Hello my friends!

How are you all doing? Wow I’m hyped up on a tremendous amount of caffeine, so thats a good thing. 

Also, the truth is that these last few months, since January have been hard for me when it comes to my health and taking care of myself. I haven’t been going to yoga regularly - and in the last 7 years, hot yoga has been the way I stay strong and sane. And I simply got out of the habit.

I also have been eating my feelings, especially at night, how many of you can relate to that? Numbing myself with Netflix, wine and chips. ANd there’s nothing wrong with doing that. It's simply that it’s making me unhealthy, and it wasn’t making me feel very good. Isn;t that funny. Even when we know something isn’t good for us, if we’re used to it, even if it feels bad, it kinda feels good or safe at the same time? It’s like our bodies are used to doing this thing and so they want us to keep doing it. It feels normal and safe in so many ways.

I had some realizations over the last week, some really great things that have happened. I started going back to hot yoga and I’m feeling feisty! In the best way possible! so I’m calling this Spring my focus on my renewal.

Alright! Today my friends we are talking about WITCHES...

Double, double

Toil and trouble

Fire burn and

Cauldron bubble

Today we are going to start our conversation around WITCHES, and I say START because this is a really vast topic and we will talk about this from lots of different perspectives over the course of the show.

We’ll delve into WHY the 3 witches were so important in the Scottish Play, even though they only appeared 2 times

And we’ll START to look at the comparison and contrast between Lady Macbeth and the 3 witches and LAdy Ms transformation inside her story arc

It’s important to set the stage with some backstory on the time period we’re talking about- the very early 1600s. King James 1 of England is also King James the 4th of Scotland. Same person. He rules as King of Scotland from 1567 to 1625 and picked up the role of King of England in addition to Scotland when Queen Elizabeth, his distant cousin died, and was chosen as her successor. 

And my promise to you in that we are going to go deep into Queen Elizabeth 1 as a powerful fierce ruler and leader, why she never married, and how she was able to rule in such a patriarchal structure .

Witchcraft, and women (and men) being accused of being witches was not a new thing in Jacobean England but it wasn’t made a capital offense in Britain until 1563, although it was deemed heresy and was denounced as such by Pope Innocent VIII in 1484. 

From 1484 until around 1750 some 200,000 witches were tortured, burnt or hanged in Western Europe. Most of them women.

What we need to understand is that during the reign of King James 1 people of all social status and intellect levels believed in the reality of witchcraft or enchantment. This was part of their everyday lives - just like we know for a fact that the planets rotate around the sun, the people back then “knew” this as if it were absolutely truth.

In fact before he assumed the role of King of England King James actually wrote a dissertation titled Daemonologie that was first sold in 1597, and this book was heavily influenced by the North Berwick Witch trials of 1590. 

And this all gets very interesting on several fronts, when King James is betrothed to Princess Anne of Denmark.

She’s only 14 years old at the time and in 1589 they’re married in Denmark by proxy, and an earl marchial stands in for King James. Then Anne sets sail from Denmark to Scotland along with a fleet of 14 ships. Now, the weather and storms that fall caused some pretty harsh sailing conditions and set light to a vigorous renewal in the fear of witches.

According to Phillipa Gregory, author and historian,

“ Anne’s journey was a disaster – the...