What witchcraft is, and its history

Your goal in this lesson: to know the real history behind modern witchcraft, so you can start your practice on honest ground.

A word with a long shadow

Today “witch” can mean a person who practices modern craft by choice. For most of history it meant something else: a person accused of using harmful magic. Keep both meanings in mind, because they explain a lot about how witchcraft looks now.

Ancient magic

Historical Ritual is ancient. The cave paintings of Lascaux in France, often dated to roughly 17,000 to 22,000 years ago, may have had ritual purposes among other meanings, though nobody can be sure. Once writing appears, the evidence is much clearer. In Mesopotamia, clay tablets record the work of the āšipu, specialists who combined religion, magic and medicine and sometimes served kings. In Egypt, magic was heka, a divine force, and priests, amulets and healing papyri used it. Greeks consulted oracles; Norse sagas describe the völva, a seer with a staff. None of these people were called witches, and they were not one secret religion. They were ritual workers in their own worlds.

The witch trials

Historical In later medieval Europe, church teaching came to hold that power outside the church came from the Devil. That idea helped ground the witch trials, which grew from the fifteenth century to the eighteenth. The Malleus Maleficarum (“Hammer of Witches”), first printed in 1486 or 1487 and written mainly by Heinrich Kramer, gave magistrates a handbook and tied witchcraft to women in vicious terms.

Historians usually estimate around 40,000 to 60,000 executions in Europe, not the millions you may see online. Roughly 75 to 85 percent of those executed were women, often older, poor or alone. Scotland’s Witchcraft Act of 1563 made witchcraft a capital crime. In Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692 and 1693, nineteen people were hanged and Giles Corey was pressed to death. In England and New England the condemned were hanged, not burned. The story that midwives were the main victims is a modern myth.

Cunning folk and the long quiet

Historical The trials faded with the Enlightenment. England’s Witchcraft Act of 1735 punished pretending to use magic, as fraud, and was repealed only in 1951. Meanwhile cunning folk, wise women and men, kept finding lost things, healing and making charms, while avoiding the word “witch”. Under slavery in the American South, African practices blended with others into Hoodoo, and in the Caribbean traditions such as Vodou developed. These are living lineages with their own rules, not free samples.

The modern revival

Later tradition In 1921 the Egyptologist Margaret Murray argued in The Witch-Cult in Western Europe that the trials had targeted a surviving pagan religion. Historians have rejected that idea, but it inspired early modern witches.

Modern After the 1951 repeal, Gerald Gardner published Witchcraft Today (1954), presenting Wicca as an ancient religion that had survived in secret. How much he invented, rebuilt or received is still debated. Doreen Valiente reshaped its rituals, and Raymond Buckland took it to the United States in the 1960s. Later decades brought Alexandrian and Dianic Wicca, feminist and ecological craft and, today, many solitary and eclectic paths.

Witchcraft accusations still cost lives in parts of the world. In 2021 the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted resolution 47/8 against harmful practices linked to them. The freedom to practice openly is new and not universal.

Try this

Today’s exercise: in your notebook, write three things you believed about witch history before this lesson. Next to each, write “confirmed”, “corrected” or “still unsure”. Keep the page. You will look at it again at the end of the course.

Quick recap

• Ancient ritual workers were not “witches” and not one religion.
• The European trials killed around 40,000 to 60,000 people, most of them women.
• Cunning folk kept folk magic alive under other names.
• Wicca and most modern craft date from the twentieth century.

Keep going

Press “Mark as done” and continue with Intention, grounding and centering. For the full story, read a short, honest history of witchcraft.

Need an overview? See the whole course.

Sources

• Lauri Mukkala, The Novice’s Guide to Witchcraft, chapter 1, “The History of Witchcraft”.
• Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present (Yale University Press, 2017).
• Brian P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (London: Longman, 1987).
• Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford University Press, 1999).

Go deeper: The Novice's Guide to Witchcraft

Mark as done