Missing Witches - Missing Witches - Urduja： You Are Kapwa, Kin, Connected To Everything

00:00:00.000 we live in a global era characterized by PTSD maybe in your own life you're

00:00:13.240 familiar with how post-traumatic stress disorder works traumatic violence distorts

00:00:18.720 memories and the way we experience time making violence repeat on a loop like a

00:00:23.360 record skipping changing how we see and talk about ourselves the witch hunts

00:00:28.320 were one trauma against women and against the earth, and against a worldview that saw holiness 0.93

00:00:33.140 and spirituality as the birthright of every being. They were also a weapon in the global violence of 1.00

00:00:39.320 colonialism. And as we work to disrupt androcentrism, the mind frame that sees masculinity

00:00:45.180 as normal and all else as other, with feminist history, and to heal from the violence of 0.97

00:00:50.260 colonialism, and to resist the worst of earth-eating capitalism however the fuck we can,

00:00:55.400 it is useful to go looking for places outside of Europe and the Americas 0.98

00:01:00.280 where women were and are called witches.

00:01:05.940 One of the many places this happened is in the Philippines

00:01:08.940 and in investigating this branch of witch history,

00:01:11.880 it draws us back, back before the colonial trauma

00:01:15.000 to honor the women folk therapists, priestesses, warriors, healers,

00:01:20.340 storytellers called Bapailan

00:01:22.460 and forward to honor the badass feminists who carry the Babai Land spirit today. 0.83

00:01:27.960 In this episode, we'll tell the story of Orduja,

00:01:31.100 the pre-colonial warrior heroine who is one aspect of the Babai Land personified.

00:01:36.900 We'll dip our minds with reverence into the spirit and magic of this sacred spring of world knowledge,

00:01:44.020 and we'll just try as usual to learn a little something and not fuck it up. 1.00

00:01:49.120 You aren't being a proper woman, therefore you must be a witch. 1.00

00:01:51.980 You must be a witch. 1.00

00:01:58.520 Seres Pio Quinto, writing her grandmother Lola's healing spirituality into a context of Babylon history, 0.98

00:02:05.480 gives us a clue to reading this tradition as witch history.

00:02:08.440 She talks about discovering Barbara Tedlock's book, Women in the Shaman's Body.

00:02:12.220 In this book, Tedlock takes a fascinating expedition into this ancient tradition,

00:02:16.780 from its prehistoric beginnings to the work of women shamans across the globe today,

00:02:21.140 Illuminating the long-hidden female roots of the world's oldest form of religion and medicine,

00:02:26.160 she argues that humankind's first spiritual and healing practice was originally the domain of women.

00:02:31.640 In this narrative, Ted Locke reveals the hidden and often ignored or dismissed female roots of religious and healing practices,

00:02:38.840 with a dazzling array of evidence, from prehistoric African rock art to modern Mongolian ceremonies for women's shamanic powers.

00:02:47.860 Among others, this book has made me acutely aware of the demonization of wise women

00:02:52.020 by an androcentric culture that first labeled them as witches and burned them alive,

00:02:57.060 and later vilified their gifts by calling them quack.

00:03:00.780 As Barbara Tedlock tells me that the first shaman was a woman,

00:03:04.020 my heart leaps at the thought that my Lola's story adds

00:03:07.280 another evidence of the primacy of women's role in this life-giving, cosmos-shaping tradition.

00:03:13.440 i should say this essay and others we'll get to get into come from lenny mendoza strobel's

00:03:20.320 revelatory collection babaylan filipinos and the call of the indigenous i love this beautiful book

00:03:26.660 and lenny strobel's writing on her own journey that started as an academic interest and unfolded

00:03:31.660 into a revelatory homecoming of personal babaylan knowingness is a generous and loving spirit guide

00:03:37.940 for anyone seeking a path from their daily work back to their ancestors you can start with her

00:03:42.980 YouTube talks and website as entry points for understanding Babailan spirituality. But then if

00:03:48.120 you have the means, we always want to triumph spending the money to buy the books from the

00:03:52.340 women whom we lovingly call witches who have taken the time to teach us. Side note, I am always

00:03:58.140 struggling to not make these history episodes sound super wonky. So as usual, I'm not going to

00:04:03.140 drop the full reference every time. But also as usual, we'll link to all our sources in the show

00:04:07.600 notes on our website, missingwitches.com. Of Princess Urduja, Tara Maxwell writes that the

00:04:13.900 first written record of her appears in the Berber Muslim explorer, botanist, and judge Ibn Battuta's

00:04:20.280 account of his world travels from 1325 to 1354. Make an image in your mind of traveling the world

00:04:30.460 in the 1300s. Batuta's account is called A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities

00:04:37.900 and the Marvels of Traveling, and it offers insights from the perspective of an Islamic

00:04:43.460 legal scholar in early days of Islamic conversions and collisions with Buddhism, Hinduism, and early

00:04:49.300 Christianity, and on the lives of people in over 40 countries in the medieval period, from China

00:04:54.980 to the Volga River Valley, from Alexandria to Maghreb to Tanzania. Ibn Battuta describes

00:05:01.460 sailing to a place called Kailukari in the land of Tawalisi, where he met Urduja, a local princess.

00:05:09.580 She was a brave warrior, and her people were opponents of the Yuan dynasty, the unified

00:05:14.820 Mongolian dynasty under Kublai Khan. She is described as an idolater, but she could write

00:05:20.680 the phrase bismillah in Islamic calligraphy. The bismillah is the Islamic phrase bismillahi

00:05:29.160 in the name of God, the most gracious, the most merciful. The phrase is considered magical

00:05:38.740 in folk Islam traditions. So maybe we can imagine Urduja picking it up, adding it to her arsenal 1.00

00:05:46.020 as a warrior priestess of a pre-colonial religion.

00:05:50.080 Maswell writes, 0.55

00:05:51.600 On route to China, Batuta encounters the lovely princess

00:05:54.520 while visiting the island of Tawalisi,

00:05:57.260 an egalitarian kingdom where the women ride horses,

00:06:00.400 understand archery, and fight like the men.

00:06:03.580 Impressed by Erduja's courtly grace and intelligence,

00:06:06.100 Batuta notes that she speaks Arabic and Turkish

00:06:08.880 and reads from the Quran,

00:06:10.600 leads an army of men and women soldiers, 1.00

00:06:12.780 and controls the South China Sea with her pirate ships

00:06:15.980 She is skilled in archery and hand-to-hand combat. 0.64

00:06:20.920 In one fierce battle, Orduja breaks through enemy lines,

00:06:24.400 kills the enemy king, and brings back his head on a spear.

00:06:29.020 Let's keep this queen in mind, head held high, 0.83

00:06:32.320 heads on spears, taking magic phrases from the tongues of those who might convert her, 0.99

00:06:37.520 defending her egalitarian island people.

00:06:40.800 Let's hold her in our mind's eye, blazing, 0.94

00:06:43.360 and pull back to put her in the broader context of the Babaylan. 0.94

00:06:46.900 Because the Babaylan is a warrior witch and more.

00:06:49.580 More from Lenny Mendoza-Strobel and from other authors in her collection.

00:06:54.580 What is a Filipina Babaylan?

00:06:56.340 The Babaylan in Filipino indigenous tradition

00:06:58.960 is a person who is gifted to heal the spirit and the body.

00:07:02.440 The one who serves the community through her role as a folk therapist,

00:07:06.620 wisdom keeper, and philosopher.

00:07:08.560 The one who provides stability to the community's social structure.

00:07:11.640 the one who can access the spirit realms and other states of consciousness and traffic easily in and

00:07:17.580 out of these worlds, the one who has vast knowledge of healing therapies. Babailan, indigenous,

00:07:26.020 shaman, healer, priestess, ritualist, herb doctor, village therapist, diviner, mediator between

00:07:32.920 ordinary and non-ordinary realms of reality. She slash he is known by other names in various tribes.

00:07:40.000 Ma'aram, Balian, Balian, Mumbaki, Dawak, Catalonan, Manogbulong, Tambalan, and more.

00:07:53.420 In the many tribal communities' governance structure that included the tribal chief or Datu, 0.51

00:07:58.260 the Bayani, warrior, and the Panday, craftsperson, no decisions were ever made without consulting the Pabalan.

00:08:05.180 These four pillars of a tribe held together the communal life of its members,

00:08:08.820 but the Babaylan seemed the most important and powerful, 0.66

00:08:12.080 and hence became the target of extermination

00:08:14.060 as soon as colonizers arrived in the islands in the 15th century.

00:08:18.560 Today there are still primary Babaylans in indigenous communities in the Philippines.

00:08:23.340 And outside of these land-based communities,

00:08:25.300 the Babaylan is now often disguised and donning a different dress and language. 0.97

00:08:30.980 She walks among us like a shadow,

00:08:33.300 revealing herself only to those whose souls cry out for her. 0.99

00:08:39.680 The majority of Babaylan are women, and when men take on the same role and functions,

00:08:44.300 as they started doing during the Hispanic colonial period, they usually wear women's clothes.

00:08:50.680 One can surmise that this shift in outerwear might be symbolic of the privileged role of the Babaylan as a woman's domain.

00:08:56.760 However, it can also be argued that this privileging of the female gender in this case can be contested

00:09:02.040 by citing a Filipino creation story where the creator splits a bamboo

00:09:05.820 and simultaneously creates male and female.

00:09:10.000 In this sense, according to Katrin de Gia,

00:09:13.080 the man Babailan honors the mother goddess, Earth, when he approaches her,

00:09:17.800 and doing this develops his feminine side in order to balance his masculinity.

00:09:22.520 Likewise, the woman Babailan would develop her masculine side 0.77

00:09:25.900 to stabilize her tenderness and all-consuming compassion toward all life forms. 1.00

00:09:30.760 This is why these women lived alone on the fringes of the villages, the heads of enemies

00:09:35.840 on bamboo stakes, while the men in ceremonial malongs wore fragrant flowers in their hair.

00:09:44.320 This derives from the bilateral egalitarian kinship system that is at the root of our

00:09:49.560 indigenous cultures.

00:09:52.980 When the Spanish colonized the Philippines, the Babaylan was considered a threat to the

00:09:58.220 colonial, and Christianization project.

00:10:04.420 It is the role and function of the Baba Ilan 0.68

00:10:06.980 to mediate between the world of the spirits

00:10:09.120 and the human and non-human world

00:10:11.220 and remember for us the deep connectedness between worlds,

00:10:15.680 thus suturing and healing the split in our psyche.

00:10:20.160 And so maybe it is the role of witch in every culture,

00:10:23.780 especially in the post-traumatic culture,

00:10:25.760 to suture and heal the splits in our psyches,

00:10:30.240 to wake and lead us out of the repetition of trauma

00:10:33.340 to the great exhilarating calm of connection to everything. 0.96

00:10:39.000 Pre-colonial Philippines was neither a patriarchy nor a matriarchy. 0.85

00:10:42.480 The division of labor between men and women was a harmony.

00:10:45.180 In a country that lived balanced between destructive waves of fire and water,

00:10:50.220 volcanic eruptions and typhoon,

00:10:51.940 men and women shared in danger equally to nurture and protect their children.

00:10:57.400 When the Spaniards in the 1500s co-opted the Datu,

00:11:01.060 the leaders of the indigenous people who declared their loyalty to the Spanish,

00:11:05.360 the Babaylan resisted fiercely. 0.50

00:11:08.100 And then they resisted creatively, 0.99

00:11:11.020 adopting Christianity to survive, becoming pey-san chanters. 1.00

00:11:15.580 They functioned as a priesthood, 0.99

00:11:17.560 Christians who balanced between the material and non-material world,

00:11:21.140 explains Dr. Faye Mangajas in Centennial Crossings,

00:11:26.240 readings on Babailan feminism in the Philippines. 1.00

00:11:29.940 When the Babailans became rivals of the Spanish priests,

00:11:33.480 the latter called them bruja, or witches,

00:11:36.200 who allegedly dabbled in black magic. 0.71

00:11:38.660 They were demonized and systematically exterminated

00:11:41.280 during the first hundred years of Spanish colonization in the Philippines,

00:11:44.500 and not just murdered, but cut in pieces and fed to crocodiles.

00:11:48.460 so heavy was the oppressor's terror of these women

00:11:51.400 and of the transgressive men

00:11:53.580 who lovingly put on women's clothes

00:11:55.360 and worshipped the divine feminine

00:11:57.340 and if that sounds familiar 0.87

00:11:59.900 as a pattern of dominance and terror

00:12:02.000 it should

00:12:02.620 2017 was the worst year ever

00:12:04.980 for violence against transgender people

00:12:06.880 in the United States

00:12:07.800 until 2018 came around

00:12:09.420 the cycle echoes

00:12:11.560 and we have to keep reaching through walls

00:12:13.920 in worlds and across cultures and times

00:12:16.120 to decolonize ourselves

00:12:17.720 and heal. Make a circle and then bring each other into the middle to be safe. So let's be clear.

00:12:25.560 Missing witches believe if you are transgender, you are a brave being of magic and it is every

00:12:31.280 witch's and human's responsibility to protect you. We also believe that witch hunts have been and are 0.52

00:12:38.640 a weapon of capitalism. Check out this super fucking badass article. It's called Witches 0.97

00:12:45.040 and class struggle. It was in Jacobin Magazine. Silvia Federici wrote it, and I would quote the

00:12:52.140 whole goddamn thing, but let's just do this. Feminists were quick to recognize that hundreds 1.00

00:12:57.100 of thousands of women could not have been massacred and subjected to the cruelest tortures unless they 1.00

00:13:02.360 posed a challenge to the power structure. They also realized that such a war against women, 0.97

00:13:08.840 carried out over a period of at least two centuries, was a turning point in the history

00:13:13.180 of women in Europe, the original sin in the process of social degradation that women suffered

00:13:19.700 with the advent of capitalism. What has not been recognized is that the witch hunt was one of the

00:13:24.920 most important events in the development of capitalist society and the formation of the

00:13:29.220 modern proletariat. For the unleashing of a campaign of terror against women, unmatched by 0.56

00:13:34.460 any other persecution, weakened the resistance of the European peasantry to the assault launched

00:13:39.320 against it by the gentry and the state at a time when the peasant community was already

00:13:43.280 disintegrating under the combined impact of land privatization, increased taxation, and the

00:13:48.360 extension of state control over every aspect of social life. The witch hunt deepened the divisions

00:13:54.620 between women and men, teaching men to fear the power of women, and destroyed a universe of

00:14:00.780 practices, beliefs, and social subjects whose existence was incompatible with the capitalist

00:14:06.080 work discipline. So to be a witch then, to find the women and men who have been called witch

00:14:14.540 and honor them, is not just a spiritual act, not just a healing act. It is an act of resistance 0.53

00:14:22.520 and of decolonization. Artist Alma Orduja Quinto is a modern-day Baba Ilan, an artist-activist

00:14:31.380 who creates art inspired by her work with the child survivors of rape and incest. Women 0.99

00:14:36.020 migrant workers, women laborers, differently abled and street children, Moro women, peace

00:14:40.860 journalists, orphans, prostitutes, Baikal evacuees, and other participants of her art

00:14:45.860 workshops in various museums, academic institutions, and communities all over the Philippines.

00:14:51.660 Quinto first learned about Urduja from her mother and grandmother, but in college she

00:14:57.260 embraced her and all her attributes. She writes, I see myself as a contemporary Baba Ilan,

00:15:02.640 just like all other women who recognize their power to transform and exercise this power to

00:15:07.840 create a peaceful and nurturing environment. Her appropriation of the name Urduja reveals a kind of

00:15:13.300 born-again commitment to Urduja's legacy. As Quinto recalls, she adopted Urduja's name to

00:15:19.260 disseminate information about the pre-colonial ruler. Perla Daly is a designer, art director,

00:15:25.840 and cyber activist who might fit the description we sketched of a techno-shaman or digital witch 1.00

00:15:30.520 from last season's Brenda Laurel offering.

00:15:33.080 As a visual communicator and art director,

00:15:35.140 she earns a living designing for companies like Apple and Google and IBM,

00:15:38.820 but she also contributes design and writing

00:15:40.720 to the contemporary flowering of the Baba Ilan.

00:15:44.840 Daly is the artist behind the Baba Ilan Mandalas,

00:15:47.460 a polyglot of symbols, echoes, and references to indigenous spirituality.

00:15:53.300 She also developed meditation guides

00:15:55.040 based on Angelus Ariens' archetypes in the fourfold way

00:15:59.480 that focus on the Babaylan spirit and leadership,

00:16:02.820 specifically for Filipina women willing to learn from the Babaylan path.

00:16:07.320 Of these, she writes,

00:16:09.060 Healer. Water.

00:16:11.040 My first understanding of the Babaylan was from personal experience.

00:16:14.960 I realized that the hilo is a Babaylan.

00:16:18.160 He or she is a village healer or hilo. 1.00

00:16:21.540 Bonesetter. Massage therapy. 1.00

00:16:24.000 An herbalario. Herbalist.

00:16:25.860 Our family had one or two favorites in the barrio.

00:16:28.640 A healer removes dis-ease and disease

00:16:31.820 and brings about health and wholeness

00:16:34.060 in the physical and emotional well-being of the community.

00:16:38.080 Seer, visionary, heir.

00:16:41.160 My second understanding of the Babaylan from personal experiences

00:16:44.680 was of the seer or psychic truth-teller.

00:16:48.600 Most of these healos I encountered also had the gift of third sight.

00:16:53.560 They peered at you as if looking through to your very soul

00:16:56.260 and they knew things about you, your past, your future,

00:17:00.420 through the bumps and depressions of your skull,

00:17:02.860 the shape of your bones, by reading cards,

00:17:05.600 or just by looking at you.

00:17:08.220 A visionary intuits and perceives truth and understanding

00:17:11.280 and shares this with family and or community

00:17:13.880 from which action is taken to move forward

00:17:16.080 toward harmony and peace.

00:17:18.420 Teacher, Earth.

00:17:20.740 The teacher harvests knowledge and heritage,

00:17:23.220 processes, nurtures, and develops knowledge and heritage

00:17:25.860 and plant seeds for future generations to harvest.

00:17:29.580 I met two women who embodied the teacher archetype outright.

00:17:33.040 The first was Lenny, who was an associate professor

00:17:35.240 who taught and was writing, publishing,

00:17:37.140 and bringing about active community dialogue

00:17:39.080 on the topic of decolonization.

00:17:41.340 This discussion of decolonization

00:17:42.880 was also a process of individual and community healing.

00:17:46.040 So here was a very good example of a teacher archetype

00:17:48.580 doing work with essential healing,

00:17:50.500 thus dual essences of teacher and healer within her work.

00:17:54.100 The other teacher was a young woman named Bing.

00:17:56.340 She worked in the Llocos Mountains.

00:17:58.860 Having learned the oral histories in song,

00:18:01.600 she was taught by tribal storytellers throughout those hills.

00:18:04.780 She traveled from village to village to learn and impart legends and poetry and song and music.

00:18:10.560 She was an initiated and honored Babailan,

00:18:13.320 one of the youngest, who was eager to receive the seeds of heritage from our elders

00:18:17.380 and spread and plant them within the communities.

00:18:20.420 Warrior fire. 1.00

00:18:21.580 I was exploring the deeper meaning of feminism for a few years by this time, 0.95

00:18:26.820 and had already come to the realization that the feminist was embodied by a few archetypes, too. 0.73

00:18:31.260 One of these is the warrior, the fiery, angry woman who demands justice and equality.

00:18:36.680 So my third understanding of the Babailan as a leader was the warrior.

00:18:40.800 In Philippine culture, we have these Babailan warriors named as historical,

00:18:44.620 Gabriela Silang and the legendary princess, Urduja. 0.95

00:18:48.000 I realized that feminism and Baba Ilans were related somehow

00:18:53.260 and I was determined to figure out how

00:18:55.300 and as I began to find my own voice and express it in online communities

00:18:59.000 such as NewFilipina.com and in online discussion groups

00:19:02.240 and as I witnessed other brave women and men find their voices to speak up

00:19:05.680 on behalf of the exploited or the oppressed

00:19:07.760 I realized that the Baba Ilan spirit of the warrior is in us

00:19:11.320 when we speak up and openly for justice

00:19:14.040 and risk the consequences of the powers that be and society at large.

00:19:20.040 Priestess. Light.

00:19:23.200 My understanding of Babailan as a ritualist or priestess

00:19:27.520 was given to me when I read both the books of Mary Lou Hardillo,

00:19:31.980 or Ninga, and Aileen Tabios.

00:19:35.220 They both defined Babailan as women community healers, 0.98

00:19:39.560 leaders, and priestesses.

00:19:41.200 The word priestess resonated with me and made me excited.

00:19:44.660 It was a new discovery of roles that were actually possible for women

00:19:48.060 in the past, in my own people's history,

00:19:51.540 and possibly in the present because it just so happened

00:19:53.980 that I had become acquainted with my first Filipina priestess, Letitia,

00:19:58.960 while in my first days of publishing Bagong Pinay.

00:20:02.440 Letitia was ordained in three goddess traditions,

00:20:05.360 including the Temple of Isis and the Dianic tradition.

00:20:08.600 During her first formal training by elders,

00:20:10.980 that included rituals and women's mysteries.

00:20:13.840 She reached into her ancestral roots,

00:20:16.360 finding what she could in the ethnographic writings,

00:20:19.140 thanks to Linda Nietes,

00:20:22.120 the Mandala tribal practices of the Bailan Asgard.

00:20:27.800 Daly lives and gives life to a kind of diversity of practice

00:20:30.800 that is hyper-contemporary in our interconnected times

00:20:34.940 and also true to pre-Spanish Philippines.

00:20:39.940 Katrin Deguia describes the Babaylan as she who still knows sacred time and space,

00:20:45.360 and who remembers this with every cell of her body before she was interpolated by history.

00:20:50.260 The Filipina as culture bearer has colonial history written in her body.

00:20:55.420 Because of this colonial miseducation that centers Spanish and American influences,

00:21:00.660 Deguia writes that what is hardly mentioned in Babaylan literature

00:21:03.520 are the Buddhist and Muslim influences on the Filipino culture.

00:21:08.220 These influences are hardly mentioned in English and Spanish texts,

00:21:11.740 yet if we consider that the Baba Ilan epitomizes the global animist,

00:21:15.940 the Asian Buddhist, the Oriental Muslim,

00:21:18.440 traditional European, modern American, and postmodern global culture,

00:21:22.440 doesn't this make the shamanic tradition of the Baba Ilan so unbelievably rich?

00:21:27.700 It's not even the layers that are important,

00:21:30.460 but the retention of ancestral memory, despite all the layers,

00:21:34.360 integrating matching elements due to the inherent including strength of the Kapwa culture.

00:21:41.960 The Babailan is recognized by her community as this embodiment of the power of Kapwa. 0.96

00:21:47.840 This is what sets her apart. 1.00

00:21:50.540 All would-be Babailans are culture bearers, 0.95

00:21:53.660 but not all culture bearers are necessarily Babailan.

00:21:58.280 What is Kapwa?

00:22:00.340 It is at the heart of a Babailan philosophy, 1.00

00:22:02.480 and I think it's the key to understanding witchcraft

00:22:06.000 as a revolutionary political philosophy as well.

00:22:09.940 According to Lenny Mendoza-Strobel,

00:22:12.440 one of the most difficult questions and tasks about dismantling privilege

00:22:15.980 is this requirement to shift our understanding of this self

00:22:19.260 from the I to we, Capua.

00:22:24.460 In the latter, we, privileged Americans, or Canadians,

00:22:28.740 must begin to know and feel deeply that our affluent lifestyles have a social cost

00:22:33.980 and a social burden that is carried by the poor of the world and by the earth.

00:22:39.340 One of the most important features of the indigenous knowledge systems and practices

00:22:43.760 is the tendency to see the world with all its beings as a holistic system

00:22:47.920 where things operate interdependently.

00:22:51.120 Harmony with other people and the environment is a much-needed trait today

00:22:54.640 in our shrinking global village.

00:22:57.540 This orientation is called kapwa, the shared self.

00:23:04.160 Perla Daly says she created her Babelan mandala to be a gift of healing for a people

00:23:09.300 whose identity and dignity were fragmented historically,

00:23:13.320 who lost their connection to their ancestors, their noble beliefs, and their ancestral pride,

00:23:18.080 who lost the awareness of their inner gold in a striking parallel to the loss of the immense wealth of gold

00:23:24.060 that was once abundant in the islands

00:23:25.720 before the conquistadores brought it back to Spain.

00:23:30.720 She offers this rallying cry,

00:23:33.740 and I hope hearing it will give you light and strength

00:23:38.380 for the battle we fight together

00:23:39.780 to decolonize our minds and our lands.

00:23:43.260 If it helps, close your eyes and remember Orduja,

00:23:46.420 beloved leader of warriors, women, and men,

00:23:49.620 she who would take the language of those 0.85

00:23:51.900 who would meet her or convert her to forge her own magic, taking the heads of her would-be 0.97

00:23:57.180 violators and taking no shit, giving all those who would defend the earth and our profound 0.95

00:24:03.000 interconnectedness the fire of her vivid magic. The Babailan Mandala represents you, your soul 0.98

00:24:10.420 and existence in the cosmos. You are the Bahala, tree of life at the center of creation. With

00:24:17.480 Symbols and sacred numbers, the mandala tells you you are kapwa, kin, connected to everything.

00:24:24.400 Earth, water, air and fire, seen and unseen, dark and light, macrocosm and microcosm, you are not alone.

00:24:32.840 You are kin, kapwa, to all blessed beings and creation.

00:24:38.720 beautiful, beloved, blessed friend

00:24:42.900 behold, see how expansive

00:24:46.640 and unalone you truly are

00:24:49.300 you are Capua, kin, connected to everything

00:24:55.000 you are Capua, kin

00:24:58.200 connected to everything 1.00

00:25:00.260 you must be a witch

00:25:05.280 thanks for listening to the missing witches podcast be sure to come back wednesday for 0.93

00:25:11.000 witches found when i speak to nurse witch nova about mental health physical health

00:25:17.340 radical compassion and one of our favorite books witches midwives and nurses in the meantime

00:25:24.820 hit us up at missingwitches at gmail.com or on instagram facebook twitter at missing witches

00:25:32.120 and blessed be.

Missing Witches - March 31, 2019

Missing Witches - Urduja： You Are Kapwa, Kin, Connected To Everything

Episode Stats

Transcript