Witchcraft

From the Old English wiccian (meaning to practice sorcery), it is sorcery as practiced by witch or witches.

Sorcery denotes the pursuit of a certain end through magic, which might be harnessed through such varied means as simple herbalism, the use of waxen images or more elaborate spell-making. Common to all folklore traditions and to virtually all eras, sorcery relies upon the intervention of good and bad spirits but does not necessarily involve any deeper specifically anti Christian purpose. A sorcerer might call on the assistance of demons, but in so doing there is no automatic presumption that he or she thereby denies the supremacy of God.

In the modern world witchcraft is a form of nature religion, also called 'wicca', that emphasizes the healing arts. The term is also applied to various kinds of magic practiced in Asian, African, and Latin American communities.

Witchcraft, sorcery and simple spell casting are as ancient as humankind: there is some evidence from cave markings that Paleolithic man indulged in it. It is also universal. African tribesmen chanted much the same invocations as the witches in Shakespeare's Macbeth.

We may not fully realize the extent to which ancient magical ideas have colored our culture. Many of the customs of Western people who may not be in the least interested in magic derive from ancient beliefs. They also survive in children's rhymes. The mother who croons "Sing a song of sixpence" to her child has no idea that she is recalling the legend of the Celtic spirits of the Underworld to whom Rhiannon sent 24 blackbirds to announce the death of Man. Many of us, when children, were told how to cure warts perhaps by rubbing them with a piece of meat and then burying it: as the meat rotted, the warts would disappear. These are small examples of ritual folklore, or domestic magic. Real witchcraft, seen as far more attractive or repulsive, is something different.

What little is known about the history of witchcraft in Europe comes from hostile sources. In traditional European society witchcraft was associated with the worship of Satan, a doctrine formulated in the late Middle Ages. Just how many of the beliefs about witches were based on reality and how many on delusion will never be known. The punishment of supposed witches by the death penalty did not become common until the fifteenth century. The first major witch-hunt occurred in Switzerland in 1427, and the first important book on the subject, the Malleus Maleficarum appeared in Germany in 1486. The persecution of witches reached its height between 1580 and 1660, when witch trials became almost universal throughout western Europe. Geographically, the center of witch-burning lay in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, but few areas were left untouched by it. No one knows the total number of victims. In southwestern Germany alone, however, more than 3,000 witches were executed between 1560 and 1680. Not all witch trials ended in deaths. In England, where torture was prohibited, only about 20 percent of accused witches were executed (by hanging); in Scotland, where torture was used, nearly half of all those put on trial were burned at the stake, and almost three times as many witches (1,350) were killed as in England. Some places had fewer trials than others. In the Dutch republic, no witches were executed after 1600, and none were tried after 1610. In Spain and Italy accusations of witchcraft were handled by the Inquisition, and although torture was legal, only a dozen witches were burned out of 5,000 put on trial. Ireland seems to have escaped witch trials altogether.

Many witch trials were provoked, not by hysterical authorities or fanatical clergy, but by village quarrels among neighbors. About 80% of all accused witches were women. Traditional theology assumed that women were weaker than men and more likely to succumb to the Devil. It may in fact be true that, having few legal rights, they were more inclined to settle quarrels by resorting to magic rather than law. All these aspects of witchcraft crossed over to the Americas with European colonists. In the Spanish and French territories cases of witchcraft were under the jurisdiction of church courts, and no one suffered death on this charge. In the English colonies about 40 people were executed for witchcraft between 1650 and 1710, half of them in the famous Salem Witch Trials of 1692. Witch trials declined in most parts of Europe after 1680; in England the death penalty for witchcraft was abolished in 1736. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries one last wave of witch persecution afflicted Poland and other areas of eastern Europe, but that ended by about 1740. The last legal execution of a witch occurred in Switzerland in 1782. Beginning in the 1920s, witchcraft was revived in Europe and the United States by groups that considered it a survival of pre-Christian religious practices. Some forms of modern witchcraft follow the traditions of medieval herbalists and lay healers; the supreme law of the 'Craft' is called the Wiccan Rede; 'An' If harm none, do what ye will'. Witches do not worship the Devil and blood sacrifice is forbidden.