Daughters of Smoke. The True History and Mythology of Witchcraft

From Ancient Goddesses to the Salem Witch Trials, and the Women Who Refused to Burn

By: Terri Gallagher

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

60,000+ women burned or hanged. So, why fear the healers more than those who killed them? Why did humanity's healers become history's most hunted?

She delivered your babies. She saved your mother. She sat with your dying father. Then, accused of witchcraft, she died.

The questions that haunt us: Why does the witch still fascinate us, inspire us, and terrify us? Why did entire communities turn on their healers? How did moles, pets, or poverty become proof of witchcraft? What made neighbors betray women they'd known for decades? Why did witch trials spread like a contagion across continents? How did the accused fight back when the system demanded their silence?

Daughters of Smoke uncovers the brutal truth behind the witch trials, not folklore, not superstition, but a systematic campaign of terror that spanned continents and claimed tens of thousands of lives.

FROM THE UK TO SALEM: Essex's Chelmsford trials, where England's first witch was executed in 1566, to crossing the Atlantic to fuel Massachusetts' nightmare. Matthew Hopkins, the self-styled "Witchfinder General," claimed hundreds of English lives and inspiring Salem's magistrates.

STORIES HISTORY FORGOT: Meet Agnes Waterhouse, the first to be hanged in Chelmsford. Joan Cunny, who confessed to summoning black frogs. The Pendle witches, England's most famous trials. Not faceless victims, but real women with families, trades, and voices that survived in trial records.

BEYOND EUROPE'S FIRES: Tracing persecution across five continents and three millennia, from defaming Goddesses to medieval trials to witch hunts that still claim lives today in Tanzania's ongoing persecution, Japan's hidden hunts, Latin America's curanderos disguising indigenous know-how as Catholic devotion. Global perspectives revealing witch-hunting as a weapon of colonial control, not just religious mania.

THE HEALER'S CRIME: Midwives were targets because they controlled life and death. Knowing herbs to prevent pregnancy, ease pain, and suffering. When male physicians demanded legitimacy and the Church insisted on controlling bodies, women's medical knowledge became "evidence" of devil worship.

ENCODED IN THREAD: Writing could condemn them, so wise women hid their knowledge with symbols stitched into embroidery, herbalism disguised as cooking, midwifery wisdom passed from hand to hand, all preserved, despite what persecution tried to erase.

THE POLITICS OF FEAR: Witch trials weren't random hysteria. They surged during wars, economic collapse, and social upheaval. See how land disputes, inheritance battles, and neighbor feuds transformed the local healer into a scapegoat, and how accusations are used to silence dissent.

VOICES FROM THE FLAMES: Trial testimonies reveal unexpected defiance. "All my doings were but fantasy, and I never harmed any creature," insisted one Scottish accused. Even under torture, some refused to confess. Their words show resilience long forgotten.

FROM PERSECUTION TO RECLAMATION: Follow the complete arc from sacred power through systematic persecution to modern witchcraft's revival, understanding not just how the witch was destroyed, but how she survived economic, political, and religious machinery that transformed healers into heretics.

Daughters of Smoke, part of the Formidable Legends of Mythology Series, where history is made accessible, giving voice to those who were silenced and uncovering truths that textbooks overlooked.

The witch wasn't the villain in this story. The people who burned her were.

The Daughters of Smoke remembers what fire sought to erase. Their stories demand to be heard.

Those accused of witchcraft weren't monsters. They were midwives, herbalists, women (& some men) who refused to stay silent.

Scroll up and discover the truth they tried to burn.