1 the Middle Ages and led to the establishment of capitalism was achieved, amongst other things, through the destruction of the female sphere of existence, of which midwives were the main representative by way of the power of life and death they ex- ercised. In order to oust women from any public role in socie- ty and to deprive them of all forms of power, they were reduced to their bodies and their reproductive capacity. More generally, women were disqualified or even criminalized as a result of be- ing associated with nature. Their power to give life and death as well as their medicinal knowledge and their spiritual links with the living world were grounds to indict them as irrational, ig- norant or heretical. While the disqualification of nature around which women’s nature is wrapped spans the entire history of Western metaphysics, Greek and Christian, its scale and effec- tiveness changed when the mechanistic revolution imposed a worldview in direct opposition to nature and living bodies. As noted above, this part of history is now known, or at least recognized, even if the subtlety and complexity of this negative articulation has yet to be properly understood. The much less- er known part of history is the one that followed. The idea that modernity is characterized by the cross-destruction of nature and women may imply that this was not previously the case. Be not mistaken: efforts to disqualify women and nature existed long before the emergence of capitalism, but they existed along- side the recognition and affirmation of the value, the authority and the power of the female world and of the living world. The tragic irony of the situation in which we are stuck since the end of the nineteenth century lies in the fact that the main response to this destruction of nature and of the female world Born from Earth: A New Myth for Earthbounds Emilie Hache DOES RECONNECTING to the Earth, (re)terrestrializing one- self, mean reconnecting with the feminine dimension of the Earth? Some slogans seen in demonstrations for the climate, such as “Love your Mother,” “Respect your Mother,” “Protect our Mother Earth,” and so on, openly make this suggestion, and that idea is most certainly associated with eco-feminist perspectives (see fig. 1). The term eco-feminist has come to signify the affirma- tion of a historical link between the violent disqualification of the female dimensions of existence and the destruction of nature, to which these dimensions have been negatively associated through- out modernity. It is also seen as a call to re-appropriate this fe- male dimension and our relationship with the living world. 1 This is also why eco-feminism still tends to arouse so much mistrust; the criticism levelled at it could be crystallized in the notion of Mother Earth, which at best is labelled “New Age,” and at worst is denounced as cultural appropriation. Either way, it is accused of putting the patriarchal female figure of the mother on a pedestal and stretching it to cover the whole world: “Love your Mother!” But it would be short-sighted not to look any fur- ther into it. Even if the expression has aged, or seems like a bad fit, it articulates something that now appears clear but which has taken all this time to be found again and re-named: a bond of belonging to the Earth. Behind these worn-out words, a new myth of humanity’s creation is emerging, a new myth for Earth- bounds. To understand it — or rather to hear it — one must find the thread of this forgotten herstory, partly buried under an accumulation of successive and contradictory historical stra- ta, and pull on it. Here, I will outline some possible connections within this long history. These should be fully unpacked and discussed elsewhere, but the short-breathed type of thought we will exercise now is just as valuable in allowing us to recover this past from the centuries throughout which it lies scattered. The modern history of this cross-disqualification is now be- ginning to be known and documented, even though much re- mains to be done, due to our undying habit of compartmen- talizing our knowledge between social history and the history of science and nature. The missing thread was found again in recent decades when feminists unearthed the immense witch- hunt that had raged for almost two centuries throughout Eu- rope. 2 The ultra-violent and rad- ical reorganization of the social world that occurred at the end of 1 If I may refer to the preface of my own anthology, see Emilie Hache, ed., Reclaim: Recueil de textes écoféministes (Paris: Cambourakis, 2016). This article is drawn from a work in progress, Still Life: Histoires pour mes fils et autres vivants. 2 See especially Starhawk, Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex and Politics (Beacon Press, 1982); Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the body and primi- tive accumulation (Autonomedia, 1998). Fig. 1: Demonstration of the Fridays For Future movement in Bonn, Germany, September 20, 2019.