By Romy de Vos and William Arfman – Friday the 28 th of November 2025. “Feel your feet on the ground. Look each other in the eyes. Give each other a hug. We’re here again!” We do as the woman leading the ritual says, and hug the people on either side of us. We have ritually travelled several centuries forward in time, to our own days. A sense of relief and connection fills the air. We take a deep breath and look around. There is a mix of emotions on the faces of the ad hoc assemblage of participants in the reclamation ritual that just kicked off tonight’s Witches’ Night. Tears glisten with the reflection of the torch we have gathered around. There’s laughter too. Confusion. Awe. Love.
A light cover of clouds has emerged over the Arboretum Belmonte Park in
Wageningen, hiding some of the stars that were visible earlier. It feels as if the smoke from the torch has cast a dome over us; further adding to the moodiness of the moment. Within this dome, the ritual is about to conclude (see part one of this two-part blog: Voices Reclaimed: Finding the Spark that Feminists and Witches Share). Its central part had us still feeling in awe, but also somewhat puzzled. Later tonight, we would march against gender-based violence, and demand safe streets at night for all, in a protest that is part of the UN Women’s Orange the World campaign; hosted by the Dolle Mina’s, The Purple Group, Thalia, and Soroptimist International. But how exactly was this ritual experience connected to the purpose of that protest? Why had these feminist activists gathered our small crowd of sympathisers here, to ritually travel into the past, and communicate with victims of early-modern witch-hunts, before the march?
In all fairness, the slogan on the flyer for tonight’s event already answered a part of our question: Feminists and witches share the same spark. They refuse to be burned by a world that tries to silence them. Both contemporary gender-based violence and the historical atrocities of the witch-trials are presented here as expressions of patriarchal violence –predominantly against women. However, in the ritual we had just performed, contemporary gender-based violence was not mentioned whatsoever. That is, not until these final moments
of the ritual.
We are asked to gather closer around the torch as people from the organisation start handing out pieces of red thread to tie around our wrists. They explain that these serve as a symbol against violence against women. The two women who guided the ritual start playing music on a harp and begin to sing “I sing free, I now sing free, the rising tide in me”. Slowly, more and more people join in on the singing. This makes things click for us. The song and the red threads poetically reinforce tonight’s slogan. In this moment, in this song, a message comes through. Rather than seeing the witch-hunts and contemporary gender-based violence as two separate manifestations of patriarchal violence, the organizers of tonight’s event are presenting themselves, and all of us in attendance, as the heirs to the history of the
witch-hunts; bound together through time, by ties as blood red as the ones around our wrists.
With these thoughts on our minds, we leave for the city centre. A group of young activists sets out on bikes, chanting loudly and obstructing traffic with the banners between their bikes. We don’t have bikes and walk into the city, joining a group of older women. We had spoken with one of them upon arriving in the park, and knew they were part of a feminist choir in the 1970s. They begin singing some of their old protest songs during the walk. First
about scaring creepy men who hide in bushes, and then – to our surprise – about the return of the witches! Witches with fiery hair, from an ancient matriarchy, coming straight from hell to bring back women’s culture. Listening to their stories and songs, both of us are quietly in awe. We are in the presence of the Second Feminist Wave… and it is still rolling.
When we get to the 5 Mei Plein, things come full circle. Not only in the pre-march speeches given here, which explicitly reference the patriarchal violence of historical witch-hunts, but also in the stories of the women we had joined on our walk. They take the stage and recount the first Witches’ Night they organized in Wageningen five decades ago. It had been a smaller affair than tonight, and had included dancing around a bonfire and threatening to turn a young police officer, who had been sent to see what they were up to, into a frog. This provided us with the final part of an answer to our question.
Rituals cannot be understood without the context of their past iterations, and tonight’s Witches’ Night had not been the first of its kind! In that sense, it was telling that tonight’s Witches’ Night was co-organized by the Dolle Mina’s, a renowned and recently revived feminist collective from the 1970s. Yes, we are bound to the past by ties as red as blood, but tonight’s event was showing us other historical ties as well. This Witches’ Night was part of a tradition of opposition to the patriarchy that goes way back. Historically, these particular ties might not go all the way back to the early-modern witch-hunts; but tonight, we had been bound to those days nonetheless. Our hilltop reclamation ritual had brought us back in time. For a moment, past and present had been bound together; not just as a slogan, but as an embodied experience. During the ritual, we shouted into the night on behalf of those who
could not do so in their own time. Now, as the protest march commenced, it was time to put away our notebooks, and use those same voices to loudly reclaim the night-time streets.
PS: By coincidence (or was it?), Romy was handed the sign in the photograph above this post just moments before the march commenced. If this topic interests you, you can dive into the rabbit hole of all the different ways in which that slogan can be interpreted. Enjoy 😉
Romy de Vos is an alumnus of the master’s programme Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. William Arfman is a sociologist of religion at Tilburg University, his research focuses on contemporary ritual practices in unexpected places. Romy and William are founding members of research group HEFT (Heritage of the witch-hunts: Echoes of Femicide and Trauma).