Guest Post from Elizabeth Blackthorn: Four Winds Witchery
There are stories that don’t begin with ink. They begin with firewood stacked outside a jail cell. With prayers twisted into confessions. With a rope. They begin in the soil where someone screamed, and someone else recorded nothing.
When I speak of witchcraft, I don’t start with herbs and candles. I begin with what was taken. Because before the books and the courses and the polished altars, there were bodies. There were women and men dragged from their homes and accused of things they didn’t need to prove because the fear was loud enough to be its own conviction. There were mothers who midwifed babies and made teas for coughs, and died from it. There were men who walked the woods too freely and were taken. There were those who remembered too much, spoke too directly, saw too clearly. They were accused, stripped, tried, and hanged.
Now those souls are remembered in the marrow of those who carry the work forward. Some people find witchcraft. Others are born into it through a door they didn’t choose.
My inheritance came through both blood and practice. I come from a long line of wise women, healers, and witches whose names were never printed in books but whose work shaped the world around them. I was raised beneath the echoes of their rituals. I have pieces passed down from more recent generations... old tools, scraps of handwritten wisdom, things once tucked in drawers and altars that were quietly sacred. But even without those, I would still feel it. That rustle behind the ribs. That echo in the marrow. The pull of a lineage older than memory, deeper than logic.
The deeper I go into my path, the more I realize witchcraft is not just about belief. It’s about inheritance. The land remembers. The blood remembers. There are rituals passed down through families that never had a name for them. There are instincts that outlived persecution. There are hands that know how to heal without ever being taught. I believe some of us are born into this work because someone in our line could not finish theirs.
Through the women who stood accused and refused to break.
My eleventh great-grandmother was one of them. Sarah Cloyce (Towne) was fifty years old when they came for her during the Salem witch trials. Her two sisters, Rebecca Nurse (Towne) and Mary Eastey (Towne), had already been accused. Rebecca was a respected midwife. Mary, a housewife. Both were hanged. Rebecca was seventy-one when the noose closed around her neck. Mary followed her to Gallows Hill weeks later. Sarah, the youngest of the three, stood accused not long after.
The charges were feverish and absurd. She was said to have attended a blasphemous ritual in the parsonage, where witches mocked the Lord’s Supper and served red flesh and blood. They claimed she served as a deacon in the Devil’s church. They said her specter choked servants, bit the afflicted, pinched, and tormented. When she fainted during her examination, one girl screamed, “Her spirit is gone to prison to her sister Nurse.” Sarah was imprisoned. She was held in Salem, then moved to Boston. By August, she was transferred to Ipswich jail, awaiting execution. She would have been hanged, like her sisters, had her case continued. But something shifted.
Some say she was spared when the court changed. That no formal indictment was returned. That she was released in January of 1693 after nine months behind bars. But other stories suggest something different. That her husband, Peter Cloyce, was permitted to visit her. That with his help, she escaped Ipswich jail and disappeared into the countryside. That friends and family hid her until the fires of accusation burned themselves out.
In either case, she lived. She survived when so many others didn’t. And with Peter, she left Salem and never looked back.
They made their way to what is now Framingham, Massachusetts. The land was given by Deputy Governor Thomas Danforth. Maybe it was reparation. Maybe it was shame. Sarah and Peter changed their name to Clayes. They built a home on what is now Salem End Road. That home is still there, quiet and weathered by time. And if you stand still long enough, you can feel who’s still watching.
I am her blood. The sentence that nearly ended her still lives in me. The silence she survived echoes in my chest when I speak too loudly, too boldly, too much like a woman who knows something. I have carried that fear. I have carried that strength.
We do not always get to choose the form our inheritance takes. But once it arrives, we decide what to do with it. Witchcraft, for me, is not about aesthetic or trend or rebellion for the sake of provocation. It is about memory. It is about survival. It is about standing in the place where my grandmothers were meant to fall and saying: I am still here.
When I cast spells, I do it with their names in my breath. When I light candles, I remember that they lit none before they were dragged to their deaths. When I pour herbs into boiling water, I think of how dangerous knowledge was for a woman. When I speak openly, I remember the centuries of silence that made this moment possible.
We are not just practitioners. We are descendants. And with that comes grief. And responsibility. And a wild, sacred remembering.
The Druid blood runs deeper still, across an ocean and into the green hills of another homeland. That old Celtic knowing still hums beneath my skin. Trees that speak. Stones that remember. Cycles that teach. My ancestors knew the names of trees. They listened to the wind as if it were scripture. The persecution was different there, but the violence was familiar. Colonizers, inquisitions, silencing, burning, erasure. And still the bones remembered. And still the songs passed on.
When I walk my land now, I feel them both.
The Druids and the Puritans.
The sacred and the hunted.
The ones who named their magic and the ones who never had the chance.
And I know I am not here by chance. I am here because the fire survived.
Sometimes when I light a candle, I hear them. Not with ears, but with something older. A rustle in the soul. A stirring in the blood. They do not speak in language. They speak in bone. There is no neat lineage to trace for most of us. But blood remembers what paper forgets.
And bone? Bone never lies.
“They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.”
— Mexican proverb
🖤 Elizabeth Blackthorn Four Winds Witchery
About Elizabeth Blackthorn
Meet Elizabeth Blackthorn, Founder of Four Winds Witchery. Elizabeth Blackthorn is a modern-day witch known for her sharp truth and sacred softness. Her writing blends ancestral wisdom, emotional truth, and grounded magick into language that lands like a spell. Through her Substack, she offers lunar insights, witchcraft guidance, seasonal celebrations, and poetry for mystics, seekers, and the tender-hearted. Elizabeth doesn’t only teach magick, she remembers it, lives it, and invites others to do the same.
Follow her work at:
fourwindswitchery.substack.com
fourwindswitchery.org
Check out Elizabeth’s Book:
The Novice Witch's Grimoire: A Beginner's Guide to Magickal Practice and Mysticism