The One With Patriarchy’s Last Stand
When I was a little girl, I believed in magic. That is part and parcel of being a child; we know no limitations. Nothing is too absurd, nothing is too unbelievable, and nothing is impossible. We believe in folk tales and mystical beings, dragons, and monsters under the bed — sometimes benevolent, sometimes not. We talk to the imaginary friend at the end of the table and fall gently into our dreamscape with only the whispered hope that a faerie will place a little coin under our pillow while we rest. Our world is spectacular. Full of wonder for things both seen and unseen. Full of possibilities. Full of magic.
At least, that’s how it was for me. It was the magical golden years of a child in the nineties, a time that feels so distant now, yet sends me messages across time, in a language only my soul can understand.
I have only vague memories of myself then, as if it were a movie I once watched, a character played by me in a cosmic skin suit. Small scenes flash before my eyes occasionally; days in the garden looking for the snails I’d marked with a coloured Sharpie to see if they’d returned, nan’s corned beef with mash and peas, trips to the corner store to buy Winfield Blues for mum and my stepdad while secretly adding a bag of 10 cent red frog lollies to the bill, a room full of Spice Girls posters and a dog named Murphy.
It was not too long after that golden era concluded that I journeyed into the tempestuous era of adolescence. Those pre-teen years felt like being thrown into a deep ocean with no life vest and spending the next decade trying not to drown. Where I came from, we didn’t have rites of passage. No one saw you and said, “Here, let me guide you, sacred one. Things are about to get bumpy.” It was the era of fending for yourself and, in my case, barely making it out alive.
In those earlier years of adolescence, I hadn’t fully forgotten my wonder, though it had slightly morphed into a mild fixation with the supernatural. I’d gone from faeries and dragons to witches and warlocks. My friends and I developed a peculiar obsession with movies and television series that featured supernatural themes, such as Practical Magic, Charmed, and The Craft. We found graveyards rather enthralling, and we practised divination through the use of tarot cards, subsequently developing a determined curiosity about whether we could communicate with the dead using an Ouija board.
Although television conditioning fed us the narrative that the supernatural was something to fear, exaggerating the ideas of demons, possessions, exorcisms, and the eternal battle of good versus evil, the fear didn’t sway me. It’s as though a stronger emotion surpassed it; something intrinsic. Combine that with adolescent rebellion, and my curiosity for the unseen heightened. I wanted to defy what I’d been taught; question it. I wanted to push the metaphorical red button they told me not to push. What could be so scary about what existed beyond the veil? If demons had a place, it would be Earth. I’d have more of a chance seeing evil walking alone in the local park at midnight. Why was the supernatural laced with fearmongering? What were they trying to hide from us?
For many years, I kept my curiosity about that unseen world a secret. I couldn’t tell my father, a strict fundamentalist Christian who already thought I was the anti-Christ, even without my sharing my esoteric endeavours with him. I had the sense my mother was a closeted mystic, but she was overwhelmingly busy trying to raise her new children and work two jobs to put food on the table. And my friends…well, they’d been pulled into the undertow of Western civilisation, conditioned deeper into the dullness of monotheism and consumerism. And soon, so was I. In a mere spec of time, all those years I played with wonder washed away with the influence of modernity. I learned to suppress the fierce, mystical curiosity that lived in me, pouring sand on the burning feminine fire that was my birthright, and I diminished into a version digestible to the masses. I cookie-cut myself and, in that process, suppressed the ancient wisdom that yearned to move through me all those years ago.
Until now…
If you have been following my journey for some time, you will know I am no stranger to transformation. Since I began publicly sharing my innermost musings back in the winter of 2013 — sitting in boredom behind my corporate desk on Saturday mornings during weekend shifts in the buying department of Australia’s leading supermarket chain — I’ve probably been five different women since then… yet still me. That’s the beauty of allowing yourself to grow, like a gnarled yet majestic oak tree continuing to blossom and wither as the seasons permit. I’ve always held this kind of unwavering determination to stretch the boundaries of my life and ask myself, Is there more for me out there? Not in the way of material or experiential accumulation, but rather in the way that reflects whether or not I am living in deep accordance with my soul truth (hence the name of my book).
It was, in fact, my book that led me down the long, winding path of self-inquiry that has taken place over the last few years. When one publishes a book titled ‘Soul Truth’ about living in alignment with your deepest truth, and then subsequently realises they are still wearing metaphorical masks between them and the world, it makes for a take-a-long-look-in-the-mirror-and-start-to-see-what-you-are-still-hiding revelation that is not so comfortable to accept.
You see, we are all masking in some way, shape or form. And I am no exception. It presents in the way we save face, in the words we want to say but don’t, in the outfit we choose not to wear because of what people will think of us, in the reasons we don’t dance in fear of looking silly, in the way we say yes when we want to say no, in the way we try and fill the silence in between because the silence makes us uncomfortable. Our masks are so multi-layered that we can sometimes forget who we are beneath them; who are we when the world isn’t watching? I almost forgot who I was beneath them. I wore so many masks, because I, too, lived in fear… what would they think if I showed them who I really was?
I may have left my corporate career, redefined ‘success’ on my own terms, and built up the courage to travel the world, but was I courageous to reveal myself outside of a version agreeable to the masses? Did I feel safe enough to express myself as the raw, wild, feminine spirit that I was and had always been? Did I express my needs? Did I assert my boundaries? Did I walk braless down the street without hiding the breasts that feed us into life? Or was I still masculating myself to fit into a society that still objectifies women and asks us to act like men; to hustle, work, and strive, rather than flow, rest and receive? Was I truly embodying my soul truth?
The years following the release of my book brought some of my most profound life challenges, even after all the transformation that had occurred in the previous years. The process of the unmasking, or what I will call ‘reclaiming my intrinsic feminine’, shed layers I had been too afraid to witness; parts of me that had been buried for lifetimes. And the shedding reached its tipping point in the one school they don’t tell you offers the greatest initiation — family.
Despite being the black sheep, the one who made questionable life choices and walked a path my family struggled to comprehend because it went against the status quo, I still played the good girl. I sat at gatherings with my head down, dressed ‘appropriately,’ smiling politely, nodding through small talk about wars and weather and what was on the news that day. Deep down, I craved to speak of mysticism, spirits, dreams, and things they’d call “weird,” but I stayed silent, not knowing that I was shrinking myself with every breath that passed.
Those Sundays beneath the backyard canopy, I found myself trapped in the same Groundhog Day of listening to people complain about their lives, tearing others down for daring to live differently, slurring racial and homophobic insults as the salt was passed across the table. It was the classic Australian/Maltese tall poppy syndrome in full swing. Surely they, too, longed to speak of magic and beauty. What happened to their wonder? What happened to their awe? Did they succumb to the trance of Western capitalism, a disease that severs our connection to the sacredness of it all and replaces it with an unquenching yearning to consume? My family owned three properties, but still talked about winning the lottery like it was the only way they'd find true happiness. With hindsight, they did teach me a great lesson — that no amount of material wealth will ever fill the void of a soul starving for a deeper meaning.
And then there was my father, projecting his unwarranted self-righteous sermons about Christianity being the one true path we must all follow, because we’re all doomed to hell if we don’t. My sister and I would joke about how Dad would be the only one up there in heaven at this rate, seeing as we were all sinners to him. It made for a rather awkward lunchtime discussion, yet it was like clockwork with him. He couldn’t help turning any conversation into a lecture about salvation. Probably because he’d been up the night before watching Christian influencers like Allie Beth Stuckey and Paul & Morgan on YouTube, absorbing their rhetoric like gospel, then regurgitating it back at us as if he’d thought of it himself. Often, no one dared to challenge him. That was the frustrating part. We just sat there like obedient doormats while he paraded his faith around the table, offering grace before meals like it was currency to buy his way into heaven. Never mind that just days earlier he’d been down at the local poker machines. I suppose "Thou shalt not covet" doesn’t compute at the Bardwell Park RSL.
It was around the time I started challenging my father, speaking up for myself and debating his so-called “truth,” that I felt a deep stirring in my being, like the words to a powerful melody rising from a sleeping grave. I stopped being obedient, I stopped receiving his one-hour monologues like a dutiful parishioner in the front pew, and instead, started to interject my own views. Let me tell you, he didn’t like that.
At the same time this reclamation of voice was unfolding, I was working on a historical fiction novel about women in 16th-century Malta. The novel led me to conduct extensive research and discovery about the suppression of the feminine across the ages. I travelled to eras long before the oppressive patriarchal cultures of our modern times. I met goddesses and societies who revered the feminine for her power to bring life into the world, celebrated her blood and sang songs in her reverence. I read alternative creation stories, ones where the feminine was not cast out but summoned. I found gnostic gospels that were intentionally buried and hidden because they didn’t align with the Council of Nicaea's controlling agenda to instil fear in the collective so they could continue to reign power. Through my research, I saw how many of the stories we'd been fed were lies; tales rewritten to silence the feminine. And in our modern times, the knowledge was revealing itself, as if through sacred sands that transcended time.
The uncanny synchronicity was that my personal life had seemingly become the cinematic stage in which the reclamation of the feminine was unfolding, both on a macroscopic level in the greater world and microscopically, through my ability to show up in truth to my father and the world around me. The fear to speak up, the fear to be seen — these were not only a part of my story but a part of the long story of women across the ages. We had been vilified, oppressed, controlled, sexualised, demonised, you name it. Even in our modern day, I saw the colonisation of the feminine manifested in daily life, especially how Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions continue to suppress women; our intuition, our bodies and our voices — my voice.
Every self-righteous comment my father made towards me was laced with the anti-feminine rhetoric we have been fed for the last two thousand years. And the more I challenged him, the angrier he got. He was the patriarchy’s last stand. A personification of every church father, king, president, leader, and council that ever decreed women should not be seen or heard. Though my father had no authority, no sword or crown. He had only words: “Heretic, slut, pagan, demonic witch.” I’d heard it all before. Nothing could pierce me like it used to; my skin wore the light armour of a thousand women before me. All I saw in front of me as he projected his anger was a man threatened by the sovereignty of a woman. A man whose beliefs had become so ingrained that he forgot the wild feminine that existed both within him and around him, and he couldn’t see that he was merely copying the same playbook the patriarchy had used for thousands of years to vilify women in their power.
When I faced my father in my deepest truth; when I shared my journey as a mystic, as a woman of the healing arts, as a believer in the mysteries, a seer between worlds, a priestess, a goddess, an embodiment of the divine feminine, it felt like I was facing the wounded masculine that has existed for the last two thousand years. I felt like an army of ancestors stood behind me with a fierce love that said, “We are home now. We will no longer be silenced.” In that moment, it felt like I stood for all the women in my lineage who had been oppressed, vilified, and murdered for speaking their truth. I stood for my daughter, for those who will succeed me, those who still seek the courage to safely express themselves as the mystical beings they are. It is our birthright to live freely, like the sea in all her forms. It is our birthright to connect with the unseen, to remember the magic that has existed within and around us since we were birthed by our mothers through the primordial portal of creation.
Before religion was colonised, women held the sacred.
We anointed the people. We massaged oil into the heads of the dying. We sang souls into this world, and out of it. We held rites of passage - ceremonies for first blood - celebrating the creation portals that we hold between our thighs. We held circles for the thresholds of womanhood, motherhood, widowhood, and wise age. We offered water blessings - sacred baptisms - long before the word even existed. Because we spoke to the water as kin. We understood her power to cleanse, initiate, and carry spirit.
And then the Dark Ages came. We were cast out by those threatened by our power. They plagiarised and colonised any sacred offering that didn't align with their agenda to control. We were called witches, heretics, sinners. We were silenced and almost completely erased from the story.
What you must know is that religion did not invent the sacred. It stole it, reframed it. Put men in robes where women once stood barefoot on the earth, connected to the oneness of it all, the spirits of land and sky.
The church took what once belonged to the feminine and called it holy only in their image.
And now we return.
Unstoppable.
Reclaiming our birthright.
And revealing the truth.
My reclamation is yours, sacred one. May the feminine rise, may the masculine hold her in reverence, and may we all remember the harmonious, divine union — the prophecy that has always belonged to this great Earth.
With love and blessings,
~ Bianca
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