From Witch Trauma to Ecofeminist Joy

This year, I became one of the founding members of the Ecofeminist Society. We are building an online orgo.space where people can learn together more about ecofeminism. One of the important hubs is the witchcraft x ecofeminism hub.

The founder, Asmae, shared in the weekend of Lugnasadh Irish stories. I proposed to write a post for Instagram, where we move from Ireland to the Low Countries, where there is a movement of rehabilitation of witches (in Dutch & Flemish: eerherstel van heksen). The rehabilitation is a movement in which towns and historians offer posthumous apologies and erect memorials to people, often women, who were wrongly accused, tortured and executed for witchcraft in the early modern period.

In Lier (Belgium), you have Cathelyne Van den Bulcke (c. 1542–1590) . They were executed at the stake on the Grote Markt in Lier on 20 January 1590 following a false accusation of witchcraft. In 2021, they were officially rehalitibated by Lier’s town council. 

There is now a walking tour in Lier (see also A Flemish ghost in the throat: Imagining who Cathelyne van den Bulcke was) which educates you more about Cathelyne and the (political) ecology in which they had to live. Lier is situated in what we now call Belgium. This is the second country, after the United Kingdom, in the world, where the train, and hence, standard time (bye bye to working with human and celestial bodily clocks and seasonal rhythms) are introduced. 

Landscapes, once belonging to the Celtic ancestors, have been occupied by diverse armies, from the Roman Empire to the nazi empire, and have witnessed religious wars. The lands there became more disenchanted, but when you really dig or look in linden groves and black alder marshes, you find traces of enchantment. 

In the Netherlands, ecofeminist and author Susan Smit is calling for an official posthumous rehabilitation and a national monument to the victims of witch hunts in the Netherlands. Having written her historical novel De heks van Limbricht (The Witch of Limbricht), she is active in the National Witch Monument Foundation to commemorate and rehabilitate women and men who were wrongfully convicted and executed (Source: (https://www.nationaalheksenmonument.nl).

However, we also want to highlight stories of the women who were not burned as witches. 

Often, narratives are full of Witch trauma (cfr Queer trauma, with the infamous bury-your-gays trope) and not enough about Witch Joy (with burn-your-witches trope). 

Not far from Lier, in Belgium, a village celebrates a witch and folk healer, who has never been burned. Their name is Mie Broos and they lived from 1839 until 1927. People came from abroad to get helped by Mie Broos. Since 1989 (the birth year of the founding member (re)rooting in the Low Countries), a commemorative plaque to Mie Broos (birth name: Maria Van Loock) has stood near the church, yes, near a Catholic church. 

They were not a doctor, as they lacked the necessary qualifications, but they learnt from her experiences with their parents, who were both employed by a doctor. They further expanded that knowledge through their own research. They understood the healing power of plants better than anyone and used them to prepare ointments. 

One of the founding members has already spent time looking in the local library there to find lists of their plant allies, but was not successful yet. However, knowing the land and that Mie was known for skin diseases, I speculate that Mie might have worked with ribwort plantain, nettle and chickweed. 

Ordinary, poor people could always turn to Mie Broos for help. According to witnesses, however, their patients also included a few cardinals and the provincial governor.  

And although Mie Broos’s expertise was often dismissed as quackery, there are several known cases in which doctors, having given up on their patients, sent them to Mie as a last resort. 

Ok, there was almost a Witch trauma. They were once summoned to appear before the court in Turnhout to answer for their actions, but they were not convicted.  (Source: municipality Vorselaar). 

Nowadays, Vorselaar is a transition town with a unique local government. The municipality is not governed by a national party, but by a bottom-up party which works from local needs and with resources. Wendy, one of the founding members, has a root in this Village and has witnessed great initiatives (e.g. desealing concrete playgrounds, circular and regenerative initiatives…), some of them featured in her work on unmuting multispecies voices in circular economy (Wuyts, 2024). Apparently, the sister of Mie Broos, never married themselves, was married into their family. 

In the Ecofeminist Society, we will not shun away from Witch Trauma and Wounds as they provide lenses on learning why horrible things happened (and still happen) in a systematic way to certain people, but we also want to nurture Witch Joy to provide a more hopeful counter narrative that can seed our work.  This means learning with and from the land, the folktales and folk names. Mie Broos is actually not often called a witch, but a folk healer. 

As ethnobotanists know, folk names of plants tell more about the relationship between plants and humans than the colonial scientific Latin names. These place-informed names about the relationships can reveal how plants can help humans in that place. Folk healers and witches, like Mie Broos, work with relations, and that is what we do at the Ecofeminist Society: learning, cocreating and co-producing about and with relations with humans and the more than human world. 

The Ecofeminist Society brings the cauldron for this joy-full and care-full witchcraft.

Will you bring … the ingredients (folknames, folklore…) from your place? 

You can sign up here to the waiting list to become one of the 100 new members in 2026.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeftgV0LgrqFkXQL9gbRouDG46rW-_HPyWSjpOvp02PJfYH8w/viewform