Vampires & Werewolves & Others [information]

Witchcraft

Witchcraft, in historical, anthropological, religious, and mythological contexts, is the alleged use of supernatural or magical powers. A witch (from Old  English wicca masculine, wiccefeminine) is a practitioner of witchcraft. Historically, it was widely believed in early modernChristian Europe that witches were in league with the Devil and used their powers to harm people and property. Particularly, since the mid-20th century, "bad" and "good" witchcraft are sometimes distinguished, the latter often involving healing. The concept of witchcraft as harmful is normally treated as a cultural ideology, a means of explaining human misfortune by blaming it either on a supernatural entity or a known person in the community.

Beliefs in witchcraft, and resulting witch-hunts, are both found in many cultures worldwide, today mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa (e.g., in the witch smellers in Bantu culture), and historically notably in Early Modern Europe of the 14th to 18th century, where witchcraft came to be seen as a vast diabolical conspiracy against Christianity, and accusations of witchcraft led to large-scale witch-hunts, especially in Germanic Europe.

The "witch-cult hypothesis", a controversial theory that European witchcraft was a suppressed pagan religion, was popular in the 19th and 20th centuries. Since the mid-20th century,Witchcraft has become the self-designation of a branch of neopaganism, especially in theWicca tradition following Gerald Gardner, who claimed a religious tradition of Witchcraft with pre-Christian roots.

Definitions of witchcraft

In anthropological terminology, a "witch" differs from a sorcerer in that they do not use physical tools or actions to curse; their maleficium is perceived as extending from some intangible inner quality, and the person may be unaware that they are a "witch", or may have been convinced of their own evil nature by the suggestion of others. This definition was pioneered in a study of central African magical beliefs by E. E. Evans-Pritchard, who cautioned that it might not correspond with normal English usage.

Historians of European witchcraft have found the anthropological definition difficult to apply to European and British witchcraft, where "witches" could equally use (or be accused of using) physical techniques, and some really had attempted to cause harm by thought alone.

As in anthropology, European witchcraft is seen by historians as an ideology for explaining misfortune; however, this ideology manifested in diverse ways. Reasons for accusations of witchcraft fall into four general categories:

A person was caught in the act of positive or negative sorcery

A well-meaning sorcerer or healer lost their clients' or the authorities' trust

A person did nothing more than gain the enmity of their neighbours

A person was reputed to be a witch and surrounded with an aura of witch-beliefs

Éva Pócs in turn identifies three varieties of witch in popular belief:

The "neighbourhood witch" or "social witch": a witch who curses a neighbour following some conflict.

The "magical" or "sorcerer" witch: either a professional healer, sorcerer, seer or midwife, or a person who has through magic increased her fortune to the perceived detriment of a neighbouring household; due to neighbourly or community rivalries and the ambiguity between positive and negative magic, such individuals can become labelled as witches.

The "supernatural" or "night" witch: portrayed in court narratives as a demon appearing in visions and dreams.

"Neighbourhood witches" are the product of neighbourhood tensions, and are found only in self-sufficient serf village communities where the inhabitants largely rely on each other. Such accusations follow the breaking of some social norm, such as the failure to return a borrowed item, and any person part of the normal social exchange could potentially fall under suspicion. Claims of "sorcerer" witches and "supernatural" witches could arise out of social tensions, but not exclusively; the supernatural witch in particular often had nothing to do with communal conflict, but expressed tensions between the human and supernatural worlds; and in Eastern and Southeastern Europe such supernatural witches became an ideology explaining calamities that befell entire communities.