I have seen this Geranium Lake Properties comic identified many times as Mother Jackal in her guise as the Rescuer of Witches, so the first thing I want to say is, this mask is NOT THAT. This panel happened in the middle of “The Numerous and Numinous Satisfactions of a Belletrist”, an adventure where everybody in that tale (except Jack Loki and Alice Aroumbeyski) mistook Iffareesha* for Mother Jackal. Plus there is no divine vocation like “Rescuer of Witches” in the lore of the Inultaru. There are tales of Mother Jackal, Father Antelope and Iffareesha providing sanctuary to people accused of witchcraft during the Satanic panics that often plagued Christianity, but these people were not witches. Most of them were women persecuted because they were vulnerable females, and all of them were innocent of the apocalyptic conspiracies trumped-up by craven witch hunters and inquisitors.
I can see why people who have read these tales might reach for the pithy title “Rescuer of Witches” (rather than “Rescuer of People (Mostly Women) Falsely and Maliciously Accused of Witchcraft”) but that convenient term obscures this most important truth: there were no witches.
Well, except that there were witches (and still are), but no witch hunter or inquisitor ever encountered any of them. “Verum dominae magicae se liberant,” was what Iffareesha said on that issue. “The truth is that witches free themselves.” The Jackalopian goddess of magic affirmed that an actual practicing witch had all the talents needed to evade witch hunters, and the power to rescue herself. Most of Iffareesha’s followers were (and still are) wise women, scholars of the magic arts, all kinds of “cunning folk”, and demalions of the natural and occult worlds. In the stories about Iffareesha, she sometimes came to the aid of her devotees against a persecutor, but that persecutor was almost always a powerful magic user or a divine force, and was usually an enemy of Iffareesha. She did not concern herself with Christian authorities who inflicted bloody pogroms on their own congregations. There were no real witches in the infamous witch trials, there were just Christians murdering Christians.
“Non nostri chaos circulus,” said Iffareesha, using the majestic plural. “Not our circle of chaos.”
(Please avoid the common gaffe of using the erroneous “Non nostri chaos circulus, non nostri simiae.” I can’t find the source of this error, but Iffareesha never said “Not our circus, not our monkeys.”)
*She is Iffarresh-wut-Kyyatsee when she is performing her role as the demalion of the new moon and seed-planting.
Vraicking 