Witchcraft

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Witchcraft is the alleged practice of harmful or supernatural magic — a term that has carried, across its history, two almost opposite charges: an accusation levelled at others, and a self-description embraced by those who now use it of themselves. The same word names a fear and a faith, and most of the confusion around it follows from that split. To call someone a witch was, for most of the word’s life, to mark them for the gallows or the fire; to call oneself a witch, in the last lifetime, is to claim a craft. Almost nothing crosses between those two uses except the word.

The older sense: maleficium and the inner power

In the older sense, the witch was someone who worked harm by occult means — maleficium, the Latin word for the evil deed: blighting crops, sickening livestock, killing children, curdling milk, raising storms, striking a neighbor lame. The charge attaches not to a profession but to a person, and to the damage that follows them. A cow dies, a child sickens, a marriage goes barren, and the misfortune is read backward to a quarrel, a refused loaf, a muttered word at the door. Witchcraft, in this register, is the explanation of ordinary catastrophe by hidden malice — a way of making the random world answerable, of finding a face behind the blight.

Anthropologists, working from living societies rather than archives, drew from this material a distinction that has since organized the whole field. In his 1937 study of the Azande of the southern Sudan, E. E. Evans-Pritchard separated witchcraft from sorcery. The Zande witch harms through an inner, inherited power — a psychic substance carried in the body, capable of acting at a distance, sometimes without the witch’s knowledge or will; one can be a witch and not know it, and a post-mortem examination might settle the matter. The sorcerer, by contrast, harms deliberately, through the manipulation of spells, rites, and substances — a learned technique, performed on purpose. The line is not universal, and many cultures blur it, but the contrast it draws is sharp and durable: witchcraft as a condition of the person, sorcery as an act of the will. The figure of the harm-working witch is itself close to universal, recorded across societies with no contact between them — which is part of what has demanded explanation rather than supplied it.

Europe and the trials

Europe gave the idea its most lethal form. Across the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, in waves rather than a single event, tens of thousands of people — the great majority of them women — were tried for witchcraft, and a large share of those tried were executed, by burning in much of the Continent, by hanging in England and its colonies. The chronology was uneven: the trials clustered in the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, fell hardest on the patchwork of small jurisdictions in the German lands and the Alpine zone, and were comparatively rare where strong central courts restrained local panic. They were not a relic of the Middle Ages but a phenomenon of the early-modern centuries — of the same generations that produced the printing press, the Reformation, and the new states.

What made the European trials singular was not the fear of maleficium, which is old and widespread, but the theory that grew up around it. A learned demonology fused the village fear of the harm-worker with a wholly different charge: that the witch had entered a pact with the Devil, renounced baptism, taken his mark, and joined a vast conspiracy against Christendom. The pact converted the lone malefactor into a member of a sect. To this the demonologists added the witches’ sabbath — the nocturnal assembly where witches were said to fly, worship Satan, feast, and invert the Mass — which turned scattered accusations into evidence of an organized anti-church. The cumulative concept, assembled over the fifteenth century, made witchcraft both a crime against neighbors and a heresy against God, and heresy is what licensed the inquisitorial machinery: the crimen exceptum, the exceptional crime, in which the ordinary protections of procedure could be suspended and torture freely applied.

The theory was codified in treatises, the most notorious of which is the Malleus Maleficarum — the Hammer of Witches — written chiefly by the Dominican inquisitor Heinrich Kramer (Institoris) and first printed at Speyer in 1486. The book systematized the demonological case, argued at length that women were peculiarly susceptible to the Devil, and furnished judges with a procedure for detection, interrogation, and sentence. Its authority has sometimes been overstated — many jurists ignored or distrusted it, and it was one text among many — but it crystallized the fusion of maleficium, pact, and sabbath that the trials then ran on.

Confessions were extracted under torture, and torture shaped what they contained. A prisoner pressed to confess a pact, name accomplices, and describe the sabbath would, broken or terrified, supply the demanded material — which then implicated others, who were arrested and pressed in turn, so that a single accusation could metastasize into a chain. The documents the courts produced therefore record the demonologists’ theory far more than any practice of the accused. This is the central problem of the sources: almost everything that survives about what witches did was written by the people prosecuting them, in the vocabulary they had brought to the interrogation. Historians now treat the witch of the trials less as a real practitioner than as a construct — a figure assembled by accusers, inquisitors, and demonologists and projected onto neighbors, midwives, the poor, the widowed, the old, the quarrelsome, and above all onto women.

Where that construct came from has itself been reconstructed. Norman Cohn, in Europe’s Inner Demons (1975), showed that the lurid charges attached to the sabbath — secret nocturnal gatherings, the worship of a beast-form deity, infanticide and cannibal feasting, incestuous orgy — were not new in the fifteenth century but a stereotype reused across a thousand years: first levelled by pagans at the early Christians, then by Christians at heretical sects such as the Cathars and Waldensians (see Catharism and the wider machinery of heresy), then at the Knights Templar, before settling on the witch. Cohn also demonstrated that several documents earlier historians had relied on were forgeries, pulling the floor out from under accounts that took the sabbath as fact. Robin Briggs, in Witches and Neighbours (1996), turned from the demonologists to the villages, arguing that the trials were not simply imposed from above but generated below — in the ordinary frictions of peasant life, where envy, stinginess, and unneighborliness made a quarrelsome neighbor into a plausible witch long before any magistrate arrived. The two readings are complementary: an elite theory supplied the conspiracy, and local conflict supplied the names.

The persecutions were real; the conspiracy they punished was not. No coven flew to a sabbath, no sect worshipped the Devil under cover of night. What the courts described had, so far as the evidence shows, never taken place — and the charge of it sent many thousands to their deaths.

The pagan-survival thesis and its rejection

What the accused themselves actually believed is far harder to recover, since the record is so thoroughly the prosecutors’. One influential attempt to read through it was made in the early twentieth century by the Egyptologist Margaret Murray, who argued in The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) and The God of the Witches (1931) that the trials had documented a real, organized, pre-Christian fertility religion — a surviving pagan cult that worshipped a horned god whom Christian persecutors mistook for the Devil, met in covens of thirteen, and held seasonal festivals. The thesis carried weight for decades, in part because Murray wrote the Encyclopædia Britannica article on witchcraft for its fourteenth edition (1929), which presented her view as established fact and stayed in print until 1969.

It does not survive examination. Specialist historians of the trials dismantled it — Elliot Rose in A Razor for a Goat (1962), Keith Thomas in Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), and Cohn in 1975 — and the verdict is now settled. The core of the critique is methodological: Murray treated confessions extracted under torture as ethnographic reportage, quoted trial records selectively, and silently edited out the impossible elements — the flight, the shape-shifting, the Devil in the flesh — so that the residue would read like the minutes of real meetings. There was no continuous pagan religion beneath the trials. The cult she described was assembled, not found.

The modern reclaiming

The modern reclaiming runs the term the other way. From the mid-twentieth century, the movement that became Wicca — associated above all with the retired colonial official Gerald Gardner, who published Witchcraft Today in 1954 — took up “witchcraft” as a positive name for a nature-centered, ritual, often goddess-honoring practice. Its public emergence in Britain followed the 1951 repeal of the old Witchcraft Act, which had been used to prosecute spirit mediums as fraudsters; the repeal removed the legal instrument under which a self-professed witch could be charged, opening the space in which Gardner could write openly.

Gardner presented his craft as the survival of exactly the cult Murray had described — the Old Religion, carried in secret through the centuries of persecution. That lineage is not borne out. The historian Ronald Hutton, whose The Triumph of the Moon (1999) is the standard study, traced Wicca’s ingredients to identifiable modern sources: the literary and folkloric Goddess revival, including Charles Leland’s Aradia (1899) and Robert Graves’s The White Goddess; the ceremonial magic of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and of Aleister Crowley; Freemasonry, which supplied the initiatory structure; and Murray’s now-discredited pseudo-history, which supplied the claimed pedigree. The whole was assembled by Gardner and substantially refined by Doreen Valiente, who rewrote much of the liturgy and is properly regarded as its co-author. Hutton’s conclusion — taken up as the scholarly consensus — is that Wicca is not an inheritance from antiquity but a genuinely modern religion, the rare case of a faith born in twentieth-century Britain.

That finding is held alongside, not against, the religion’s seriousness. Practitioners understand their craft as a real working relationship with nature and with power, and they do not, as a rule, recognize themselves in the demonologists’ portrait of devil-worship: the witch they affirm and the witch the trials burned are not the same figure. From its Gardnerian and Alexandrian beginnings the practice has loosened into many forms — feminist and Goddess-centered currents, eclectic and solitary practice decoupled from coven lineage, and a broader modern paganism of which contemporary witchcraft is one wing. Some forms are devotional and supernatural; some are frankly naturalistic, treating ritual as self-cultivation rather than commerce with spirits. The shape it takes now is plural, and still moving.

The classical and folkloric inheritance

Both the fear and the reclaiming drew on older imagery. The Greco-Roman world supplied a gallery of dangerous magical women — the child-stealing lamia, the witches of Thessaly who drew down the moon, the literary figures of Circe and Medea — and a goddess, Hecate, who presided over the crossroads, the night, and the underworld and who became, in later imagination, the patroness of necromancy and of the magical arts generally. From this inheritance the demonologists drew the threatening female magician they then read into the village, and the modern revival drew, more affirmatively, the figures of a powerful goddess and a sacred night. The amulet worn against the evil eye, the curse-tablet buried at a grave, the cunning-folk’s charm to find a thief or cure a fever — the broad folk practice of protective and harm-doing magic ran continuously beneath both the learned theory and its modern reversal, mostly untouched by either.

Sources and scholarship

The modern study of European witchcraft turns on a small number of decisive works. Norman Cohn’s Europe’s Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired by the Great Witch-Hunt (Sussex University Press / Heinemann, 1975) established that the sabbath stereotype was a recycled libel and that key sources were forgeries; it remains foundational (Open Library record). Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbours: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (Viking, 1996), relocated the trials in the social world of the village and is the standard social history (H-Net review). Ronald Hutton’s The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford University Press, 1999; revised 2019) is the authoritative account of Wicca’s twentieth-century construction. The anthropological witchcraft/sorcery distinction descends from E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937) (Wikipedia overview, with bibliography).

The primary texts fall into two bodies. On the persecuting side stands the Malleus Maleficarum (Speyer, 1486), the demonological handbook, available in several modern editions and translations. On the modern-revival side, two public-domain works that fed the construction of Wicca are Charles Godfrey Leland’s Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches (David Nutt, 1899) — whose underlying manuscript is itself of disputed authenticity — and Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (Clarendon Press, 1921), which must be read as the discredited source-thesis rather than as reliable history. The core Wiccan texts of Gardner and Valiente remain in copyright, and their initiatory material is, by the tradition’s own discipline, oath-bound.

Between the two senses lies the term’s whole difficulty. What the trials punished and what modern practitioners affirm share little beyond the name they both go by — and that shared name keeps the old fear and the new identity uneasily in the same room.

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