During the Witch Hunts, some of the accused were traditional healers continuing family traditions going back generations. I have often thought about these women, wondering why they continued to care for their patients even when they knew that they were increasing their risk of arrest. Whether they considered this or not, they were also essential for preserving traditional ways for us, their descendants who lived in what was to them a far future.
Jonnet was a real person listed in the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft of the University of Edinburgh. She was a traditional healer who mentioned charms and spells, as well as a thorn tree, a traditional gateway to the fairy world, at her trial. Might she have ever thought of escaping this world by vanishing into the fairy mound by the tree?
While writing this poem is honor of her, I thought of so many women I’ve known who were healers or dedicated to making sure that traditional lifeways continue. I remembered how their dedication to their life mission was an essential part of who they are. I think I may understand better now what Jonnet may have been thinking.
If you were she and thought you could escape into the world of fairy, would you have? What do we each need to do to make sure we continue to heal one another and that the wisdom of our ancestors, whomever they may have been, is available to future generations?
Jonnet presses her body into the soft, wet, black, fruitful soil
Beneath the thorn tree on Thorn Tree Hill.
Can her human ear hear faint fairy feasting sounds?
A fiddle, singing, dancing, dishes clanking, laughing —
All merriment in that twilight realm her mother whispered about
Fifty years ago, “listen for it with your Underworld ears.”
Jonnet and her mother and all her mother’s mothers from forever
Tended every village baby from its first breath
To easing the pain of last sighs with herbs, charms and amulets.
From the time the mantle of village healer fell onto her shoulders,
Jonnet was always listening for the
Knock on the door, the desperate plea
For a tonic to ease a baby’s cough, a talisman against heartbreak,
Never slept a night free from worry about some languishing neighbor.
But now the minister speaks against her and some villagers do, too.
She has heard rumors of other women healers
Testified against, jailed, and burned just over the mountain.
Now each morning she wakes up with panic gnawing at her belly.
Will the next knock be the cart to take her away?
Jonnet could quietly chant secret words into Thorn Tree Hill
And she would vanish into the door of the Fairy Queen’s castle.
She could leave behind hunger and cold and danger.
She could stay a lifetime, or even just a few years and emerge
Centuries in the future, when the panic would be silent, forgotten.
Forever the women of her motherline have known the fairy mound spell
And none have used it even in famine and war.
How could they? Who would take care of the people?
If she disappeared, what would her daughters and granddaughters learn
About the responsibility that comes with the ancestral knowledge
That is theirs by right?
Everyone would say that the ministers and judges were right,
The old ways are evil and women are of the devil.
If she were not a witch, how could she disappear?
And these trying times would never end.
Jonnet lies beneath the thorn tree on Thorn Tree Hill,
The incantation silent inside her trembling bones.
She rises from the ground and brushes the soil and leaves from her skirt.
She gathers more herbs for she has the second sight and knows that
Tomorrow Elizabeth from the farm next door will be at her time
And need help bringing new life into this sad world.
But she will also say a prayer asking that someday, in the future,
Women may stand up for love without fear,
Do their work conscientiously in the day
And rest peacefully at night.
Everyone knows that a prayer left at a tree goes both to heaven
Through the branches
And to the fairy folk through the roots.
Tomorrow the ministers and judges
May dispatch her to one domain or the other
But today she is alive and hears the sounds of a human world to heal.