Between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, European authorities tried and executed tens of thousands of people, most of them women, on charges of witchcraft. Director Donna Read builds her film around the argument that this was not random hysteria but a systematic campaign, backed by church and state, to destroy a folk tradition of healers, midwives, and women who held knowledge outside institutional control. The film moves through the machinery of the trials themselves: forced confessions under torture, executions by burning at the stake, and the fear that spread through entire villages once an accusation was made. Historians and scholars narrate the political and religious motives behind the persecutions, while the film draws a direct line from that era to present-day violence against women and to the exploitation of the natural world, treating both as outcomes of the same mindset. It is the second installment in Read's trilogy on women and spirituality, following Goddess Remembered and preceding Full Circle, and it treats the witch hunts as unfinished business rather than closed history.