burnt innocent women in medieval
00:31:23.020 Europe live on in other places, in different guises. Witch hunting never stopped. It just 0.92
00:31:29.620 took on a more deceptive mask. In my experience with thousands of women who have come to me for
00:31:35.640 help, I would say that every strong woman is a witch and all are hunted. It goes against the 0.98
00:31:42.000 nature of most men to tolerate a woman they cannot dominate. Witch hunting is present not just in 0.95
00:31:48.740 rural Bengal, Bihar, Orissa, Uttar Pradesh or Madhya Pradesh. It prevails everywhere in the
00:31:55.840 world where women stand up for themselves and what they believe in. It is there whenever women
00:32:01.400 refuse to be the pawns or playthings of a callous society. In a society which batters and bruises 1.00
00:32:09.040 its women physically and mentally, in home and in the workplace, every woman is a witch. 0.98
00:32:17.200 Me too, Episcita. Hashtag me too. Writing about Episcita is slippery. Sometimes I want to 1.00
00:32:25.700 holler in agreement with her, and print her fucking catchphrases on a t-shirt. Sometimes 1.00
00:32:30.700 the tone of her books and website and movies is melodramatic, haughty, even gossipy, and
00:32:38.480 sometimes they read like a gothic novel. But we're looking for the missing witch stuff,
00:32:43.600 so I'll tell you this. She says her daily physical training, including yoga and bathing
00:32:49.820 rites with rose petals, have honed her insight and intuition and slowed her aging. She still
00:32:57.760 today leads a Wiccan brigade and the Young Bengal Brigade, an open access community of study in
00:33:03.520 Calcutta, which explores comparative religion, philosophy, and psychology, ancient scriptures,
00:33:09.580 and mystical traditions. Even when she has encountered evil, she says curses haven't been
00:33:16.460 necessary. She sees the people who would harm her hit with scandal and sickness, their parades
00:33:23.960 drenched in a monsoon rain. She rejects superstition and considers herself a scientifically
00:33:31.620 minded skeptic in some ways, a seeker of truth. From a 2004 article in the Hindu, India's
00:33:40.220 national newspaper, she has fought against tantric cults that believe in human sacrifices
00:33:45.820 and there is no quarrel in her own scheme of things between logic and the unknown since she
00:33:51.020 never lets either rule her life entirely superstition is a vague word if you cling too
00:33:56.900 much to logic you are robbed of the beauty and venture of life she says logic no doubt can't
00:34:03.140 explain all there is to life in beloved witch she writes what i have actually striven for
00:34:11.360 is a few pickings from the vast harvest of truth which lies beyond. And if I continue to use my
00:34:19.000 arrogance against society, it is because I deplore its hypocrisy. Though at times it's grating,
00:34:27.300 the best and fiercest knowledge you get from reading her interviews in books 0.89
00:34:31.200 is that she truly gives no fucks. I love arrogance in a woman. It is the one quality that sets her 1.00
00:34:40.940 at par with the goddess. She has a strength that is completely at peace with her own powers and
00:34:48.880 beauty. She has transmuted the experience of being hunted into being huntress, Durga, and Diana,
00:34:57.180 and that for her is the Wiccan path, and I wish it for all of us.
00:35:02.860 i want to tell the elvis story before we end it's the summer mid-60s in montreal
00:35:12.400 and ipicita's friend and actress is invited down to visit her friend elvis
00:35:17.700 and she brings her lovely witch in training along they hang out at graceland for a couple days
00:35:24.840 swimming and talking with the young musician and his parents the scene is sunlit and innocent
00:35:31.740 he tells her that when he was younger he had a healer's touch
00:35:36.140 that he would be asked to lay hands on a child in pain and the pain would actually
00:35:42.020 gradually go away he doesn't do it anymore or talk about it knowing how it would seem
00:35:48.440 she writes that he said people are funny that way at besita they'd rather believe the worst
00:35:56.780 of a person. They don't like anyone to have it too good. You know, most people think I'm selling
00:36:03.100 sex. They say my attitude and movements are indecent. They seem to think the only commodity 0.82
00:36:09.360 that is saleable and earns money is sex, but I know for a fact that's not so. People want healing.
00:36:19.600 Maybe you're healing through your music, I said.
00:36:22.160 He looked at me as if I'd just said something he'd been trying to say for a long time
00:36:28.180 We were both possessors of an alien energy which didn't have a name
00:36:33.940 I knew that his phenomenal attraction was misunderstood by people
00:36:39.340 And I knew that his time with this special energy was short
00:36:43.620 It would leave him about the time his mother, Grace, passed on
00:36:48.640 from that time onwards he would return to the mundane world dimension
00:36:54.220 and life would be a struggle as it is for most people
00:36:57.640 Episcita seized Elvis's future from that sunny innocent veranda
00:37:03.480 that a quality of his magic was tied to grace
00:37:08.140 and maybe there's something for us here
00:37:11.020 a knowledge balanced between arrogance and grace
00:37:15.220 sex appeal and healing
00:37:17.880 wicca and gospel music as we go looking for the witches we've been missing out there in the world
00:37:26.380 or inside of ourselves i officially pod bless us all with a little early elvis a little ageless
00:37:35.480 chakra verti a dash of rose petals and crystal skull fakery and mad love for wherever we happen
00:37:44.220 to be these days in the
00:37:46.260 vast harvest of truth-seeking. 0.99
00:37:53.480 You must be a witch. 0.92
00:37:56.000 Thanks for listening to episode 2 0.88
00:37:58.180 of the Missing Witches podcast. If you
00:38:00.160 want to know more about Ipsita, be sure
00:38:02.140 to check out our companion podcast
00:38:04.000 Witches Found. We reached out
00:38:06.160 to Ipsita and she reached
00:38:08.180 back, y'all. So this week on
00:38:10.120 Witches Found, you'll hear her answers
00:38:12.040 to our questions as we chat with
00:38:14.080 Ayurvedic practitioner about self-care and a whole bunch of other stuff. So
00:38:19.060 that's Missing Witches Sundays and Witches Found Wednesdays and don't
00:38:22.900 forget to like, share, subscribe and follow us on social media at Missing
00:38:27.560 Witches.