MW Queen Himiko - The Sacred Was Entangled With Survival

The Shaman Queen Himiko was a 3rd-century ruler of a powerful federation in ancient Japan called Yamatai. She’s part of the origin story of the nation. She helped make it a place, she wove its destiny into the sun. We know she used sacred bronze mirrors to reflect and communicate with spirit, and archeologists still find them in tombs and passionately debate what it means that these mirrors are here or there, where did she actually live, who did she confer power to, what did the mirror actually do? We know she read the cracking of bones.

And look, we love the word witch, but just because we play with it doesn’t mean we are actually claiming these people would have understood themselves as witches or that the word meant the same thing to them as it does to us. We are the missing witches, we have been longing for more intersectional magic, for more layers and complicated stories so we are endlessly turning with reverence to stories of women and queer people beyond our white settler colonizer culture and we know we’ll inevitably be clunky and biased and we’re coming anyway, arms full of awe and love.

Missing Witches is a feminist history of magic podcast exploring the meeting place of spirituality, activism, and art practice. Join us for deeply researched, scripted histories and meditations on historical figures, uncovering what their stories teach us about modern witchcraft today. We feature interviews with real practitioners across diverse magical, pagan, occult, and spiritual traditions—digging into tarot, astrology, divination, herbalism, and our relationships with plant medicine and the more-than-human world.

Whether you are a science-loving feminist witch or someone longing for the re-enchantment of the world, you’ve found your people.

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The Missing Witches coven is trans-inclusive, anti-racist, feminist, pro-science, anti-ableist, and full of AWE and LOVE.