Missing Witches - Missing Witches： Paula de Eguiluz - Come To Aleluya

00:00:00.000 We are so very proud to announce that we have partnered for all of season three with Fox

00:00:06.980 Glove Farm.

00:00:08.120 Now that's Fox Glove, like the animal, like the thing you put on your hand. 0.99

00:00:11.680 Like the witch plant.

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00:00:15.060 So F-O-X-G-L-O-V-E-P-H-A-R-M.

00:00:20.680 Go to Fox Glove Farm and use offer code missingwitches. 1.00

00:00:26.320 You aren't being a proper woman, therefore you must be a witch. 1.00

00:00:29.480 You must be a witch. 0.99

00:00:35.520 This is a story about a woman born into slavery who became one of the most powerful healers in the hot, mad, cruel town of Cartagena de Indias in 17th century colonial Colombia. 0.81

00:00:48.740 A woman who was tried three times for witchcraft and survived, still imprisoned, while the bishop himself paid for her services.

00:00:56.580 This is a story about Paula de Eguiluz, who went by the nickname Alleluia. 0.70

00:01:03.460 And I want to call her that because I want to call all these witches and all of you out there by the names you choose. 0.57

00:01:09.860 And I want to call her a patron saint of surviving and fucking thriving against the odds, 0.95

00:01:15.920 even though the odds are stacked against you again and again. 0.92

00:01:19.680 Patron saint Alleluia of learning the game and playing it better than them

00:01:23.680 and escaping with your life while the people who hunted you pay for your services.

00:01:28.300 Thank you very much and alleluia.

00:01:33.120 And though she was persecuted under the rubric witch, 0.97

00:01:36.660 I want to own that name and call her witch. 0.98

00:01:39.920 Because as Pam Grossman wrote in her delicious must-read history slash memoir,

00:01:45.300 Waking the Witch,

00:01:46.780 check out our interview with her in a previous episode

00:01:49.320 and check out her podcast and buy this queen's book

00:01:52.600 because she wrote more than anything the witch is a shining and shadowy symbol of female power

00:01:59.520 and a force for subverting the status quo no matter what form she takes she remains an electric

00:02:05.620 source of magical agitation that we can all plug into whenever we need a high voltage charge 1.00

00:02:11.240 she is also a vessel that contains our conflicting feelings about female power

00:02:16.820 our fear of it our desire for it and our hope that it can and will grow stronger despite the

00:02:24.220 flames that are thrown at it whether the witch is depicted as villainous or valorous she is always

00:02:29.600 a figure of freedom both its loss and its gain she is perhaps the only female archetype who is 0.83

00:02:35.040 an independent operator virgins whores daughters mothers wives each of these is defined by whom 0.64

00:02:41.880 she's sleeping with or not the care that she is giving or that is given to her or some sort of 0.98

00:02:46.780 symbiotic debt that she must eventually pay. The witch owes nothing. That's what makes her

00:02:53.300 dangerous. And that is what makes her divine. This episode is also about the market for good 0.87

00:02:59.480 love and all the safety good love can bring. And it's about colonialism and the imposition

00:03:04.540 of the Inquisition system and how that torture and story manufacturing machine was negotiated

00:03:09.720 by a powerful, canny, healer witch I wish I could have met. I wish I could have heard

00:03:15.720 about it in her own unhindered words rather than through layers of tortured confessions

00:03:20.340 and 400 years of colonial history.

00:03:23.480 But let us do our best to summon her today and see if we can catch at least an echo of

00:03:28.780 her voice.

00:03:31.420 We are lucky to live in a time where she's been lovingly conjured by wise writers before

00:03:35.980 us.

00:03:37.040 In Violent Delights, Violent Ends, Sex, Race, and Honor, and Colonial Cartagena de Andias,

00:03:42.880 Nicole von Germaden writes,

00:03:45.100 As a historian pours through documents hundreds of years old,

00:03:48.980 sometimes an almost invisible dust swirls above the surface of paper

00:03:52.540 covered in hastily written notarial scrawls and whips itself

00:03:56.260 into a tiny imaginary tornado, and a fully embodied human takes shape.

00:04:02.500 The written records that outline Paula d'Eguiluz's life 1.00

00:04:05.620 reveal her to be an astoundingly opportunistic, canny woman.

00:04:10.220 Her decades of interactions with the Cartagena Holy Office over the course of three separate 0.97

00:04:14.700 trials for sorcery and witchcraft have intrigued historians since the 19th century. Paula thoroughly

00:04:20.180 exploited every available advantage, striving to survive and prosper against the odds of birth 0.91

00:04:26.260 into slavery and the machinations of her lovers, friends, foes, adversaries, and highly suspicious

00:04:33.160 Spanish inquisitors. As we begin, and now that we begin to see an outline of her tornado spinning

00:04:42.060 before us, I want a detour. And if you know our podcast, you know detours and spirals are an

00:04:49.000 inevitable part of the potion to give you a soundtrack. Because I wrote this episode on the

00:04:55.680 road, a seven-week slow meander across Canada with our old van pulling our very old camper and our

00:05:01.920 nine-month-old calling the shots on the stops. I rode it lying in grassy parks in the prairies

00:05:07.500 and in the Rocky Mountains, listening to musicians from all over the world at folk festivals whenever

00:05:12.580 my baby would fall asleep. So I was listening to Beverly Glenn Copeland when I started writing

00:05:19.080 about Daeguilus, and I heard this beautiful trans man with his glowing otherworldly voice say,

00:05:25.620 I do not write these songs. I listen to the frequencies that I am tuned to as we are all

00:05:31.360 uniquely tuned and when I hear the songs that come for me I write them down. One day I woke up and

00:05:38.100 wrote a song in Italian and by the end of the day I again could not speak Italian. I heard him say

00:05:44.740 I write songs for my wife on her birthday and one year a song came through and I realized it was

00:05:49.640 about all women. The world will be healed when we know that women are our foundation, our home.

00:05:55.720 Beverly Glenn Copeland is a magical conduit who, despite a decades-long career as a songwriter

00:06:03.160 and performer, his earliest albums released in the 1970s, earning comparisons to Joni Mitchell.

00:06:09.100 He was still presenting as a woman at the time. Those albums went largely unheard.

00:06:14.740 So if you feel like it, please listen to Beverly Glenn Copeland and be embraced by his warm,

00:06:19.900 loving voice and transmissions from across the universe as you listen to this episode, okay?

00:06:25.720 and we can imagine we are lying in a field on an island in the Bow River together while the baby

00:06:30.680 sleeps. Together let's listen to songs we've been missing and let them help call up the wisdom of

00:06:37.880 these witches we've been missing. Listen and know that we stand in a stream, a long history of

00:06:43.880 violence and colonialism, and of survivors and witches and warriors and peacemakers.

00:06:49.480 And as you remember that we are all together, gather the strength to face it over and over again.

00:06:57.360 Because to paraphrase Ipsido Roy Chakraverti, one of our goddess witches from season one,

00:07:04.060 strong women are witches.

00:07:06.180 They have always been hunted, and they are and will be again. 0.99

00:07:11.220 And to quote a Glenn Copeland song, Onwards and Upwards. 0.53

00:07:15.480 Alleluia was born into slavery and sold away from her mother, whose name was Guillomar, 1.00

00:07:22.840 as a teenager. She was moved from Santo Domingo to Havana and was sold again to de Guiluz, 0.94

00:07:29.140 who married her, and she began to practice as a healer in the fervent colonial port city of

00:07:34.780 Cartagena de Indias. For what it's worth, Cartagena de Indias only begins to thrive

00:07:41.280 as a colonial port city when Spanish settlers discovered treasures in the tombs of the Sinus

00:07:46.880 indigenous peoples who buried their dead with all their riches. Less than a hundred years later,

00:07:53.120 a picturesque city being built of stone still haunted by its origins in a pillaged graveyard.

00:08:00.400 The largest port in the Americas and a hub for the international slave trade.

00:08:04.480 From an article in Atlanta, Black Star, over 1.1 million captive Africans entered the docks

00:08:12.920 at Cartagena de las Indias. The Spanish crown had the system of trafficking African souls

00:08:18.820 down to a grisly science and made it their most profitable business, according to the

00:08:23.700 governor of Cartagena province during the 16th century. Buyers and agents came from as far away

00:08:29.740 as Calao, Peru, to the south, and Matina, Costa Rica, in the north, to get first dibs at the

00:08:35.780 auction blocks. The isolated islands of Cartagena Bay, like Baru Island, served as the perfect

00:08:41.840 quarantine site for these arriving ships from hell. Several levels of inspection ensued after

00:08:48.120 reaching Cartagena Bay, and they were among the following. The Fondeo, the Visita de Sanidad,

00:08:54.300 and the Palmeo. The last of the three was an actual measuring of the profitability of each

00:08:59.380 of the enslaved's potential work output. Be they 5 foot 7 inches in height without malady, 18 years

00:09:05.160 or older, sometimes younger, they were considered to be a full pieza de india, piece of indies,

00:09:11.780 literally translated to mean one fully capable unit of work. Every soul did not constitute a full

00:09:19.740 pieza. As many as three adolescents could be counted as one. We will never know even close

00:09:27.360 to much less exactly how many ancestors passed through Cartagena. Some of the more wicked 0.97

00:09:32.460 slaving ships during the inspection process would declare just over 40 souls on board

00:09:37.540 when in reality there would be over five times that number chained to the walls below in

00:09:42.860 the hold. Among the more egregious cases of contrabanding, slightly more than 40 souls

00:09:48.380 were declared at customs when in reality an inconceivable 600 plus captives were on board,

00:09:54.580 never to be officially recorded. Cartagena to this day remains a majority black or Afro-Colombian

00:10:01.620 city. It has never had a black mayor. Few if any of its city council members are or consider

00:10:07.760 themselves black. Blacks in Cartagena still live alongside the ruins of slaving wharves while 1.00

00:10:13.080 relics such as slave coffles from the days of holding Africans in bondage are still known to 0.76

00:10:18.200 be found when walking along the beaches of Baru Island. Picture this place and a teenage girl

00:10:25.160 alone here, far from family, who by some combination of personal power, canniness, luck,

00:10:31.660 education, and magic, finds freedom. Joanne de Aguiluz, an important administrator in the

00:10:39.220 Spanish mines, was her owner for years until he freed her. Picture this person. She had a real

00:10:46.160 life of her own, at least for a while, a freed woman, a sought-after healer in Cartagena with

00:10:52.640 damask skirts of purple and blue and gold braid. Her neighbors first accused her of being a witch 0.72

00:10:59.740 in 1623, and she was accused and tried and punished three times between 1623 and 1636.

00:11:08.540 Gather your strength because the fight will come like waves in different shapes over and over again. 0.93

00:11:14.340 The first time, Alleluia's Cuban neighbors accused her of killing a newborn by sucking on its navel, 0.59

00:11:20.620 jumping out a window to avoid a blow from her master but suffering no injuries, 0.81

00:11:25.740 practicing erotic magic, and a pact with the devil as a member of a witch's gathering.

00:11:32.540 Paula explained these accusations as resulting from the jealousy of people who hate her

00:11:36.640 because her master loves her and they see her well-dressed.

00:11:39.760 By the time of her second arrest, she had lived in Cartagena for eight years, first as a prisoner in the tribunal's secret prison, and then as a menial servant in the hospital of the San Juan de Dios friars.

00:11:53.060 While serving her penance, washing filthy linens for hospital charity cases, Paula started to arouse inquisitors' suspicions.

00:12:00.480 The inquisitors arrested her for the second time in September 1632. They did not immediately reveal

00:12:07.760 the charges against her, but Paula quickly assessed her vulnerable position. At this time,

00:12:12.820 she described her occupation as curandera. She was a popular healer in the city of Cartagena

00:12:18.540 and its surrounding regions. She worked and socialized with a number of other Afro-Caribbean

00:12:23.080 women who sold love potions and taught incantations and conjurations to a large clientele of women, 0.56

00:12:29.060 rich and poor, white and black.

00:12:32.400 Brazil was rich with layers of traditional relationships to the earth,

00:12:36.180 to unseen powers, to healing,

00:12:38.620 and it ran bloody with a colonial violence that obscured those sacred sources.

00:12:44.340 Max Dashu writes,

00:12:46.260 The native Brazilian cultures became the most obscured.

00:12:49.260 The voices of the Tupi and Tapajos and Gui

00:12:52.720 were drowned out in the furious slaughter and land seizures of the 1500s

00:12:57.580 and every century that followed. The colonials referred to catimbos, indigenous gatherings

00:13:03.420 where people danced, singing and shaking the sacred rattles. An account from Grao Para around

00:13:10.460 1765 refers to people speaking with souls during night rituals. Angela Michaela of Marajo Island

00:13:19.180 had mysterious visitors who appeared by night to speak with her from a tree.

00:13:22.700 She said that the Christian god only had to do with the dead, not the living.

00:13:27.740 It would be better to adore the sun or moon or time because only they should be adored as lords of the living.

00:13:35.420 Native Brazilian languages, ceremonial herbalism and healing had a measurable impact on the meld of cultures that emerged in the 1600s and 1700s.

00:13:44.620 The Tupinamba, with their incomparable knowledge of the medicinal rainforest plants, were known as great healers.

00:13:49.700 healers. The Tupinamba Pajes blow on the painful spot, sucking and spitting out the evil and 1.00

00:13:57.340 infusing its cure. Most Brazilian curanderos were African, Indian, and mestizos. Many cultures 1.00

00:14:05.420 contributed to the mix in colonial Brazil. West African, Tupi, and other Indian nations, Jewish

00:14:11.700 and Moorish, as well as Catholic Portuguese. Many in this last category had been exiled to Brazil

00:14:16.720 for practicing witchcraft or other heresies. They added pagan European customs, such as 0.81

00:14:22.040 sieve divination, to the blend. A sizable number of these old Christians were incompletely 1.00

00:14:27.120 Christianized. They did not know Catholic doctrine, such as what the Trinity was, or even the basic 0.80

00:14:32.220 prayers. Often they were skeptics who scoffed at church dogma, or they punished statues of the

00:14:38.720 saints, virgin, or Jesus when bad things happened to them. Brazilians performed Jewish and Moorish

00:14:45.340 and gypsy dances. The authorities complained that they danced and formed conga lines during

00:14:51.040 religious celebrations. Inquisitorial visitations began in the late 1500s. Many Muslims and Jews

00:14:57.740 were forced to appear before the inquisitorial tribunal. A gypsy woman was interrogated for

00:15:02.960 denying that there was a day of judgment. Brazilians lived in a panic of inquisitorial

00:15:07.860 inquests. The areas most prosecuted were always those of greatest prosperity. From 1592 to 1595

00:15:17.240 there were 10 autodefi in Pernambuco and Bahia. Prisoners were whipped bloody and humiliated in

00:15:24.780 the streets of Lisbon. Some got five years in the galleys. The famous Maria Gonsalves was tried in

00:15:32.660 1591, she had defied institutional church authority, saying that if the bishop had a 0.55

00:15:37.800 mitre, she also had a mitre. And if the bishop preached from the pulpit, she also preached from

00:15:42.700 the cadera, the great chair from which priestesses presided over ceremonies. Gonsalves was commonly 0.64

00:15:49.880 known as Burntail. Much of her practice concerned sexual matters such as impotence and sterility. 0.93

00:15:55.820 She made powders from herbs she gathered in the forest. She was accused of feeding the devil from

00:16:00.640 a wound in her foot. Violante Carrera, who denounced her to the Inquisition, was herself 0.52

00:16:05.880 soon arrested as a witch after being reported by an ex-lover. 0.77

00:16:13.100 Luisa Pinta presided over divinatory dances, sitting on her high cadera like a throne,

00:16:18.980 dressed in Angolan garb and feathered headdress. Unmarried, she was about fifty, tall and heavy,

00:16:24.300 with tribal marks on her cheeks. As two Angolan women sang and drummers played for hours, she

00:16:29.880 danced. Louisa entered trance with great trembling, and as the winds entered her ears, she prophesied

00:16:37.800 and answered questions. She laid people on the ground and leaped over them several times to cure

00:16:43.900 them. Sometimes she carried a dagger in her hand and prescribed forest leaves to the sick. 0.99

00:16:50.820 She untied a belt and whirled it in the air and gave emetic drinks to get rid of sorceries.

00:16:56.360 we don't know where alleluia learned her cures or her magic but this is the community and culture 0.58

00:17:03.420 and world of knowledge and power that she moved in in violet delights von germenden also unpacks

00:17:08.600 the accusations made each of the three times egluz was hunted and arrested and she goes into

00:17:13.480 the details of who was accusing her and of the magic they had seen her do or in some cases had

00:17:19.160 hired her to do and then pointed fingers at her when the magic didn't work the way they wanted

00:17:23.800 or when they wanted more than she would supply.

00:17:27.880 This is a tricky fact of practicing in service to

00:17:30.760 and exerting your will over unseen things

00:17:33.160 and then of selling that service

00:17:34.600 and asking others to participate and believe.

00:17:38.840 Magic in my limited experience

00:17:41.480 comes from a profound alchemy of making change within yourself.

00:17:45.680 A powerful healer witch is a lot like a coach or a therapist or something,

00:17:50.480 helping you pick up the tools and open the doors along your own path of doing the work. 0.68

00:17:56.400 But in a colonial context, and we still live in one, when you are trying to survive,

00:18:02.080 there will be a starving market for anything that might offer a step upward.

00:18:06.960 And there will be a deadly fetishization we've seen of the colonial body

00:18:11.120 that will in one moment turn to you for secrets and the next moment hunt you for selling them. 0.99

00:18:15.680 be careful out there and work hard to be better white women who have been focused on positivity 1.00

00:18:22.520 culture burning sage and going to yoga retreats but then voting for trump or not voting at all 1.00

00:18:28.580 need to come to jesus moment about the violence they participate in or better yet why don't you

00:18:34.360 come to alleluia and now a word from our sponsor foxglove farms it's actually just going to be a 0.96

00:18:44.960 word from us talking about fuck yeah we love her so much she's so cool one of the things she does 0.98

00:18:50.020 is every time you bar buy a bar of soap she donates a bar of soap she and her children 0.99

00:18:55.240 take her handmade soaps wrap them in washcloths and distribute them basically to homeless people

00:19:02.160 in in her town and she told us she has probably given away twice as many soaps as she's sold which

00:19:10.840 again you know it just it makes our hearts feel warm go buy things from this witch yes if you

00:19:17.520 if you want to support missing witches by buying yourself a present you can do that something that

00:19:23.420 we recommend yeah get yourself a beautiful soap get yourself some beautiful teas or better yet

00:19:30.120 subscribe to those subscription boxes they come out once a month she makes them by hand everything

00:19:36.380 in the boxes is environmentally friendly recyclable like we said cruelty free vegan

00:19:42.780 and like attuned to that time of the season yes oh yes and um let it guide your coven yeah let

00:19:50.420 it guide you oh that's a great idea to to actually like wait for the fates to come and tell you what

00:19:58.000 your what your moment will be so thanks again to foxglovefarm please go to foxglovefarm.com

00:20:03.460 That's F-O-X-G-L-O-V-E-P-H-A-R-M

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00:20:19.400 Von Germinen shows that love magic at the time concentrated on attracting a man to love you well.

00:20:24.620 Those words are repeated over and over in the transcripts

00:20:27.420 and it's clear that good love, being loved well, is more than safe, satisfying sex.

00:20:32.280 though that's definitely a part of it blessed be women would have had no chance of inherited

00:20:38.840 wealth especially women descended from slaves uh and so retaining devotion meant some chance

00:20:45.640 for stability so the specter of good love is also of financial safety and a way to escape danger

00:20:52.280 von germiden also shows the uncomfortable truth that paula fought dirty to survive 1.00

00:20:57.940 under torture she pointed the finger at other brujas and was the cause of a wave of witch 0.65

00:21:03.560 hunts in Cartagena. So be careful about the blame you lay witches and the fires you light. 0.71

00:21:10.960 She also seems to have visited the accused and maybe helped them shape their narratives

00:21:15.160 and some of them escaped with their lives. She certainly did and throughout the hours and days

00:21:21.540 and finally years of forced confessions she never deviated from her own version of events. 0.84

00:21:26.200 She knows the Inquisitors will not rest until they hear stories of witches having sex parties 0.95

00:21:31.880 with Satan, and she gives them what they want, but keeps herself on the sidelines. 0.89

00:21:37.080 To hear her tell it, her demon companion in Craft is more of a powerful ally, an ideal

00:21:42.380 partner, and a focus of intense jealousy from her love-magic customers who want to deal

00:21:48.220 with the devil directly.

00:21:50.000 Here's some fascinating bits from Violent Delights. 0.87

00:21:53.320 Paula de Aguiluz was one of the city's 1.00

00:21:57.520 most skillful incarcerated negotiators. 1.00

00:22:00.640 A talent she picked up as a successful free businesswoman

00:22:03.600 and during her long stints as a captive 0.96

00:22:05.560 in the holy office secret prisons.

00:22:08.540 She learned a great deal from her first arrest in 1624

00:22:11.920 and applied this knowledge to her second incarceration and trial. 0.99

00:22:16.360 Paula's primary defensive tactics were to accuse other women 1.00

00:22:19.120 among her peer group of sorcery and pacts with the devil.

00:22:22.860 After the women were arrested, Paula attempted to control their relationships with the Inquisitors from her cell.

00:22:28.520 For the first three days after her second arrest and imprisonment in September of 1632, Paula stayed in her cell, planning her next move.

00:22:36.980 After this interlude, she asked for an audience with the Inquisitors and confessed that she had made a new pact with her demonic father, Manteillos, her companion dating back to her days in Cuba.

00:22:47.460 She also immediately began naming other alleged witches.

00:22:51.480 Although it's difficult to understand what Mantillos really meant to Paula, whether or

00:22:55.380 not he was a conscious invention or a living being who dominated her mental and spiritual world,

00:23:01.240 she knew how to use her demon to manipulate the Inquisitors. She claimed Mantillos was

00:23:05.780 whispering instructions to her through the window in her cell in the holy office, jail.

00:23:10.580 In her third trial, which began in 1634, Paula was not let out of jail between her second and

00:23:16.880 third trials. She revealed that Manteillos scared her into going back to the juntas. She elaborated

00:23:23.380 on her earlier story, saying that one day she entered the garden of the Espiritu Santo hotel,

00:23:28.720 thinking this would lift her spirits. Manteillos appeared to her from hiding place behind a vat,

00:23:34.840 poorly dressed and assuming the form of a dumen guillo, or movable mannequin, similar to those

00:23:41.180 used in bullfights to enrage the bulls. He frightened Paula with the fire that emanated

00:23:45.940 from his entire body and threatened her that he would kill her if she did not give him her soul.

00:23:51.240 In this audiencia, Paula clarified that she did not have sex with Montillos because, as she confessed

00:23:56.860 in her first trial, this act wounded her in other regions when she did it many years before in Cuba. 0.99

00:24:03.320 Paula's strategy was to accuse other women and then attempt to influence their confessions by 0.80

00:24:08.660 communicating with them during their incarceration in the secret prisons of the Holy Office.

00:24:12.620 The fly in the ointment of Paula's maneuvers was the free mulatto surgeon, Diego Lopez, born to an enslaved mother in 1593 in Cartagena.

00:24:23.200 Paula had mentioned Lopez in passing in one of her numerous confessions, leading to the surgeon's arrest and interrogation.

00:24:30.640 In casually listing him with many other alleged co-conspirators, Paula underestimated Lopez's rage and desire for revenge, which were later manifested in calumnous accusations against her.

00:24:40.880 In his audiences with inquisitors after his arrest and imprisonment,

00:24:45.160 Lopez formulated his entire defense around the notion that

00:24:47.940 Paula was the dogmatizer and master of all,

00:24:50.980 the maleficio that led to crimes and irreparable damages

00:24:53.880 notorious all over this city harming important people of this republic,

00:24:57.980 thus directly contradicting Paula's defense tactics

00:25:00.420 and carefully worded confessions.

00:25:02.880 To back up his claims when the inquisitors asked Lopez

00:25:05.280 to inform them of specific examples of maleficio,

00:25:08.160 he passed on several rumors that Paula had poisoned people with powders.

00:25:12.320 Lopez was an untrustworthy witness, but he sensed what the Inquisitors wanted to hear

00:25:15.980 and whom they would target next.

00:25:18.340 Given the significant number of free, relatively prosperous, 1.00

00:25:21.740 and unattached women of African descent in Cartagena, 1.00

00:25:26.140 Lopez rode the tide of disapproval of these women 1.00

00:25:28.580 by accusing them of the most damning acts of poison 0.99

00:25:31.680 and all of the other classic behaviors for witches. 1.00

00:25:34.420 paula was certainly vulnerable on account of her ties to white women suspicious healing practices 1.00

00:25:40.900 and her record as a convicted witch she definitely took part in cures that had nothing to do with the 1.00

00:25:47.840 official european understanding of physical disease even when dealing with physical ailments 0.94

00:25:53.300 she undoubtedly used herbs and methods contrary to those lopez learned in a spanish hospital

00:25:58.220 paula may have learned curing from her mother or other africans working within a broadly atlantic

00:26:03.680 school that drew on African, indigenous, American, and traditional Iberian healing techniques.

00:26:09.740 All of these strains came together in the Caribbean and were practiced by women like her,

00:26:15.100 who competed for business as curanderas and experts in love magic.

00:26:20.340 It's very likely that Diego Lopez considered women healers such as Paula as his rivals.

00:26:26.540 Despite all of this, both Diego Lopez and Paula de Igvilluz continued practicing their trades

00:26:31.200 after surviving their public and painful auto-defe.

00:26:34.800 Lopez moved away for a time, then regained his practice in Cartagena.

00:26:40.780 Paula remained in prison, but allegedly enjoyed furlough to travel in a sedan chair,

00:26:46.340 luxuriously dressed and well-paid, to advise bishops and inquisitors on their medical care.

00:26:52.880 Unfortunately, this is the only extant information about Paula's later life.

00:26:57.920 That's all we know, and it's haunting.

00:27:00.140 She remains incarcerated while Lopez gets to move away and regain his practice.

00:27:05.120 But she flourishes still, and powerful men pay her well and rely on her wisdom

00:27:10.540 while keeping her where they can imagine they control her.

00:27:16.700 One tiny moment from the annals of accusations against her sticks with me.

00:27:20.720 The first Donna to speak against her was Magdalena de Estrada, age 23, who came to the Inquisitors

00:27:28.600 in May 1631 about Paula's ability to control men's affections, confessing that one night

00:27:34.520 she had discussed the penitenciada with one of Paula's lovers, a Spanish soldier named Diego

00:27:40.180 Nunez. Nunez admitted that he loved and desired Paula so much that he could not stop thinking

00:27:45.600 about her day or night, even when he was with another woman. These feelings were so extreme

00:27:51.100 that he feared that she had given him something to provoke his intense desire and longing.

00:27:56.220 In his view, love and powerful sexual desire were wild and dangerous emotions,

00:28:01.020 very likely fueled by magic. After the soldier left, Donna Magdalena, out of womanly curiosity,

00:28:10.640 claimed to have questioned Paula, who lived at her house working as a servant and washerwoman 0.76

00:28:15.040 at the time. Paula laughed at the Doña Magdalena's curiosity. As the two women stood on the balcony,

00:28:22.560 the Donna reported that the sorceress pointed to the clear starry sky and invoked the brightest

00:28:27.840 star in a conjuration mentioning demons. A girl who goes by Alleluia learns her mother's religion

00:28:35.440 and healing from a mother named Gilmar who traveled in a death ship, was sold, and who survived.

00:28:41.840 she's smart and learns more healing practice and more ways of getting good love

00:28:47.680 and of getting white women to pay her for her skills 0.93

00:28:50.340 she is loved 0.78

00:28:54.060 and she makes some people jealous 0.97

00:28:59.560 she talks to the stars and bends her fate to her will 0.92

00:29:04.060 and under torture and threat of death

00:29:07.240 she starts a craze of witch hunts and loses control and people get hurt

00:29:11.680 But she survives, and even held in darkness, she retains a power.

00:29:20.940 And so I think let's end by calling out to them, mother and daughter, our patron saints

00:29:26.400 of missing witches and of survival, of pain and power.

00:29:30.960 Oh, Alleluia and Gilmar, please be with our sisters and brothers and children, especially

00:29:36.560 those incarcerated, especially the over 900 children separated from their parents so far

00:29:42.420 this year, five more every day, who walked, hopeful for a better life, only to be betrayed

00:29:48.680 at the U.S. border.

00:29:52.040 Be with all the families and refugees fleeing climate crisis and collapsed governments following

00:29:56.940 decades of capitalism's rape of the Global South detained in El Paso, where Department

00:30:01.920 of Homeland Security inspectors found on May 7th that more than half of the 756 immigrants

00:30:07.900 being held at the El Paso facility were kept outside. Those inside were in cells, packed

00:30:15.100 at five times their capacity. Government inspectors saw people standing on toilets because there

00:30:21.520 was not enough room in cells. Be with us all as we faced the terror of living through horrors

00:30:28.340 we hoped humanity had overcome somehow hoped our children would only read about

00:30:33.700 help us mourn the sickness of our present moment and then bless our rising rage

00:30:39.900 please alleluia and guillomar bless and protect centoya brown bless her freedom and her healing

00:30:47.340 and bless the fight to free every single human used for sex against their will

00:30:51.380 please offer your rage and light and power to the estimated 20 to 40 million people enslaved today

00:30:58.260 Witches alive and those who have returned to the fabric of it all

00:31:04.140 Especially Alleluia and Gilmar 0.93

00:31:06.160 Raise your healing tears and fearsome anger

00:31:09.220 And your knowledge of the darkness and gather your powers

00:31:12.620 And gather your powers 0.99

00:31:17.280 Violators and slave traders and obedient fascists 1.00

00:31:22.380 Put down your shackles 1.00

00:31:23.860 And come to Alleluia

00:31:26.300 Put down your shackles and come to Alleluia, because the tides are turning as they are

00:31:34.440 always turning.

00:31:37.260 And in the immortal words of Lindy West, yes, this is a witch hunt. 0.94

00:31:41.580 I am a witch and I am hunting you. 0.95

00:31:45.780 We are witches and we are hunting. 1.00

00:31:56.300 you aren't being a proper woman therefore you must be a witch 1.00

00:32:07.640 you must be a witch 0.98

00:32:12.560 season three of the missing witches podcast is lovingly sponsored by foxglove farm

00:32:18.160 use offer code missing witches for a super witchy 13 off your next order and don't forget to

00:32:24.360 subscribe to those beautiful subscription boxes coming monthly.

Missing Witches - September 29, 2019

Missing Witches： Paula de Eguiluz - Come To Aleluya

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