Sacred Grief, Shadow, and the Rising of the Divine Feminine

A Two-Part Reflection for Witches Living Through Collapse

When the World Burns and the Witch Feels It

There are moments in history when the sensitive begin to feel something before anyone else names it. Witches have always known this. I imagine if you read this, you and I are alike, and we are acutely experiencing the anguish of the world. The weight of the world is heavy on our shoulders, and there is no escaping this reality.

Those who listen to wind, soil, and spirit often feel the disturbance severely. Long before headlines appear. Long before, historians wrote their summaries of what went wrong. The land tells us. Animals tell us. The spirits of place tell us. And right now, the message is unmistakable. The world is deeply out of balance. Forests disappear under machinery. Rivers choke on poison and become cooling systems for data plants. Animals vanish from the Earth forever. War grinds across landscapes where children are bombed for no good reason, leaving mothers to grieve their broken hearts. To most people, these are news stories, something to swipe away from when it all becomes too real.

I invite you to stop for a moment and sit with the weight pressing on us from all around. This is the reality of our world, and we can never forget it. We also cannot move past it if we ignore it. Is it painful, yes, as it should be. We should understand this pain so we can address its cause and correct the mistakes made. The world demands justice; turning the other cheek will not get us there. We need to rewrite the failed narratives of the Patriarchy. To heal these wounds, we must do the work.

A witch does not see the world as a warehouse of resources. A witch sees a living cosmos. The forest is not lumber. It is a cathedral of spirits, where plants, animals, and minerals are not commodities. They are sovereign nations of life. The rivers are not sewage lines for industry.
They are arteries of the Earth herself.

When these things are destroyed, something sacred is violated. And those who are empathic, those whose nervous systems remain open to the living world, feel the rupture like grief piercing the body, and bruising the soul. The shredding of our collective humanity is visceral and evident in many ways. Each empath is different; you will experience this differently than I might. You may feel sorrow for animals you have never seen. You may feel anger for the land that has been stripped bare. You may feel a strange, haunting sense that something ancient is being forgotten. This grief is not imagined. It is relational because witches exist in consideration of the living world. The spirits of land and forest are not metaphors. They are present.

My High Priestess and my first Shadow Work teacher always had some pointed insight for every difficult situation. The one that comes to mind for this situation is this one:

We always want to be the person who has reached the end of the difficult journey. The one who is transformed—the one who healed from the trauma and has corrected the mistakes. We never want to be the person actively going through the darkness, learning the lessons, nor do we want ot be the one standing in realization of our trespasses. We want to fast-forward to be the person at the end of this journey—the one who has healed and atoned. We forget that to heal, we must go through difficult times and experience them, or we will never become the person who has healed.

-Tavara

When the world is wounded, the witch feels it. But the collapse we are witnessing now is not only environmental, but also psychological, civilizational, and spiritual.

Societies, like individuals, repress their darker impulses (in shadow work, we call this the collective shadow): greed, division, domination, cruelty, unchecked dominance, and genocide. When these shadows are ignored long enough, they erupt into the world through politics, war, corruption, abuse, and social upheaval. This is how toxic Patriarchy looks and acts. It seems to diminish, dominate, and control no matter the cost. This illness we are watching unfold, not only infects men who harbor a deeply rooted need to be important and have control, but it also infects women who have forgotten their sacredness. This reminds us that the Patriarchy is not exclusive to men. While it is the manifestation of toxic masculinity, masculine and feminine traits are not exclusive to men vs women.

The empath feels this eruption intensely. Not because they are weak, but because they are perceptive. The empathic pings we sense are often the early warning system of the collective psyche - The canary in the coal mine. Which means the empath’s suffering during times of upheaval is not meaningless; instead, it is deeply rooted in their being. What we feel is a diagnostic tool to gain insight into the diagnosis. You are feeling what the world refuses to acknowledge. But Jung also discovered something else. When we descend consciously into the shadow, we can transform it. He wrote that the task of the individual is not to avoid darkness, but to integrate it.

To understand the deeper dynamics of collapse, we can look at the work of Carl Jung, whose descent into the psyche produced the extraordinary manuscript known as The Red Book. In 1913, Jung began experiencing terrifying visions. In today’s terms, he was in psychosis. He saw rivers of blood flooding Europe. He saw civilization collapsing. He believed he might be losing his mind. But instead of suppressing these visions, after much debate with himself, he chose to enter them. As a trained spiritual practitioner, Priestess, and witch, I recognize this as something different from psychosis. He documented symbolic encounters with archetypal figures and forces within the psyche, exploring the depths of the unconscious in a process that nearly destroyed him. Not ironically, shortly after these visions began, World War I erupted.

Jung realized something profound. The destruction he had seen within the psyche was manifesting in the world. Humanity’s shadow: its greed, domination, cruelty, and hunger for power were erupting collectively. In my opinion, his psychosis was enabling him to tap into the collective consciousness and receive premonitions of what was to come.

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.

-Carl Jung

Witches understand this dynamic instinctively. When a culture forgets the sacredness of life, imbalance begins to grow. When the feminine principles of nurture, reciprocity, and relational wisdom are denied, dismissed, and suppressed, supremacy fills the vacuum.

Power replaces stewardship.

Extraction replaces reverence.

Conquest replaces our ability to be in the right relationship with the natural world.

Eventually, the imbalance becomes unsustainable and collapse follows.

The empathic witch feels this long before institutions acknowledge it, because the witch listens not only to politics and economics but also to the living world. To the grief of the land. To the silence where birds once sang. The stumps where noble trees once grew. To the unease moving through human communities. Many witches today carry a grief that feels almost unbearable; I am one of them. It is not just sadness, something deeper. A grief that feels ancient. It is the grief of remembering that humanity once lived in relationship with the Earth. And that relationship has been systematically dismantled by centuries of conquest, greed, and a severed connection to what truly matters.

Jung believed that modern civilization had severed itself from the symbolic and spiritual layers of the psyche. The rational mind had crowned itself king. The ego claimed dominion, but the soul cannot be ruled indefinitely. When the deeper forces of the psyche are ignored long enough, they erupt. They erupt through dreams, visions, social upheaval, war, social collapse, and utter destruction.

The destruction we see around us may not be the end of the story. It may be humanity’s psyche forcing itself into transformation, because destruction is not always annihilation. Sometimes it is an initiation.

Stay tuned for part two. This is most certainly not complete.