Tea at Trianon: How 'Wicked' Is Deeply Tied Into Feminism’s Occult Origin Story

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, January 17, 2026

How 'Wicked' Is Deeply Tied Into Feminism’s Occult Origin Story

And it's not even part of the original Baum stories, which are weird enough. From The Federalist:

Gage worked alongside Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in the early days, when they founded the National Women Suffrage Association (NWSA), and she coauthored with them the six-volume work The History of Women’s Suffrage (1881–1922). In 1893, Gage wrote her own book, Woman, Church, and State: The Original Exposé of Male Collaboration Against the Female Sex. She worked ardently to publicly discredit Christianity, engaging in public confrontation for her radical view, such as her 1886 publicity stunt at the unveiling of the Statue of Liberty. “She showed up,” as the Smithsonian reports, “on a cattle barge with a megaphone, shouting that it was ‘a gigantic lie, a travesty and a mockery’ to portray liberty as a woman when actual American women had so few rights.”

Gage eventually broke ranks with Stanton and Anthony, who joined forces with the Women’s Christian Temperance Movement, a move that Gage found disagreeable because of the group’s openly Christian principles. Stanton and Anthony were, however, more pragmatic, believing that aligning themselves with the much larger temperance movement was good for their effort.

Despite the break, Gage’s influence did not end there. Like most of her first-wave comrades, Gage was involved in various occult activities, including theosophy, seances, manifesting, and a firm belief in both good and bad witchcraft. She spent years researching witchcraft, even moving to Salem, Massachusetts, to investigate the Salem Witch Trials. “Those condemned as sorcerers and witches, as ‘heretics,’ were in reality the most advanced thinkers of the christian [sic] ages,” Gage wrote. (Read more.)