Written for The Daily Elemental
22nd June 2025
“She changed.”
“She became cold, distant, weepy… or worse — angry.”
“She defied me. Spoke with strange intensity. Lost interest in the household. Said she had dreams.”
And then:
“She must be mad.”
There was a time — not so long ago — when a man could walk into a doctor’s office, speak a few grim words about his wife’s behavior, and walk out with a signature.
A signature that could send her away.
For weeks.
For years.
Sometimes forever.
⚖️ The Elemental Imbalance Behind Institutional Betrayal
In the 1800s and early 1900s, women were routinely committed to asylums for reasons that, today, we might call… life.
- Postnatal depression.
- Refusal of intimacy.
- Grief.
- Passionate belief in something her husband did not approve.
- Menopause.
Yes — menopause.
That most natural of transitions — where the bleeding stops but the vision begins — was often interpreted as a rupture of sanity. Why?
Because the elements within her changed, and the men around her could not understand what they were witnessing.
🌊 Water: The Tide Turned
A woman’s emotions during perimenopause and menopause run deep. Memories long submerged rise like sea creatures. Old injustices resurface. Tears, rage, melancholy — not because she’s weak, but because her soul is washing out the falsehoods she swallowed for decades.
To a man who’s only known her as caregiver, lover, mother of his children, this flood looked like madness.
But it was clarity.
🌬️ Air: The Ignorance Was The Spell
Doctors — mostly male — did not study women’s hormonal cycles in depth. Psychiatry was in its infancy. Hysteria, that infamous diagnosis, simply meant:
“We don’t understand what’s happening inside her, but it’s definitely bad.”
Air — the element of understanding and communication — was choked with superstition and male arrogance.
And so she was sedated, restrained, confined. Not because she was dangerous, but because knowledge was lacking.
🔥 Fire: Her Power Was Misread
Post-menopause, a woman’s Fire can reignite — not for procreation, but for truth-telling. She stops apologizing. She sees through illusions. She may challenge her husband’s worldview or call out his hypocrisy. She may awaken a longing in herself for freedom, adventure, or solitude.
This Fire terrified men who were not ready to meet it.
And so they called it hysteria.
But what they really meant was:
“She has stopped being what I wanted her to be. And she refuses to go back.”
🪨 Earth: The Weapon of Control
And here lies the final piece — the institutional Earth that allowed men to act. They held the deeds, the legal standing, the word of power. Society trusted their authority.
With the stroke of a pen, they could make her disappear.
In some cases, they married again.
In some, they visited rarely.
In many, they told the children she had “gone away sick” and never explained.
This was not Earth as protector.
This was Earth as prison.
👁️ The Forgotten Crone
At the heart of this horror lies a deeper truth: society has never known what to do with the Crone — the wise post-menopausal woman.
In ancient cultures, she was revered:
- The keeper of prophecy.
- The steward of community memory.
- The final teacher before death.
But in industrial patriarchal society, the Crone had no use.
She could not breed.
She could not seduce.
She would not obey.
And she could not be lied to.
So she was renamed:
Crazy. Bitter. Unstable. A burden.
🕯️ What We Lost
When we institutionalized these women, we did more than destroy lives — we silenced the final teachers of the feminine path. We cut off the chain of wisdom passed from woman to woman. We shattered the rite of becoming old without shame.
And men — ignorant, insecure, or simply terrified of change — made decisions that history must now judge with open eyes.
🔄 The Reckoning Now
The irony is heavy: today, many of the same societies that once locked women away for menopause now suffer from a different imbalance — the suppression of masculine Fire, the dilution of masculine Earth. A generation of boys raised without fathers, under endless maternal oversight, confused and adrift.
We swung the pendulum, but we never healed the wound.
We just inverted the trauma.
🌿 Let Us Say This, Then
Not all men were tyrants.
Not all women were victims.
But the system — elemental, institutional, cultural — was bent toward silencing what it didn’t understand.
May we never again confuse initiation with insanity, or mistake a woman’s awakening for her decline.
And may the Crone rise again — not in bitterness, but in truth.
“The Men Who Locked Away Wisdom” – Elemental Breakdown of Institutionalizing Women
- Air (Belief Systems, Diagnosis, Misunderstanding): 30%
- Fire (Female Sovereignty, Rage, Truth-Telling): 25%
- Water (Hormonal Depth, Emotional Truth, Soul Memory): 30%
- Earth (Institutional Power, Control, Societal Structures): 15%
Dominant Elements:
Air and Water dominate this tale.
Air manifests in the medical and cultural ignorance that misnamed female transitions as madness. The element of thought and understanding became distorted — used not to clarify but to condemn.
Water, meanwhile, holds the heart of the story: the soul-deep changes of menopause, the emotional tides misread by men, and the ancient feminine wisdom that surfaced too late for comfort. The Crone’s knowing was mistaken for instability.
Fire appears in the woman’s reawakened will — the inner voice that speaks after decades of silence. But her Fire, unrecognized and unwelcomed, was feared and punished.
Earth underpins the legal and institutional machinery that allowed men to remove their wives. Not protection, but possession.
This post traces the forgotten wound of womanhood — when Water surged and Air failed to understand.
When Fire returned, it was mistaken for threat. And Earth was used to bury, not support.
This is not just a story of injustice — it is a mirror of imbalance.
The Crone rises through Water and Air — her soul cleansed, her voice misunderstood.
She is the memory keeper, the dreamwalker, the last truth in the room.
They feared her because she saw. And she rose again because she remembered.
The Daily EleMental 
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