The first figure that we will analyze is that of the elusive "witch". What is the witch? This figure is considered a creature, almost always female, capable of using magical practices, almost always for unworthy purposes.By witch (once also lamia) we mean a woman (or a man) dedicated to the practice of magical arts and with or without supernatural powers, but it is also the name that the exponents of pagan culture give to themselves, this term does not it is therefore used in a negative sense but only to define a scholar of herbology, crystallomancy and witchcraft. According to various cultures, witches would have been devoted to the practice of magic, especially popular, and endowed with occult powers that would have derived from being in contact with the evil one or in any case with supernatural entities. These women (because it was mostly women) would use such powers almost exclusively to harm people and things and sometimes to oppose the whole of human society. For some centuries many people have been subjected to persecution by the Church when the characteristics attributed to witches were identified in them. In Western folklore the figure of the witch has usually had a negative meaning: it was believed that witches used their powers to harm the community, especially the agricultural one, and that they took part in periodic gatherings called sabbaths where they worshiped the Devil.
The figure of the witch has very ancient roots, which far precede Christianity. Already in the second millennium BC under the reign of Rameśśêśe III, deeds of inquiry are drawn up which show the forerunners of voodoo rites that recall the rites performed by witches. Hammurabi's code is also a source of information regarding the attitude that the regency holds towards magical practice, therefore plausibly widespread in society. Moving on to Assyria, in the library of Ashurbanipal (8th century BC), there are reports of exorcisms to counteract the action of witches and sorcerers.
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If you look at the classical era, one encounters a current presence in criminal decrees, in which black magic is punished with death. But the most flourishing field where the figure of the witch is painted is literature. Both Greek and Roman mythology is teeming with witches and wizards, described as half human and half animal beings, capable of taking on different aspects depending on their goal and interested in sucking the blood of children and seducing men, not exempt from it. terrible end. Examples are the empuse or lamiae of Greek mythology, the latter probably originating from the myth of the bird goddess embodied in the Burney relief (2nd millennium BC), which represents a female figure with wings and claws presumably connected to Lilith, a Mesopotamian deity present in the Judaism in the form of an owl. Or again we can remember the so-called witch of Endor, actually a necromancer, mentioned in the Bible , as well as the famous witches of Thessaly, in ancient Greece. In Italy, full of charm among many others, are the stories that are handed down among the inhabitants of the Aeolian islands of these women heirs of an ancient wisdom that naked at night, sprinkled with a portentous ointment gives them the power to fly to distant lands and from which they bring exotic fruits to their husbands not present in their homeland.
