Modern Hag-iography: Empowering Hags

Photo by Srini Somanchi on Unsplash

Some time after they no longer shed their monthly wise blood, elder women can become powerful. Hags. One becomes a hag by stepping, willingly or not, into the fire that burns but does not consume - the psychological torment of healing your trauma, your egoic identity, shedding the herd mentality of your conditioning, and becoming real. Naked, exposed, willing to die.

We used to have more women elders, but patriarchal control disappeared them. It stoked hysteria by turning Hecate into a witch - the archetype of the terrible hag we should “not suffer” to live. Or they turned her into a caricature, the ridiculous old woman derided, warts and all. But a fully realized hag has power in her wide-open heart, her edges worn smooth over decades by the steady flow of tears, milk, and menstrual blood through the canyons of her soul.

Elder women were once revered and their decisions respected and implemented. It takes a lot of difficult personal and community work to get to that pinnacle, that crown or croning, if you will, of a life. This transformation only happens if you are fearless, or circumstances give you no back door. So, obviously, not every old woman has done their work. But the woman who has submitted her ego to enough purifying fires develops great insight and power.

The root hag means holy or sacred. Hagia Sophia, for example, means holy divine wisdom, obviously feminine, and that is the power elder women become if they have lived their lives fully and honestly, surrendered to the Nth degree to the gift that life poured inside them the moment their heads crowned as they were born. Yes, I could use the softer word, crone, but I’m not. What’s the difference between a hag and a crone? Anger. Do you think dark emotions aren’t nice or spiritual? Step out of the way.

An elder woman who has embodied their wisdom is a force of nature. She is power and common sense combined - for she has been in the trenches of life with an eye toward every phase. She has become grand as in large. Through a lifetime of contractions, her ego has effaced, and she is as wide as the whole sky, and ready for her own death. But still here, engaged with life.

Her wisdom comes from the proximity to death, our own of course, but everyone else’s, too. Attending to the dying, and the laying out of corpses, was always done by elder women, the midwives who were present at life’s beginning and at its end. The gift of that work is gravitas. Infants die. Young people die; middle-aged people die. Beloved people die. Life comes and goes here all the time. Death is our teacher. Hags have befriended Death, and she has returned the favor. She doesn’t have power; she is power. There’s nothing you could add to her, and so she can’t be bribed. Gravitas settles around her like a worn, old cloak. A hag is a force of nature.

It’s the difference between becoming older and becoming an elder. In matrilineal societies, after a long and arduous life journey, elder women like that are respected. You can’t lie to a hag. You can’t trick them. With one silent glance, she can see all the way through your little plan, and into your heart. So, these women hold veto power, because their present moment is so expanded, they think in generations.

When patriarchies began using violence to dominate, one of the first magical sleights-of-hand was to remove elder women from power and authority in a gender-ic (rather than ethnic) cleansing with its own disinformation campaign. Something real was lost when we transitioned from wisdom to violence as the basis of power. But the best government is egalitarian, with everyone represented. Elder women know this. We do not want domination, which is power over others. We never have. That’s why there has never been a matriarchy. But the Fathers had to learn this. The destruction you see around you now is the lesson.

Before the transition to a violent monotheistic father-god, we were matrilineal, matrilocal, and matrifocal. Because the next generation is what matters - for every species, God was a mother in three phases, like the moon, the only trinity that comes from common sense. If you see a maiden moon waxing, you know all of the moon is still there. It’s one thing. When you see a young woman, the crone she will become is right there, too. It’s a figure-background shift. From personal experience, I would add a fourth phase, the dark moon, when it seems there is no moon at all. A quaternity.

Now, as a culture, we are in that dark moon phase. But even in the darkest of skies, the moon still is. No matter how terrible, disgusting, or invisible patriarchal domination has tried to make us, hags who have embodied their own spiritual power are still here, too. Still wise to their game.

When human beings committed to patriarchal violence as a way of being on Earth, they lost their rudder and created a world of chaos and suffering ruled by the fear of death. And the whole world pulled back in horror and terror. What else could violence inspire? Not love, surely.

Then, we added a capitalist twist that cannibalizes living systems for personal wealth. That’s a shift in values from what serves the common weal, to thinking that individual accumulation can somehow save you - from death - which is ridiculous on its face. You can never stockpile enough, because you are running scared from something that can’t be escaped. That’s the root of colonialism, which we are still playing at. This evil is under everything and has caused immense suffering, and not just to humans.

We need to return to an egalitarian government, where elder women are the final word, because domination through violence (not some disobedient female chomping an apple) is what kicked us into the harsh reality we live in now, and our time is tasked with taking us back to a world run by wisdom, not violence.

In the U.S., we have actually worshiped rich people since our wealthy Puritan fathers told us that abundance meant a man was favored by God, an extension of the divine right of kings. We still let them do whatever they want. The truth is 180 degrees from the illusion, though. Remember how our history books told you the colonial witch trials were caused by mass hysteria? It was wealthy oligarchs, a murder of ministers, then as now, who caused and benefited from that hysteria. Our wealthy are a fear-of-death cult, still ruling by kindling hysteria and fanning the flames.

You don’t have to look far to see one of the most extreme forms of violent patriarchal culture in the modus operandi of the U.S. president and his loyalists who have abandoned their common sense for an ideology - at enormous cost to the entire world, and the possibility of their own extinction. And we all know those fat cats don’t give two shakes of a little lamb’s tail when their followers suffer or die.

This week, it seems the whole Northern Hemisphere is having a heat wave so extreme that our pollinators are dropping dead at our feet. In some places, there are documented losses of local, native bees of up to 75%, and larval mortality is also up to 75%. That’s a huge drop in reproduction. Individual bees show a 6-day reduction in lifespan in a creature that only lives weeks during the summer. And that’s just one example. Where is our food going to come from?

And people who stand to benefit in the short term from ignoring our problems are making climate change a wedge issue, a focus of disinformation. Because they refuse to pay taxes. Oh, and of course, when food becomes limited, guess who’s not going to starve. But, those poor drinkers of the Kool-Aid? They will.

Our patriarchal capitalism is a mental illness. It should be listed in the DSM, with features of sadism and cruelty, antisocial behavior, grandiosity, and a complete lack of empathy. It places profit above even life. Well, your life.

Elder women know there is little good, perhaps none, that will come to ordinary people from this corporate deal or that data center. No personal need for an underground McMansion could justify supporting the parasite class - shareholders. The real cost is too high. Value comes from serving others, loving others, and loving the community as a whole, including our more-than-human siblings.

The ultimate council of elders, hags with veto power, works like a nation’s Supreme Court. I would argue that they shouldn’t be lawyers, with few exceptions.

Sure, lawyers can and should argue before the hags, interpret the law, and explain points of view, but the decision-makers should operate from common sense rather than the pretzel logic of legalese or bribery. And obviously, they should not all come from the same ideological club, like the Federalist Society. That’s how our Supreme Court was captured this time, but honestly, they have always been prone to disastrous decisions because they were steeped in the culture of patriarchal violence.

While it’s not impossible that one could retire from a career in the law and come out the other side with common sense, it’s just unlikely. A woman like that would have to come through great hardship. Those lawyers exist, usually hailing from an underclass (or two combined) that suffers oppression, but they’re rare.

This Supreme Court of Hags would sit atop an egalitarian government dedicated to equal representation. That power shift alone would change everything. The grift would be over. This is what the political right and the manosphere are really terrified of. Equality. That’s why they desperately and ridiculously and often brutally fill us with horror at the lengths to which they are willing to go to maintain inequality. It’s absolutely stunning, really, and something a true Court of Hags would never allow. Ah, but their end is nigh. They can feel it coming, and that is why they are so dangerous right now. But they have proved themselves unworthy.

Their end? A radiance of hags who eat patriarchal systems for breakfast. Their ally, Death, teaches our patriarchal bullies that their power is puny. They don’t control earthquakes, volcanoes, the weather, or people’s imaginations. She enlivens dreams at night, whispering to some and sending nightmares into others’ waking lives. She has initiated the Dark Night of the Soul, which is why whole cultures have rightly respected her demands and have already started building systems that work. All over the world, some people are reorienting their relationship with her and building sustainable communities.

But the U.S. has ignored her at our peril. If you’ve gone through a dark night, as I have, you know what I mean. What’s the lesson of every dark night? Ignorance is the disease. There are forces greater than your ego. Control is an illusion. To know love, you must surrender fear. And finally: you have no choice in this matter. We are on the cusp of losing the illusion of control now.

Like it or not, we are all one. No one is superior. We have a common problem. We’ll either surrender to our shared humanity and pull together, or we’ll die. We’ll suffer further ecological collapse, wars, genocides, and the refugee crisis our patriarchal outrages have already created. Now, we must step out of our learned helplessness to set things right. It’s hard, but we can do it.

What would it look like if we chose Door #1 and surrendered to the Council of Terrible Hags who would reorder everything?

A Shift from Aggressive, Individual Wealth Accumulation to Community.

• Human life is valued: from infancy through aging. Individuals have complete bodily autonomy.

• Leadership is stewardship, not power; a burden, not a source of wealth.

• Signs of aging become symbols of status, wisdom, and presence.

• Younger women look forward to aging. Men redefine themselves when the highest echelon of power is held by elder females, and government is egalitarian.

• The institutionalization of care into paid models with retirement guarantees for raising children, creating art, community programs, and volunteering. Focus shifts to addressing vulnerability and belonging.

• Redistribution of wealth through:

1. Collaborative, egalitarian government that represents everyone.

2. Universal Basic Dignity: child care, access to good nutrition, elder care, public health, mental health, education, and systems of public good as a right, simply for being human.

3. Infrastructure, legal, and social would shift to support mothers over fathers.

4. De-escalation is valued over dominance in our policing, and the demilitarization of our community police forces.

5. Restorative Justice over punitive justice. Elder-led courts geared toward healing the victim, perpetrator, and the root cause: the systems that led to harm. The assumption that all people are good.

6. Dismantling tribalism; no us vs. them.

7. PRE-distributing wealth through universal access to housing, land, and start-up needs for young people building their dreams. They are allowed to fail and start again.

8. The abandonment of short-term metrics like GDP in favor of a focus on the world we leave our grandchildren.

9. Giving legal status to forests, the soil, bodies of fresh water, and the oceans, recognizing their equal right to exist and be healthy.

10. Redefining National Security as resource independence: food, energy, water. No more resource wars. Focus shifts to cyber intelligence and high-tech defense systems, invisible shields that reduce the casualties of boots on the ground, freeing much of our standing military for mission-based uses within the community. Instead of projecting power, we use targeted financial instruments such as sanctions, asset freezes, boycotts, and global mediation unless we are attacked.

11. Environmental degradation is a national security issue. Reforestation, wetland restoration, dam destruction, and soil reclamation all secure food supply. Reinforce the coastline, build wildfire mitigation programs based on indigenous practices, update systems to withstand extreme weather. These programs create dignified employment.

12. Societal resilience: build strong local community networks ensuring we can’t ever be destabilized from within by foreign or domestic psychological disinformation campaigns. Proof of facts is required if you broadcast; political lies are outlawed. All campaigns for office are short and publicly financed. Outlaw lobbies and PACs.

13. Radical Transparency: No more state secrets that lead to abuses like the Epstein Trafficking and Spy Network, Iran/Contra scandals, and a litany of others. Secrets do not keep us safe. Anti-profiteering defense contracts stripped of profit motive.

14. Shift the military to Public Works when possible, creating a construction force for housing, engineering, eco restoration, civic infrastructure, crisis management, high-speed rail, clean energy grids, water purification systems. and rapid deployment for emergencies with systems for crisis response and community defense.

15. Research and Development now housed in the military is repurposed for long-term survival, including medical tech, renewable energy storage, and sustainable waste systems. Outlaw non-biodegradable plastics.

16. Accept Refugees with empathy and efficiency. Biometric screening and background checks, swiftly done. Micro housing new communities, holistic intake hubs that include medical and mental health services, linguistic education, mediators, trauma counselors focused on family unity, and resource guarantees. Community dialogues, town halls, swift civic inclusion, legal work, access to schools. Invited to begin the journey toward citizenship by joining the civil service pipeline or public works corps for immediate, dignified, compensated work within the local community, creating long-term repopulation for rural towns with declining birth rates, allowing them to have services on par with any city.

This is just a start, only a partial list meant to show the necessary shift in thinking and the possibility of hope. We can do this. I only hope we don’t wait for a large-scale disaster to completely wipe out the old system before we begin. Oh, and empower hags. What the patriarchal system thinks of as its worst nightmare is actually our salvation. As I said, the truth is 180 degrees from the illusion.

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