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.

In the older sense, the witch was someone believed to work harm by occult means — maleficium, the Latin word for the evil deed: blighting crops, sickening livestock, killing children, raising storms. Anthropologists, working from living societies, have long distinguished this from sorcery, the deliberate manipulation of spells and substances; the witch, in that analysis, is held to harm through an inner power or disposition, sometimes without even willing it. The figure is close to universal, recorded across cultures with no contact between them — which is itself part of what scholarship has tried to explain.

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 and executed for witchcraft. The machinery rested on a learned demonology that fused the older fear of maleficium with a newer charge: that witches had made a pact with the Devil and gathered at the sabbath to worship him. Treatises codified the theory, among them the Malleus Maleficarum of 1486, and confessions were extracted under torture. Historians now treat the witch of the trials less as a real practitioner than as a construct — assembled by accusers, inquisitors, and demonologists, and projected onto neighbours, midwives, the poor, the old, the quarrelsome. The persecutions were real; the conspiracy they punished was not.

What the accused actually believed or did is far harder to reach, since almost all that survives was written by their prosecutors. The older notion that the trials suppressed a surviving pagan religion — an organised fertility cult hidden beneath Christianity — was argued in the early twentieth century and has since been rejected by most historians as unsupported by the evidence.

The modern reclaiming runs the term the other way. From the mid-twentieth century, the movement that became Wicca — associated above all with Gerald Gardner — took up “witchcraft” as a positive name for a nature-centred, ritual, often goddess-honouring practice. Its founders claimed descent from the very cult historians had dismissed; that lineage is not borne out, and the tradition is now generally understood as a modern construction drawing on older materials. Practitioners hold their craft to be a real working relationship with nature and with power; they do not, as a rule, recognise themselves in the demonologists’ portrait. Wider contemporary witchcraft has since loosened from Wicca into many forms, some solitary, some without belief in the supernatural at all.

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.

→ Related: Divination · Middle Ages · Lamia