Women were once centered in family, tribal and village life, as well as in actual old time religion.
The breaking of these traditions was brutal, and involved mass torture and murder over centuries. We learn nothing of this in school or the media, with only cultural references to ''witch trials'' and ''witch burnings'' remaining, as ''knocking on wood'' is the only remnant of the pagan religion of the Brits.

  "We have all heard of Europe’s 400 years of witch persecutions, from the 14th to the 18th centuries, but few are aware of the enormous extent of the holocaust. The church likes to pretend that “only a few hundred thousand” innocents were murdered, but secular sources estimate as many as nine million. (Four centuries of killing can dispose of a good many people.) Over 85% of them were female: grandmothers, mothers, maidens, even children, mostly illiterate peasants who couldn’t even understand the questions their torturers asked, and in their agony begged to be told what to confess to. Local chroniclers spoke of stakes set up as thick as a forest, and hundreds slaughtered in a single day. At the height of the frenzy, we read of villages in Germany and France where only one or two women were left alive. In some places, whole villages were destroyed altogether."

   And now women speaking is once again considered to be blasphemy and heresy. And the MOPEs use the images of the past, barely remembered, in their attempt to stomp out the gains women have made in the last 50 years, with images of women tied to stakes and burned, or hanged. Coincidence? I think not.

    ''The Greeks’ principal Goddess of oracular powers, magic, and midwifery was Hecate, derived from the Egyptian pre-dynastic term for a tribal matriarch, hek, which meant a wise-woman versed in the hekau or “words of power.”[6] This was a woman having the authority of the logos, the creative word. She could make things happen just by speaking—as witches, centuries later, were supposed to make things happen by speaking their curses or spells''.
    As women now are said to have the power of ''erasing'' people, just by speaking.