Missing Witches - October 16, 2023


MW Mary Kawena Pukui + Morrnah Simeona： A Unified and Unifying Force

WF Maria Minnis： An Invitation To Explore WF Nadra Nittle on bell hooks： We Can Create Our Own Spirituality

Episode Stats


Length

36 minutes

Words per minute

140.42

Word count

5,084

Sentence count

255

Harmful content

Misogyny

6

sentences flagged

Toxicity

20

sentences flagged

Hate speech

22

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 The Missing Witches podcast is brought to you by The Missing Witches Coven.
00:00:04.420 Our covenmate, poet, son, said,
00:00:07.280 I came to this coven because nobody else was centering mutual aid and informed resistance like the Missing Witches,
00:00:13.100 but this community is also hugely loving and supportive and full of artists and thinkers and healers
00:00:18.420 who have such a huge diversity of experience.
00:00:22.100 Even when we're not in circle, there's magic afoot.
00:00:25.120 Also, I have a chronic illness, which makes it really hard not to swear all the time,
00:00:29.260 so I am in fabulous company here. 1.00
00:00:31.700 Bless a fucking being. 0.99
00:00:34.140 And Covenant Jen from Wheel of My Year wrote, 1.00
00:00:37.980 I discovered missing witches through Queen of All Queens,
00:00:41.140 Jinx Monsoon's podcast.
00:00:43.660 After reading their Contributor Covenant,
00:00:45.680 I thought I would give it a chance
00:00:46.740 and attended a new moon circle.
00:00:48.920 As a queer person of color living in a flyover state,
00:00:51.760 I had very low standards.
00:00:53.880 I was used to being burned by performative allyship
00:00:56.680 and virtue signalers.
00:00:58.480 These witches were different.
00:01:00.500 My first circle was a transformative experience as a solitary witch.
00:01:04.960 Missing Witches Kevin is what was missing from my practice.
00:01:07.700 I'm so grateful to be found.
00:01:09.800 Anyway, those are some of the people who bring you this podcast.
00:01:13.620 And if that sounds like your people, then come find out more at missingwitches.com.
00:01:19.880 We've been missing you. 1.00
00:01:21.620 You aren't being a proper woman, therefore you must be a witch. 1.00
00:01:24.720 Be a witch. 1.00
00:01:26.000 Be a witch. 1.00
00:01:26.420 Be a witch. 0.96
00:01:27.800 In early August this year, 2023, the capital of the former Hawaiian kingdom of the 1800s and home to Hawaiian chiefs for centuries burned in what the governor called the worst natural disaster in the history of Hawaii. 0.64
00:01:46.960 It was the most lethal wildfire in the U.S. since 1918.
00:01:53.120 The count of the dead stands at 115, and an unknown number of people are still missing.
00:01:58.580 Far-right conspiracy theorists grabbed on to the burning pain of lost lives and lost history
00:02:03.840 and shared doctored images claiming a space laser was involved.
00:02:08.980 Researchers found that a Chinese government-directed disinformation campaign
00:02:12.900 used the disaster to attempt to sow discord in the U.S.,
00:02:16.480 and that residents were discouraged from getting help
00:02:18.660 by disinformation aggressively spread
00:02:20.520 by people who regularly use social media
00:02:23.560 to spread Russian propaganda.
00:02:26.700 I am up in the night coughing again.
00:02:29.880 I lie there for a while, and then it's five,
00:02:32.200 so I start to write.
00:02:34.240 I'm thinking about Ho'oponopono.
00:02:36.900 I'm not feeling well,
00:02:39.540 in a way that unfolds from the pain in my throat
00:02:42.820 and ache in my belly out along vectors
00:02:45.080 of chronic exhaustion from being a parent during climate crisis, during plague years,
00:02:52.020 wildfires coating our throats with smoke, friends unhoused, the sense of being in a
00:02:57.720 world stretched so thin, and the little one is not the only one with nightmares breaking
00:03:03.140 through her sleep.
00:03:06.360 It's 5 a.m., and I'm thinking about violence and colonialism and the hunger for capital
00:03:11.560 and power that breaks minds, chips away at social ties and ecological ties, ties to ancestors and
00:03:18.840 history, and makes sociopaths. And I'm thinking about the means and uses of ritual, the ways of
00:03:26.880 tying knots one by one to hold on to some kind of hope, some belief in possible futures.
00:03:34.440 my bed is covered in books about hawaiian history and spirituality my mind is a tangle that looks
00:03:42.060 something like the 52 tabs i have opened in my web browser on everything from the role invasive
00:03:47.280 grasses imported to aid cattle farming played in the lahaina fires to the history of the great
00:03:53.700 mahele that resulted in the loss of common land the enormous transfer of wealth and identity from
00:03:59.500 Native Hawaiians to colonize their corporations, to writing on how white men invented a spiritual
00:04:05.200 system based on European spirituality and then claimed it as ancient Hawaiian knowledge
00:04:10.640 called huna, and how it became baked into American witchcraft traditions.
00:04:18.540 I'm at the stage in these writing seasons we have conjured for ourselves with the Missing
00:04:22.860 Witches podcast where, in trying to feel along the lines of a story, to feel the tangles
00:04:28.400 and tensions and relationality and politics and power that led me to a person whose story I want
00:04:33.980 to know, I am all tied up. In my fever dream, I see a net. And I think this is a story about women,
00:04:41.860 grandmothers, who saw images of fires raging on the horizon, saw the loss of their people behind
00:04:48.260 them in a wall of sorrow, saw their ancient family traditions sold like plastic leis and tiki mugs.
00:04:55.060 and they tried to untangle generations of loss and invasion to find a way to knit the past into
00:05:01.560 the future not by careful not to way find a kind of health again i am thinking about ho'oponopono
00:05:10.840 you could be forgiven for thinking ho'oponopono is a repetition of phrases that can blast you
00:05:19.240 past your limitations grant you miracle chakra healing and help you manifest your divine destiny
00:05:25.020 this is all in just the first page of results in the search on amazon books for ho ponopono
00:05:32.380 but i am sending reverence today to mary kawena pukui
00:05:37.280 and to morna simiona to the gatherers of stories and genealogies and chants and dances
00:05:47.200 the ways and means of healing and community those who took what might have felt like the last seeds
00:05:54.140 left on the scorched earth and tossed them as far as they could planted them into the hearts
00:05:59.420 of colonizer nations in the hope that even as the rampant individualism of self-care obsessed
00:06:04.480 new age hybridized those seeds packaged and resold them even then they might colonize the
00:06:11.320 colonizer. Root secrets into rapacious systems. Crack them slowly from the inside. 0.99
00:06:21.660 It's 5 a.m. and I am on unceded Anishinaabe territory, where the leaves are changing,
00:06:28.520 the autumn decay is glorious and everywhere, and I am dreaming post-colonial fever dreams. 0.92
00:06:34.640 Mary Kawena Pukui, born 1895 in Ka'au, Hawaii, was the source gatherer, declared a living
00:06:45.160 treasure of traditional Hawaiian culture and spirituality, raised by her grandmother,
00:06:51.040 Nali'ipo Aemoku, who was a kahuna, medicinal expert, and kahuna midwife.
00:07:00.240 Kahuna is a reverential term indicating expertise.
00:07:04.640 There were several traditional areas for people to develop their expertise and to earn their place in this pantheon.
00:07:15.360 And they all seemed to have had at their center land, kinship, and community in a way that understood relationships like a careful weaving.
00:07:27.180 Mary's grandmother was a respected healer and a hula dancer in the court of Queen Emma, who ruled from 1856.
00:07:34.640 to 1863. Hula was forbidden in public by 1830 as the royal family navigated decades of pressure
00:07:43.480 for missionaries and continued to privately patronize the hula. By the 1850s, public hula
00:07:49.780 was regulated by a system of licensing. Sacred traditional hula traced its origins back to the
00:07:56.300 creation of the islands, the creation of the world. These were dances from the sacred that
00:08:02.740 were performed open-hearted, bare-chested, and accompanied only by chants which held
00:08:08.160 both ancient history and a vibrational power. Nali'ipo Aemoku, grandmother, dancer, kahuna,
00:08:19.180 delivered Mary and asked her parents for the child to raise in the traditional way,
00:08:25.440 and her request was granted. Kahuna was born into the fire clan of Kao. Kahuna and her
00:08:32.300 grandmother were inseparable, and the child was taught many things she needed to know.
00:08:38.880 Mary was also educated in missionary schools and became a teacher of Hawaiian history and
00:08:44.020 culture in those same schools at a time when the pressure to forget parts of that culture was
00:08:48.160 enormous. She was from a line of people who remembered ancient stories in their bodies.
00:08:54.720 In dances were the gestures encoded sacred knowledge and jokes, too. As a teenager,
00:09:00.840 she began collecting and translated Hawaiian folktales, proverbs, and sayings. She worked at
00:09:07.300 the Beatrice P. Bishop Museum from 1938 to 1961 as an ethnological assistant and translator. She
00:09:14.540 taught Hawaiian language and culture to scholars and anthropologists. She published more than 50
00:09:19.980 scholarly works. Pukui is the co-author of the Definitive Hawaiian English Dictionary,
00:09:24.880 as well as place names of Hawaii and The Echo of Our Song, a translation of old chants and songs.
00:09:32.320 Her two-volume set, Na Na Ike Kumu, Look to the Source, contains gathered stories about Hawaiian
00:09:38.360 ritual, family practices, of personal and collective healing. She wrote the dictionary.
00:09:45.760 She gave things their names. She preserved names and revealed the layers of meaning.
00:09:51.040 She preserved sacred traditions and knowledge as best she could, and one of the practices she rescued was Ho'oponopono.
00:10:00.320 Ho'oponopono, quote, survives largely through the efforts and determination of Mary Kohenapukui.
00:10:07.120 From the mid-1960s through the early 1970s, Pukui had the opportunity to ensure that this part of Hawaiian culture would not die.
00:10:15.300 She collaborated with mental health professionals and social workers at the Queen Liliuokalani Children's Center
00:10:22.560 to codify the cultural practices in systematic terms that could be understood and learned by modern professionals and families.
00:10:30.800 She wanted to ensure that Hawaiian families would once again be able to use Ho'oponopono.
00:10:38.640 A hypothetical Ho'oponopono to illustrate basic procedures.
00:10:42.280 I have called you, all children, to come here and look into this problem with me.
00:10:48.460 Your brother Kippie is losing the sight of one eye.
00:10:51.380 We want to save the other eye, so that is why we called you together.
00:10:54.740 We will all pray together, and then we'll discuss things.
00:10:59.340 O Jehovah God, creator of heaven and earth, and his son Jesus Christ, we ask your help.
00:11:04.300 To our omakua, from the east and from the west, from the north and from the south, from zenith
00:11:13.780 to horizon, from the upper strata and the lower strata, hearken, come. We want to discuss
00:11:21.160 together and get your guidance and help so we can know what is wrong with this boy.
00:11:26.940 Mrs. Pukui then questioned each child. What came to light first was that Kahana was angry
00:11:32.500 with Kippy over some mischievous prank he had played.
00:11:36.540 The brother's sister disharmony was settled promptly
00:11:38.620 before any further questioning.
00:11:41.100 Kippy admitted his misbehavior,
00:11:42.660 then followed the conceptual ritual of Kala.
00:11:47.680 This, again geared to the young, went as follows.
00:11:51.780 Kahana, are you willing to Kala your brother?
00:11:54.200 Yes.
00:11:55.360 Free him entirely of this entanglement of your anger.
00:11:58.980 Yes.
00:11:59.300 remember Kahana as you loosen your brother from his trespasses you loosen yourself too
00:12:05.360 as you forgive you are forgiven now who do you want to forgive you please God forgive me yes
00:12:13.640 we will ask that now you gods hear now that Kahana is to free her brother of his trespasses
00:12:21.760 and to free him from the crown of his head to the sole of his feet to the four corners of his body
00:12:28.820 May he be happy later.
00:12:31.660 And you, Kippy, are you willing to Kala your sister for being angry with you?
00:12:35.820 Nearly identical phrases of Kala were addressed to Kippy.
00:12:39.200 The significant use of free and loosen rather than forget
00:12:43.020 is discussed in the definition of the word Kala.
00:12:48.120 Then Kippy was questioned more intensively.
00:12:50.700 The boy confessed to stealing some money.
00:12:52.800 He also owned up to an Hawaiian offense.
00:12:55.020 He had thrown stones at an elepayo, a bird form, of a family omakua.
00:13:00.780 For both he expressed contrition and asked for forgiveness.
00:13:04.620 Then Mrs. Pukui again prayed,
00:13:07.420 To you, O God, and your sacred son, and all the omakua everywhere,
00:13:11.900 hearken to this prayer.
00:13:13.880 This boy is sorry for what he has done.
00:13:16.380 I am sorry he has done such things, so please free him of his trespassments.
00:13:22.000 Then followed arrangements for restitution.
00:13:25.680 Kipi was to work small jobs and earn enough to return the money.
00:13:29.540 His sisters agreed to help him.
00:13:31.620 And to make amends with offended omakua, 0.99
00:13:34.180 he was to offer and burn a food sacrifice of an egg and a tea leaf. 0.96
00:13:38.860 This symbolized the traditional chicken and pig used in pani closing rites.
00:13:43.920 This settled, Mrs. Pukui concluded.
00:13:46.400 Now we dismiss our ho'oponopono,
00:13:48.720 and we pray that all this trouble be taken away and laid away.
00:13:53.240 O great eyeball of the sun, please take all this bundle of wrongdoing.
00:13:58.260 Take it out to the west with you.
00:14:00.460 And as you go down again to your rest, please take all the faults and trespasses that were committed.
00:14:07.320 Lay all of this in the depth of the sea, never more to come back.
00:14:15.460 There are several examples of traditional Ho'oponopono and look to the source, but I love this one.
00:14:21.080 I think because Mary wrote it herself and because she did it to show two worlds together.
00:14:27.260 The way they could be woven and knotted into something beautiful,
00:14:31.160 something syncretic that could pull the past into the present where a new faith had taken hold.
00:14:36.800 She holds on to the reverence and power of ancestors and the sun.
00:14:44.260 She demonstrates a praxis for repair to the web as a whole.
00:14:47.680 She wrote,
00:15:17.680 thrashing out every grudge, peeve, or sentiment among us.
00:15:21.700 In this way, we became a very closely bound family unit.
00:15:27.840 According to Pukui, the burden of the problems needed to be lifted from their minds
00:15:32.800 before their bodies were ready for medical treatment.
00:15:37.260 And listener, witches, weavers, healers, and activists,
00:15:41.340 this is why I keep thinking about Ho'oponopono.
00:15:44.180 because so much new age culture and instagram witchcraft feels stuck in a kind of thinking 0.97
00:15:49.700 about self-care and manifesting shit you want and this makes no sense while the world burns 0.87
00:15:55.360 we need to untangle the histories of our magics and try to tell the truth 0.99
00:16:00.220 if we're going to survive active well-funded distortion machines bent on sewing hellfire
00:16:06.220 today folks in witchy or new age circles are often familiar with a version of ho'oponopono
00:16:12.580 that is summarized in four phrases. I am sorry, please forgive me, I thank you, and I love you.
00:16:20.360 A version of Hawaiian philosophy and spirituality that's sold as huna,
00:16:24.620 though neither of these are actually indigenous in source. In Manna for a New Age, Rachel Morgaine
00:16:31.060 traces part of this history, focusing on the way the Hawaiian concept of manna is extracted
00:16:36.460 and becomes a staple of New Age and contemporary pagan practices.
00:16:40.580 Quote,
00:16:41.480 Mana entered the New Age movement primarily through the spiritual practice known as huna,
00:16:46.320 the invention of white American teacher and writer Max Freedom Long.
00:16:51.520 The most sympathetic Hawaiian account from the scholar and living treasure of Hawaii,
00:16:56.260 Charles Ken, highlights the limitations of a genuinely Hawaiian influence in Long's work.
00:17:01.460 Ken was a friend and longtime correspondent of Long
00:17:05.220 who spent some time as one of his HUNA research associates
00:17:07.900 in Los Angeles in the late 1940s
00:17:10.760 In 1949, having returned to Hawaii
00:17:13.900 he wrote in a letter to a member of the HRA that
00:17:16.600 I have no doubt about Long's sincerity
00:17:18.700 but he may have introduced some non-HUNA factors
00:17:21.040 on account of his white man's mind
00:17:22.720 Ten years later, he wrote to his friend, author and scholar
00:17:27.060 Le Nanny Melville-Jones
00:17:29.040 that Max Long was Auana 0.98
00:17:31.240 to stray morally or mentally. 1.00
00:17:34.680 He wrote, I too cannot swallow his huna stuff, and I told him so. 1.00
00:17:39.120 Max means well, but being a heole is unable to comprehend 1.00
00:17:43.180 the inner meaning of the kahuna philosophy. 1.00
00:17:48.940 Far from being able to learn of Hawaiian spiritual traditions,
00:17:52.160 which it seemed he originally hoped to do,
00:17:54.360 in the end, the huna method that long developed was a Western esoteric system
00:17:57.960 dressed up, with a few Hawaiian terms and some scattered stories and imagery.
00:18:03.800 Building on the base of Long's writings, many authors from the continental United States have
00:18:07.720 expanded upon the tradition of Huna and core concepts such as mana. Chief among these
00:18:12.380 contemporary proponents of Huna is Serge Kahili King, a prolific writer and teacher of Huna in
00:18:18.720 New Age workshops, including in Hawaii. King is Anglo-American and a former student of Long's,
00:18:25.040 who claims to have been adopted into the Hawaiian Kikili family
00:18:28.000 by his Hawaiian teacher, although this has been disputed.
00:18:31.760 He describes Huna as, quote,
00:18:33.700 the Polynesian philosophy and practice of effective living, end quote,
00:18:39.240 demonstrating the way in which the ideas of Huna
00:18:41.260 fit within the broader New Age movement
00:18:43.660 in focusing first and foremost on self-improvement of the individual.
00:18:50.880 Serge King defines mana as all power comes from within.
00:18:55.040 And it's in this formulation that it enters both modern witchcraft, especially the fairy tradition, as well as New Age healing pyramid schemes.
00:19:05.000 Morgrain writes,
00:19:06.420 By the 21st century, these principles were being reproduced in images posted on the Facebook page of the Kalani Retreat Center, which claims to be the largest retreat center in Hawaii.
00:19:16.120 In the poster for the sixth principle, mana, all power, comes from within.
00:19:20.700 The words are superimposed upon an image of a woman holding a yoga pose on a cliff overlooking the ocean.
00:19:26.760 Kalani is a well-loved destination for yoga, wellness, and Hawaiian culture, personal retreats, and volunteer vacations.
00:19:34.180 In 2011, the center ran a huna workshop, which was promoted as follows.
00:19:38.160 According to the ancient Hawaiian huna philosophy, all illness is a result of stress.
00:19:43.640 Modern medical research continues to prove this relationship, linking stress to everything from high blood pressure to weight gain.
00:19:49.940 If you know how to relieve tension, the body's healing energy can flow and you can achieve
00:19:54.340 instant healing.
00:19:56.860 This workshop reveals ancient secrets to managing stress, as well as the latest information
00:20:02.180 on achieving optimal health.
00:20:05.220 Instant healing, optimal health, all for sale today with a convenient down payment plan.
00:20:12.040 Morgrain continues.
00:20:13.140 very different from that of new age and pagan conceptions the mana of kanaka maoli
00:20:20.000 indigenous hawaiians hawaiians with knowledge of the land and the kinship genealogies their
00:20:27.180 healing evokes a collective power mobilized for the purposes of transforming a whole community
00:20:32.760 i want to anchor myself in this recognition of collective power for transforming communities
00:20:41.040 but i also want to tease out the complications here because the huna version of ho'oponopono
00:20:47.200 has a kanaka maoli woman as the source too the story isn't as simple as white people stealing
00:20:53.140 things and indigenous people being victimized indigenous philosophers healers activists and
00:20:58.740 witches know that there have always been weavers story keepers transgressors truth tellers hidden
00:21:05.060 in plain sight disrupting from the inside. An inescapable part of the history of colonization 0.88
00:21:10.760 is the creative trickster resistance of those who would not be colonized. It is in no way my job to
00:21:17.600 teach indigenous histories or philosophies anywhere. I bury myself in these stories because
00:21:22.520 I want to learn about what I've been missing. And I know that part of what we're missing is stories
00:21:27.380 of indigenous women who were and are connected to their source, working their expertise and
00:21:33.200 connection to their power, understood in an identity that sees their craft and will,
00:21:40.460 and not just their victimization. 1975, Morna Simeona, a descendant from two powerful kahunas,
00:21:49.720 a kahuna herself in Healing with Words, begins to adapt the Ho'oponopono, inspired by Christianity
00:21:56.020 and her studies of Indian and Chinese philosophy, as well as the channeled works of medium Edgar
00:22:01.400 Casey. This indigenous wisdom keeper takes white knowledge and uses it to her own ends, I assume
00:22:07.960 because she sincerely believed in the power of her own praxis, to weave and to untangle. 0.67
00:22:14.840 Morna and Simeona presented the Ho'oponopono process for the first time at the Huna World
00:22:19.980 Convention in Ponolu'u, Hawaii, in August 1980. She used her will and her mind and she developed
00:22:27.400 something she wanted to share. It's not her fault it was taken up by white people, who position 0.64
00:22:32.760 themselves as keepers of ancient Hawaiian secrets, which they sell at expensive retreats. It also 0.89
00:22:38.540 doesn't feel correct, though, to erase her from that history, to frame men like Serge King and
00:22:44.160 John Freedom Long as solitary actors when Morna was there, trying to do something else, something
00:22:50.360 she believed in. Serge Kahili King, who authored the book Instant Healing, Mastering the Way of
00:22:56.920 Hawaiian shaman, wrote a piece called Ho'oponopono Revealed. The basic practice designed by Morna
00:23:04.440 was simply to express forgiveness for something on behalf of someone else. She used to visit
00:23:10.640 battlefields and forgive all the anger and pain and suffering that happened there. And she would
00:23:16.500 walk down the street and connect with the people who had placed coins in parking meters and ask
00:23:21.180 forgiveness on their behalf. As she herself said, clean, erase, erase and find your own
00:23:28.740 Shangri-La, where, within yourself, the process is essentially about freedom, complete freedom
00:23:35.220 from the past. King continues, her work is being carried on by Dr. Hu Len, who has emphasized the
00:23:42.360 extension of one's identity to include anything or anyone else who needs healing. He developed
00:23:48.700 the formulistic phrase, I'm sorry, please forgive me, thank you, I love you. By repetition of these
00:23:55.640 phrases, a person was supposed to connect his or her own light with the light of the divine source
00:24:00.200 and over time dissolve disharmonious patterns in the subconscious. Today, this is probably
00:24:06.340 the most well-known version of Ho'oponopono as a healing practice outside of Hawaii.
00:24:11.240 both mary and morna were raised in the heart of the culture mary dedicated her life to documenting
00:24:19.920 it and treasuring it and she makes clear that healing happens in community before an illness
00:24:26.200 can be treated the threads between the hearts and minds and histories of people had to be gently
00:24:30.580 untangled the truth has to come out the layers needed to be pulled back morna was a master of 0.93
00:24:38.840 Hawaiian healing massage. Lomi Lomi has been called the connection of the heart, hand, and soul
00:24:44.540 with the source of all life. Morna studied anatomy as well as the laying on of hands. 0.83
00:24:51.600 She wrote, Western man has gone to the extremes with his intellectualism. It divides and keeps
00:24:56.880 people separate. Man then becomes a destroyer because he manages and copes, rather than letting
00:25:03.380 the perpetuating force of the divinity flow through him for right action. She recognized
00:25:09.640 the depth of disease and pain from which Western civilization needed healing and knew that
00:25:15.380 Ho'oponopono could help. Ho'oponopono means to make right or to rectify an error. The
00:25:23.040 traditional format required the entire family to attend the healing. With a moderator present,
00:25:28.020 each family member had a chance to ask for forgiveness from the others.
00:25:34.380 Morna thought this form of resolution, forgiveness, healing,
00:25:38.680 could help the people she met when they visited her spas.
00:25:41.840 But she also knew that Western communities and families were fragmented.
00:25:46.900 So, in 1976, when Morna was 63,
00:25:51.500 she began to develop a new form of Ho'oponopono,
00:25:55.020 modifying the original process.
00:25:56.700 she saw the ways individualism and imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy had
00:26:06.700 broken and fragmented the web and so she altered a sacred praxis of her people
00:26:12.300 who has permission to alter and to export who gives such permission and what are the constraints
00:26:19.980 i don't know what the right answer is and it's not really for me to say
00:26:25.020 But this permission is granted to some visionaries, or perhaps they give it to themselves, who changed the praxis and changed the world.
00:26:35.060 Morna was one.
00:26:36.480 Morna toured the world lecturing about her adapted version of Ho'oponopono and founded the Pacifica Seminars to continue the tradition.
00:26:44.660 And so Ho'oponopono becomes a practice that's exportable, lightweight, and memeable.
00:26:49.660 And that's okay, I guess, as long as we insist upon remembering that it is also rooted in a specific place.
00:26:56.660 History, land, ecosystem, social and cultural context, in interpersonal relations, and in action, in actively making restitution.
00:27:07.000 Mary's book, Look to the Source, continues with this testimony.
00:27:12.880 Ho'oponopono seems to be a supreme effort at self-help on a responsible adult level.
00:27:18.220 It also has the spiritual dimension so vital to the Hawaiian people.
00:27:23.580 And even here, prayers to omakua in the past, or God in the present, are responsible adult prayers.
00:27:31.160 The appeal is not the childlike, rescue me, get me out of this scrape.
00:27:35.800 Rather it is, please provide the spiritual strength we need to work out this problem.
00:27:40.700 Help us to help ourselves.
00:27:42.060 this is the kind of magic i am looking for
00:27:49.060 what i want is a craft that draws in community family politics and goes all the way into the
00:27:56.580 body and all the way out into the web of the world i want all the social determinants of
00:28:03.280 health accounted for in conversations about healing including climate crisis poverty wages
00:28:08.460 and the love and messages from my 10,000 ancestors
00:28:11.400 because moving energy from the stars into my bones
00:28:14.260 and asking for forgiveness from my energy and yours
00:28:17.560 will not be enough. 0.99
00:28:18.640 We need fucking health care too. 0.99
00:28:21.080 And we need to listen to each other's stories 0.99
00:28:22.940 of violation and heroism and spirit.
00:28:27.880 And we need to make restitution.
00:28:30.760 A connection with land established by me talking to the trees
00:28:33.660 in my neighborhood will not be enough
00:28:35.440 without the truth-telling and reparations
00:28:37.760 that will put the land and the people back into a net of right relations.
00:28:43.300 Witnessing the wisdom in the waves isn't enough
00:28:45.580 when access to the beach is privatized.
00:28:49.720 Here at Missing Witches, we are driven by longing for missing threads,
00:28:53.800 missing knowledge, missing context.
00:28:56.740 I think a lot about what has been lost in translation.
00:29:00.760 As Malcolm Naeya Chun points out in their book
00:29:03.660 Ho'oponopono, Traditional Ways of Healing to Make Things Right Again,
00:29:07.020 An article entitled Tetala by Zephrin Cahuali'i Cappellino is distorted by the translators, rendering Tetala as counter-sorcery.
00:29:21.420 But Tetala literally means to forgive.
00:29:25.020 And inserting this into the translation opens up questions about how magic and craft got distorted and buried by missionary thinking.
00:29:31.640 Forgiveness, tetala, is something associated with all the priests involved with sorcery.
00:29:38.780 The skilled guardian of sorcery was able to counter, tetanaana, the sorcery of others.
00:29:45.820 This was the true priest, and one who was not able to do so was unskilled.
00:29:52.340 So I have to ask, if forgiveness is counter-sorcery,
00:29:56.780 then how should sorcery have been translated in the first place?
00:30:01.640 Some of the kahuna's expert knowledge was called sorcery, and they were said to have power over death.
00:30:09.220 Traditional ho'oponopono would be led by a member of the family who was trusted, who knew both sides,
00:30:14.840 or by a kahuna, sorcerer, healer, adept in calling forth the truth.
00:30:21.480 A sorcerer, a witch, finds the truth,
00:30:24.980 follows the threads into human hearts and social relations, and into the painful facts of injustice.
00:30:31.640 They help find words and rituals and practical action that will help that truth find the peace it needs before it festers and brings death.
00:30:41.080 In a colonial context where the truth was that 90% of the people who had lived on the islands had died following contact with the white men, 0.51
00:30:49.280 that the land had been transferred away from those who were left into the hands of white American businessmen,
00:30:56.020 that the people lived often in great poverty while tourists partied,
00:30:59.680 it's not surprising that a ritual and knowledge-keeper
00:31:02.740 dedicated to the social and spiritual context of disease
00:31:05.900 would be mocked, feared, labeled as sorcerer.
00:31:12.140 Quote,
00:31:13.220 For when Christianity came in more than a century ago, 0.81
00:31:16.300 Ho'oponopono went out. 0.67
00:31:18.260 Because Ho'oponopono prayers and rituals were addressed to pagan gods,
00:31:22.660 the Akua and Aumakua,
00:31:25.320 the total Ho'oponopono was labeled pagan. 0.99
00:31:28.460 Many Hawaiians came to believe their time-honored method of family therapy was a stupid heathen thing. 0.98
00:31:34.840 Some practiced Ho'oponopono secretly. 0.96
00:31:37.860 As time went on, Hawaiians remembered not Ho'oponopono, but only bits and pieces of it,
00:31:43.320 or grafted on innovations, or mutations, or complete distortions of the concept, procedure, and vocabulary.
00:31:50.700 Fortune-telling was called Ho'oponopono.
00:31:53.020 So were unintelligible rituals.
00:31:55.560 This lady prayed over me, I think in Portuguese.
00:31:58.380 The kahuna prayed in Hawaiian so low I didn't know what he was saying.
00:32:02.280 I went to this man and he chanted something.
00:32:06.040 A self-styled kahuna offered to kill by sorcery, and this was called Ho'oponopono. 0.83
00:32:11.240 The Mormon family circle and any family discussion were termed Ho'oponopono.
00:32:16.840 Many Hawaiians called family prayers Ho'oponopono.
00:32:20.500 One client said Ho'oponopono was fasting and praying three days.
00:32:24.380 and others said it meant blessing the house and casting out demons.
00:32:28.620 Others said it meant reading the Bible and forgiving each other.
00:32:34.980 Mary was dedicated to finding the stories, words, and oral histories of rituals
00:32:39.560 that would connect her people to their wisdom at a time when it was slipping away.
00:32:46.280 Since Mary was a gatherer of the meanings of words,
00:32:49.500 here is a definition of terms in Ho'oponopono
00:32:52.160 offered as a map to the stages in the process of the ritual.
00:32:57.800 And I hope you'll extend a little forgiveness
00:33:00.840 to my pronunciations throughout this piece.
00:33:06.940 Hihia, entangled or entanglement, 0.90
00:33:10.660 snarl or snarled, enmeshed. 0.86
00:33:16.120 Kukulu Kumuhana, the pooling of our strengths.
00:33:21.100 Emotional, psychological, and spiritual, for a shared purpose.
00:33:26.520 Group dynamics characterized by spiritual elements and directed to a positive goal.
00:33:32.400 A unified, unifying force.
00:33:35.620 In broad context, a group, national or worldwide spiritual force, constructive and helpful in manner.
00:33:42.480 in Ho'oponopono, the uniting of family members
00:33:46.960 in the spiritual force to help an ill or troubled member
00:33:50.720 Mahiki, to peel off
00:33:56.160 to pry, as in to peel the bark of a tree 0.69
00:33:59.700 to judge the wood beneath, to scrape at the skin
00:34:02.760 to remove a tiny insect burrowed beneath the epidermis
00:34:05.880 also to cast that out as of a spirit
00:34:09.940 Pa'omalu, to shelter, protect, make peace, keep quiet, control, suspend, a period of
00:34:22.520 peace and quiet, silent period, mihi, repentance, confession, apology, kala, to release,
00:34:39.940 Grace, untie, unbind, and let go.
00:34:52.360 Witches, it's 5 a.m., and dawn is a long ways off.
00:34:57.540 Here in the dark, in the coven we make between our ears, 0.91
00:35:01.320 let's light a candle for Mary, and for Mourna too.
00:35:05.680 And in their honor, let's reach out to tell true stories
00:35:08.700 and to make reparations.
00:35:11.180 To reach into ourselves for forgiveness
00:35:13.460 and to reach for each other
00:35:15.180 in defiance of the clone armies of dictators
00:35:18.480 who desperately want us at war.
00:35:21.680 Let us turn our magic to the vision of the fishing net.
00:35:25.840 Hide not by sturdy, truthful knot.
00:35:28.880 That unified and unifying force
00:35:31.700 that refuses to give up on each other
00:35:34.340 and insists on making shelter for the magic in the world.
00:35:38.700 The Missing Witches podcast is created by Risa Dickens and Amy Turok with insight and
00:35:52.060 support from The Coven. Amy and Risa are the co-authors of Missing Witches, Reclaiming
00:35:56.940 True Histories of Feminist Magic and of New Moon Magic, 13 Anti-Capitalist Tools for
00:36:03.440 Resistance and Re-enchantment. Available now wherever you get your books or audiobooks.
00:36:09.780 Find out more at missingwitches.com.