The Old Witch, Lady of the Potent is a female archetypal figure who guides, judges and consecrates the potentes (“the potent”), the women of power of the chronicles. Her only recorded words endorse Maleika’s castration of Graz’zt.
| Type | Entity |
| Houses of the Cycle | ⟳ House of the Rotating Office · ※ House of the Name |
| Spanish entry | Señora de potentes |
Nature
Her title is office and domain: lady not of lands or towers but of the potent. She speaks not the tongue of the powers but the language of the Plata, vulgar and exact: a witch with a local voice. To Maleika:
“Tuviste que agarrarlo bien del pingo.” (“You had to grab him good by the dick.“)
Her potent women
- Erzebeth, a founding figure, won her battle and so guards the Platform of Taurus: the sentinel’s office as the victor’s prize.
- Maleika, the shaman who castrated Graz’zt. Under the witch’s sanction the cut is not filial revenge but a tutored initiation: where Cronos and Uranus beget traumatized offspring, it founds a sustained female tradition, an inherited office, not a wound.
Erzebeth and Maleika share the same soul — the soul that also returns as Magda of Les Libertateurs and as Sisi of the Invisible Cities: this is the line the witch watches over.
Conjecture
If the line continues in Lucy Eva, daughter of Maleika and Lucifer, and the Taurus square awaits her (an open question), the Old Witch would be the fourth figure, the Crone above the three of the Triple Goddess: where other traditions see Hecate in old age, Baba Yaga in her walking hut, or the Cailleach of Gaelic winters.
Conflicting accounts
- Erzebeth is given both as present guardian of the Taurus square and as retired from it.