Lisa Marie Rankin [00:00:00]:

In today's episode, I want to talk to you about something ancient and a little bit dangerous. The witch archetype. And here's the thing. You might already be a witch. Now, I know maybe you don't call yourself that, but if you've ever stirred a healing soup for someone you love, whispered wishes to the moon, or sensed that animals are trying to tell you something, there's a good chance that you're already walking the path. Today we're going to explore why the witch archetype is so powerful and misunderstood, why resilience, creativity, imagination are key, and five simple ways to invoke your inner witch in everyday life. So let's settle in and let's dive in. Welcome to the Goddess School Podcast, a space for women who want to reclaim their story, awaken their archetypal power and live mythically.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:00:57]:

I'm Lisa Marie Rankine, author, teacher and your mythic guide. I help women step beyond self help and into soul work by weaving together Jungian psychology, storytelling, ritual and feminine wisdom traditions. In each episode, you'll find personal reflections, mythic frameworks, and soul stirring conversations designed to help you re enchant your everyday life and become the heroine of your next chapter. This isn't about fixing yourself. It's about becoming the woman you are meant to be. The veil is parting. The ship is setting. Sail.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:01:34]:

Let's begin. I suspect most women have a deep, ancient longing to be a witch. You know, to cast spells that alter the course of reality. To stir healing potions on the stove and whisper secrets to the trees. To gather under the full moon with sisters who see them clearly. And to live in tune with cycles older than time. Now, if that stirs something deep within you, you probably already are one. Now, you might not wear a pointy black hat.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:02:16]:

Personally, I prefer flowy floral dresses. In the summer. You might not even call yourself a witch. But if you believe there's more to life than meets the eye and that you have the power and the magic to affect reality, sister, you are already walking the path. Because let's get real. Your words are spells that you cast all day long. So whether you are arguing for your limitations, advocating for your potential, it becomes true. That's why we say things like it's a self fulfilling prophecy.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:02:53]:

The chicken soup that you make for your kids when they're not feeling well. Is there really a better healing potion than that? Or what about the pet that senses your mood better than anyone? Could that be your familiar? What about the cardinal who visits your window? The toad you spy in the garden. These animal allies that have messages to share. But make no mistake, the witch is not all love and light. She's also a wild, potent, and sometimes disagreeable and ruthless force within you. The witch does not adhere to another's moral code. She obeys her own, which admittedly can sometimes be gray. But it's one written in deep intuition and forged in a fire of.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:03:44]:

Of lived experience. There are many faces of the witch. The witch comes in many forms, some you likely know. Now, if you've been in my book club, Women who run with the wolves, you are likely familiar with the Baba Yaga. She is the old Slavic forest witch. She is ugly, terrifying, and she is wise beyond belief. She has discernment. And you never really know what the Baba Yaga is going to do.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:04:11]:

She could help you or provide you with wisdom or like she does in Vasili, Lisa the beautiful. Provide Vasilisa with fire or she could eat you. You simply don't know. She just judges whether you are worthy or not. Then there's also one of my favorite witches, man in Black Beak. So many of you know that I have been very interested in romantasy and really looking at romantasy as a modern myth and all of these beautiful archetypal forces that we can connect to to become the heroine in our own life. Now, in the Throne of Glass series by Sarah J. Maas, man in Black Beak is beautiful, sensual and deadly.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:04:55]:

She's really my favorite witch. And she reminds us, this is what she says, you don't need a weapon when you are one. There's a lot of power, a lot of confidence. In man in Black Beak. We also get to see her trajectory in the Throne of Glass series, where she also gets to connect with her softer side as well. And of course, there's the Wicked Witch of the west and Glinda the Good Witch. So from the popular wizard of Oz, they provide us with the polarities of power both distorted and sweetened. But whether we look at the witch as fearsome, soft, or something in between, the witch archetype includes qualities such as creativity, resilience, disagreeability, perseverance, strength, focus, ruthlessness.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:05:46]:

But above all, and perhaps even most importantly, is imagination. The witch can envision a new reality. A witch is creative. Now, one of the reasons that I think the witch archetype is so powerful, especially in our modern zeitgeist, is that the witch is really the opposite of the victim. So in a culture that often promotes victim consciousness and can lead us down this endless path of healing and focusing on Our trauma. In this cycle of fixing, which I've been talking about a lot lately, the witch you can think of as the antidote. When the victim says, life is happening to me, the witch declares, life is happening with me. And for me, the witch takes radical responsibility for her life and the story she tells about it.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:06:43]:

So in my community, enlivened, we are doing a lot of work with stories, and I just want to talk about that a little bit as it really relates to the witch. People might often say that you can't change the past, but actually you can. We can look at the stories that we are telling ourselves about a particular situation. Once we change the story, we can change the past and also how we decide to experience the future. And I'll give you a little bit of an example. It might take us a little bit off track, but we will loop back around. And you might have heard this example before, but say you are walking down the street and you see a friend on the other side of the road, and you're like, hey, Mary, it's me. Look over here.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:07:31]:

But Mary just keeps walking. Right now you're going to have a story about that. It could be like, oh, Mary's. Mary's a real. Like, she's not even. She's not even acknowledging me. Or it could be, what did I do wrong? Oh, I hope I didn't screw something up. Oh, I can never maintain friendships.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:07:50]:

Or it could be, Mary must be really busy. She seems super focused. I hope everything is okay. There could be countless stories that we could attribute to why Mary did not respond right. And the story we come up with, it's going to affect our mood for the day, how we show up. And it's also going to affect how we make friends. If we go into friendships thinking that we are going to be abandoned or thinking that, oh, maybe there's just something bitchy about us. Or we go in with an open mind.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:08:22]:

And I share that because the witch understands that there are so many different possibilities for how we interact with life. Life is never just happening to us, but it is happening with us and for us. And when we can start to see these unseen forces that are shaping our reality, we have that opportunity to shift them. The witch is not defined by her past traumas, but she uses them as symbols of her resilience. Now, this ethos is really captured in one of my favorite lines about man in Black Beak's beloved Wyvern Abraxos. So again, this is referring to Sarah J. Maas, throne of Glass Ceres So the witches all. All got to ride on wyverns and man in black beaks.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:09:10]:

Even though she was one of the most powerful witches, her wyvern was a little bit smaller. He was a little bit beat up. But as the story goes, Sarah J. Maas writes, each of the scars, the chipped teeth and broken claws, the mutilated tail, they weren't the markings of a victim. Oh, no. They were the trophies of a survivor. Imagine if we could look at our past drama, trauma and karma, not as the markings of a victim, but as a way of showing our strength and our resilience, really as emblems of our power. Now, another really fantastic thing about embodying the witch archetype is she doesn't subscribe to another's rules or opinions.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:09:55]:

Now, I also think that this is a really important quality in our culture today, where, you know, we have so many influencers and we have to be either on this side or that side, that sometimes we can lose the sense of critical thinking as we want to identify with one group but not the other. This group is good, this group is bad. So the witch really has, you can think of that critical thinking capacity where it's not about identifying with a particular group or going along to get along. She has her. Her own agenda, her own moral code, her creed, and this is also a creed from Wicca as well, is do as you will and do no harm. I think that's pretty good right. Now, how do I embody the witch archetype personally? There's so many different types of witches, right? We have health witches, green witches, kitchen witches, love witches, and then just, you know, the general witch who wants to shape her reality and talk to animals and connect with nature. Now, I like to do all of that, but I really consider myself a health witch, too.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:10:58]:

As many of you might know, I am a student and teacher of Ayurveda, which is an ancient Indian health system that really looks to optimize health by holistically caring for body, mind and spirit, and has Ayurveda has beautiful rituals. So I have daily rituals, elixirs, and other practices that I like to think keep my skin glowing, my energy strong, And I also see my symptoms as my body malfunctioning or something wrong that needs to be fixed, but as messages from my soul asking me to realign, asking me to do something different. I'm also a love witch. I anoint myself with rose and sandalwood when I want to invoke my inner Aphrodite and perhaps attract my partner's. Attention. And I also love the connection with animals. So I have a 10 month old Bernadoodle named Moose who is just the cutest thing that I have ever seen. And I think of him as my familiar.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:11:58]:

So I walk with him daily. And as I'm walking with him in the woods, one of my practices to just stay really present too is to be aware of my surroundings, but really paying attention to the animals that cross our path. I noticed the hawk, the fox, the snakes, the owls, and then afterwards I'll research their meaning so I can receive their wisdom. What are they here to tell me? But probably the most important way that I live as a witch is that I take care of my energy. Other people, the weather, the news, they don't get to run my field, my energy, my responsibility. And that's really the key. We create our reality through the energy that we carry. That's why we often use phrases like it's feast or famine.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:12:47]:

Because when we operate from a place of scarcity, there's never enough and we bring more scarcity into our field. But when we cultivate a sense of abundance, we generally attract more good our way, the way that we can affect our energy are through practices like ritual embodiment and breath work. And I think that this is an important point because it's not just necessarily waking up and saying, you know, I want to invoke my love and magnetism as I become a love witch. We often need practices to invoke a particular energy. And that is why we have rituals, whether it's taking a walk in nature, nature, lighting a candle, pulling an oracle card. But we do things to evoke an energy. This isn't to control life, but to attune to the current that we seek. I also want to take a moment to talk about the witch wound.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:13:43]:

So many women carry the witch wound. And this is an ancestral and cultural imprint that warns us that it's dangerous to be visible, powerful, or to speak up. Because like historically, women were truly burned at the stake for being different or simply for irritating the wrong person. Now, this fear didn't just vanish with time with the flame, but it still very much lingers. So today it can show up as the fear of being judged, misunderstood, or punished for speaking our truth or being a bit different. So it keeps us playing small, it keeps us like in a box. So we might want to be a little bit more witchy. We might want to tap into our powers, speak up.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:14:31]:

But we don't because we're literally in fear of being burned at the stake being ostracized. But when we begin to acknowledge the witch within, something starts to shift. When we begin to take these little steps, steps to step out of the box, to embrace our inner witch, we start to reclaim our wisdom, our creativity, and our ability to see beyond the veil. So we can stop hiding and stop playing small and start taking up space and creating the life and the world that you actually want to live in. So, beautiful ones, have I convinced you to embrace, to embody, to let out your inner witch? If so, I want to share you with five rituals that you can do to start invoking your inner witch. And these are easy rituals. The first one is to create a sacred start. And that just means begin your day with ritual.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:15:30]:

This could be different for all of you, depending on what you're trying to invoke. I will share a few of my favorites. So, morning pages. So this is the beautiful ritual by Julia Cameron where you just write free flow journal in the morning. Having tea in silence, anointing yourself with an essential oil, pulling a tarot card or taking a walk, anything that brings you back into communion with your inner wisdom, with nature, with a divine, intelligent force. The second one is to follow the moon cycles. So the moon has long been associated with the divine feminine. It waxes and wanes just like you do.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:16:12]:

And the moon governs intuition, magic and change. So notice how your energy fluctuates in sync with the moon's phases. Are you more creative at the full moon and maybe more reflective at the new? So it can be really great to keep a lunar calendar. The third way is to celebrate the wheel of the year. So the wheel of the year was traditionally a pagan calendar that marks the eight seasonal sabbats. And the sabbats are the beginning and midpoints of each season. And these are sacred pauses that allow us to connect to something bigger. It's just a reminder that you don't get into nature.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:16:51]:

You actually are nature. Number four is to connect with animal allies. So we talked a little bit about this already. But pay attention to the animals that may live with you, but also the animals that you encounter when you are taking a walk that you see from your window, consider that they aren't random. Seek them out and ask what they're here to show you. Let the natural world be your oracle. And then the Last 1, Number 5, and this is a really important one, is to gather with women. So our witchiness is amplified when we commune with other women.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:17:28]:

Sharing space with others heals the sister wound and the witch wound, which is the fear of being seen, judge or burned for our truth. There really is power when we come together as women seeking to witness each other, inspire each other and evolve to together reclaim our power. So what do you think? Is there a witch in you that is just waiting to come out? If so, trust your intuition and let her. Let her be wise, wild and even a little bit dangerous. All right beautiful ones, thank you so much for joining me today. If you loved this episode, consider subscribing, sharing or leaving a review that really helps other people find this podcast. And until next time, be well. Beautiful ones, thank you for joining me for this episode of the Goddess School Podcast.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:18:26]:

I hope it sparked your imagination and expanded your vision for what's possible. If you're ready to explore these concepts more deeply, reclaim your personal myth and live with greater creativity and enchantment, I invite you to join me in the Inside Enlivened my Divine Feminine Mystery School and Sacred Community where we bring these teachings to life through ritual, story coaching, and of course, real world action. You can find the link to learn more in the show notes. And remember, the Goddess isn't a deity outside of yourself. She's an aspect of your highest self. You are the Goddess. Until next time, Sam.