The Origin of the Shapeshifting Crone
Transcript from the first podcast episode
PODCAST
Welcome to the inaugural episode of the Stone Cauldron podcast. I’m your host, Lee Frost, the Shapeshifting Crone. Here, you’ll find stories, history, and commentary about complex PTSD and trauma-informed care, told through the lens of ancient Irish lore and with a heavy focus on decolonization and examining the systems that allow for complex trauma to develop at scale. Why focus on the systems of our society? Because we’ve spent too much time focusing on the individual—way too much time pathologizing and blaming the victim, when the environments that cultivate and then excuse abuse and oppression are the root causes of the trauma. These systems have existed for centuries, and are still with us today, though they’ve been rebranded with new terminology.
If you’re not comfortable talking about politics, religion, or the social determinants of health, this content may not resonate with you, but if you’re interested in deconstructing these systems and learning how they’ve been used to create the capitalist hellscape we live in today, then tá fáilte romhat anseo. You’re welcome here, and I hope you enjoy this program that I’ve been working on for several years. It’s liberating to finally launch the Shapeshifting Crone educational program and Stone Cauldron podcast. This work started in 2022, after a medical crisis upended my world and I started collecting diagnoses like infinity stones.
After writing a series of fiery blog posts about the medical trauma I experienced in 2022, an instructor from Virginia Commonwealth University Medical School invited me to work with her students on a curriculum to teach the principles of trauma-informed care. I later gave a keynote talk to her students about the neurobiology of CPTSD. What followed was a series of talks with other organizations for healthcare professionals, and I’ve been wanting to create a platform for this work ever since. I earned some certificates in trauma-informed care and disability rights to develop my skills in this area in addition to my lived experience, and have been digging into books, research papers, online courses, and every resource I can get to in order to develop this content.
You can find transcripts of this podcast and other content on Patreon, Ko-Fi, and the Shapeshifting Crone website. To be clear, this is in no way medical advice or therapy. I’m just a crone, doing her thing in the liminal spaces between worlds.
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I never fit in. Anywhere.
I was the Lost Child from a very early age. One of my earliest memories was walking by myself, at the age of four, around the neighborhood because being in the house with my terrible stepbrothers was not safe. There was a stone wall nearby where I used to pretend it was the wall in Sesame Street where kids would meet Grover or other muppets to talk and tell stories. Maladaptive daydreaming became a way of life. I immersed myself in Star Trek and Doctor Who, wanting to explore like they did. The library was always my safe space. Witches and vampires were protectors in my stories. I was often the odd kid out, struggling to make and keep friends, with the exception of a very tiny inner circle.
My mom was entering her third marriage by the time I turned nine. This was the 1970s, when women were only just gaining financial autonomy in the US. In 1974, women were finally able to have their own bank accounts and credit cards, but the sexism was still ever-present. There were plenty of struggles, but we got by the best we could, and made a good home for ourselves. But by then, the damage was done. The early childhood trauma I experienced rewired my nervous system and I was stuck in freeze mode and my mind was fragmented in a way that was impossible to describe. And even if I could have described what was happening in my inner world, I would have been too afraid to say anything.
PTSD wasn’t officially recognized until 1980, and it was mostly associated with combat veterans. It took a while before it was regularly used in situations of domestic violence. Complex PTSD was introduced in the late 80s by Judith Herman. It’s recognized internationally now, but is still not in the DSM in the US. The claim is that it’s too similar to PTSD, although there’s ample evidence to the contrary. We’ll be getting into plenty of THAT in the episodes to come.
Suffice to say, there was no help for me. And it’s also important to note that this was the time when disabled people were not welcome in open society. While the last of the ugly laws were repealed in 1974, the attitude toward disabled people being out in public was one of strong disapproval. Family members were hidden from the world, and this happened in my family too. My mom’s third husband had an autistic daughter who was put in an institution from early childhood on. Her mom took care of her, but she was a non-entity in my stepdad’s life. Her name was never mentioned, there were no photos of her anywhere. So understanding implicitly that I could disappear too, I kept my mouth shut.
And so on it went. I was an easy mark for bullies, fake friends, and men who called themselves “nice guys.” My inner critic gathered up all the cruel words from the people around me and deployed them relentlessly. With everything I did, it was accompanied by a barrage of insults to myself about how ugly and worthless I was. Learning about the Morrigan helped me put a stop to this, but that’s a story for another episode.
By the time I was diagnosed with CPTSD at the age of 51, I was fortunate to have better resources available to me. With the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, a lot of doubt was cast on survivors of abuse. Neuroscience has come a long way since then, and I’ll have plenty to share about that as well. At the same time I was diagnosed with CPTSD, I discovered I had endometriosis while having a hysterectomy to remove fibroid tumors. The connection between CPTSD and medical problems is strong, and the more I read, the more I learned about why my medical history was so complicated. I was just considered a sickly kid. Over the years, most of the medical problems seemed random, so it wasn’t until the CPTSD diagnosis that I could step back and see the full picture. This is why I put so much advocacy work into recognizing this connection—because there are so many people out there living with a whole array of chronic conditions and autoimmune diseases that are exacerbated by complex trauma.
All of this to say, I’m very much the Wounded Healer archetype described by Carl Jung. My aim is to provide resources for anyone who is interested in CPTSD, advocating for trauma-informed care, and disability rights. I’m a wise woman healer for the digital world. We need more crones today. Crones, wise women—whatever you want to call them—have traditionally played an important role in societies all over the world. But events in the Middle Ages purged the role of elders and women in particular in order to pave the way for capitalism. Words like gossip changed meaning. Originally, gossip referred to close friends and neighbors, and specifically the circle of friends and family who helped with the birthing process. But as the witch hunts got underway, the term took on negative connotations in order to discredit the role of midwives and community. The focus from the 16th century on was productivity as a Chrisitan virtue, and it was in how we looked at philosophy, science, and so many other aspects that we consider foundational knowledge today.
The Wounded Healer is a natural progression from being a Lost Child, and the Crone is a healer of communities. A book called Hagitude has one of my favorite quotes about crones: “She’s the one who haunted the edgelands, the mysterious shadow in the heart of the darkwood. The exile, the rebel, the one who shrugged off the fetters of conventional society; the one who imagined and cultivated her own vision of how the world should be.”
This theme is common throughout the lore of crones. Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, who wrote Women Who Run with the Wolves, did an amazing audiobook series about crones. Her work is based in Jungian psychology, and she does a fabulous job of pulling together the common themes that cross cultures about this archetype of the dangerous old woman.
The dangerous old woman was a protector. As Dr. Pinkola Estés explains, the term meant that to stand in her aura, to stand in her danger was to be protected. The dangerous old woman is passionate and observant. She protects the marginalized and those who have been harmed. She’s a healer, repairing what has been destroyed. She preserves everything that should never be allowed to perish from this earth.
She speaks truth to power, and she’s unpredictable because she’s led by the soul. Society calls her dangerous because they consider it “unreliable” to be led by the soul. But she’s reliable precisely because of that. She knows human nature the way it is, not the way it is portrayed. And that is what is dangerous to a selfish and controlling ruling class that would have us conform to their demands. To let people be who they are, and who they aspire to be, to seek repair from past harms, is to diminish the power they so desperately cling to.
The crone is in charge of emotions, and she knows what to do with them. She knows that when you’re outraged and angry, that’s actually power to fix the situation. It’s huge energy that is raw, and that you can make into anything you want. It’s the reason why we’re told that expressing anger is inappropriate. It’s why they talk about decorum. To be angry is to demand justice, to demand repair, to demand change.
Fear is also powerful energy, and an opportunity to seek out information and to learn. Fear is often a lack of information. And a lot of governing powers feed that fear. Our last election cycle was full of made-up stories about immigrants eating pets and terrorizing children, when in fact the very things that we should be fearful of, like our gun problem, climate change and the depletion of our natural resources, of the theocracy they want to force upon us, is worthy of deep concern. We need to be good stewards to the earth. But they don’t want you to think about that. This is a story that goes back hundreds of years, as we’ll see. After several hundred years of peasant wars where common folk revolted against the injustices put on them by the ruling class, the ruling class set about dividing the working class in any way they could: through witch hunts and other propaganda to set people against each other.
Not conforming became dangerous, and according to Dr. Pinkola Estés, eccentricity is the first sign that someone has a gift. The dangerous old woman comes from the source and is here because she has something to say. She is revolutionary and will not be dictated to. She was given something to do here on earth that is way larger than herself. She lives as she should.
She’ll tell you not to live small. Part of being a crone is to take back the aspects of yourself that you abandoned to conform earlier in life. The crone knits the shadows together to make something substantial come to life. She encourages you to live fully, and to not be afraid of death. When you get to a point where you have more years behind you than ahead of you, it can set off a spark of inspiration to follow your dreams wherever they lead you.
The crone observes. While everyone else is people-pleasing from a place of anxiety, the crone stands her ground. With the ageism in our society, people treat the crone’s generation as “invisible.” So this is the time to gather your power and share your story. All crones of the world have a story to tell. Take up space without doing harm. Follow what’s meaningful to you, because that’s what creates stories. You don’t have to be well-travelled, because being a good observer is the key to having good stories.
In ancient Irish lore, the Cailleach was an Otherworldly crone, a trickster and shapeshifter, and a shaper of the land. There are many stories about her across Ireland, Scotland, and the surrounding areas, and there may be a link to Norse tales as well. She was said to rule over winter, and could be seen riding a wolf, carrying a staff and hammer to bring storms across the land. One of my favorite books about her is called The Book of the Cailleach: Stories of the Wise Woman Healer.
In the book, the author talks about how the Cailleach is the personification of cultural knowledge, a combination of real people and Otherworldly figures. Long ago, the wise woman, or bean feasa, was an important figure in communities: they were healers, both of body and mind. They were often seen as having a connection to the Otherworld.
In ancient Ireland, there’s also a connection to the concept of the sovereignty goddess. That a man couldn’t just claim that he was king of the land, that a sovereignty goddess bestowed that honor, and it came with conditions. Rule justly and honestly, and prosperity would follow. Be a dishonest leader, and the community would be beset with disasters of all kinds.
Alas, the colonizers arrived and everything changed. The patriarchy devalued the role of women, especially those who lived on the outskirts: the unconventional ones. Being an autonomous woman was stigmatized throughout Europe in the Middle Ages as new political ideologies developed: the cosmic agency of a wise women was too rebellious for the Church. They called it reason. Many of the ancient stories changed as they were transcribed by monks. I think this is one of the reasons why I didn’t get into Irish mythology when I was a kid. I was given a book written by Lady Gray, and these sanitized tales treated the myths in a way that was heavy-handed, especially in how women and goddesses were portrayed. They became shallow, petty, and vindictive.
But these views shifted over time, depending on the geopolitical landscape. The bean feasa experienced a renewal in the 1700s, as the long years of brutal colonization harmed generations. Several rounds of laws made the Irish language illegal, and Catholics couldn’t hold public office, teach, own land or firearms, they were excluded from legal professions, and a host of other repressive policies.
The people suffering under these laws drew inspiration from the bean feasa and sovereignty goddesses. Insurgent groups used stories and images from ancient times to reconnect with their ancestral lands. The divine sovereignty goddess not only spoke to the yearning for a free land, but also for a more democratic and proletarian sense of common freedom, justice, and solidarity that challenged the foreign oppressor’s control of the land, and the burgeoning commercialization that stands at the heart of capitalism. In the years leading up to the French Revolution, several groups in Ireland embraced this ideology and used ancient lore to inspire their gatherings, their goals, and their poetry.
In this book, there’s a lot of discussion about the wise woman being a healer in times of crisis and trauma, and that they played a major role in helping people with Otherworldly problems. A bean feasa was similar to a shaman at times: they counseled on making things right with the spirit world, and restored cosmic social and psychic harmony. She may be seen collecting herbs at dusk, often accompanied by entities from the Otherworld.
Certainly, it’s easy to romanticize these ancient stories. There was no perfect past. But the world we’ve built is destructive on a cataclysmic scale. Wars and greed drive the world’s economy, and we’re being priced out of existence by being charged subscription fee after subscription fee, all the while being subjected to constant surveillance in every facet of our lives. It’s unsustainable on such a grand scale and no one’s coming to save us. We have to take these essential next steps to find and create community, and rebuild on the world that is collapsing under the weight of the rapacious greed of the Epstein class.
There’s a lot of work to be done, and to be honest, it feels overwhelming, but we have to start somewhere. Decolonizing and deconstructing can feel uncomfortable. Be prepared for that. But approach with a curious and open mind, and you’ll start to find the source of the power they wanted us to forget. We can embrace our authentic selves, adapt as shapeshifters do to meet the moment, and forge a better, equitable path where we can all thrive.
That’s why I’ve called myself the shapeshifting crone. I’ve had to shapeshift to get through many phases of life, often without realizing that I was doing so. I spent many years as a gray rock, doing my best not to be noticed. I had to become a dragon to force change in my life, to become a scald crow to release years of very justified rage, to become a fox to give a space for my inner child to learn how to play, and to become an owl to reassess where I was in life and observe the world closely to make the next best step, and I hope you’ll find these powers too.
I’m really looking forward to sharing what I can to raise awareness for CPTSD, advocate for trauma-informed care and disability rights, and hopefully, over time, help to grow a larger coalition of like-minded individuals and organizations to repair what we can in order to make a better world. Thank you for listening. Please like, share, and subscribe to help this project grow, and I’ll be back soon with another episode of the Stone Cauldron podcast, and there’s lots to come on the Shapeshifting Crone platform, wherever you choose to follow along.