ROOTS, FIRE, AND REMEMBRANCE – HOW HERBALISTS BECAME WITCHES
It always starts with the scent of something drying on the rack. Sage, thyme, maybe the last of the rosehips I gathered with the children before the rains came. The kitchen smells earthy, faintly sweet, and I can feel the season shifting. The light is lower now, falling across the table like an old photograph.
Every autumn, as I hang herbs and line bottles on the shelf, I think about the women who came before me – the ones who also gathered, dried, and brewed, but did so at far greater risk.
I grew up in Belgium, in a landscape of cobbled streets and foggy fields, where the stories of witches still linger. As a child, I remember hearing about them in school – vague tales of strange women with cats and cauldrons, the kind meant to make children shiver. Only later did I understand that these were not stories about magic at all. They were stories about women who knew too much.
THE REAL STORY BEHIND THE WITCHES
In the 1500s and 1600s, Belgium – then part of the Low Countries – became one of Europe’s centres for witch trials. Hundreds of women were accused of witchcraft and executed. The accusations often began with something painfully ordinary: a failed harvest, a sick child, or an unexplained illness. When fear gripped a community, suspicion turned toward the women who worked with herbs or helped deliver babies.
They weren’t casting spells but doing what women had always done: helping neighbours through childbirth, easing fevers, tending the dying. Many were midwives and herbalists, carrying knowledge passed down from mother to daughter.
One of them was Tanneke Sconyncx, a midwife from Tielt in Flanders. In 1603, after one of her patients died, she was accused of witchcraft. Tortured until she confessed to impossible things, she was burned at the stake. The records describe her as “a woman of knowledge and pride” – as though that were enough to condemn her.
Further south, in the Prince-Bishopric of Liège, the trials were even harsher. Thousands were interrogated, imprisoned, and executed. The church courts there were relentless, and torture was routine. The story of Quintine de la Marlière, executed in 1610 in Ellezelles, still echoes in local memory.
Both Flemish and Walloon women suffered during those years. In the north, trials were often sparked by misfortune, a failed harvest or a neighbour’s jealousy. In the south, the church courts hunted women in the name of purity and order. But everywhere, the pattern was the same: women with knowledge of the body and the land were feared, silenced, and erased. I sometimes picture those narrow Flemish streets, not far from where my grandmother later lived, and imagine the silence that must have followed when another woman disappeared from her community.
WHY IT HAPPENED
The persecutions were never really about spells or devils. They were about power. For centuries, medicine had belonged to the people. Every village had its healers who knew which roots to dig, which teas to brew, which smoke to waft through a sickroom. But by the 16th century, healing was being claimed by new authorities: universities, physicians, and the church. And most of those in power were men.
A woman with knowledge of her own body, or the plants that could help it, was a threat to that new order. Add in a few bad harvests, a sick child, or a village desperate for answers, and you had the perfect storm. The witch trials, across Europe and in my own homeland, were really about reclaiming control – over medicine, over women, and over mystery itself.
ECHOES IN THE LANDSCAPE
If you travel through Belgium now, the remnants of those stories are still there, though you have to look for them. In the town of Ellezelles, they remember Quintine de la Marlière, executed in 1610. There’s a small museum called La Maison des Sorcières, and a yearly walk along the “Witches’ Path.” It’s less about superstition now, more about remembrance. When I visited a few years ago, it struck me how ordinary it all felt. The same hills, the same cold wind, the same wild plants growing along the verges – mugwort, nettle, yarrow. The kind of plants they would have known intimately. I found myself wondering whether I was walking the same ground as they once did.
PERSONAL LINEAGE
Sometimes I think about those women when I’m in my dispensary, pouring tinctures into amber bottles while the kettle hums in the background. I think about how different my life is – and how it isn’t. There’s still a courage in choosing this path. People often romanticise herbal medicine, but there’s also a certain solitude in it, long days spent in thought, hands stained with plant resin, the faint worry that the world doesn’t quite understand what you do. Perhaps that’s what connects us. They had to hide their work; I get to teach it. And yet, the thread between us feels unbroken.
SEASON OF REMEMBERING
Each year, as Samhain approaches – the Celtic turning of the year – I feel that thread more strongly. It’s the time when the veil between worlds is said to thin, when we honour the ones who came before us. In older parts of Europe, people burned herbs and wood for cleansing and remembrance. Juniper for protection, rosemary for memory, bay for strength, sage for wisdom. I sometimes light those same herbs in a small dish at home, letting the scent fill the room. It’s not a ritual in any formal sense, just a little act of gratitude. Maybe that’s what those women were doing, too – tending to life in small, steady ways, caring for the sick and the vulnerable, keeping the fire of knowledge alive.
WHY THEIR STORY STILL MATTERS
When I teach herbal medicine today, I often remind my students that we’re not just learning how to use plants, we’re continuing a story that was almost lost. The witch trials may have silenced many voices, but they didn’t end the tradition. It simply went to ground – into gardens, kitchens, and memory – waiting for the right time to grow again. And maybe that’s the real power of herbal medicine. It isn’t rebellion for rebellion’s sake. It’s a kind of continuity, an insistence that healing, care, and knowledge belong to all of us.
When I light a candle on the kitchen table this time of year, I sometimes imagine it burning for those women too – the wise ones of Flanders and Wallonia, who walked before me and carried the same love of plants in their hands. The flame flickers, the herbs dry above me, and the world turns once more toward the dark.
And still, the knowledge endures.
Kristine x
If you’d like to learn with me and the plants through the seasons, The Crafty Herbalist Academy will soon reopen for winter. Click here to learn more and sign up to the waiting list.