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Read the human record end to end and it does not read like the story of a wise species. It reads like a case file. Chronic delusion, cyclical violence, a compulsive hunger for dominance that never once resolved into satisfaction. Eckhart Tolle’s diagnosis in A New Earth is that this is not metaphor. It is literal collective mental illness, and its engine is the ego, the mind-made self that can only sustain itself through separation.
But the madness was never evenly distributed. For roughly two thousand years it found a preferred host, and the cost of that preference was borne almost entirely by women.
The Ego Needed a Host, and Chose One
The ego is not a person. It is a pattern. A conglomeration of recurring thought forms, conditioned reactions and borrowed opinions that we mistake for identity because it never stops talking. It survives by identification: with possessions, with roles, with grievances, with being right. Take away everything it identifies with and it experiences that as death, which is why it fights so hard.
Tolle’s claim is that this pattern rooted more easily in the male form, because men were more thoroughly mind-identified. The culture handed men their sense of self through intellect, achievement, position and mastery over matter, and men took it. The female form, by contrast, remained more anchored in the body’s own intelligence, in cycle and sensation, in a felt connection to the living world rather than an argued one.
That connection was the threat. An ego seeking total supremacy over the planet cannot tolerate a dimension of human experience that keeps pointing back toward the formless. Balance would have curtailed its growth. So the balance had to go, and rendering the female powerless was not incidental to the ego’s expansion. It was the precondition.
It is worth saying plainly that the gendered framing here is a description of conditioning, not biology. Tolle is not arguing that women are innately spiritual and men innately blind. He is describing what two millennia of cultural training did to two groups of people. Men can and do carry deep interiority. Women can and do become ferociously mind-identified. The pattern is a tendency produced by history, not a law written into flesh.
The Fires, and Why the Real Number Matters More
The most violent expression of this came during roughly three centuries of witch trials across Europe, running from about 1450 to 1750. Tolle gives the figure as three to five million women killed. That number circulates widely in spiritual and feminist writing, and it needs to be corrected, because the truth is both smaller and more damning.
Careful archival work has steadily brought the estimates down. Brian Levack, whose survey remains the standard reference and who discusses the evidence in this interview, identified around 110,000 recorded trials, of which roughly half ended in execution. His third edition revised the total downward to about 45,000 deaths across Europe. Older high-end estimates reaching into the hundreds of thousands, and the survey of the German and Swiss trials published in the Swiss American Historical Society Review, note that these represent the extreme edge of what the sources will bear. Around eighty-five percent of the victims were women. A meaningful minority were men.
Why insist on this? Because a teaching that rests on an inflated number can be destroyed by anyone who checks. And because the smaller figure exposes something the larger one obscures. Forty-five thousand deaths, spread across three centuries and a continent, was enough. It did not require industrial slaughter to break the transmission of women’s knowledge. It required only that enough women burn, publicly, for long enough, that every other woman learned to make herself smaller. As that same survey notes, hundreds of thousands more lived under the constant possibility of accusation. Terror is efficient. It does not need volume.
And the accusations reveal exactly what was being targeted. It could be enough to love animals visibly. To walk alone through fields or woods. To know which plants healed and to gather them. These are not crimes. They are the ordinary expressions of a woman still in relationship with the living world. By branding them demonic, the collective ego did not merely kill women. It severed a whole dimension of human experience and left the world running on half its instruments.
The Queen They Had to Invent
Fast forward three hundred years, and the machinery had refined itself. It no longer needed fire. It had the printing press.
Marie Antoinette arrived in France at fourteen as the terms of a treaty, and left it on a scaffold at thirty-seven as the most hated woman in Europe. Between those two points lies one of history’s clearest demonstrations of how a woman is manufactured into a monster.
She never said “let them eat cake.” Rousseau put the line in print around 1767, attributing it to an unnamed great princess, when she was a child in Vienna. It was not even attached to her name until more than fifty years after the Revolution. Yet it remains the single thing most people know about her, because the ego does not require accuracy. It requires a face for its rage.
What she was actually subjected to was an industrial pamphlet campaign, thousands of publications accusing her of adultery, lesbianism, incest, sorcery over the king and the deliberate ruin of France. The Library of Congress research guide traces how these libelles constructed an identity that was then accepted as reality, and at her trial the accusation of incest with her eight-year-old son was introduced by a prosecutor who had coached the child. She refused to answer it, saying nature itself refuses to respond to such a charge against a mother, and appealed directly to the mothers in the courtroom. Some of them called for the proceedings to stop. The trial documents preserved in the Liberty, Equality, Fraternity archive show a verdict that had already been settled before anyone spoke.
She was not blameless. Once France and Austria were at war she genuinely passed information to the enemy, and by any state’s standard that is treason. But treason was not what killed her reputation. Sexual monstrosity did. A male regent doing precisely the same things would have been condemned as a bad politician. She was condemned as an unnatural creature, and the charge that stuck was the one about her body.
The Same Machinery, Now Wearing a Lab Coat
None of this is safely historical. The mechanism simply changed costume.
In 1967 a Cambridge graduate student named Jocelyn Bell Burnell noticed an anomalous signal in data from a radio telescope she had helped build, and identified the first pulsar. In 1974 the Nobel Prize in Physics went to her supervisor Antony Hewish and to Martin Ryle. Britannica records that prominent scientists including Fred Hoyle protested her omission at the time. She was awarded a three million dollar Breakthrough Prize forty-four years later, and gave the entire sum away to fund scholarships for women and minorities in physics.
The detail that gives the game away is not the prize. It is what she described about the press coverage: reporters directed the astrophysics questions to Hewish, and asked her how many boyfriends she had and what colour her hair was. Physics World has noted that she herself attributed the omission to her student status rather than her gender. Perhaps. But the interviews were not about her student status.
Then there is Australia in 2012. Julia Gillard, the country’s first female prime minister, had spent months being attacked over her marital status, her childlessness, her wardrobe and the contents of her fruit bowl. One member of parliament had declared her unfit to lead because she was deliberately barren. The opposition leader had been photographed beside placards reading “Ditch the witch.” SBS documents the sequence that led to her rising in the chamber and telling him that if he wanted to see misogyny in modern Australia he did not need a parliamentary motion, he needed a mirror. The National Film and Sound Archive holds the recording, and Guardian readers later voted it the most unforgettable moment in the history of Australian television.
Note the word on the placard. Witch. Five hundred years after the fires went out, the same syllable, aimed at a head of government, in a parliamentary democracy, in living memory.
The Body That Carries What Was Never Digested
Pain that is not fully faced does not evaporate. It accumulates. Tolle calls the residue the pain body: a semi-autonomous energy field of unmetabolised emotion that lives in almost every human being and periodically wakes up hungry.
Every woman alive carries a share of a collective female pain body, built from millennia of accumulated suffering that was never allowed to complete. The violence. The childbirth endured without support or consent. The generational transmission of being told that one’s own nature is inferior, dangerous, demonic. This field often activates in the days before menstruation, arriving as a flood of negativity that seems disproportionate to anything currently happening, because it is not currently happening. It is old, and it is looking for a reason.
The pain body is not a wound to be treated. It is closer to a guest that has been living in the house so long it believes it holds the lease.
When the Suppression Became Internal
Here is the part that is hardest to sit with. The ego eventually took most women too.
Once the structures were built, they no longer needed external enforcement. Women began to run them internally: the same mind-identification, the same defensiveness, the same competitive hunger, the same conviction that being enough is always one achievement away. A woman who defines herself entirely through motherhood, career or spousehood, in a way that forgets her own beingness, is playing precisely the game that was used against her ancestors.
The ego is genuinely indifferent to which form it wears. Macho patriarch or empowered seductress, corporate warrior or spiritual authority, it does not care, so long as it can maintain a fictitious self and the accompanying sense of insufficiency. What is lost in either case is the same thing. Real contact becomes impossible, because two mental images are relating to each other and no actual person is in the room.
The Last Trap Is the One That Feels Most Justified
Centuries of this produced a deep victim archetype in the collective female psyche, and it is entirely earned. The history is real. The harm was real. Nothing written above softens that.
And yet the victim identity is where the ego makes its final and cleverest offer. If a woman, or a nation, or a people, remains identified as the wronged one, the ego has simply been handed a new costume. Contracted, rigid, permanently unhappy, but an identity nonetheless, and one that comes with the added advantage of feeling righteous. The ego will take that trade every time.
Tolle’s formulation is that there is finally only one perpetrator of evil on this planet, and it is human unconsciousness. This is not absolution. It is precision. The men who lit the fires, printed the pamphlets and took the prizes were themselves possessed by the collective insanity they served. Seeing that clearly is what severs the link, because the story loses its power to organise the present.
What Comes Back
The old structures are visibly failing under the weight of their own dysfunction, and the sacred feminine is returning through the cracks. There is an irony in the timing. Because the ego was never as deeply rooted in women, many women are now moving into presence faster than the men around them, finding it easier to loosen their grip on the story and recognise themselves as the awareness in which the story appears.
The path forward is not a war against the male ego. Fighting unconsciousness only recruits you into it, and any movement organised primarily around opposition will eventually reproduce what it opposes. The restoration happens somewhere much less dramatic: in the individual nervous system, in the moment a woman notices the pain body rising and does not become it.
That is the whole shift. Not a victory but a dissolution. The inner realm transforms first, and the outer arrangement follows, which is what a new heaven and a new earth has always meant. What was hijacked was never a possession that could be permanently stolen. It was always the formless life essence underneath all of it, mislaid rather than lost, and available the moment anyone stops arguing long enough to feel it.
