Aug 6, 2026 · 42 min · 13 segments
The history of the witch hunts, the devaluation of female power, and how to tap into your witchy side, with Good Witch author and journalist Lucianne Tonti. Lucianne Tonti is an Australian-based…
Lucianne TontiGuest
Jasmine WallisHost
Maggie ZhouHost
You're a fashion journalist by trade, as you've said, and your last book was about sustainable fashion.
Like, I, I was on a tour for Sundressed, and I was in San Francisco, and that's, on the outskirts of San Francisco in Point Reyes is where the head of the regenerative fiber farming movement began, and that's a movement called Fibershed.
And I was, um, visiting their headquarters, and I, I just had, like, an epiphany.
Like, I, you know, when we- you work in sustainable fashion, you know, we've had these conversations.
Like, the systems that are up against you from improving the industry feel just so entrenched.
We're gonna exploit the environment, and we're gonna exploit women's labor, and we're gonna keep producing, you know, crap, basically.
And see, anyway, so I, I was at Fibershed, and I'm getting a tour of the property and, you know, behind the house there's a meadow where they're growing dye plants.
Uh, there's a stream that's, like, flowing down beside this enormous old tree, and there's a circle of stools, and, you know, where they do weaving.
And then we got into the dye shed, and it was, like, cauldrons everywhere, um, which were obviously being used, like, big saucepans [laughs] being used to dye the clothes, and little, um, vials of powders and, you know, drying herbs.
And I, I was like, "Well, this is..." It was, my mind was pinging, like, "This is the iconography of witches." And I went away.
I went away, and I, I just started to pull at that thread, and you see very quickly that the iconography of witchcraft was often aligned with the ico- with women's work.
And, you know, symbols like in Sleeping Beauty, for example, you know, what happens? She gets a cur- she gets cursed by a witch to prick her finger on a spindle, and then she's gonna sleep.
Well, she's gonna die, but they change the spell so that she'll sleep for 100 years.
And so also because so much of fashion, you know, the system changed around the time of the Industrial Revolution, and what you see, one of the first things I learned when I was started my research was that the 300 years the witch hunts spanned, from the middle of the 15th to the middle of the 18th centuries, were the 300 years leading up to the Industrial Revolution, and that's, like, a real...
This system that we live under now with, you know, all of its flaws, and it's extracting from the environment and exploiting women's labor, like, it was born on, on the tail end of 300 years of the persecution of women."
You're a fashion journalist by trade, as you've said, and your last book was about sustainable fashion.
Like, I, I was on a tour for Sundressed, and I was in San Francisco, and that's, on the outskirts of San Francisco in Point Reyes is where the head of the regenerative fiber farming movement began, and that's a movement called Fibershed.
And I was, um, visiting their headquarters, and I, I just had, like, an epiphany.
Like, I, you know, when we- you work in sustainable fashion, you know, we've had these conversations.
Like, the systems that are up against you from improving the industry feel just so entrenched.
We're gonna exploit the environment, and we're gonna exploit women's labor, and we're gonna keep producing, you know, crap, basically.
And see, anyway, so I, I was at Fibershed, and I'm getting a tour of the property and, you know, behind the house there's a meadow where they're growing dye plants.
Uh, there's a stream that's, like, flowing down beside this enormous old tree, and there's a circle of stools, and, you know, where they do weaving.
And then we got into the dye shed, and it was, like, cauldrons everywhere, um, which were obviously being used, like, big saucepans [laughs] being used to dye the clothes, and little, um, vials of powders and, you know, drying herbs.
And I, I was like, "Well, this is..." It was, my mind was pinging, like, "This is the iconography of witches." And I went away.
I went away, and I, I just started to pull at that thread, and you see very quickly that the iconography of witchcraft was often aligned with the ico- with women's work.
And, you know, symbols like in Sleeping Beauty, for example, you know, what happens? She gets a cur- she gets cursed by a witch to prick her finger on a spindle, and then she's gonna sleep.
Well, she's gonna die, but they change the spell so that she'll sleep for 100 years.
And so also because so much of fashion, you know, the system changed around the time of the Industrial Revolution, and what you see, one of the first things I learned when I was started my research was that the 300 years the witch hunts spanned, from the middle of the 15th to the middle of the 18th centuries, were the 300 years leading up to the Industrial Revolution, and that's, like, a real...
This system that we live under now with, you know, all of its flaws, and it's extracting from the environment and exploiting women's labor, like, it was born on, on the tail end of 300 years of the persecution of women."
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