We’re excited to welcome @angelajherrington back to the podcast to talk about her new book and overcoming Christian patriarchy. For over a decade, Angela has helped women break free from the grip of Christian patriarchy and reconnect with the wisdom they were taught to silence. She is a trauma-informed coach, strategist, and author, who has walked alongside thousands through deconstruction, spiritual burnout, and the messy, beautiful work of building a life that feels whole and true. Her work brings together spiritual insight, nervous system awareness, and grounded practices that create lasting change. In this episode, Fr. Shay talks with Angela about her new book, “Embracing the Old Witch in the Woods: Liberating Feminine Wisdom from Christian Patriarchy” and how it is building on her first book about faith deconstruction. Angela explores how Christian patriarchy and nationalism shape our inner lives, limit our sense of self, and disconnect us from embodied wisdom. She discusses archetypal feminine wisdom beyond gender binaries, the power of intuition and embodiment after high-control religion, grief over missed developmental stages, and the healing potential of reconnecting with these feminine archetypes. This conversation offers a compassionate invitation to self-nurturing, wholeness, and reclaiming wisdom that was never meant to be lost.
Learn more about Angela Herrington at https://angelajherrington.com/ Buy Embracing the Old Witch in the Woods: Liberating Feminine Wisdom from Christian Patriarchy by Angela HerringtonLearn more and join the Community at https://www.queertheology.com/community/This transcript was generated by AI and may contain errors or omissions.
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Tuning each week on Sunday for conversations about Christianity, queerness and transness, and how they can enrich one another. We’re glad you’re here. Hello and welcome back to the Queer Theology Podcast. Today we have a special guest in Angela Harrington. I’m really excited for you to hear this conversation. So, here’s a little bit about Angela before we jump in. For over a decade, Angela Harrington has helped women break free from the grip of Christian patriarchy and reconnect with the wisdom they were taught to silence. She is a trauma informed coach, strategist, and author who has walked alongside thousands through deconstruction, spiritual burnout, and the messy beautiful work of building a life that feels whole and true.
Her work brings together spiritual insight, nervous system awareness, and grounded practices that create lasting change. So let’s get into it. Welcome, Angela. Well, Angela, welcome back to the podcast. I’m so thrilled to have you back to talk about your new book. Thanks for being here.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
So it’s been, it’s been, I think, probably at least a year, maybe even more since we had you on to, to talk about your first book. And I, I’m wondering for, for folks who missed that interview, we’re gonna link it in the show notes, but would you just tell us just a brief, brief bit about your first book and maybe anything that you’ve noticed in, in the time since that book came out?
Yeah. So the first book really honed in on supporting people who already constructing, deconstructing your faith without losing yourself was just really timely and, and really important for me. And I think that it served, I think it served as a guide for a lot of people who weren’t sure if, if they wanted to hang onto their faith or not hang onto their faith, but they were sure that they were tired of people telling them what they should and shouldn’t believe. Right? Like, there’s just a lot of, yeah, deconstruction is fine as long as you don’t lose your faith or you don’t give up these core tenants. And so when I wrote that book, my, my goal was really to provide a container and some really valuable questions for people just to sit with and chew on.
So it, it, it helps people with deconstruction. It talks about sort of some steps that you can take, maybe some stages that you can go through, but it’s not a Google Map 12 step program, because that’s not what deconstruction is. So really, really rooted in curiosity. Lots of questions I joke about, you know, this is the kind of book you may wanna throw across the room a couple times, and that’s fine. Go ahead, do what you gotta do, but I’m here to support you, not to give you all the answers that I think you should have. And that’s, that’s kind of the, the Tldr r version of the book.
Yeah, yeah. I love that. I love that. And now, now you’ve written your second book, which is Embracing the Old Witch in the Woods, Liberating Feminine Wisdom from Christian Patriarchy. It came out in October for, yeah. And before we even dive into what that book is, I, I’m curious for you why that felt, why this book felt like the next thing to write after, after your book about deconstruction. Like, what was the journey that led you from writing about deconstruction to really diving into this, to this next topic?
Yeah, so this book really, I, I don’t wanna say it’s part two of the first book, but it, it does feel like it’s on a continuum. It does feel like it’s time to go deeper with these conversations about Christian patriarchy, because I think that we can only deconstruct so far without really getting into this sort of Christian nationalism, Christian patriarchy. I mean, those are, you know, practically twins, right? Really getting into that conversation about how it has shaped culture, but more importantly, how it, it has shaped us internally. So a lot of my clients who were going through safety construction or who were just, you know, trying to sort out who they were and, and how to get over some limiting beliefs we’re always shocked to, to really dig into how much of the, the negativity and the doubt and everything was learned.
And, and that’s really one of the things that I think everybody in deconstruction, I think goes through those conversations of like, okay, what have I learned? What have I unlearn? This book goes much, much deeper into talking about feminine wisdom and, and women in general and kind of, you know, historically how femininity has been seen in the church and how it has been corrupted and twisted in ways that then just, I mean, we’re, we’re literally holding ourselves back because of what we believe. And when I say we, you know, men, women, queer folks, non-binary folks, all of us are, are exposed to these tropes and these horrible stereotypes about gender.
And there’s so much that’s wrong with to that’s wrong with society today that is really rooted in this idea that, that masculinity is valuable and strong and powerful, and femininity is weak and dangerous and needs to be colonized. It needs to be controlled and co-opted, and that’s what’s holy. Rather than saying no, actually there, the, it’s not binary. It’s not that forced binary. There’s good in all of us, there is messiness in all of us. There is strength and weakness in all of us, and really tapping into what it actually means to lean on feminine wisdom outside of this sort of co-opted view of, you know, sitting quietly raising kids, like kind of the proverbs.
Even Proverbs 31 is a little, you know, that gets a little twisted into kind of a trad wifes type thing. But we just saying, okay, if we, if we can pull back a little bit from the mythology of, of Christian patriarchy, what’s actually true and, and how would we have lived had we not been swimming in that pond of this toxic religious system? And that sort of, so again, it’s, it’s not necessarily like book one, book two sort of chapters or, or volumes, but it’s very deeply connected to the work that I’ve done over the last decade or so as a coach and just saying, where are we getting stuck and, and what do we need to call out from inside of us that is learned behavior?
But it just has happened for so long that it feels natural and it feels like it’s part of us.
Hmm. Yeah, man, there’s so much I wanna dive in. I, but I, I feel like, I feel like the first question I have to ask, you know, this podcast of mostly probably queer listeners, probably lots of trans and non-binary folks who might be feeling nervous, right? About talking about femininity and feminine wisdom as opposed to masculinity and masculine wisdom. So like, how do you, can you maybe just define how are you talking and thinking about those terms? You mentioned it’s not a binary, but I feel like anytime we talk about feminine masculine, people are already like, but it, you’re talking about it in a binary way, And I know that you are not doing that, but like, you know Yeah.
For anyone who might be feeling nervous about that, can you just talk about that a little bit?
Yeah, absolutely. First of all, that nervousness is totally valid. Like our society kind of crap right now, having conversations that are nuanced and that are fluid. So I, so first of all, yeah, like, just take a deep breath and know that you’re not overreacting. Like you’re not overreacting at all. That’s a, that’s a natural valid response to the world that we live in. For me, when I talk about mothering, when I talk about feminine wisdom, when I talk about these terms that are, you know, Christian patriarchy, typically genders in a certain way kind of skews in a certain way. I’m talking about feminine wisdom from an archetypal perspective.
And so if that’s, if that’s something that’s new, we’ll talk, I’m sure we’ll talk about a little bit here, But we go into the book a little bit more about what that means. And it’s, it’s more, it’s so funny because I think, I think that that talking about feminine wisdom is probably one of the most egalitarian conversations we can have if we can get back to its truest self. So when I talk about women, you are who you say you are, right? Like you, you know, it’s not, I’m not gatekeeping that, And I, I hope that anyone who hears this feels safe enough that they’re not trying to justify who they are or, you know, where they fit into some sort of manmade spectrum as far as gender goes.
Because feminine wisdom’s in all of us, you know, even, even even the most masked people walking around in our life right now, there is feminine wisdom that’s there too. And I think part of the, part of the nervousness, part of that uncertainty and that question of, you know, is this a safe space to, to talk about gender comes from the hate of all things feminine, right? Because this hyper false idol of some sort of, you know, unattainable masculinity is like the thing that we’re told is the most powerful, the most sacred, the most godly, like yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, anything that’s not, that kind of gets looked down on.
And there are different degrees, right? Intersectionality is real. We can talk about lots of different overlapping layers, but there’s like, you fit that, like you’re inside the circle of Christian patriarchy’s definition of men, or you’re outside. And from my perspective, that is, that’s just, that’s a method of control more than observation of people. It’s not rooted in science. It’s not even really ru rooted in Theology or, or philosophy or ancient wisdom. So wisdom, I’m, I hope that there’s no pressure coming from me when I say women or when I say feminine to, to fit into somebody else’s box of what that means.
Hmm. Yeah. And I wonder, yeah. Talk. Can you talk a little bit more about the idea of archetypes? I I think that the archetypal language, it’s so fascinating to me, and it’s so interesting. Yeah. You know, like your book is so much of an echo of, of my, no one taught me how to be a man. And, and in that I’m talking about like Iron John and Robert Bly, which is also like, so much about the archetypes. And, And I, and we have so much, I think, inherited wisdom around gendered expectations that are, that are both like, can be really beautiful and also like really weird. So I wondering if you can talk about that.
Yeah. I think for me, the big difference between sort of the, the framework that most of us know and the archetypal frameworks is that there’s not these hard delineated containers, right? There’s not these hard lines. So for example, with women, a lot of times we sort of have this, we talk about feminine archetypes. We sort of have this arc that’s age related, but it’s, it, it’s not like, oh, it’s not like in Christianity where you’re like, oh, you’re a maiden, you’re a virgin, you haven’t had sex, you’re not married. You’re a completely different human being with different value than people who have had sex that are the same age, right?
It’s not, it’s, it’s not, it’s just not as judgy as that, right? It’s not as controlled as some of these really tight-fisted conversations that, that are driven by unhealthy religious systems. So the archetypes, we have the mother, we have the maiden, the crone, which the, the old witch in the Woods, we talk in the book, the Crone, that’s who she is, right? She’s the, the older woman who a lot of times is full, full of wisdom, but not necessarily valued by our society, and is therefore a little bit of an outcast. An outcast. But she’s also kind of okay with being an outcast. And she’s ornery and she’s like, you know what?
I don’t have to chase your approval. I am who I am. And like, I think there’s so much beauty and strength in that that is really, I don’t know it right now. The world is just bonkers, like, just irrational, right? Like, I, like they, there’s just so much that doesn’t make sense. And for me, I think looking at these archetypes and saying, okay, these seasons have existed for as long as people have existed, and these, these archetypes, both the, the masculine and the feminine have been woven throughout all of our stories throughout all time. So no matter how hard the church, the unhealthy aspects of the church are trying to obliterate them, they’re still there.
Which means we can still tap into the pieces that, that give us strength. And not just the grown, but you know, there’s a wild woman, you know, sometimes she’s called the sorceress. There’s a wild woman, there’s a maiden. There’s a lot of different stages. And I especially think people who’ve grown up in these really cult like high control religious spaces, you can go back and tap into the stages that you missed. Especially doing some inner child work and, and doing some, you know, just navigating things again that you would’ve had access to stages of, of archetypal femininity that you would’ve had access to, had that oppression not been there.
So it’s a, it’s fascinating. It’s really easy to nerd out. I’m actually having a really hard time like cring it down because you And I always have such deep conversations, I’m like, oh, we could talk about this for three days. But there’s other stuff to talk about too. So
I, what about like, going back And I that experienced in my own life both as like someone who grew up in a high control religious space, but also as someone who like grew up queer and trans in that space without language for it, and who then transitioned a little bit later, right? Is this real deep sense often of feeling like I’m behind, I’m behind other people, I’m behind where I should be Yeah. And, or that I’ve like missed out, right? I missed out on, I don’t know, the normal high school experience, not that looking back I’m like, I don’t think I would’ve wanted that.
But, but there is this sense sometimes of like, oh, I, I feel like I, I feel like I missed out. And I, I feel like that’s probably an experience that a lot of the people that you talk with and work with have also experienced. Yeah. And so I’m wondering it, can you just riff on that, that experience a little bit more and, and what, how you’ve kind of coached people through that?
Yeah. I, I think what I think right now, when we talk about resilience and we talk about navigating the world today, it is really, really, really important to be aware of those pieces that we missed. Because nourishment that we missed creates usually creates tender spaces. And tender spaces are scary, right? Tender spaces, especially when, when they’re getting stepped on. But we don’t know why, and we don’t know why they hurt so bad. And like how many times have we said, oh, I’m overreacting, or, oh, I just wish I could not be so emotional or not be whatever.
A lot of times those are the tender spaces where we needed nurturing and we didn’t get it. Or where, you know, certain normal, like you said, normal experiences, air quotes, where those listed on the podcast, normal experiences didn’t happen. And we didn’t get that learning from those experiences that maybe our peers got, or, you know, maybe people who had a different support system got. And the reason that that’s important to resilience is because we are in a season where most of us aren’t gonna get our needs met. And I hate saying that I wish to God it wasn’t true, but I, I think that that is a fair statement, especially for people in, in marginalized groups.
I have a but ton of privilege And I will absolutely acknowledge that. I also live in the Midwest in a really conservative, lots of fundamentalist religion around me in that kind of space. So, you know, I, I don’t have a, a progressive coffee shop with a bookstore that I could go sit at and find like-minded people. There’s, you know, there’s one an hour or two away, but I’m not gonna be able to just go have that community that nourishes me and, and, you know, helps anchor me in hard times. So what that means is I’m gonna have to be really conscientious about caring for my tender spaces in ways that maybe in a less crazy time I would be able to lean on community more.
’cause a lot of us are really tapped out, right? My friends who are activists, we’ve had this conversation all year long. Like, there’s just so much. There are so many needs. And so if, especially if we we’re kind of in a place of privilege where we have some resources, it may not feel good to, to lean on people and to ask for support from people who are caring a lot more than us. And so our activism is figuring out what we missed, figuring out those tender spaces and learning how to nurture and care for ourselves in a way that allows us to, to self sustain so that we can shoulder things for other people.
And we have to be really careful, right? Like, I, I, if we’re doing work on ourselves for other people, we’re probably still tangled up in some of that. Oh, it has to be productive to be worth time. Otherwise it’s just selfish. But healing is not selfish. It’s not, you know, it’s essential. And if we’re in a place where growing up we, we didn’t get some of the things that we needed, or maybe we did, maybe we had a fantastic childhood, but then we had a couple years that were just catastrophic and, and created a lot of trauma in our life. And we have a lot of tenderness from that.
Okay, well let’s, let’s figure out how to go back and connect with the us in that moment that just needs some love. And again, just doing it from a place of I deserve this, doing this from a place of healing and presence rather than like, oh, I gotta heal these things that are negative at me. ’cause then I can go save the world. You know? That’s that internalized, like, gotta be productive all the time, white saviorism kind of thing. And we just have to learn how to check out from that because it’s exhausting.
Mm. Yeah. Yeah. I know that for a lot of folks, again, who grew up in kind of high control religious spaces, the idea of, of intuition, right? Of trusting ourselves Yeah. Is something that we’re very much encouraged against, right? Yeah. Trusting yourself is the, you know, the root of everything, evil and bad. And so as we start to do this healing work as, or as we deepen in this healing work, what, how, how, how would you talk about intuition and this idea, you know, in your book is wisdom, I think often talked about as a, as a more bodily intuitive wisdom Yeah.
As opposed to an external wisdom. Can, can you just talk a little bit about, about that and also like how folks maybe start to get over the fear of, of leaning into that, that wisdom as opposed to a wisdom that comes from outside of us?
Yeah, and you absolutely hit the nail on the head. Feminine wisdom is embodied, right? It, it’s, it’s very, very challenging to stay connected to all the different aspects. To stay connected to your, to your physical body, to stay connected to your curiosity, to those, those tender emotions that a lot of times we’re told are junk. And we need to just get over it. Your intuition, your soul, like all of these different parts, they’re, they’re more connected than, than what we’re led to believe. And so when we’re taught in these religious spaces to just shut off that part of us and shut off this part over here, and well, if you’re a dude, you can trust that part.
But if you’re a woman, you better put it away. And you know, the people who are saying that, like, in their mind, non-binary folks don’t even exist. So that, again, it goes back to this very rigid, like, here’s the parts of you that are valuable and productive. Here’s the parts that aren’t, and you need to do something about it. But in all actuality, you can’t separate us out that way. Like, you can’t separate your brain and your heart. It doesn’t work. Like, I mean, maybe in some sci-fi movies it works, but when we’re talking about day-to-day living, I had a therapist a long time ago who I was actually my therapist, and she said, you can absolutely shut out the bad stuff.
You can repress the old stuff that hurt. You can, like, you can do all of that, but you need to know that when you do that, you’re also blocking out the good. And not just memories, but like feelings, emotions, levels of connectedness with, with people. So when we’re thinking about all of these different pieces, anytime that we’re separated from our body, anytime that we’re separated can be complicated. Anytime we’re disconnected, anytime we’re disregarding our body, we’re easier to control and to confuse and to exploit. Because those, the intuition, those gut sense of like, Hmm, maybe something’s wrong here.
Or maybe, maybe that, I dunno, that I like what that person is saying. Maybe I should take a step back. Like those voices get shut down when we’re not embodied, when our nervous system is activated. Think of a fight flight, and there’s a whole bunch of other words that go in there. But for simplicity’s sake, fight, fight, fawn and freeze. Right? If you’re being chased by a bear, honest to goodness, your emotions in that moment don’t really matter. We need all of the energy pumping. We need all the adrenaline, we need our oxygen flowing, like all those things. ’cause we need to get away from the bear. But if we’re walking down the street and we see somebody in a, you know, in a hat or something that has slurs on it, that’s probably not the same as the bear.
And so we, it’s good to have a reaction, but if we’re always walking around like we’re running from a bear, then there’s like 75% of our brain and our intuition and the rest of our body that we’re just ignoring like it’s offline because our nervous system is so activated. And I, I, I wanna put a little asterisk by this, because the more marginalized you are, the, you know, the, the more of the, the Venn diagram of marginalization, the more circles that you’re within, the less safe the world is, and the more likely you are going to need to be, your nervous system’s gonna need to react a little faster and be a little edgier.
And, and that’s not overreacting. Okay? So what I’m talking about is there are safe spaces and there are sometimes things that, that are learned behaviors so that even in safe spaces we’re not fully embodied, right? Our nervous system being activated in some ways is kind of a disembodied process because again, our body’s like trying to save us from the bear. So what happens if most of the time we are not in safe spaces, and maybe we’re not running from the bear, but we’re like, Ooh, the bear was here before, I need to be careful.
We’re spend, that just means we’re spending the majority of our time in this hyper arousal and we’re not fully connected to all of our bodies. So reclaiming feminine wisdom, again, not, not within gender boundaries, but like just all of us, a big part of reclaiming feminine wisdom is understanding that those feminine aspects of our body, those parts of us that we’ve been told, were the fall of mankind, right? Like, all of those things, like those parts of us are sacred too. And even if no one else in the entire world is going to hold space for us embodied, and in our most full self, we can learn how to, and for some people, you, your body might be the only safe place you have in the entire world.
And it breaks my heart to say that, but I think it’s, I think it’s that level of brutal honesty that we really need to be talking about and, and really understanding what’s at stake if we can’t figure out how to be embodied and how to reclaim these things that we’ve always been told are bad, but are just as sacred as, as the things we’ve been told are good.
Yeah. Yeah. I’m gonna go back to the archetypes for a minute. Yeah. Unless you maybe nerd out a little bit more. I, I’m wondering if you can talk us through each of the archetypes, obviously with like, not giving away your whole book because people should go and buy it, but like, what is maybe one, one thing from each of the archetypes that we could learn or should be paying attention to, or, you know, like for, for folks who are just totally new to archetypes, right? I think that a lot of that feels a little like, what, what are we even talking about? So like yeah. If you just really bring it down to something tangible.
Yeah. So the, the archetypes, so here’s what’s interesting is the archetypes are a little bit different depending on your source, depending on what you’re looking at. There are slightly different names and they’re slightly different. I mean, there’s not like, it’s kinda like the Bible, right? Like, there’s not just like one translation. So I’m gonna take a little bit of a step back and what I, what I think is the most helpful, rather than getting too overly nerdy on like what each of them are and what we can draw is, is to think of them as a continuum, right? So we have, you know, you have the maiden, you have the child, you have these kind of young, innocent, playful, curious seasons, if you will, you know, there archetypes, But we could also talk about them as seasons of life in a way.
Mm. And all of the archetypes are always present, but there are just some seasons where, you know, different ones come to the forefront. And so if maybe you’re one of those people who just didn’t have play as a child, and especially women in, in high control religions, like you might’ve been seven years old and taking on the role of raising your siblings and doing all these things where you are being treated like an adult, reconnecting with that child is gonna be really, really essential because you’ll be able to love on yourself in ways that you always should have been loved on. And you’re like, well, how do I do that? Well, maybe for you it’s blowing bubbles.
Maybe for you it is. Gosh, I had a client once who, it had been, she lived in Florida and it was thunderstorming the day we had our appointment. And she was, she’s like, you never gonna guess what happened. And I was like, oh my gosh, what is everything okay? And she said, I was just out there stomping in the mud puddles, And I came in And I didn’t even wipe my feet. I just tracked metal over the kitchen And I don’t actually care. That was healing, right? Something that simple was healing because that was not a space she was able ever able to be in. There’s also different stages of, like, we talk about mothering a lot, so I’m gonna come, I’m gonna come back to mothering. There’s a wild woman stage.
Like, who, like worry. Did you actually have permission to just, just be a little off the wall and try things that felt a little risky and like, you know, feel sexy and feel flirtatious and, and all of those things? Or was that off limits? Right? So in that case, maybe, maybe things need to get a little spicy. Maybe that’s the piece of the archetypes that you really wanna draw into your life. And again, it’s, it’s, it’s tapping into these, it’s reconnecting to these without shame. That is really kind of the secret sauce. Because a lot of us know that these are out there and we think about these desires, But we’ve been taught that they’re shameful. So we’re like, oh, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t listen to that spicy book.
I’ll, you know, that’ll ruin me. Or I can’t, you know, get like a little frisky and try, you know, ask my partner about trying new things because you know, I, the last thing I wanna do is I wanna let that evil into our bedroom. Like, there’s so much baggage, right? So that, I mean, that wild woman is another one. Mothering whoof. There’s a lot in this book about mothering and, and for me, again, mothering in the archetypal sense, it’s kind of like when we talk about feminine wisdom in the archetype sense, we’re not talking about like fundamentalist baptist culty mothering, okay, yeah. Christian patriarchy.
The more fun you go, the worse this is. Christian patriarchy doesn’t value mothers. It values what mothers produce. Hmm. And there are gonna be people that are like, whoa, that’s it. I gotta, I gotta shut the podcast off and chew on that for a little bit, right? When I’m talking about archetypal motherhood, the archetypal mother is the creator, is the nurturer. There’s so much junk. There’s just so I, there’s like probably a list of 500 things, all this baggage that we carry around, but the mother will not tolerate that, right?
Like, when, when we can tap into that mother archetype, we can be tender and compassionate with ourselves and also, you know, be a little firm and, and, you know, it’s, it’s not just like willy-nilly do whatever you want, but like, there’s that, that sense. The mother creates a sense of safety a lot of times that we didn’t have growing up. Or again, you know, maybe we had a growing up, But we didn’t have it in young adulthood. And so even for people who will have zero desire to carry children or are are unable to carry children or just aren’t even sure mothering is essential. It is, it is a, it is a love and a nourishing on a soul level and it’s fully embodied.
When you think about some of the matriarchs, you think about some of the activists that you see out there, there’s probably some, there’s probably some really strong, wise nurturing women who are in your community who are mothering even if they didn’t birth or raise children. So that one I think is really, really powerful right now. And then, you know, there’s others, but, but again, the, the old wish in the Woods, the crone, she knows who she is. She knows who she is. And, And I think that there’s a real fear of being ostracized that keeps a lot of us holding on to some of these old just toxic religious mythology of who we’re supposed to be.
And I am seeing a lot of people who are just over it. They’re like, you know what? I am I, they’re not gonna be happy with me anyway, so why am I trying? Right? And I think that again, for, for the most marginalized people groups, same thing. Like they’re, they’re oppressors aren’t gonna be your friends just because you try harder. That’s not a thing. But that’s what we’re taught, right? Like, just be better, try harder, all those things. The old witch in the Woods is like, screw it, I’m gonna go live in the Woods. And some of the best, like ba yaga, if you’ve never looked at ba yaga, ba yaga, iss a hoot dude.
She doesn’t give a crap. She’s usually ugly. She’s usually smelly. She lives in a house that has chicken legs. She’s kind of mischievous, And I wouldn’t say a trickster, but like, nobody’s gonna pull one over on her. I think that sounds pretty good. I dunno about the chicken legs. I’m a little weirded out by the house on chicken legs. But, but like, that’s who, that’s who you go to when you need something that’s like above and beyond what the average human can do. And to go with the metaphor again of the, the witch, like the beginning of the book, we start with this, this conversation about the witch trials never ended because it was never about witches.
It was about wise, powerful women who anchored their community. And if you wanna take over community and strip away all its resources and have absolute power, you go for the strongest people. You go for the healers, you go for people who were a threat to whatever it is that you were trying to indoctrinate. And, and it was, it was, you know, Protestant church, the Catholic church, like that’s where that panic came from. It’s powerful people who saw people who are powerful in a different way, who were able to resist. And holy moly, don’t we need that now?
Don’t, don’t we like, we can’t play the game of the powerful people because the deck is so far stacked against us. Like yeah, like you, you can’t, you’re not gonna be able to, to, to bet and win against the house. So what do you do? Well, you, you, you play a different game and you find resilience in ways that they can’t strip away. And that’s really what all of the archetypes are there. There are little pockets of strength and hope and compassion and all these other things that seem so rare right now that we can tap into and nurture in ourselves. And I promise they will spill out to others.
I agree. I still say that should not be our number one goal, But we can only give out what we have in us. And so that’s why the archetypes are so important to me.
Yeah. And I just wanna underline something that, that I think you’ve been saying throughout this and, and you say in the book too is like that these, these qualities are good for all of us no matter what your gender or how you identify, right? I think that so often, And I mean this, we talk about this all the time at Queer Theology, right? That that queerness and the lessons of queerness and transness are like good news and good for straight and cis people too, right? That there’s something deeply important about these things that isn’t just for women or queer folks or trans folks. Right? You know, I don’t, I don’t wanna center like men in this conversation, but I, but I am curious like what you think is the most vital tool or thing for people to kind of who are, who are interested in doing this work to grab onto who maybe like, don’t identify with the feminine or for for whom?
And, And I I think that’s not just men, right? Like I think that there are probably some women who are like, I dunno if I identify with like the idea of the feminine or femininity or whatever, which is like, not exactly what you’re talking about, but I’m just curious how you would answer that, that question for someone who’s like, I I I’m not sure quite yet where I’m finding myself in this and, and what, what is in there for me, I guess.
Yeah, no, that’s a great question because I, again, there’s so many definitions and stereotypes and, and, and things that are baked into our conversations that some of this is probably going to feel like it’s off limits or it’s not useful. Not that, not that anybody’s gatekeeping, but like, oh, I don’t actually wanna be more feminine. Okay. That defining it, that that way is rooted in that binary thinking. It’s rooted in that, that Christian patriarchal teaching of like, you’re either masculine or you’re feminine, but no, actually there, all of us, every single one of us has access to these different archetypes and these different energies.
And maybe even thinking about it as as masculine energy versus feminine energy, sometimes that’s helpful. I, I wrestle with using that language because that’s like the opposite end of the spectrum from the toxic Christian patriarchy type thing. It’s like this just toxic spirituality that is just like, well, you gotta be in your masculine energy. Like it’s still toxic, right? Yeah. ’cause it’s pushing us to, to the polar opposites, right? It’s like, you know, A is good, B is bad, that’s how we live. You gotta embrace your A and ignore the B and like, you know, fill, fill in the blanks there, depending on which motivational speaker you’re listening to at the time.
But really like, okay, so this is kind of a cheesy example, but what I, what I want you to think about is the, the archetypes that we’re talking about, I want you to think about it like air, okay, air is made up of a whole bunch of different components. And some of them we need, and some of them we don’t, But we still, we’re still swimming in it, like it’s still around us at all times. And so there are, that, that’s a better way to think about these different energies and these different archetypes is, you know, they’re always present. We all have access to them. There are times when I walk into a meeting where I’m definitely leaning more into some of my, what’s considered my masculine energy and attributes.
And that doesn’t mean that I’m less feminine right in, in the way that we talk about how I’m presenting because I’m still me, I might have a dress on, I, you know, I probably have shiny earrings and crazy hair and you know, really presenting as feminine because I am. But I can draw from these, these different molecules of, of who I am And I can, you know, I can just lean different directions and, and it’s, it’s actually really similar to gender fluid, but I just want people to be really careful about discounting the value of things because it’s not how they present.
Because you can present very masculine and still deeply be connected to feminine wisdom. It doesn’t show up externally. Like when we talk about presenting, it doesn’t show up that way In the same way, the opposite is also true. You can have someone who presents very femme, like loves, loves all the things, but, but walks in deep connection with the masculine energy and the masculine archetypes. So I, it’s, it’s, I don’t know, I’m really weird. I always use way too many metaphors, but it’s more of a salad bar than like a cut and dry.
You’re either this or you’re that. Well, some, some days I’m not. And what happens for me is sometimes when I get dysregulated, I lean, I lean way too hard into some of those sort of masculine traits. But that, like, I lean too far into what the, the Christian patriarchy says is masculine because that’s how I survived during some traumatic times. But that doesn’t mean I’m actually leaning into masculine energy, right? I’m still leaning, I’m still chasing that safety that the, the false system always told me would be there if I just found the right mix, right?
If I just suppressed my femininity enough, then I would be worthy of X, Y, z, trust, love, whatever it is. So it’s, it’s really challenging ’cause you’ve gotta hold like what you learned in one hand and then you, you hold what this new information is in the other hand, and sometimes they mash up a little bit and sometimes you’re just using the same words to describe two totally different things. Hmm. And that’s what happens with, with feminine and masculine a lot.
Yeah. Yeah. I, I’m wondering, as we’re getting close to wrapping up, up, what is your, if you had to pick your biggest hope or dream for this book and the message in this book, what, what would it be?
I think there’s, I think there’s two. Okay. The first is for the people who it is not for, okay. The people who don’t value the idea of equity and of healing. I hope it scares you off.
I, I hope it, i, I hope that it is like something you turn off and walk away. Cool. Great. Maybe someday you’ll get there and that’s what I want for you. But today, isn’t it? So stay out of the communities that are ready, right? Like do less harm by going away. So there’s that, but you know, probably see that’s a little, this is a little spicy, but that’s the gen xer in me who still, still goes a little mama bear sometimes for the people who are reading it, for the people who are hungry. Like, I think my biggest hope is that it provides a container for you to learn how to care for you first to learn how to mother, whatever needs mothered.
Because even if you don’t ever go out and change the world, the world is better if you have figured out how to heal and to love those parts that maybe nobody else is loving right now. And I think that that is more than enough, especially in times like these, like love that if you can, like, you think about, think about, you know, maybe the stereotypical sitcom where the, the mom is tucking the kiddo in at bed, or the dad is tucking the kiddo in, and there’s just that sweet tender moment and, and you know that if it was real life, that kiddo is drifting off to sleep, feeling safe and loved and connected and embodied.
Like, I want you to learn how to do that for yourself and just be able to care for yourself that way so you get a good night’s sleep. ’cause God, we all need a good night’s sleep right now.
Well, Angela, thank you so much for this conversation. Everyone needs to go out and get Embracing the Old Witch in the Woods, Liberating Feminine Wisdom from Christian Patriarchy. It is available now. You can get it wherever you buy your books. And Angela, if people wanna know more about you, dive deeper into your work, get more connected, where is the best place for them to do that?
Yeah, the best place is on my website, angela j harrington.com. I’m sure you’ll have it in the show notes. We’ll, I, I think if you’re finding yourself really curious about some of these topics, there’s a lot of blog posts that I’ve written that talk about ancestral healing. We didn’t even really get to talk about that, but like, ancestral healing, feminine wisdom, there’s just lots of good resources there and they don’t cost a penny and you can access ’em on your phone. So if, you know, maybe some of these topics aren’t safe at, at work or at home, like you can take the phone in the bathroom and read some of these articles and get some of the support that you need and just hopefully find that little, that little seed of hope that just tells you that maybe things are gonna be okay.
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being here. It was always a pleasure to talk with you.
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