A short, honest history of witchcraft

How to read the labels Historical what the old sources say. Later tradition what later writers added. Modern modern practice and my own notes.

Witchcraft has a long history, but not the one you often meet online. There is no single ancient witch religion that survived in secret, no nine million victims and no simple story of wise women against the world. The real history is stranger, sadder and, I think, more freeing. It means you can practice honestly in your own century, without having to pretend your craft is older than it is.

This page is a short tour. The labels in the text show what kind of claim each part is: Historical for what the records support, Later tradition for ideas that grew up later, and Modern for practice today.

Before the word “witch”

Historical People have used ritual, charms and divination for as long as we have records. Long before writing, people painted animals and hybrid figures on cave walls, as at Lascaux in France, often dated to roughly 17,000 to 22,000 years ago. Some researchers read certain images as ritual, but those readings are interpretations, not settled facts. Nobody called these painters witches.

Once writing appears, the evidence becomes much richer. Clay tablets from Assyria and Babylon record incantations and divination used by the āšipu, specialists who combined religious, magical and medical knowledge and often served royalty. In Egypt, heka was a divine force woven into religion and medicine alike, and amulets protected both the living and the dead. Greek communities consulted oracles such as Delphi, and Romans read omens in the flight of birds.

The point is not that these people were early witches. They lived in their own worlds, with their own words and roles. Ritual specialists were often respected, not feared. Treat them as themselves, not as proof of one continuous tradition.

Folk magic and cunning folk

Historical As Christianity spread through Europe, older local customs were absorbed, renamed or suppressed. Festivals became holy days. Sacred wells were rededicated to saints. Healing and ritual outside church authority could become suspect, though that shift was uneven from place to place and century to century.

Everyday magic did not disappear. In villages across Europe, people used charms for sick animals, protective objects over doorways and rituals to find lost things. In Britain, cunning folk (local wise women and men) offered healing, charms and help with theft, and they were careful not to call themselves witches. In their world, a witch was someone who harmed others by magic. The cunning person was the one you went to for help against her.

That is worth remembering. For most of European history, “witch” was not a name people chose. It was an accusation.

Women and magic

Historical Women often held real knowledge in early healing traditions. In many societies they knew which plants soothed, which harmed and which affected fertility, and as midwives they passed practical skill down the generations. Myths and religions around the world linked female figures with magic: Hecate with crossroads and the night, Brigid with healing and poetry, Kali with fierce transformation.

That knowledge mattered. It does not mean that the later trials were a plot to destroy women healers, or that women’s plant lore frightened a male medical profession into inventing the hunts. Be careful with stories in which the world was once balanced and then flipped overnight. The real changes were slower, messier and different in every region.

The witch trials

Historical By the later Middle Ages, church teaching commonly held that power came either from God or from the Devil, and magic outside church authority began to be framed as a pact with the Devil. That idea helped ground the witch trials, which rose in the fifteenth century and continued in parts of Europe and, later, colonial America until the eighteenth.

The Malleus Maleficarum (“Hammer of Witches”), first printed in 1486 or 1487, was a handbook for finding and prosecuting witches. Its main author was the Dominican Heinrich Kramer. It portrayed witches as mostly women and tied them to sexuality and evil in vicious terms. It went through many editions and gave magistrates language they could use for harsh interrogation.

Methods of “proof” said more about fear than about magic. Suspects were “swum” in water, pricked with needles to find supposedly numb spots, kept awake and tortured until they confessed and named others. Accusations spread through communities that way.

The persecution was uneven. Some German territories suffered terrible waves: in Ellwangen, around 430 people were executed between 1611 and 1618. Scotland made witchcraft a capital crime in 1563, and the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft records nearly four thousand people accused between 1563 and 1736. Other regions saw far fewer trials.

How many people died?

Historical Historians usually estimate that around 40,000 to 60,000 people were executed for witchcraft in Europe between about 1450 and 1750. Ronald Hutton and Brian Levack, two of the leading historians of the trials, both work with figures in this range, with real uncertainty because many records are lost.

The figure of “nine million witches” that still circulates online has no basis in the records. Hutton traces it to a 1784 calculation by the German writer Gottfried Christian Voigt, who took the trials of one region and multiplied them across Europe and across centuries. The American campaigner Matilda Joslyn Gage repeated it in 1893, and it later spread through twentieth-century witchcraft and feminist writing. Every death in the trials was a real person and a real injustice. The truth does not need to be inflated to matter.

Around three quarters or more of the executed were women, often older, poor, unmarried or widowed. Men were accused too, and in some regions, such as Iceland, most of the accused were men.

Salem

Historical The Salem trials of 1692 and 1693 in Massachusetts are the most famous case in American memory. Accusations spread from a group of girls whose behavior frightened their community. Nineteen people were hanged, Giles Corey was pressed to death for refusing to enter a plea, and many more were jailed. Among the first accused were Tituba, an enslaved woman in the Parris household, Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne. Historians point to a mix of causes: belief in a literal Devil, local land and status conflicts and the vulnerability of people on the margins. The ergot poisoning theory remains speculative.

Voices against the trials

Historical Not everyone believed. In 1563 the physician Johann Weyer argued in De praestigiis daemonum that many accused women were ill or confused, not in league with the Devil. In 1584 the English writer Reginald Scot published The Discoverie of Witchcraft, whose title page is shown at the top of this page, a long and brave argument that the accusations were cruel nonsense and that confessions under pressure proved nothing. King James VI of Scotland, who had taken part in the North Berwick trials of the early 1590s, answered with his own book, Daemonologie, in 1597. The argument between fear and doubt ran for more than a century before doubt won.

Myths to drop

• “Nine million died in the Burning Times.” The scholarly estimate is tens of thousands, around 40,000 to 60,000.
• “Midwives were the main targets.” Historians have found that midwives were not overrepresented among the accused.
• “Witches in England and Salem were burned.” In England and New England, convicted witches were hanged. Burning was used in parts of continental Europe, and in Scotland the condemned were often strangled first and then burned.
• “The trials targeted a surviving pagan religion.” This was Margaret Murray’s theory, and historians have rejected it.
• “Modern witchcraft is one prehistoric religion restored.” Today’s paths are modern creations and revivals, even when they honor older symbols and folk craft.

From the trials to Spiritualism

Later tradition The trials faded with the rise of Enlightenment skepticism. England’s Witchcraft Act of 1735 made it a crime to pretend to use witchcraft or tell fortunes, which turned the old crime into one of fraud. That Act was only repealed in 1951.

Folk magic carried on quietly as custom. In the American South, enslaved Africans preserved and adapted African practices, blending them with Native American knowledge and Christianity into traditions such as Hoodoo. In the Caribbean, Santería, Vodou and Obeah grew from their own histories. These are living traditions with their own rules, not raw material for outsiders.

In the nineteenth century, educated Europeans and Americans turned to Spiritualism, which became popular from the 1840s and gave many women mediums a public voice, and to ceremonial orders such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Neither used the word witchcraft for itself, but both shaped what came next.

Gerald Gardner and Wicca

Modern In 1921 the Egyptologist Margaret Murray argued in The Witch-Cult in Western Europe that the trials had targeted a surviving pre-Christian fertility religion. Historians have rejected the thesis, but it inspired the first modern witches.

Gerald Gardner made witchcraft public as a named religion. After the 1951 repeal, he published Witchcraft Today (1954) and The Meaning of Witchcraft (1959), describing a witch religion he said had survived in secret and into which he had been initiated in 1939. How much he invented, rebuilt or received is still debated. The Wicca he taught drew on ceremonial magic, folklore and writings associated with Aleister Crowley, whom he knew.

Doreen Valiente rewrote and refined much of the ritual and gave the Goddess a larger place. Raymond Buckland brought Gardnerian Wicca to the United States in the 1960s. Alex Sanders founded Alexandrian Wicca. Feminist witches such as Z. Budapest built Dianic Wicca, and Starhawk’s The Spiral Dance (1979) linked the craft to environmental and social activism in what became the Reclaiming tradition. Ronald Hutton’s The Triumph of the Moon (1999) is the best history of this whole story.

Witchcraft today

Modern Today the word covers many paths. Some people follow initiatory Wicca in a coven. Others call themselves traditional witches and work with folk magic, local land and old grimoires. Hedge witches, kitchen witches and green witches often practice alone, with herbs, home and garden at the center. Many people are simply eclectic, building a personal practice from several sources.

Eclectic practice is open and accessible, and it also raises honest questions about borrowing. Some traditions, such as Hoodoo, Santería and many Indigenous practices, are closed or lineage-based. They belong to their communities and are learned from teachers inside them. You can read more in ethical witchcraft.

The freedom to practice openly is new, and it is not universal. Accusations of witchcraft still lead to violence and death in parts of the world. In July 2021 the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted resolution 47/8 on harmful practices related to witchcraft accusations and ritual attacks. Many practitioners still keep their craft private for safety, which is a personal choice. If that is you, see practising privately.

Why this history matters for your practice

Carry this history as context, not as a demand that your practice look ancient. When you light a candle with intention, you join a long human habit of marking meaning with fire. When you learn about plants, you join people who watched carefully what herbs do. If you work with the moon or with named deities, you are part of a living practice in your own century.

How to check a history claim

When you meet a confident claim about witchcraft history online, a few questions help:

1. Who says so? A named historian with sources, or an unnamed “they”?
2. When does the evidence come from? A medieval record, or a nineteenth-century book about the Middle Ages?
3. Is the number sourced? Big round figures without a source are usually guesses.
4. Does it flatter us? Stories in which witches were always secret heroes are comforting, which is exactly why they deserve a second look.
5. What do the people of that tradition say? For living traditions, their own teachers come first.

You do not need to win every argument. You only need to keep your own practice honest.

If you would like to go further, the witchcraft guide is the place to start.