What witchcraft is, and its history

Before you light a single candle, it helps to know where the word “witch” comes from and what it has meant to real people. So much of what circulates online about witch history is wrong: millions burned, secret goddess religions surviving for thousands of years, midwives as the main victims. Starting your practice on honest ground matters for two reasons. It honors the people who actually suffered, and it frees you from needing myths to justify what you do today. In this lesson you will learn the real outline, from ancient ritual workers to the modern revival.

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 against neighbors. Keep both meanings in mind, because they explain a lot about how witchcraft looks now, including why some practitioners still keep their craft private.

Where the word comes from

Historical The English word “witch” comes from Old English, which had two forms: wicca for a man and wicce for a woman. Both appear in Anglo-Saxon laws and penitentials, church handbooks that set penances for sins, from around the tenth and eleventh centuries, usually in lists of forbidden practices.

The origin of the word is uncertain. Some scholars link it to words meaning “to bend” or “to turn”, others to words for “wise” or “to wake”, but none of these is proven. So when you read that “witch means wise one”, treat it as a popular modern explanation, not a settled fact.

Other languages have their own words with different histories. Finnish noita originally referred to a kind of folk healer and seer, closer to a shaman-like figure than to the devil-worshiping witch of the trials. German Hexe and French sorcière have their own roots. That variety is a reminder that “witch” never meant just one thing.

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 becomes 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, used by priests, in amulets and in healing papyri. Greeks consulted oracles, and Norse sagas describe the völva, a seer with a staff. None of these people were called witches, and they did not belong to 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.

How many died? 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, most of the condemned were hanged, nineteen people in all, and Giles Corey was pressed to death under stones. In England and New England the condemned were hanged, not burned. And the popular story that midwives were the main victims is a modern myth.

How the trials began and ended

Historical For a long time the medieval Church was skeptical about night-flying witches. A text known as the Canon Episcopi, recorded by Regino of Prüm around 906, said that women who believed they rode out at night with a goddess were deceived by dreams. Attitudes hardened in the fifteenth century. The Malleus Maleficarum (“Hammer of Witches”), written by the Dominican Heinrich Kramer and printed in 1486 or 1487, argued that witchcraft was real, mostly female and deserved death. It was influential, but it was never an official Church law, and many authorities of the time criticized it.

Historical Most executions happened between about 1560 and 1650, especially in the German-speaking lands. Historians today estimate around 40,000 to 60,000 executions across Europe over three centuries. The figure of “nine million” that circulated in the twentieth century has no basis. In England, witches were hanged, not burned.

In Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, nineteen people were hanged, one man was pressed to death and several more died in jail. In Finland’s Åland islands, a cluster of trials in the 1660s and 1670s ended with seven women executed. England’s last witchcraft law was replaced in 1735 by an act that punished people for pretending to have magical powers, and that act was itself replaced in 1951.

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 carefully 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 and communities, not free samples for anyone to take.

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 the first modern witches.

Modern After the 1951 repeal, Gerald Gardner published Witchcraft Today in 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.

Modern Two questions come up again and again. Do you need a coven or an initiation? No. Initiation matters only if you want to join a particular initiatory tradition, such as Gardnerian Wicca, which admits people through its own covens. Most witches today practice alone. And is witchcraft a religion? Wicca is a religion, but witchcraft itself is a practice, and people practice it within many faiths or none.

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 it is not universal.

Questions beginners ask

Do I have to be born a witch, or have witch ancestors? No. Witchcraft today is a practice you can learn. The idea of “hereditary witches” with an unbroken line from the past is very hard to verify, and most modern traditions do not require it.

Is witchcraft a religion? It can be. Wicca, founded in England in the mid-twentieth century and publicized by Gerald Gardner’s Witchcraft Today (1954), is a religion. Many other witches practice without any deities at all. You can choose.

Is witchcraft the same as Satanism? No. Most modern witches do not believe in the Christian devil. The link between witches and Satan was made by trial-era demonologists.

Do I need to join a coven? No. Many people practice alone, often called solitary practice. Covens can be lovely, but they are optional.

Is it legal? In most countries, yes. Practicing a religion or a private hobby is protected in many places. Be careful only with laws on fire, plants and fraud, which apply to everyone.

Myths to drop: Nine million witches were not burned. Most people executed were not healers or midwives in particular; they were usually ordinary, often poor, neighbors. And the trials were not only a Catholic thing: Protestant regions also executed many people.

An example: checking a claim

Imagine you see a post that says, “Nine million women were burned as witches, and they were all healers keeping the old religion alive.” With what you now know, you can take it apart calmly. The number is far too high: scholarly estimates are around 40,000 to 60,000. Many victims were hanged, not burned. Most were poor and powerless rather than healers, and the “old religion” idea comes from Margaret Murray’s 1921 theory, which historians have rejected. You do not have to argue with anyone. You simply know, and you can grieve the real people without the inflated story.

Try this

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.

Journal prompts: What did I imagine a witch was before this lesson? Which part of the history surprised me most? What do I want the word “witch” to mean in my own life?

Recap

For most of history, a witch was someone accused of harmful magic, while ritual specialists such as the āšipu or the völva were never called witches. The European trials ran from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century and killed around 40,000 to 60,000 people, mostly women. Cunning folk kept quiet traditions alive, and living lineages such as Hoodoo and Vodou have their own communities. Modern witchcraft grew from Murray’s rejected theory and Gerald Gardner’s 1954 Witchcraft Today into today’s many paths.

What next

Press “Mark as done” and continue with Intention, grounding and centering. For the full story, read a short, honest history of witchcraft, and if you want to see how artists pictured witches, try witches in art.

Further reading: Brian P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (Routledge, 4th edition 2016). Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning-folk in English History (Hambledon Continuum, 2007).

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