The Legacy of a Witch

"If you want to know more about [witches], you should first search yourself, throw a glance into your own past and become completely self-aware. For only if you know where you ultimately come from will you know where you are going. Sure of yourself, then you can comfortably go out on the eve of a new moon, cross the way and go over to the witches' field, to the witches' tree...You should come to it without asking "how" or thinking "but," come to it without guile and falseness, like a child, wrapping your arms around the trunk of the linden tree in order to feel the power that flows out from it and into yourself...These are no wicked faces that you are allowed to look upon. They are the faces of wise women, old as stones, furrowed with the runes of the ages, from whom radiates a deep knowing. Many of them have gone through the fire, yet their countenances have not been thereby destroyed, for their knowledge made them immune to it. Uninjured [were] their souls and spirits which were thrust into the embers in order to destroy them, for they were also not made of the transitory stuff of the earth."

-Gottlob Haag, Maientanz und Hexentanz, 1992 (excerpt from the book "The Last Witch of Langenburg: Murder in a German Village, written by Thomas Robisheaux and published by W. W. Norton & Company, 2009)