Sunday Journaling Prompt: Hagitude 📔🖋️✨
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Sunday Journaling Prompt: Hagitude 📔🖋️✨
A podcast with Dr. Sharon Blackie about reclaiming the power of 'the hag' archetype.
Fellow Empresses,
A Sunday journaling prompt based on BBC4’s award-winning podcast WITCH, featuring our favorite mythopoetic badass, Dr. Sharon Blackie, author of HAGITUDE: Reimagining the second half of life. Admittedly, this one’s a little woo-woo, but it’s scholarly woo-woo, which makes it juicy as hell!
The Gist: The origin of the term 'hag' hails from the Old English for witch or haegtes, which in Middle English is hagge, and is akin to the German hexe meaning witch. Witches were often known for being menopausal, dangerous healers, liminal beings surviving at the margins of society, and who were burned along with their cats. Again, we see the trope of the older cat lady, replete with secrets, and Dr. Blackie’s whole project of how to reclaim and embrace the power, wisdom, and inherent gifts of the hag. How can we inspire a new generation of female elders: women who lean fully into their Inner Hag, maturing into their own unique brand of hagitude, and who are ready to pass down their deep feminine wisdom for the benefit of the wider community?
So, what kind of hag would you be? A healer? A wise woman? A seer? A fury? A futurist visionary? A multi-hyphenate hag? How do you see yourself?
It dovetails with our prompt from a few weeks back about interfering in the lives of others—now we’re simply doing a deep dive and interfering with our own inner hag selves. What is your unique brand of hagitude? Your magic? 🤍
Yours in Grandeur,
Sunday Journaling Prompt: Hagitude 📔🖋️✨
A menopausal witch. Ugh. And then there’s that awful Scottish dish, Haggis. Blech. I’m with Alicia. I’ll radiate Hagnificance.
Here's a bit of HAGNIFICENCE I happened upon today from Sarah Gottesdiener, that I'm quoting/paraphrasing (rather badly here, forgive me) because she totally nails the relationship between authenticity and safety, which I think is often a whopper of a GOAL as we get into midlife, but which is also frequently misunderstood...
"The truth is, authentic relationships and love and creativity and innovation and justice and aligning more with your values will not always result in SAFETY. If you define "safety" as comfort, control, fitting in, status quo, and being perceived as “good” at all costs, then no, being authentic may not result in that definition.
However, if you define "safety" as intrinsic, as something fostered within, as a deep connection with your intuition, as a commitment to the truth beyond ego, as inherent self-trust around your values, as knowing you can lean into strength and who truly wants to support you (because you’ve been honest about your needs and non-negotiables) and you can take action from that place, that place is where growth and expansion happens.
The liminal growth zone is not a safe place to be in: it’s the unknown, fraught with uncertainty and mystery. There is no safety in risk, but there are deep doses of trust and faith. Dig deep enough into your roots and resources, and you’ll understand that safety—as we’ve been taught—is an illusion."