00:01:12.660It felt urgent to dig for stories of women who used magic to lead.0.99
00:01:19.000It felt right to conjure the witch queens.1.00
00:01:22.020and look we love the word witch there's a fuck you in it these days that's delicious0.98
00:01:31.040but just because we play with that word doesn't mean we are actually claiming these people would0.99
00:01:38.040have understood themselves as witches or that the word meant the same thing to them as it does to us
00:01:43.980We are the missing witches. We have been longing for more intersectional magic, for more layers and complicated stories. So we are endlessly turning with reverence to stories of women and queer people beyond our white settler colonizer culture.
00:02:03.380And we know we'll inevitably be clunky and biased, and we're coming anyway.
00:02:10.600Arms full of awe and love, just trying to not fuck it up too much.
00:02:26.360The shaman queen Himiko was a third century ruler of a powerful federation in ancient Japan.
00:02:32.660called Yamatai. Kids in Japan today learn about Himiko. She's part of the origin story of the
00:02:39.520nation. She helped make it a place. She wove its destiny into the sun. We know she used sacred
00:02:47.100bronze mirrors to reflect and communicate with spirit. And archaeologists still find them in
00:02:54.620tombs and passionately debate what it means that these mirrors are here or there. Where did she
00:03:00.620actually live? Who did she confer power to? What did the mirror actually do? We know she read The0.93
00:03:08.680Cracking of Bones. We don't know exactly where Yamatai was. Some scholars place it in northern
00:03:16.840Kyushu. Another influential tradition places it in the Yamato region, in what is now Nara Prefecture.
00:03:24.760It's easy to picture the birth of the spiritual nation of Japan in Nara, and to see Himiko there, talking to the sun.
00:03:34.060Nara is a place where Japan's sacred geography gathers itself.
00:03:38.620Mountains and thunder, deer and mirrors, spirits and emperors, forests and gods.
00:03:47.460Centuries after Himiko, in 768, according to the weaving of spirit stories, mythology, and history
00:03:56.380that we sometimes call legend, the thunder deity arrived at the sacred mountain of Mikasa,
00:04:03.200riding a mythical white deer to protect the new capital. The deer of Nara became sacred messengers,
00:04:11.320shinuroku, and remained protected for centuries. To kill one was punishable by death at times.
00:04:19.840They lost this protection during the furious modernization of the 19th century,
00:04:24.860when the old sacred order of things was dismantled and remade. But today, the tiny,
00:04:32.760genetically distinct deer are protected again, and Nara is one of the places on earth where
00:04:38.280humans and wild animals live together in a negotiated peace that comes from our species
00:04:45.200seeing theirs as sacred. The mountain forest has been protected since the 9th century. The trees
00:04:53.640and the ground belong to Shinto gods, and so it is considered a primeval forest,
00:04:59.560untouched by industry for over a thousand years. The forest is dominated by a dense,
00:05:06.640multi-tiered canopy of giant centuries-old broadleaf evergreens, oaks, beaches, and ancient
00:05:15.560cedars. I have this dream of traveling the world just to sit in old growth forest, to sit with old
00:05:26.460growth forests. I like to imagine these places holding a light, a healing logic woven between
00:05:35.060them that can spread through stories and podcasts that awkwardly whisper of distant mythologies
00:05:43.160and possible worlds and seep into us all and awaken us to a worldview where all of the world
00:05:50.720is sacred. Anyway, we can imagine a continuum 400 years before Nara became the imperial capital in
00:06:00.360710 CE. This region was a cradle of the spiritual and political worlds that would eventually become
00:06:07.640Japan. The forest was already thousands of years old, and at the southern edge of the Nara Basin
00:06:16.300rises Mount Miwa. At Ommiwa Shrine, at the base of Mount Miwa, one of Japan's oldest sacred sites,
00:06:24.920there is no honden, no central sanctuary in which the deity's spirit is housed.
00:06:31.460Instead, the mountain is the sacred body, the shintai. The land isn't a backdrop.
00:06:40.500The land is the sacred story. And maybe it was somewhere here that Himiko walked
00:06:47.520and listens to the sun as it filtered down through ancient trees.
00:06:58.160There's another possibility, that Himiko was not in Nara at all, but in northern Kyushu,
00:07:05.420where a major school of archaeological thought places Yamatai. If we see her there, the spiritual
00:07:12.560landscape changes. This was a world oriented toward the sea, the sun, rice, weather, mountains,
00:07:20.860and the dangerous passage between the Japanese islands and Korea and the Asian continent. At
00:07:28.740places like Okinoshima, offerings were left among enormous sacred rocks for the protection of
00:07:37.220sailors, and the successive journeys. Later traditions would associate this landscape with
00:07:43.320the worship of three female sea deities. Bronze mirrors, including the kind associated with
00:07:50.820Himiko's diplomatic relationship with Wei, appear in elite burials across the region,
00:07:57.680objects that caught and returned the light of the sun. Everywhere, everywhere the sacred was
00:08:04.960entangled with survival. This is the mycelial mat beneath the concrete quiet of modernity.
00:08:12.560Water for the rice, weather for the harvest, the sea for passage, iron and bronze for tools and
00:08:21.060weapons. The land singing, vibrating with forces to be honored.
00:08:27.440i feel them from here when i'm all wired for my to-do lists in the second morning coffee
00:08:40.940i walk around the property to get to my new four foot by four foot studio
00:08:46.540and i hear the voice of the indigenous elder i saw on a cbc doc last year who when asked
00:08:53.340how can we reconnect with the spirit in the land smiled and said eat outside so i do i find a dry
00:09:02.760place and sit down and slowly the ringing of the electrical energy leaves me and i eat my food and
00:09:11.180the air sent over by the trees ionized by the lake and everything everything changes in me
00:09:19.800If Himiko ruled by this place, by the sea, I can see a queen, a shaman, and a woman whose political authority emerged from a much older world of goddess worship, where the forces that governed human life were feminine, elemental, and everywhere around you.
00:09:41.480the chinese wei zi compiled in the late third century tells us that himiko became queen of
00:09:52.140wa after decades of warfare and brought a period of peace it describes her as practicing magic0.85
00:09:58.740and sorcery ruling through spiritual authority she was surrounded by 1 000 female attendants0.85
00:10:07.580only one man was permitted to see her. Her younger brother helped carry her proclamations0.97
00:10:13.820to the outside world. She was secluded. She spoke with spirits. She reflected the sun
00:10:21.960in holy mirrors, and only she could hear the voices.
00:10:25.800pyroosteomancy divination by fire and bone we know was a major state ritual
00:10:38.240before the introduction of chinese turtle shell divination plastromancy early japanese diviners
00:10:46.840used animal bones especially the scapulae or shoulder blades of deer grooves were carved
00:10:54.260into the bone, and a heated rug or twig was applied. The shaman would interpret the resulting
00:11:01.120cracks to predict weather, crop success, or military strategy. Historical Chinese texts,
00:11:09.600like the Records of the Three Kingdoms, note that Queen Himiko practices magic and sorcery.0.93
00:11:15.240They talk of bewitching the people. They speak of the demon way. Ritual bone cracking and mirror0.64
00:11:22.980gazing were central to how she communicated with spirit to guide her kingdom. I can feel what I
00:11:30.520call witchcraft in this story. What we think of as the meeting place of spirituality, activism,
00:11:38.760politics, and art. How she performed her rituals and gathered her celebrants and saw a way forward
00:11:46.200and spoke it into being. I can also feel the weight, the temptation to use her.
00:11:54.760Stories are implements, instruments, stories are tools.
00:12:07.840I wanted to find in Himiko a shamanism I could connect to the mountain, to the land,
00:12:13.520to a time when people might have shared resources and loved and adored the world energy that
00:12:18.620offered them food and water. I wanted a way of mapping this shaman queen onto a liberatory idea
00:12:26.200of my own witchcraft. Women of the woods with sacred deer ruling in peace, piercing the veil
00:12:33.300of the material world with ancient mirrors reflecting the sun, speaking of our relationship
00:12:39.260with the light itself. I wanted her. I have to admit my bias, my grasping thoughts. I have to
00:12:49.560notice the way I can't help but instrumentalize stories sometimes. I want to find stories that
00:12:57.700help. Stories and ideas and lives that might arrive with a spark of hope. Something I can
00:13:05.040offer myself and you listener here in the coven we create in the dark between our ears
00:13:11.700something we can use to have power to get free and i have to flag that yearning using desire
00:13:23.100that is not so different from consumption from the way imperialist misogynist patriarchy has0.67
00:13:30.720us all wired to use women, to use each other. And I don't really know what to do with this except
00:13:41.280to tell the truth about it, to show you where I see the tripwires and tensions. The most powerful
00:13:48.600spell is to tell the truth. I believe that, even if it doesn't give me a bangin' episode arc.
00:13:54.340and the truth about Himiko is more complicated than the witch queen I wanted. It becomes even
00:14:02.240more complicated when I look at what's been done to her, the layered ways over thousands of years
00:14:07.420she has been fetishized and translated, puppeted and played with and used. In Rebranding Himiko,
00:14:16.760the Shaman Queen of Ancient History, Laura Miller writes, quote,
00:14:21.160Some manga and anime creators portray Himiko as a presumptuous tyrant, promiscuous sorceress, or vain hag unworthy of power.
00:14:32.760At first glance, these disparate perceptions seem to have no relationship to each other.0.54
00:14:37.780Was Himiko a diabolical dictator, a talented witch, or an adorable shrine attendant?
00:14:44.600Do people see in Himiko a sexy manipulator or a spiritual mastermind?
00:14:50.320Interpretations vary depending on the goals and attitudes held by creators of her image,
00:14:56.200particularly their ideas about female power.
00:15:00.300As Laurel Thatcher Ulrich pointed out, the figure of Joan of Arc has been many things0.62
00:15:05.720across the years, including witch, virgin, heretic, whore, transvestite, peasant, and0.88
00:15:13.940A woman demonized in one era might be venerated in another.
00:15:17.560Himiko also reflects this type of shifting assessment, often holding contrasting personas
00:15:25.680within the same time period, end quote. A woman with extraordinary spiritual authority is
00:15:35.600dangerous. She can be made into a goddess or a monster, a defiler, a pure instrument.1.00
00:15:45.660She can be given every ugly quality we fear in powerful women, and then held up as proof that women should never have that much power in the first place.0.58
00:15:57.100The historical record gives us so little of her actual personality.0.74
00:16:02.640The woman we know is an outline of a political and spiritual figure, and she gets sketched and painted over and over and over, tarted up and filled in.
00:16:13.000she becomes sorceress the old priestess the beautiful young woman the vain woman the erotic
00:16:20.260woman the mascot the tarot figure the manga character the video game character the national
00:16:25.340ancestor the tourist icon a woman who ruled becomes a screen onto which everyone else
00:16:33.440projects an idea. There is a 1974 film by Masahiro Shinoda called Himiko, a strange, beautiful,
00:16:47.040feverish reimagining of the ancient queen. It isn't a historical reconstruction. It's a film
00:16:54.460about myth, conquest, religion, sexuality, and the making of Japan looking backward from the
00:17:00.320anxieties of modern Japan. The Himiko in this film is jealous, sexually possessive, hungry for power.0.97
00:17:08.360She falls in love with her half-brother, Takehiko, and when she discovers that he's also fucked Adahime,0.99
00:17:14.420one of the women who serves Himiko, she has him arrested, tortured, and banished. Eventually he's0.76
00:17:20.460killed. The film imagines a conflict between the people of the sun god and the people who worship
00:17:25.080the land the mountains the water animals and the earth and himigo is the voice of the sun god
00:17:31.000she's the one who hears the divine instructions enraged at her brother lover she turns against
00:17:38.740the gods of the mountain and the land she declares that her people have no use for these old gods
00:17:43.500no need to see divinity in insects animals snakes fields or mountains and in this telling
00:17:49.720it's a man who tells her to hide herself away and in this way to make herself a god0.99
00:17:55.760violence rages around her and she's depicted pushed in to giving the old man oral sex while0.97
00:18:05.300the land people are hunted the woman i wanted to imagine as a forest witch becomes in this telling
00:18:11.840an agent of separation from the living world and then the whole thing collapses takehiko and
00:18:18.240Adahime are ambushed and killed by soldiers, and their bodies are brought back to Himiko.
00:21:23.180scratch over our faces carved on the walls.
00:21:26.020And when they do record us, they find a way to put a man in the sentence, her brother, the men who interpreted her authority, the men who conquered, administered, fetishized, erased her.
00:21:38.680And when a woman becomes difficult, sticky, troublesome, recurring like the tides, like leaves, as Diane de Prima wrote, impossible to remove from the story, well, then we make her inhuman, a strange woman, a dangerous woman, a seductress, a madwoman, a goddess, a demon, a witch.
00:22:05.040and with all of that illusion cast it's hard to see a political actor a spiritual practitioner
00:22:12.320a peacemaker a strategist someone who ruled but didn't want the spotlight who retreated into the
00:22:18.480world of the bronze mirrors and burnt shoulder blade bones and what they showed her i don't want
00:22:24.760to romanticize her but i also don't want to participate in the old trick of making powerful
00:22:29.560women legible only through their deviations from femininity. Maybe she was jealous. Maybe she was1.00
00:22:36.560ruthless. Maybe she was compassionate. Maybe she was none of these things in any way we would
00:22:43.360recognize. We don't know. The record is so thin, so threadbare. We know people followed her.
00:22:53.420Her spiritual authority mattered. She brought peace after a long period of brutal violence
00:22:59.540in conflict. Years when people could raise children, could make food, could read and watch
00:23:08.420the stars and pray to the sun or the trees, could listen to each other. Weave, make art.
00:23:17.080Don't underestimate the brilliance, the sacredness of a single day of peace.
00:23:29.540When she died, she was buried in an enormous mound, and the way Z says that a hundred people
00:23:38.000were sacrificed at her burial. Here again, the witch I want begins to dissolve into violence0.82
00:23:44.620and icon-making. Because this isn't just a story of a wise woman living in communion with the land
00:23:51.120and leading her people toward peace. It is a story about power, the kind that can stop wars,
00:23:59.540but also reify class structures and pile bodies in useless sacrifice.
00:24:07.120The kind that can make a woman a symbol of liberation for people thousands of years later,0.84
00:24:13.200while she may herself have ruled through systems of profound hierarchy and violence.
00:24:21.860Himiko sits at a linchpin moment in the formation of political power in Japan.
00:24:25.640the old landscape of communities, agriculture, and ritual was changing. As rice agriculture
00:24:32.160developed, food could be stored, labor could be organized on a larger scale, irrigation, roads,
00:24:37.880bridges, fields, other infrastructure could be built, and the people who organized these things
00:24:43.080could accumulate different kinds, shapes, structures, uses of power, of domination.
00:24:51.500This is one of the oldest transformations modern historians have traced in human political life.
00:24:58.520When food can be stored, whoever controls the storehouse acquires a mantle, a layer, a resonance
00:25:05.360of power that extends outward and marks the relations around them and inward, shaping how
00:25:11.640they see themselves and how they behave. I don't want to make this too neat. Rice didn't cause
00:25:18.000hierarchy. Agriculture didn't automatically create patriarchy. Human societies aren't1.00
00:25:23.900that simple, I don't think. But one thing is clear. Surplus changes relationships. Wealth
00:25:30.900distorts attitudes and behaviors towards others. We see the extreme resolution of this disordered
00:25:37.420thinking raging unchecked across the planet today, as we are collectively brutalized by
00:25:43.680the psychopathy of billionaires. In the centuries before Himiko looked at the dancing light of the
00:25:50.640sun, cast by her mirror and saw a way to peace, the people who could organize the growing and
00:25:58.020storage of food became chiefs. Chiefs could accumulate privilege, metal and weapons, warfare0.68
00:26:05.260intensified. And eventually power could become something more than practical, it could become
00:26:10.980unquestionable. It could become divine. Those in power would use the divine to hold and gain
00:26:22.140power. The Wei Z tells us that the communities of Wa had suffered decades of warfare before0.62
00:26:28.400they agreed upon Himiko as their ruler. A woman of spiritual authority became the solution to
00:26:34.740a political crisis. The people didn't simply choose a queen. They accepted a woman who could0.94
00:26:41.500stand outside ordinary political life. Himiko's power was inseparable from her distance from
00:26:47.860everyone else. She was purified, secluded, surrounded by women, hidden from men. Her0.87
00:26:55.920brother spoke for her. She communicated with the spirits. Her authority couldn't be debated in the
00:27:01.080ordinary sense, because the source of her authority was somewhere beyond ordinary human
00:27:06.120argument. And it worked. For decades, there was peace. Her name traveled across the sea.
00:27:15.100The Chinese Wei dynasty treated her as the ruler of all wa. We know about her in part because
00:27:21.740someone outside the islands wrote her down. The woman who may have been one of the most important
00:27:27.780political figures of early Japan, survives in history in large part because another civilization
00:27:33.800thought she was worth recording. And let's highlight this in classic Missing Witches
00:27:41.220deviation to say, if the people around you can't see you clearly, if standing in your shadow they
00:27:48.600can't see your true shape and importance, please remember Himiko. Coming to us from Chinese
00:27:55.300historians, across centuries, across the sea, imagine how gracefully grand you are when seen
00:28:02.400at a distance. The mark you make is so much larger than this place where you stand today.
00:28:09.860Imagine your works, your workings in the material world or in spirit, echoing across distances and
00:28:18.640generations, witches, okay? Maybe you are a heroine in the local bee culture. Maybe the0.59
00:28:25.160beech trees sing your name. Why not live as though it's possible, so long as it's beautiful?
00:28:31.840One thing we know about Himiko is that she was isolated from the people, and it seems this is
00:28:38.040how things eventually fell apart. She went too far afield. She lost the authority over the
00:28:45.660different chiefs because they couldn't connect with her and hear her wisdom directly from her.
00:28:51.560Maybe she was kept from them on purpose and instrumentalized by men who wanted her spiritual
00:28:56.500authority without the messiness of what an oracle actually tells you about yourself. Or maybe she0.61
00:29:03.880just got tired of the mundane world and focused her practice on dancing with the light. Who knows?
00:29:09.520we know himiko represents a time when spiritual authority and political sovereignty could become
00:29:20.700almost indistinguishable her rule was not democratic there was no expectation that
00:29:27.000everyone should have access to the voices she heard there was no open source archive of her
00:29:32.440revelations for the community to examine her authority came precisely from being singular
00:29:38.240and that made her message susceptible to distortion.