
It was based in magic–not unlike Christianity. Its work-things were animal parts and fluids, botanical herbs and mushrooms, minerals, symbols and words–particularly invocations chanted in ritual ceremonies and spells cast over crops, people and property alike.
It came from all over: The Greeks had their witchcraft, as did the Gauls, and the Germanic and Nordic tribes.
The modern European concept of a witch, and of witchcraft, however, has been shaped by the perspectives of the Catholic and Protestant churches which sought to identify and prosecute them. While some of the elements are traces of older, pagan beliefs, magical practices, and simple fairy tales, some are purely paranoid invention.
In contemporary popular culture, witchcraft is associated with a cackling wicked old witch in a black pointy hat and dress, bent-over a stew of bats heads bubbling in a big, black iron cauldron over a fire. She is aided by a spirit familiar who connects to the spirit world.1
She controls the weather, withers crops, manipulates and deceives men. She casts fortunes, foretells the future, and talks to the dead. She works black magic, casts spells, and flies through the air on a broomstick. She can prepare potions to make a man fall in love, or to kill him. She is a priestess of infertility, blight, and poison.
History of the Devil, by Paul Carus, 1900, at sacred-texts.com. Accessed June 2010
A Satanic side of our stereotype arose from the pens of various second millennium Christian witchcraft “experts” who wrote manuals to assist in prosecutions (see Malleus Maleficarum):
Witches are united in their hatred and fear of anything holy. To gain her powers the witch has signed a pact with the Devil, and she communes with her coven performing unnatural sex acts in secret nocturnal Sabbaths. Satan appears and there are sacrifices of the innocent and pure.
The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century [1967] 3: The European Witch-craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, by Hugh Trevor-Roper, 2001, at Online Library of Liberty. Accessed June 6 2010
But witches could be uncovered in various ways (they said). There might be a peculiar mark on their bodies that was the Devil’s mark. If one were to drive a pin into their bodies one might discover a tell-tale insensitive spot. A witch thrown into a pool might float where an innocent person would drown.

Once in print, the images called up in the tremulous mind could never be extinguished again, and the terror took hold all the more firmly. These imagined details were subsequently extracted from suspected witches during interrogations (often including torture) which pressed the suspects to confess to doing whatever the experts accused them of doing.
Although there have been suggestions that witchcraft is the remnant of an ancient witch cult, the evidence is scanty (as one might expect after hundreds of years of persecution), and the original early modern witch cult proponents were given to invention and speculation, and have been discredited. There is no reliable evidence of an ancient witch cult.
The witchcraft trials of the middle ages portrayed witchcraft’s magic as Satanic–where Catholic priests performed the sacred magic of the Holy Spirit, the so-called witches practiced a lower, cruder grade of magic derived from a sordid association with God’s mongrel angel, Satan. According to the Church, witchcraft was decidedly anti-Christian, to the point of being a dark mirror image Bizarro World of Christianity.
“It may be said that the Church was always interested in another heresy: dualism. The Manichees, like the Zoroastrians before them, decomposed good and evil, and postulated a God of Light forever in conflict with a God of Darkness. The Church could not allow that any pre-Christian religion had been correct even when it had itself begun to fall into the same error. It sought to distinguish itself by the claim that, whereas in Manichaeism the outcome of the conflict was uncertain, in Christianity the devil only operated by permission of God, so that the outcome was sure. It then proceeded to make this claim ridiculous by persecuting heretics with rack and stake, saying that this violence was made necessary because it might have brought the whole world to ruin. Once the Church adopted its desperate plan of encouraging decomposition, persecution of Manichaeism became inevitable, because it made the whole Christian position ludicrous. But although Manichees decomposed, they did not project, and so were not led into the sexual and sadistic obsessions which entrapped the Church. They were not only more logical in doctrine, but psychologically were more mature than the unhappy neurotics who led the ranks of Christendom.”
Sex in History.. By Gordon Rattray Taylor, 1954, at ourcivilisation.com. Accessed June 2010
European witchcraft then, became a reflection of Christianity: evil versus good. The witches were good for the Church in that way–they helped everybody to focus on two polar opposites – good and evil. In witchcraft, good Christians finally had a suitable and tangible mortal enemy of God complete with back-story, and they could get on with God’s work on Earth.
Father God, Mother Goddess
Sex in History.. By Gordon Rattray Taylor, 1954, at ourcivilisation.com. Accessed June 2010
In Sex in History, Gordon Rattray Taylor portrays Christianity and specifically the Church, as “Patristic” or paternal (“God the Father”), and pagan spirituality as “Matristic”, or maternal (“Mother Earth”). In the logical inversion of Christianity, Mary, Christian Goddess of Fertility, becomes the witch: the witch is the antithesis of Mary: Goddess of Infamy, sodomite, and Satan’s whore.
“…Besides the arts used by Hopkins to extort confession from suspected persons, he had recourse to swimming them; which was done by tying their thumbs and great toes together, previously to throwing them into the water: if they sunk it was a proof of their innocence, but if they floated they were guilty. This method he pursued till some gentlemen, indignant at his barbarity, tied his own thumbs and toes, as he had been accustomed to tie those of other persons, and when put into the water, he himself swam, as many others had done before him. By this expedient the country was cleared of him.”
A tryal of witches, at the Assizes held at Bury St. Edmonds for the County of Suffolk, on the tenth day of March, 1664, before Sir Matthew Hale Kt., then Lord Chief Baron of His Majesties Court of Exchequer (1838). (It’s not known if this is true!)
The divisions become then, not good and evil, but father versus mother. Through this division, good and evil are further defined: man is good, woman is bad.
Ever since God gave dominion over the Earth to Man, you could tell He had it in for Mother Earth. It’s small wonder then that His priests zeroed in on witchcraft as a threat to Christianity–they were on the lookout for a swing in the direction of Matrism–God is a jealous and misogynistic God: He doesn’t like Mother Earth, and that’s why the kids don’t respect her.
Sources and some important works
- Sex in History, (1954). Gordon Rattray Taylor
- The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century: Religion, the Reformation and Social Change. Chapter: 3: The European Witch-craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Hugh Trevor-Roper. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001. Accessed from http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/719/77036 on 2010-06-09.
- Wikipedia article European_witchcraft. Accessed May 2010.
- Witchcraft Out of the Shadows: A Complete History
, (2004). Leo Ruickbie. Robert Hale, Pubs.
- Especially in Great Britain and France (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Familiar_spirit). [↩]