Unlocking Ancient Secrets: How "Mothers of Magic" Reveals the Hidden Power of Ancestral Wisdom
Even so, what keeps the book grounded is Finn’s own raw material: her mother’s body, her mother’s hunger, her mother’s instruction, on her deathbed, to skip the ashes and turn her into mulch for the roses instead. When Finn writes that her mother was a tiger, a seal, a crow, a spider, a snake, a vole, a hawk—”my mother was an animal”—it doesn’t read as metaphor performed for effect: it reads like someone describing a person she actually knew.
I came to this book already primed by my own history: I spent my college years studying how thoroughly Western religion dismantled and buried the mother goddess, how completely “God” got made male and stayed that way. I recognized the history Finn lays out about the witch trials, about communal mothering erased, about the “soul-silencing terror handed down from one woman to another” in a patriarchal society intent on muzzling anything “other.” There’s something in seeing that history stated this plainly, without hedging, that feels like permission to be as angry about it as I already was, and to let that anger sit next to the tenderness the rest of the book asks for.
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