Reclaiming the Fire, 2018.
River stones from the River Wyre, wax, cotton, fire.
Reclaiming the Fire is a ceremony for the womxn burnt at the stake during the European and colonial witch-hunts of the Early Modern period, as well as further back in history.
In a recent vision, I was told that the fires ignited to burn the healers, community members, elders and outcasts during the genocidal witch-hunts, had consumed and protected the witches’ energetic power and life-force as they were being burnt. The womxn knew to give their power to the flames to be protected for future generations. Centuries on, to reclaim the agency and embodied power of the fire, we would have to imaginally step back into the flames of these stakes, and meet with the sacred fire that has held and stewarded the knowledges for all this time.
Reclaiming the Fire is a ceremony performed in London in 2018, with river stones from the River Wyre, Lancashire, a site where I received the visions of the stone-womxn and Pendle witches. The stone-womxn are a group of more-than-human beings existing currently in deep time, whose rupture by the hands of the patriarchy pre-empts and sets in motion the later historic witch-hunt of 1612. The Pendle witches were taken from their villages through the Forest of Bowland, to Lancashire for execution in 1612, passing over the River Wyre.
The body of the witches are held in the memory of the river stones and the ceremony consisted of inviting them into this stone-body, igniting the fire and the heart at the centre of their (womxn-river-stone) collective dreaming. Native willow branches and cotton covered in wax is used to ignite the flames, invoking the intersection of the European enclosures and witch-hunts, with transAtlantic slavery and Indigenous genocide that enabled the Lancashire cotton trade, industrialisation and colonial-capitalism at large. The ceremony also invokes the work and life of exiled Cuban artist Ana Mendieta, murdered by Carl Andre in 1985, and honours the lineage of witches, earth-workers, and their intersections across divergent histories, times, spaces and identities.