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“Some models of strength have been largely lost, repressed, or hidden from view, particularly images that are not acceptable or are not safe in a patriarchal society. Those images of the Sybil, the wise woman, the wild woman, women who are embodiments of specific powers of transformation, magical, spiritual, and psychic, have become wicked witches. Estimates of the number of women executed as witches from the 15th and 18th century, primarily by being burned alive as it was considered a more painful death, range between 60,000 to 100,000. Those were times of puritanism and sexual repression, and the women burned as witches were often independent or rebellious women who lived alone and practiced herbalism, or women who disobeyed their husbands and refused to have sex with them. Images of the devoted, peaceful mother have always been safe. Such images have always been acceptable in all cultures, even patriarchal ones. But there is another level of reflection of the primal feminine experience that both men and women long for, and this is an experience that comes from the intuitive sacred feminine, a place where language may be paradoxical and prophetic, where the emphasis is on the symbolic meaning, not the words, a place where women sit in circles naked, wearing mud, bones, and feathers, women who turn into divine goddesses and old hags, who turn into fierce dakinis.” — Lama Tsultrim Allione