WITCH'S STEP

Iris Rivero, the author of the novel, dedicates it, in a kind of chant, to the "priestesses, healers [...] witches"; she alludes to ancient civilizations that, under different names, venerated the Goddess of three faces: maiden, mother, and harpy. They erected temples in the name of the Goddess: they venerated her, prayed to her, took refuge in her lap, until they were torn down and the Goddess was replaced by a bloodthirsty and power-hungry Christian god. "But we are the last bastion of the Ancient People, of the power that ruled the land during a distant era, when the Ancients, who now lie beneath the earth, inhabited the world." We were goddesses and now we are nothing more than a myth.
The intertextual fabric found in the novel affirms the existence of the goddess Hecate and a matrilineal lineage of witches; in the case of the novel, the Moray dynasty, composed of Vivian, mother of Elizabeth and Katherine, and Amaris Moray, the protagonist. The novel begins in 1720, but the arrival of the clan would be in 1520, fleeing from Scotland, the Christian god, and the witch hunts. Esles, Santa María de Cayón, Cantabria, was the chosen point of arrival because it was a small village situated in the midst of an exuberant forest, where, through the crackling of tree branches and the sounds of the wind, it was possible to hear the roar of the goat god, the voice of the forest, and because the ancestral remnants of the blood offered to the Mother Goddess Hecate were perceived by creatures like them. Hecate is the deity that presides over magic and spells. She is linked to the world of shadows. She appears to witches in the form of various animals, such as a mare, a dog, a wolf. She presides over crossroads or places par excellence of magic. Their statues or images express the Triple Goddess in her three ages: maiden, mother, and crone. These statues were very abundant, in ancient times, at crossroads, in the fields, and in places like Esles de Cayón.
The novel is constructed as a response that vindicates witches, not in the sense of denying their existence, but in affirming themselves from a female sexualized body. It is counter-discursive to what is stated by the Malleus Maleficarum and the Dominican inquisitors, who affirmed the existence of witches, constructed from their misogynistic fears, even fantasies. In this story, humans, animals, and spirits blend and coexist: humans who turn into animals and vice versa; witches who cohabit with humans but refuse to have their children to avoid weakening their species; witches who desire and are not punished.
Pisada de bruja is a fine weave of what was pointed out by the Dominican friars and what was expressed by the witches in an intersubjective dialogue with the writer. Iris Rivero does not deny the misogynistic legends surrounding witches, but she reinterprets them from a body and a sexualized female consciousness, in a deep and committed sororal companionship. In the novel, the witches do it through transgression, but as if it were a world where women didn't have to remain outside the social order for fulfilling a self-chosen destiny.