The Seventeenth Century Is Back — Kings, “Witches,” and the Usual Heads Will Roll

Based on a Podcast with Katie Dean, PhD and host Philipp Kobald

The Past Isn’t Dead. It’s Simply Waiting for Us to Notice

History doesn’t knock. It slips in like a draft under the door — quiet, cold, and reminding you that you’ve forgotten something important again. That was the feeling running underneath this conversation with Katie Dean, PhD. Two people who genuinely enjoy speaking with each other — host and guest in an unusually effortless rhythm — diving into a century most of us barely remember from school, and discovering it sounds uncomfortably like our own.

Because when a society begins to wobble, the past isn’t a museum. It’s a warning.

When the World Breaks, Everyone Reaches for Something Sacred

The seventeenth century was a demolition zone disguised as a timeline. England watched its monarchy collapse, resurrect, collapse again, and stagger back to life once more. Religious factions multiplied. New technology — the printing press — was disrupting information flows with the elegance of a wrecking ball.

And in the middle of it all, ordinary people were trying to survive.

In that world, truth was fragile. Fear was currency. And superstition? That was the national language.

Katie brought the emotional weight of that reality to the table — not as abstract history, but as lived human experience. Because the past becomes real the moment you realize how easily we could have lived those same lives, made those same choices, fallen for those same traps.

Philipp framed it clearly: their world was constrained, not foolish.

A Quick Tour Through a Century That Didn’t Sit Still

Katie’s history lesson moves fast, but the arc is unmistakable. She walks us through the seventeenth century like a tour guide who knows the back alleys better than the official route. Elizabeth I dies in 1603, and the crown jumps to James VI of Scotland — now James I of England — the first sign that the old order is already shifting. His son, Charles I, tightens the religious screws and eventually loses his head for it, sending the country into its only king-less experiment: the Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell.

From there the pendulum keeps swinging. Charles II returns from exile to restore the monarchy, only for his brother James II to lose the crown in the Glorious Revolution. William III and Mary II step in — imported stability, politely wrapped in Protestant packaging. It is, in short, a century that changes rulers as often as convictions, and Katie’s quick tour makes clear how fragile the idea of certainty really was.

Control — the Oldest Religion

If there’s one theme that threaded through every minute of our conversation, it was control. Who has it. Who wants it. Who pretends they don’t want it while quietly building a system that guarantees it.

When monarchs flipped from Catholic to Protestant and back again, the entire population was expected to switch overnight. Your prayers changed not because you believed differently, but because your landlord did. Today, the method is subtler, but the muscle is the same.

Katie reminded us that fear was the primary political tool of the age. If you could scare a population into believing the wrong kind of worship might send them straight to hell, you didn’t need logic. You didn’t need books. You certainly didn’t need debate.

You just needed three words: the antichrist is coming.

Now replace that with any modern panic slogan, and the pattern becomes painfully obvious.

Where Reason Fails, Superstition Fills the Vacuum

People in the seventeenth century weren’t foolish. They were terrified. They were traumatized. Many lived through famine, plague, war, and daily loss of children. In a world without security, meaning becomes a survival instinct.

So they read signs into everything. A cracked floorboard, a black cat, a sick child. Nature was talking, spirits were negotiating, the neighbor might be casting spells. The cost of being wrong felt enormous.

Fast-forward to now: different superstitions, same neurological wiring.

The more unstable the world becomes, the more conspiracy replaces curiosity. The more fear rises, the louder the voices promising certainty. And certainty — especially cheap certainty — is always a trap.

When Women Rise, Systems Panic

This part of the discussion felt like holding history up to a mirror and finding our own reflection staring back.

During the chaos of the seventeenth century, women briefly gained space — running farms during war, healing communities, preaching in early spiritual movements. Then, as the new order formed, society pushed them back down using a classic fear campaign: female energy equals disorder.

Katie described how the era’s solution to chaos was not balance — it was suppression. Stamp out the unpredictable. Silence anything intuitive. Replace embodied wisdom with rigid hierarchy. Science became not just a method, but a fortress.

And then we wonder why our modern world feels lopsided.

The Age of Rebirth — Then and Now

Here’s where the conversation expanded from history lesson to something sharper.

We aren’t simply watching our systems shake — we’re watching our worldview crack. Just like the people of the seventeenth century, we’re standing at the hinge of eras. Institutions wobble. Economic certainty dissolves. New technology — AI — rearranges everything from identity to labor to purpose.

The question isn’t whether change is coming. It’s whether we’ll repeat the same reflex: reaching for control instead of consciousness.

Katie said it plainly: “If we’re going to survive this next transition, healing trauma matters more than ideology.”

Philipp added another truth: “Superstition replaces spirituality the moment fear enters the room.”

This is why history matters. Not as nostalgia. Not as trivia. But as a manual for avoiding the traps humans fall into every single time the ground shifts.

The Quiet Work That Actually Changes Things

The conversation closed on an unexpected note: softness.

Not as an escape, but as a discipline.

Healing the nervous system. Relearning connection. Finding a relationship with the world that doesn’t require force or fear. Allowing both masculine and feminine energy to exist without domination.

History shows what happens when that doesn’t occur.

Our era will show what happens when it finally does.

Guest Bio
Katie Dean, PhD, graduated with a PhD in History from Cambridge University and later developed a healing and self-reconnection system using sacred geometry and color. Link: https://www.findmyenergy.co.uk/

Watch the full episode on the @HolisticCircle YouTube channel.

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By Philipp Kobald in cooperation with AI
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