October 26, 2025 • 39 mins
The history of witches has ancient connections to women as the primary users of magic, which is revered by some and feared by many. The idea of the evil "witch" evolved over time, particularly with the medieval association of witchcraft with Devil worship, which fueled the widespread persecution of women. Today, the image of the witch has transformed. One woman, who is not intimidated or shamed by being called a witch, is Rissa Miller. Her expertise stems from being raised in a nontraditional family with nontraditional beliefs, as well as extensive research into esoteric history, including ghosts, witchcraft, cryptids, and folklore.
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Virgin.
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Beauty.
Bitch.
Podcast.
Inspiring women to overcome social stereotypes and share unique life experiences without fear
of being defiantly different.
Your hosts, Christopher and Heather.
Let's talk, shall we?
I can't say that I'm a big fan of Halloween, but who might have rained on anyone's
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pumpkin patch?
However, there is one character that is staple at all Hallows Eve, an archetype associated
with evil and darkness, and is almost always female.
The witch.
My curiosity is to learn how women came to be branded with this character.
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So, to explore that connection, we reached out to Tosagrifer, Capnamancy and Divination
practitioner, Rissa Miller to help shed some light.
Rissa, welcome back to Virgin Beauty Bitch.
Thank you both so much for having me back.
It's wonderful to talk to you again.
So, just to be clear, Rissa's name was top of mind when this topic came up between Heather
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and I.
However, we don't want to give any impressions that you have anything to do with witchcraft.
Even though your work is truly magical, maybe that's a good place to begin.
How does what you do relate to magic and the supernatural, if at all?
Okay, so first of all, I'm not afraid of the word witch, and I've certainly been called
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worse.
So, and you know, I think there's a lot of baggage hung on the word witch, and it comes
down through centuries, actually, of stereotyping and archetyping.
And it's really fascinating to put it into a perspective that, you know, just because
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someone does divination work, are they a witch?
Does someone do Reiki?
Does that make them a witch?
You know, there are a lot, if you collect crystals, are you a witch?
And you know, some people would say yes to all three, and some people would say no to
all three, and there's a million shades of gray in the middle.
I think that the definition of what a witch is has changed dramatically over time.
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I mean, if we went back to the 1600s, the Catholic Church would tell you that witches are
wild women who must be stopped from cavorting with the devil in the woods and plotting with
demons.
And that's simply not the way that most people perceive a witch anymore.
Some people sure, you know, it's time to catch up, I think.
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So, your experience and your definition of that word or that concept, how do you see it?
How have you come to learn about it?
So going back in my own life, I was raised in a family that was pretty nontraditional.
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And you know, my father had lived with natives and spent time in their spiritual circles.
So that was already pretty nontraditional.
You know, it was my mother who gave me my first deck of tarot cards.
It was never presented to me as an evil or dark thing.
So when I got a little older and learned about the burning times and witch trials, I was
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actually quite surprised.
I didn't understand why these things that didn't seem all that strange or evil to me had caused
the death of thousands and thousands of people, mostly women, but also men, children and animals.
And I mean, seriously, in Salem, why were they hanging dogs?
Why did that happen?
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You know, but superstition is a powerful tool to control people, honestly.
And the way that I have come to understand the baggage associated with the word which
and what are which actually is different.
So the baggage associated with the word which is all about fear and control.
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And it's about fear of a powerful woman and trying to control her.
And what are which actually is that's actually, that's a pretty broad definition because
which can encompass pagans, druids, wikens, it can also encompass solo practitioners that
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simply believe in folk magic or folk remedies or people who have nature-based faiths.
That's a lot of people.
And it's a rising number, especially as we came through the pandemic when people started
to lose faith in traditional mainline religion that simply wasn't giving them the answers
or the comfort they needed.
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And this has actually been documented by the New York Times and USA Today.
People started leaving these traditional faiths and moving more into nature-based faiths.
And there's another element as well bringing people into the witchy practices.
That's the environment.
So as more and more people are, especially younger people, are reaching a point where they're
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like we have to continue to live on this earth.
They are looking for a deeper connection to nature.
And they're finding that in pagan faiths that base their religion on the wheel of the
year, on the actual seasons, on the rotation of the earth, of the moon, of the cycles of
nature.
So there's a lot of elements into what makes someone an actual witch and the stereos
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type of the sinister female witch.
She can be a young, beautiful seductress or a scary old hag.
But there's definitely the maiden mother-crone aspects of the traditional witch archetype.
But honestly, those are cycles in all women's lives.
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And it doesn't make you a witch to be any of them, right?
It should be totally fine to be any of those places.
And yet when you attach the broomstick and the hat, it changes everything.
I just love what you had to say there.
And when I've done some digging into the origins of the word witch and just how things evolved
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prior to the witch hunts with women's medicinal healing properties, as you said, being so connected
with our own cycles as women with our menstruation and how we are just like that one step closer
to being in alignment with the cycles of nature, with the cycles of the moon, that power
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source and that connection to herbs and medicine and being able to heal in a world that was
very quickly developing with monotheistic ideas of why the world worked the way that it did.
I find it so fascinating to see the transfer from these powers to be able to heal through
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understanding medicines through herbs as then being associated to rather than the healing
properties that they were associated to the opposite of what these monotheistic religions
were wanting to uphold and obviously control of women's bodies being one of the things
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that was on the drawing board.
What do we do with these wild women who have these powers to do things?
And so the connection between women's wisdom, ancient wisdom and the knowing that comes
in being close to your cycles and the cycles of nature, being connected to Satanic or
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to evil, as a way to say, "This is not of the light, it is not of what this male God wants
and it should be feared because it is the opposite of what we know to be divine truth."
Yeah, absolutely.
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It's interesting that when you bring up Satan and Satan became a big part of the witch
hunt, Satan and demons.
What's fascinating is that before Christianity, there was no Satan, there was no hell.
Different religions had underworlds but it wasn't considered an unnatural part of life
to die.
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It wasn't, I mean, obviously nobody gets out alive, right?
There wasn't all of this fear associated with it but fear is a great way to control the
masses and it's something that many of the current mainline religions did try to use at different
points in time to gain control over unruly people in general.
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That said, women especially seemed to be a target and right before the witch trials and the
burning times in Europe began, there was a book called basically the Hammer of Witches.
They used to go after women but before that they had the Hammer of Jews.
They used to go after Jews.
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So the books are actually very similar but they just go after different people.
I don't think they actually stopped going after Jews to be totally honest.
I think that that still happened even while they were going after the witches.
Then when you get to King James, he went after everybody.
He was just an interesting guy and he was, yeah, he didn't like anybody.
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It wasn't just like him, basically.
So, if you weren't just like him and you didn't agree with every single thing he said,
you were probably going to die.
The power that women held had to be controlled and calling somebody a witch was a great way
to do it.
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It would destroy her family, her home, her livelihood.
We just can't have these women out being independent, making money, doing things without a
male to speak for them without a patriarchal voice to rule them.
Women who could heal with herbs, who were midwives.
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It's not like some guy was like, I want to step in and do that work.
Give it to me.
I'm going to deliver the babies.
I know what to do.
It wasn't even like that.
These poor women who were doing important things for their community would suddenly be accused
of witchcraft and killed or shunned and that role was then empty in their village or their
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town.
Other women suffered because of it when they needed a midwife.
It's actually a vicious circle.
It really is.
It was willing to call you that.
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How quickly your reputation could be absolutely just stripped from you.
If you were seen as a problem in any way to your husband or your neighbors or to your community,
how quickly it was to not only defame you but also to have you killed, that alongside.
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We've had a little bit of chats on this recently that especially when you think of the wisdom
of some of the women who have done a bunch of different types of being there as a midwife
and they have the experience of their lives and what other women need.
I could definitely see how that's a threat.
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They're carrying all this wisdom to embark on to other women to help keep them safe, to help
keep them knowing of their place and their importance in the world, their gifts, their talents.
If they're cut off from believing in those talents and their kind of sacred essence, that's
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a lot easier to control.
Absolutely.
Absolutely is.
I thought of something while I was listening to you, my brain just went, "Boof."
I remember what it was now.
It wasn't even just if you made somebody mad or your herbal remedy didn't help their
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child.
There were cases where there was a young woman who just didn't want to marry someone.
The minute they got you into marrying, now he's going to call her a witch.
It was so many bizarre things like that.
Also a lot of widows, many, many widows were accused of witchcraft and once they were out
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of the way, someone else could take their land and property.
This was a super common store.
It even happened here in America, like regularly in the 1600s.
If you get rid of the widow and defame her, her rifle heres can't take the property
and someone else could swoop in and do it.
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It's extremely just, it's disheartening that people would even do that.
A lot of the stories I'm thinking of, of specific women that I know what happened to from history,
they had worked hard.
Many of them worked very hard and earned what they had only to become a widow and then
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have someone take it from them and from their offspring, their children, just because
they could because of this word which.
Such a powerful word, you know, when you think of how easy it was to take everything from a
lineage.
Yes, absolutely.
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Absolutely.
And it still carries weight today.
It was just earlier this week.
A post on Facebook was brought to my attention and there was a Catholic church that was literally
crying war against a witch walk in a small, just a small town in Pennsylvania.
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And people from all over the world were commenting on this post.
I mean, it was getting thousands of comments.
I couldn't even read them all.
But basically this church was saying, if you go to the small towns witch walk, being put
on by these, you know, a group of small businesses, they were basically trying to have an event
to attract people into a downtown, you know, to have fun Halloween family time.
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There were simple things like a jackal and her carving for children and a costume contest
and Halloween themed cocktails for adults.
There was no mention anywhere of actual witchcraft, spell casting, anything at all like that.
And they said in the Catholic church's post, there will be wicked spells and people casting
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charms.
I was like, where's the disconnect here?
And first of all, in America, we do freedom of religion.
So that should be fine if they want to do that.
But, I kind of thought the church also spoke in tolerance, but this was definitely intolerance.
And I was thinking also, have we moved on from, you know, trying to persecute witches or
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people who want to have a fun time with their kids at a costume contest in a small town
to support small business?
You know, even from an economic standpoint, I thought it was outrageous.
You know, in America, churches don't pay taxes, but small businesses do.
So it's kind of like these businesses are in business supporting you in the community.
Why would you tear down their event for any reason?
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You know, anyway, it's just shocking to me that this fear, this incredible fear of women
based of powerful women is still a problem.
We haven't really moved on.
It's interesting.
Yeah, it's interesting.
We haven't moved on in a sense of the fear that we have, but it seems that pop culture
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has taken the witch and used her or that caricature to really reap some rewards with it.
There's some pretty famous witch characters, Hollywood.
Oh, yeah.
And you know, drama that have come up.
How do we equate these two things?
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Well, you know, again, I think that there are a lot of people who are embracing the archetype
of the witch for all of its reasons.
And especially young women who are just so done with being treated like carpets, you know,
they're just over it and they've seen it happen to their mothers and they saw it happen
to their grandmothers and they're just not standing for it anymore.
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So when you see shows like Wednesday on Netflix or Sabrina and they're doing, they're breaking
records like they're doing amazing things with these young witch characters now.
I know it and I'm all for it, you know, because they're super smart and empowered.
And it's everything that the witch was feared for, but it's now being kind of put up as a
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model of how to be.
That's interesting.
So you don't see it as being not mocked but used as a way of making economic gain.
Well, it probably is.
I'm sure Netflix is making big bad dollars from that.
But don't you pay with the being used in that light?
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I'm okay with that for a lot of reasons.
And the first is that it puts the witch in a different spotlight and brings her into
a new generation as a powerful and positive figure.
Now when you look back at some of it, like when you look at like Macbeth, those witches,
they're scary.
They live in a hovel, you know?
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This is not something, I mean, nobody really want to do when I grow up.
I want to live in a hovel with my sisters.
Like, no, nobody says that.
At least nobody I've ever met.
But do I want to be, you know, a brilliant student and take no crap and also have magic,
like Wednesday or Sabrina?
Yeah.
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That sounds great.
Like, let's do it for that.
But, you know, the portrayal of the witch over time is definitely interesting through
both movies and literature.
And I think as newer writers are coming along, they are seeing her differently.
And they're giving her sort of a different persona.
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And even the mages in, like, say, the witcher, they are the right hand of rulers.
They are the power that helps the rulers, you know, win wars.
They are like the trusted associates.
And sometimes they're, you know, not so trustworthy in that show.
But all of that said, you know, they are basically witches, but they're also healers.
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And they are also teachers.
And they have a very interesting way in that show of portraying the witches.
They're all, they're all very beautiful, no matter their age.
But they do show the women at different age groups.
And they all have their own unique ways of holding power.
And some of them are corrupted by it, as I'm sure human nature would make it, make it
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like that anyway.
And others are not.
And they use their power, you know, righteously.
So I think that some of the more modern witch portrayals definitely are giving the witch a
new life a different way.
Now, when you look at old stories like Babayaga, I do love the story of Babayaga, by the way.
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She is a powerful, no crap kind of lady.
And I love the stories where she's just like, oh, you're awful.
You're going to be joining my fence of skulls.
You know, I'm sure everybody has felt that way about people from time to time.
But she actually did it.
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But if you kept your word to her and you did what you were going to say you were going
to do or what she requested of you and you were honorable, she did not add you to her
fence of skulls.
You know, and I mean, can you say that about everybody?
No?
Not everybody keeps their word if you do what you promised.
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And I, old characters like that are much scarier and they are portrayed as the ugly witch.
You know, there's the ugly old lady that's definitely part of the witch stereotype.
Look at, I mean, Disney definitely put that out there.
Definitely put that out there.
You know, I do love the remake of Maleficent with Angelina Jolie because they gave Maleficent
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a heart.
They made you understand where she was coming from and why she was angry.
She wasn't just a sociopath because she was angry because she had been betrayed and
her heart had been broken.
And she fell in love then with Aurora despite it.
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And when True Love's kiss came, it was from Maleficent, not from the boy.
And I do love how they changed that story.
Just hearing what you have to say there, especially around women, younger women kind of wanting
to, and even, you know, arguably pop media wanting to kind of reclaim the view of the
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witch, maybe because right now what's selling is that women are so done, as you've said,
about being the carpet for generations to just have the mud dragged on them.
And something that I was chatting with a friend on recently kind of in parallel conversation
to this is, you know, these pagan religions really upholding the concept of, you know, the,
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like Mother Earth or Mother Healer or Divine, feminine, deity, you know, sometimes in multiple
forms, sometimes in one form, and then also, you know, God the Father.
And that this balance of seeing both entities as a deity, as very important to people's
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sense of balance, to understanding different energies in our world, different energies
in ourselves.
And so I said to her, wow, would it be such a world or how different world some of our world
be if it was the mother, the daughter, and the Holy Spirit?
That's an, wow, that's an amazing question.
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That would be a very different world.
I almost can't wrap my brain around that that quickly.
It is a, maybe it's an idea whose time has come.
That's what you should start with.
It sounds like a great whole principle for a book too.
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But I think it would be a very different world because the whole divine feminine energy
is completely different.
It is an energy that is nurturing and patient and about creating, whereas a lot of the divine
masculine is more active and doing and also holds the destructive power as well.
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So it, you know, within those old school archetypes, they both have a place and they're both necessary.
And you know, there's the need for creation and there's the need for destruction and there
is the need for nurturing and there is the need for action.
But our whole society and Western culture is definitely built on the masculine energy.
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And it would be interesting.
I mean, would we nurture artists and value them more?
Would we think that nurses were as valuable as doctors?
I don't know, maybe.
The thing is that we are seem to always want to swing from one end of that pendulum to the
next.
And I love what you say.
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It's a balance of both.
And how what a world looks like when you do have one side, it doesn't matter what side
of that pendulum you go on.
You're going to have imbalance either way, right?
So I really love what you say about we have to embrace and look forward to balancing ourselves
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and our societies and our world on these two sides of what we are and where our powers lie.
I really enjoy that you bring that to the forefront.
And I think just building on what Christopher said, I say that, I say what I just said there,
not in hopes of creating a world where it is one-sided.
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To hear almost how outlandishly accepted it is for us to hear the one way and then to hear
the opposite just how it hits you smack in the face.
It sure did me when you said it.
I was just like, wait, I don't even know how to respond to that.
First of all, I said it, it's smack to be right in the face.
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But just again, Christopher and I both really believe in and it sounds from your words as
well, that the whole point is to get to a place of balance and to truly see both energies,
both people, all genders in this more equal footing.
So I think just, anyways, my words is just to try to call out how one-sided it is.
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Well, I would definitely agree and it's become a normal way of seeing.
It's all about your lens, right?
It's what you're looking through.
And we've so many of us have been looking through the same lens for a very long time.
It was the lens we were handed and the lens we accepted.
And we just, we didn't know there might be other ways to see as well.
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We occasionally stumble into them and we're like, just now, Heather, you handed me that
new lens.
I went, oh, I don't even know how to look through this.
But I'm settling into it now, I'm okay.
You know, it honestly, when we were speaking just now, this might even sound a little witchy.
I was thinking in the tarot deck about how there is, every card has a balance.
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There's an emperor card, but there's an empress card.
There's a magician card, but there's also a high priestess.
And no matter how you look at it, if you get a very unbalanced reading, it's super clear
to someone who understands the cards that what you need is the opposite.
You know, or if you're, if you're swaying very hard into the masculine energy, your reader
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will say, it's time to sit back into your feminine energy a little bit more if you want to,
you know, see this thing through that you're asking me about.
And sorry, there's my witchy lens as I would say.
Explaining, you know, one way that that can very easily be seen in a simple to explain
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because situation.
I appreciate that because I've had readings and I didn't actually know, like I haven't
done a full dive into it.
So to know that there's the balance of the masculine and feminine in the cards, I think,
is really even historically there always was.
And even the very first tarot jack that we know about, it had a Pope, but it had a Pope
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S as well, which was not a thing.
Which was not a thing, but the, yes, yes, the, the Visconti tarot had both.
And the old decks, there's actually one at Yale University in their library you can see
if you ever get over that way.
It had female knights in it, which weren't a real thing that I know of.
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I mean, there couldn't have been very many anyhow, but they did indeed portray it that way and
create that balance.
Oh, it's fascinating to know.
To me, I love that because Christopher and I have talked a lot about, like the essence
of masculine and feminine.
And I feel that in our world, whether in the spiritual world or in these structures that
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we live in, we have almost like this short list of aspects or attributes that are masculine
or feminine and we kind of make this check box.
When, you know, the deeper I dive into understanding my own feminine and masculine, I've come to
realize that almost any piece of me or the context around an action that I need to take,
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it could be masculine or feminine for what needs to show up in that moment.
Like I think a lot of the time we think of masculine, you know, as the protector.
And I think that that's a really important thing that a lot of men identify within wanting
to be a good man and to be there for others and to stand up for what's right.
And sometimes I do feel that in my masculine when I'm in a protector sort of mode.
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But other times, I feel very much in my feminine, you know, that I'm kind of this mama bear
or maybe even, you know, a woman night, a night task when entering into, you know, the requirements
of that decision or rising to the circumstance.
So I'm glad you shared that because it kind of, it helps me to go a little deeper into my
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understanding of masculine and feminine.
Of course.
So I'm glad it was useful.
I definitely felt called to bring it up.
So it did seem to fit into the theme of witchiness.
Yeah.
I just think we've made a mess of these words and have attached so much baggage to them that
we seem unable to see beyond the baggage and the truth is lost, completely lost.
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Well, you know, even if I think now about what happened in 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts,
it's a very famous story, right?
There was a hysteria.
It was basically almost cult like the way they went after witches, witches in that town.
And it had nothing to do with real witchcraft, let's be honest.
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It had to do with basically hysteria.
And it just caught fire.
And you know, 19 people ended up dead.
Two dogs and over 100 people were questions as witches in a village.
And now people, you know, you can go into like a craft store and find a happy Halloween sale
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on 1692.
Like it was not a happy Halloween in Salem in 1692.
It was a terrifying time.
I'm sure for men and women because both were killed.
I mean, one man was pressed to death under rocks.
Like nobody was burned alive.
That doesn't mean that it was an easy time, you know?
Because people suffered terribly and one of the things that I don't think is spoken about
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with Salem, all of those people who died or were questioned, their families were affected
too.
There were children left without parents.
There were families that were shunned.
And you needed a community in a time like that to be able to have resources.
So the repercussions of an incident like that are not a happy Halloween.
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And I kind of sometimes have this little moment where I flinch and I think, "Wow, I respect
what the people there went through."
And it is part of America's history.
I personally think it's a shameful chapter.
But I don't think it's worth celebrating every Halloween.
I don't think it's something that I want to hang on my wall.
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And you know, I think it's festive, you know, it is not.
I don't think any of those women were witch hats or, you know, believed that they were witches.
It's sort of a miscommunication of what happened.
And it's part of that witch story that we now don't really know as a culture.
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We don't really know or is it not happening?
Right.
That's the thing that is scary about it is we don't know.
It could be happening right now.
It could be.
You know, and I think there are parts of the world.
It's only been a breath into the past just a few years since voodoo practitioners in Haiti
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were blamed for natural disasters.
And I think 50 or 60 of them were executed brutally because of, you know, a natural disaster.
I don't think they caused it.
I'm pretty sure that they know that storm came because it was storm season.
And yet those people were executed.
And that's been in definitely in the past 10 years.
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So the world still has this fear of this supernatural power.
Yes.
Which is why we admire you so because you are so in tune with the reality of powers beyond
just our senses.
And you're calm with it.
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I talked to you before we came on here about my background.
And why the supernatural is so frightening, right?
So.
Yeah.
So, you know, it's interesting to note a psychologist would probably tell you that we're
born with two very legitimate fears.
One is falling and the other is loud noises.
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And every other fear is learned.
Every other fear is something that we're taught.
Now the other two are basically about staying alive.
They're about avoiding injury.
But everything else, we're taught to be afraid to put our hand on a stove for a good reason.
You know, that's legitimate.
We're taught to look both ways across the street and to be afraid if there's a car coming.
This is smart.
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But then we're also taught all of these other fears.
We're taught to be afraid what other people will say if we post something on social media
they don't like.
That's the taught fear.
And are there repercussions?
Maybe, maybe not.
You know, does it, does it deeply matter?
Maybe, maybe not.
It depends how famous you are and what you do.
(35:24):
But that said, I personally believe fear of the supernatural is taught.
Now does that mean that everything in the supernatural is light and love?
No, I definitely don't think that's true.
But I do think a lot of that fear is taught to us by faiths.
Various different faiths, by pop culture, by movies, by books.
(35:47):
You know, let's face it, the witches in Macbeth are not cheerful people.
You know, they're not shipper.
You know, it's not like, you know, the girl in I dream of Jeannie.
You know, she was a Jeannie, but still she was definitely a supernatural entity and she
was super cute.
So not the same.
(36:11):
But yeah, no, I was not raised to be afraid.
And I didn't think it was scary when there were ghosts or somebody talked about anything
supernatural because I had a very different background.
And it felt just like, and okay, or whatever, even to me.
It's my personal feeling that most spirit entities are kind of neutral, just like most people.
(36:37):
Probably curious, like most people.
Most people just, they want to, they have their own thing and they're not super worried about
us.
I feel like it doesn't change just because they're in the spirit form.
They still are doing their own thing and they might just happen to cross paths with you.
On that happy note, because that's a happy way to end this, right?
(36:58):
This could be very dark and morbid topic, but I think that's perfect way to slow it down.
Sure.
Do you want to ask Lisa, because we had asked you previously, but just for listeners who
may just be joining us for the first time for this episode, we've talked on what feminine
(37:19):
means to you, but within the context of witches.
Could you share your thoughts on that?
Oh, I would love to.
That's a great question.
I think in terms of what it means to be a female identifying witch is that you have a sense
of your own worth and power and you are unafraid of it, that you fully embrace it and express
(37:45):
it fearlessly.
And that is part of the witches, that is part of her mystique and that is definitely part
of why people have always been afraid of her.
Put that into a poem, okay?
Maybe I will.
There you go.
That was golden.
I'll send you to transcript.
(38:10):
I wanted to read this quote before we head off because it builds on what you just said
there.
And it says, we are the descendants of the wild women you forgot.
We are the stories you thought would never be taught.
They should have checked the ashes of the women they burned alive because it takes a single
(38:32):
wild amber to bring a whole wildfire alive.
I love that.
That's fantastic.
It's fantastic.
Rissa, you are a true goddess.
Thank you.
And if people want to connect with you and learn more, you are a great teacher.
(38:54):
Oh, thank you.
How do people connect with Rissa?
They can find me at my website teaandsmoke.com
I'm also on Instagram and YouTube.
Thank you for taking the time.
This is Rissa's busy time of year, as you can imagine.
And we cannot thank you enough for taking time out to share this little space with us.
(39:15):
We really appreciate it.
Absolutely a pleasure to see you both again.
And I love you.
We will continue because we want to keep you in our little family here.
I would love to be part of it going forward.
Thank you.
You've been listening to the Virgin, the Beauty, and the Bitch, and the Witch.
Yes.
(39:36):
Yes.
Mind us.
Like us.
Share us.
Come on back.
Let's keep talking.
Let's keep learning.
[Music]
Virgin.
(00:02):
Beauty.
Bitch.
Podcast.
Inspiring women to overcome social stereotypes and share unique life experiences without fear
of being defiantly different.
Your hosts, Christopher and Heather.
Let's talk, shall we?
I can't say that I'm a big fan of Halloween, but who might have rained on anyone's
(00:27):
pumpkin patch?
However, there is one character that is staple at all Hallows Eve, an archetype associated
with evil and darkness, and is almost always female.
The witch.
My curiosity is to learn how women came to be branded with this character.
(00:47):
So, to explore that connection, we reached out to Tosagrifer, Capnamancy and Divination
practitioner, Rissa Miller to help shed some light.
Rissa, welcome back to Virgin Beauty Bitch.
Thank you both so much for having me back.
It's wonderful to talk to you again.
So, just to be clear, Rissa's name was top of mind when this topic came up between Heather
(01:10):
and I.
However, we don't want to give any impressions that you have anything to do with witchcraft.
Even though your work is truly magical, maybe that's a good place to begin.
How does what you do relate to magic and the supernatural, if at all?
Okay, so first of all, I'm not afraid of the word witch, and I've certainly been called
(01:32):
worse.
So, and you know, I think there's a lot of baggage hung on the word witch, and it comes
down through centuries, actually, of stereotyping and archetyping.
And it's really fascinating to put it into a perspective that, you know, just because
(01:57):
someone does divination work, are they a witch?
Does someone do Reiki?
Does that make them a witch?
You know, there are a lot, if you collect crystals, are you a witch?
And you know, some people would say yes to all three, and some people would say no to
all three, and there's a million shades of gray in the middle.
I think that the definition of what a witch is has changed dramatically over time.
(02:23):
I mean, if we went back to the 1600s, the Catholic Church would tell you that witches are
wild women who must be stopped from cavorting with the devil in the woods and plotting with
demons.
And that's simply not the way that most people perceive a witch anymore.
Some people sure, you know, it's time to catch up, I think.
(02:45):
So, your experience and your definition of that word or that concept, how do you see it?
How have you come to learn about it?
So going back in my own life, I was raised in a family that was pretty nontraditional.
(03:11):
And you know, my father had lived with natives and spent time in their spiritual circles.
So that was already pretty nontraditional.
You know, it was my mother who gave me my first deck of tarot cards.
It was never presented to me as an evil or dark thing.
So when I got a little older and learned about the burning times and witch trials, I was
(03:36):
actually quite surprised.
I didn't understand why these things that didn't seem all that strange or evil to me had caused
the death of thousands and thousands of people, mostly women, but also men, children and animals.
And I mean, seriously, in Salem, why were they hanging dogs?
Why did that happen?
(03:57):
You know, but superstition is a powerful tool to control people, honestly.
And the way that I have come to understand the baggage associated with the word which
and what are which actually is different.
So the baggage associated with the word which is all about fear and control.
(04:19):
And it's about fear of a powerful woman and trying to control her.
And what are which actually is that's actually, that's a pretty broad definition because
which can encompass pagans, druids, wikens, it can also encompass solo practitioners that
(04:40):
simply believe in folk magic or folk remedies or people who have nature-based faiths.
That's a lot of people.
And it's a rising number, especially as we came through the pandemic when people started
to lose faith in traditional mainline religion that simply wasn't giving them the answers
or the comfort they needed.
(05:01):
And this has actually been documented by the New York Times and USA Today.
People started leaving these traditional faiths and moving more into nature-based faiths.
And there's another element as well bringing people into the witchy practices.
That's the environment.
So as more and more people are, especially younger people, are reaching a point where they're
(05:26):
like we have to continue to live on this earth.
They are looking for a deeper connection to nature.
And they're finding that in pagan faiths that base their religion on the wheel of the
year, on the actual seasons, on the rotation of the earth, of the moon, of the cycles of
nature.
So there's a lot of elements into what makes someone an actual witch and the stereos
(05:52):
type of the sinister female witch.
She can be a young, beautiful seductress or a scary old hag.
But there's definitely the maiden mother-crone aspects of the traditional witch archetype.
But honestly, those are cycles in all women's lives.
(06:16):
And it doesn't make you a witch to be any of them, right?
It should be totally fine to be any of those places.
And yet when you attach the broomstick and the hat, it changes everything.
I just love what you had to say there.
And when I've done some digging into the origins of the word witch and just how things evolved
(06:43):
prior to the witch hunts with women's medicinal healing properties, as you said, being so connected
with our own cycles as women with our menstruation and how we are just like that one step closer
to being in alignment with the cycles of nature, with the cycles of the moon, that power
(07:06):
source and that connection to herbs and medicine and being able to heal in a world that was
very quickly developing with monotheistic ideas of why the world worked the way that it did.
I find it so fascinating to see the transfer from these powers to be able to heal through
(07:33):
understanding medicines through herbs as then being associated to rather than the healing
properties that they were associated to the opposite of what these monotheistic religions
were wanting to uphold and obviously control of women's bodies being one of the things
(07:53):
that was on the drawing board.
What do we do with these wild women who have these powers to do things?
And so the connection between women's wisdom, ancient wisdom and the knowing that comes
in being close to your cycles and the cycles of nature, being connected to Satanic or
(08:17):
to evil, as a way to say, "This is not of the light, it is not of what this male God wants
and it should be feared because it is the opposite of what we know to be divine truth."
Yeah, absolutely.
(08:38):
It's interesting that when you bring up Satan and Satan became a big part of the witch
hunt, Satan and demons.
What's fascinating is that before Christianity, there was no Satan, there was no hell.
Different religions had underworlds but it wasn't considered an unnatural part of life
to die.
(09:00):
It wasn't, I mean, obviously nobody gets out alive, right?
There wasn't all of this fear associated with it but fear is a great way to control the
masses and it's something that many of the current mainline religions did try to use at different
points in time to gain control over unruly people in general.
(09:24):
That said, women especially seemed to be a target and right before the witch trials and the
burning times in Europe began, there was a book called basically the Hammer of Witches.
They used to go after women but before that they had the Hammer of Jews.
They used to go after Jews.
(09:45):
So the books are actually very similar but they just go after different people.
I don't think they actually stopped going after Jews to be totally honest.
I think that that still happened even while they were going after the witches.
Then when you get to King James, he went after everybody.
He was just an interesting guy and he was, yeah, he didn't like anybody.
(10:10):
It wasn't just like him, basically.
So, if you weren't just like him and you didn't agree with every single thing he said,
you were probably going to die.
The power that women held had to be controlled and calling somebody a witch was a great way
to do it.
(10:31):
It would destroy her family, her home, her livelihood.
We just can't have these women out being independent, making money, doing things without a
male to speak for them without a patriarchal voice to rule them.
Women who could heal with herbs, who were midwives.
(10:52):
It's not like some guy was like, I want to step in and do that work.
Give it to me.
I'm going to deliver the babies.
I know what to do.
It wasn't even like that.
These poor women who were doing important things for their community would suddenly be accused
of witchcraft and killed or shunned and that role was then empty in their village or their
(11:19):
town.
Other women suffered because of it when they needed a midwife.
It's actually a vicious circle.
It really is.
It was willing to call you that.
(11:42):
How quickly your reputation could be absolutely just stripped from you.
If you were seen as a problem in any way to your husband or your neighbors or to your community,
how quickly it was to not only defame you but also to have you killed, that alongside.
(12:02):
We've had a little bit of chats on this recently that especially when you think of the wisdom
of some of the women who have done a bunch of different types of being there as a midwife
and they have the experience of their lives and what other women need.
I could definitely see how that's a threat.
(12:23):
They're carrying all this wisdom to embark on to other women to help keep them safe, to help
keep them knowing of their place and their importance in the world, their gifts, their talents.
If they're cut off from believing in those talents and their kind of sacred essence, that's
(12:43):
a lot easier to control.
Absolutely.
Absolutely is.
I thought of something while I was listening to you, my brain just went, "Boof."
I remember what it was now.
It wasn't even just if you made somebody mad or your herbal remedy didn't help their
(13:04):
child.
There were cases where there was a young woman who just didn't want to marry someone.
The minute they got you into marrying, now he's going to call her a witch.
It was so many bizarre things like that.
Also a lot of widows, many, many widows were accused of witchcraft and once they were out
(13:26):
of the way, someone else could take their land and property.
This was a super common store.
It even happened here in America, like regularly in the 1600s.
If you get rid of the widow and defame her, her rifle heres can't take the property
and someone else could swoop in and do it.
(13:47):
It's extremely just, it's disheartening that people would even do that.
A lot of the stories I'm thinking of, of specific women that I know what happened to from history,
they had worked hard.
Many of them worked very hard and earned what they had only to become a widow and then
(14:08):
have someone take it from them and from their offspring, their children, just because
they could because of this word which.
Such a powerful word, you know, when you think of how easy it was to take everything from a
lineage.
Yes, absolutely.
(14:30):
Absolutely.
And it still carries weight today.
It was just earlier this week.
A post on Facebook was brought to my attention and there was a Catholic church that was literally
crying war against a witch walk in a small, just a small town in Pennsylvania.
(14:52):
And people from all over the world were commenting on this post.
I mean, it was getting thousands of comments.
I couldn't even read them all.
But basically this church was saying, if you go to the small towns witch walk, being put
on by these, you know, a group of small businesses, they were basically trying to have an event
to attract people into a downtown, you know, to have fun Halloween family time.
(15:17):
There were simple things like a jackal and her carving for children and a costume contest
and Halloween themed cocktails for adults.
There was no mention anywhere of actual witchcraft, spell casting, anything at all like that.
And they said in the Catholic church's post, there will be wicked spells and people casting
(15:39):
charms.
I was like, where's the disconnect here?
And first of all, in America, we do freedom of religion.
So that should be fine if they want to do that.
But, I kind of thought the church also spoke in tolerance, but this was definitely intolerance.
And I was thinking also, have we moved on from, you know, trying to persecute witches or
(16:03):
people who want to have a fun time with their kids at a costume contest in a small town
to support small business?
You know, even from an economic standpoint, I thought it was outrageous.
You know, in America, churches don't pay taxes, but small businesses do.
So it's kind of like these businesses are in business supporting you in the community.
Why would you tear down their event for any reason?
(16:26):
You know, anyway, it's just shocking to me that this fear, this incredible fear of women
based of powerful women is still a problem.
We haven't really moved on.
It's interesting.
Yeah, it's interesting.
We haven't moved on in a sense of the fear that we have, but it seems that pop culture
(16:49):
has taken the witch and used her or that caricature to really reap some rewards with it.
There's some pretty famous witch characters, Hollywood.
Oh, yeah.
And you know, drama that have come up.
How do we equate these two things?
(17:11):
Well, you know, again, I think that there are a lot of people who are embracing the archetype
of the witch for all of its reasons.
And especially young women who are just so done with being treated like carpets, you know,
they're just over it and they've seen it happen to their mothers and they saw it happen
to their grandmothers and they're just not standing for it anymore.
(17:34):
So when you see shows like Wednesday on Netflix or Sabrina and they're doing, they're breaking
records like they're doing amazing things with these young witch characters now.
I know it and I'm all for it, you know, because they're super smart and empowered.
And it's everything that the witch was feared for, but it's now being kind of put up as a
(18:01):
model of how to be.
That's interesting.
So you don't see it as being not mocked but used as a way of making economic gain.
Well, it probably is.
I'm sure Netflix is making big bad dollars from that.
But don't you pay with the being used in that light?
(18:25):
I'm okay with that for a lot of reasons.
And the first is that it puts the witch in a different spotlight and brings her into
a new generation as a powerful and positive figure.
Now when you look back at some of it, like when you look at like Macbeth, those witches,
they're scary.
They live in a hovel, you know?
(18:47):
This is not something, I mean, nobody really want to do when I grow up.
I want to live in a hovel with my sisters.
Like, no, nobody says that.
At least nobody I've ever met.
But do I want to be, you know, a brilliant student and take no crap and also have magic,
like Wednesday or Sabrina?
Yeah.
(19:08):
That sounds great.
Like, let's do it for that.
But, you know, the portrayal of the witch over time is definitely interesting through
both movies and literature.
And I think as newer writers are coming along, they are seeing her differently.
And they're giving her sort of a different persona.
(19:29):
And even the mages in, like, say, the witcher, they are the right hand of rulers.
They are the power that helps the rulers, you know, win wars.
They are like the trusted associates.
And sometimes they're, you know, not so trustworthy in that show.
But all of that said, you know, they are basically witches, but they're also healers.
(19:54):
And they are also teachers.
And they have a very interesting way in that show of portraying the witches.
They're all, they're all very beautiful, no matter their age.
But they do show the women at different age groups.
And they all have their own unique ways of holding power.
And some of them are corrupted by it, as I'm sure human nature would make it, make it
(20:17):
like that anyway.
And others are not.
And they use their power, you know, righteously.
So I think that some of the more modern witch portrayals definitely are giving the witch a
new life a different way.
Now, when you look at old stories like Babayaga, I do love the story of Babayaga, by the way.
(20:40):
She is a powerful, no crap kind of lady.
And I love the stories where she's just like, oh, you're awful.
You're going to be joining my fence of skulls.
You know, I'm sure everybody has felt that way about people from time to time.
But she actually did it.
(21:00):
But if you kept your word to her and you did what you were going to say you were going
to do or what she requested of you and you were honorable, she did not add you to her
fence of skulls.
You know, and I mean, can you say that about everybody?
No?
Not everybody keeps their word if you do what you promised.
(21:21):
And I, old characters like that are much scarier and they are portrayed as the ugly witch.
You know, there's the ugly old lady that's definitely part of the witch stereotype.
Look at, I mean, Disney definitely put that out there.
Definitely put that out there.
You know, I do love the remake of Maleficent with Angelina Jolie because they gave Maleficent
(21:44):
a heart.
They made you understand where she was coming from and why she was angry.
She wasn't just a sociopath because she was angry because she had been betrayed and
her heart had been broken.
And she fell in love then with Aurora despite it.
(22:04):
And when True Love's kiss came, it was from Maleficent, not from the boy.
And I do love how they changed that story.
Just hearing what you have to say there, especially around women, younger women kind of wanting
to, and even, you know, arguably pop media wanting to kind of reclaim the view of the
(22:24):
witch, maybe because right now what's selling is that women are so done, as you've said,
about being the carpet for generations to just have the mud dragged on them.
And something that I was chatting with a friend on recently kind of in parallel conversation
to this is, you know, these pagan religions really upholding the concept of, you know, the,
(22:51):
like Mother Earth or Mother Healer or Divine, feminine, deity, you know, sometimes in multiple
forms, sometimes in one form, and then also, you know, God the Father.
And that this balance of seeing both entities as a deity, as very important to people's
(23:12):
sense of balance, to understanding different energies in our world, different energies
in ourselves.
And so I said to her, wow, would it be such a world or how different world some of our world
be if it was the mother, the daughter, and the Holy Spirit?
That's an, wow, that's an amazing question.
(23:35):
That would be a very different world.
I almost can't wrap my brain around that that quickly.
It is a, maybe it's an idea whose time has come.
That's what you should start with.
It sounds like a great whole principle for a book too.
(23:57):
But I think it would be a very different world because the whole divine feminine energy
is completely different.
It is an energy that is nurturing and patient and about creating, whereas a lot of the divine
masculine is more active and doing and also holds the destructive power as well.
(24:20):
So it, you know, within those old school archetypes, they both have a place and they're both necessary.
And you know, there's the need for creation and there's the need for destruction and there
is the need for nurturing and there is the need for action.
But our whole society and Western culture is definitely built on the masculine energy.
(24:43):
And it would be interesting.
I mean, would we nurture artists and value them more?
Would we think that nurses were as valuable as doctors?
I don't know, maybe.
The thing is that we are seem to always want to swing from one end of that pendulum to the
next.
And I love what you say.
(25:04):
It's a balance of both.
And how what a world looks like when you do have one side, it doesn't matter what side
of that pendulum you go on.
You're going to have imbalance either way, right?
So I really love what you say about we have to embrace and look forward to balancing ourselves
(25:25):
and our societies and our world on these two sides of what we are and where our powers lie.
I really enjoy that you bring that to the forefront.
And I think just building on what Christopher said, I say that, I say what I just said there,
not in hopes of creating a world where it is one-sided.
(25:47):
To hear almost how outlandishly accepted it is for us to hear the one way and then to hear
the opposite just how it hits you smack in the face.
It sure did me when you said it.
I was just like, wait, I don't even know how to respond to that.
First of all, I said it, it's smack to be right in the face.
(26:10):
But just again, Christopher and I both really believe in and it sounds from your words as
well, that the whole point is to get to a place of balance and to truly see both energies,
both people, all genders in this more equal footing.
So I think just, anyways, my words is just to try to call out how one-sided it is.
(26:37):
Well, I would definitely agree and it's become a normal way of seeing.
It's all about your lens, right?
It's what you're looking through.
And we've so many of us have been looking through the same lens for a very long time.
It was the lens we were handed and the lens we accepted.
And we just, we didn't know there might be other ways to see as well.
(27:02):
We occasionally stumble into them and we're like, just now, Heather, you handed me that
new lens.
I went, oh, I don't even know how to look through this.
But I'm settling into it now, I'm okay.
You know, it honestly, when we were speaking just now, this might even sound a little witchy.
I was thinking in the tarot deck about how there is, every card has a balance.
(27:27):
There's an emperor card, but there's an empress card.
There's a magician card, but there's also a high priestess.
And no matter how you look at it, if you get a very unbalanced reading, it's super clear
to someone who understands the cards that what you need is the opposite.
You know, or if you're, if you're swaying very hard into the masculine energy, your reader
(27:49):
will say, it's time to sit back into your feminine energy a little bit more if you want to,
you know, see this thing through that you're asking me about.
And sorry, there's my witchy lens as I would say.
Explaining, you know, one way that that can very easily be seen in a simple to explain
(28:09):
because situation.
I appreciate that because I've had readings and I didn't actually know, like I haven't
done a full dive into it.
So to know that there's the balance of the masculine and feminine in the cards, I think,
is really even historically there always was.
And even the very first tarot jack that we know about, it had a Pope, but it had a Pope
(28:33):
S as well, which was not a thing.
Which was not a thing, but the, yes, yes, the, the Visconti tarot had both.
And the old decks, there's actually one at Yale University in their library you can see
if you ever get over that way.
It had female knights in it, which weren't a real thing that I know of.
(28:54):
I mean, there couldn't have been very many anyhow, but they did indeed portray it that way and
create that balance.
Oh, it's fascinating to know.
To me, I love that because Christopher and I have talked a lot about, like the essence
of masculine and feminine.
And I feel that in our world, whether in the spiritual world or in these structures that
(29:18):
we live in, we have almost like this short list of aspects or attributes that are masculine
or feminine and we kind of make this check box.
When, you know, the deeper I dive into understanding my own feminine and masculine, I've come to
realize that almost any piece of me or the context around an action that I need to take,
(29:47):
it could be masculine or feminine for what needs to show up in that moment.
Like I think a lot of the time we think of masculine, you know, as the protector.
And I think that that's a really important thing that a lot of men identify within wanting
to be a good man and to be there for others and to stand up for what's right.
And sometimes I do feel that in my masculine when I'm in a protector sort of mode.
(30:10):
But other times, I feel very much in my feminine, you know, that I'm kind of this mama bear
or maybe even, you know, a woman night, a night task when entering into, you know, the requirements
of that decision or rising to the circumstance.
So I'm glad you shared that because it kind of, it helps me to go a little deeper into my
(30:34):
understanding of masculine and feminine.
Of course.
So I'm glad it was useful.
I definitely felt called to bring it up.
So it did seem to fit into the theme of witchiness.
Yeah.
I just think we've made a mess of these words and have attached so much baggage to them that
we seem unable to see beyond the baggage and the truth is lost, completely lost.
(31:02):
Well, you know, even if I think now about what happened in 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts,
it's a very famous story, right?
There was a hysteria.
It was basically almost cult like the way they went after witches, witches in that town.
And it had nothing to do with real witchcraft, let's be honest.
(31:26):
It had to do with basically hysteria.
And it just caught fire.
And you know, 19 people ended up dead.
Two dogs and over 100 people were questions as witches in a village.
And now people, you know, you can go into like a craft store and find a happy Halloween sale
(31:46):
on 1692.
Like it was not a happy Halloween in Salem in 1692.
It was a terrifying time.
I'm sure for men and women because both were killed.
I mean, one man was pressed to death under rocks.
Like nobody was burned alive.
That doesn't mean that it was an easy time, you know?
Because people suffered terribly and one of the things that I don't think is spoken about
(32:11):
with Salem, all of those people who died or were questioned, their families were affected
too.
There were children left without parents.
There were families that were shunned.
And you needed a community in a time like that to be able to have resources.
So the repercussions of an incident like that are not a happy Halloween.
(32:32):
And I kind of sometimes have this little moment where I flinch and I think, "Wow, I respect
what the people there went through."
And it is part of America's history.
I personally think it's a shameful chapter.
But I don't think it's worth celebrating every Halloween.
I don't think it's something that I want to hang on my wall.
(32:54):
And you know, I think it's festive, you know, it is not.
I don't think any of those women were witch hats or, you know, believed that they were witches.
It's sort of a miscommunication of what happened.
And it's part of that witch story that we now don't really know as a culture.
(33:16):
We don't really know or is it not happening?
Right.
That's the thing that is scary about it is we don't know.
It could be happening right now.
It could be.
You know, and I think there are parts of the world.
It's only been a breath into the past just a few years since voodoo practitioners in Haiti
(33:39):
were blamed for natural disasters.
And I think 50 or 60 of them were executed brutally because of, you know, a natural disaster.
I don't think they caused it.
I'm pretty sure that they know that storm came because it was storm season.
And yet those people were executed.
And that's been in definitely in the past 10 years.
(34:01):
So the world still has this fear of this supernatural power.
Yes.
Which is why we admire you so because you are so in tune with the reality of powers beyond
just our senses.
And you're calm with it.
(34:21):
I talked to you before we came on here about my background.
And why the supernatural is so frightening, right?
So.
Yeah.
So, you know, it's interesting to note a psychologist would probably tell you that we're
born with two very legitimate fears.
One is falling and the other is loud noises.
(34:42):
And every other fear is learned.
Every other fear is something that we're taught.
Now the other two are basically about staying alive.
They're about avoiding injury.
But everything else, we're taught to be afraid to put our hand on a stove for a good reason.
You know, that's legitimate.
We're taught to look both ways across the street and to be afraid if there's a car coming.
This is smart.
(35:03):
But then we're also taught all of these other fears.
We're taught to be afraid what other people will say if we post something on social media
they don't like.
That's the taught fear.
And are there repercussions?
Maybe, maybe not.
You know, does it, does it deeply matter?
Maybe, maybe not.
It depends how famous you are and what you do.
(35:24):
But that said, I personally believe fear of the supernatural is taught.
Now does that mean that everything in the supernatural is light and love?
No, I definitely don't think that's true.
But I do think a lot of that fear is taught to us by faiths.
Various different faiths, by pop culture, by movies, by books.
(35:47):
You know, let's face it, the witches in Macbeth are not cheerful people.
You know, they're not shipper.
You know, it's not like, you know, the girl in I dream of Jeannie.
You know, she was a Jeannie, but still she was definitely a supernatural entity and she
was super cute.
So not the same.
(36:11):
But yeah, no, I was not raised to be afraid.
And I didn't think it was scary when there were ghosts or somebody talked about anything
supernatural because I had a very different background.
And it felt just like, and okay, or whatever, even to me.
It's my personal feeling that most spirit entities are kind of neutral, just like most people.
(36:37):
Probably curious, like most people.
Most people just, they want to, they have their own thing and they're not super worried about
us.
I feel like it doesn't change just because they're in the spirit form.
They still are doing their own thing and they might just happen to cross paths with you.
On that happy note, because that's a happy way to end this, right?
(36:58):
This could be very dark and morbid topic, but I think that's perfect way to slow it down.
Sure.
Do you want to ask Lisa, because we had asked you previously, but just for listeners who
may just be joining us for the first time for this episode, we've talked on what feminine
(37:19):
means to you, but within the context of witches.
Could you share your thoughts on that?
Oh, I would love to.
That's a great question.
I think in terms of what it means to be a female identifying witch is that you have a sense
of your own worth and power and you are unafraid of it, that you fully embrace it and express
(37:45):
it fearlessly.
And that is part of the witches, that is part of her mystique and that is definitely part
of why people have always been afraid of her.
Put that into a poem, okay?
Maybe I will.
There you go.
That was golden.
I'll send you to transcript.
(38:10):
I wanted to read this quote before we head off because it builds on what you just said
there.
And it says, we are the descendants of the wild women you forgot.
We are the stories you thought would never be taught.
They should have checked the ashes of the women they burned alive because it takes a single
(38:32):
wild amber to bring a whole wildfire alive.
I love that.
That's fantastic.
It's fantastic.
Rissa, you are a true goddess.
Thank you.
And if people want to connect with you and learn more, you are a great teacher.
(38:54):
Oh, thank you.
How do people connect with Rissa?
They can find me at my website teaandsmoke.com
I'm also on Instagram and YouTube.
Thank you for taking the time.
This is Rissa's busy time of year, as you can imagine.
And we cannot thank you enough for taking time out to share this little space with us.
(39:15):
We really appreciate it.
Absolutely a pleasure to see you both again.
And I love you.
We will continue because we want to keep you in our little family here.
I would love to be part of it going forward.
Thank you.
You've been listening to the Virgin, the Beauty, and the Bitch, and the Witch.
Yes.
(39:36):
Yes.
Mind us.
Like us.
Share us.
Come on back.
Let's keep talking.
Let's keep learning.
[Music]
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