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    The History Of Witchcraft: Paganism, Spells, Wicca and more
    The History Of Witchcraft: Paganism, Spells, Wicca and more
    The History Of Witchcraft: Paganism, Spells, Wicca and more
    Ebook111 pages1 hour

    The History Of Witchcraft: Paganism, Spells, Wicca and more

    By Lois Martin

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    About this ebook

    Witchcraft has recently been undergoing a huge popular revival, but does modern pagan witchcraft really bear any resemblance to its historical antecedents?
    The witch in history was a very different creature from her modern counterpart, and this book sets out to explore the historical background to the European witchcraft phenomenon. It examines in detail the growth of the ideological, cultural and legal concepts that eventually led to the carnage of the Witch Craze in the 16th and 17th centuries, which, it is estimated, may have claimed the lives of around 40,000 people.
    For both Medieval and Reformation scholars alike the Devil and all his works were a very real threat. Their conviction that witches were the servants of Satan led to the formation of perhaps one of the greatest conspiracy theories of all time: a belief that witches were working in league with the Devil in a diabolical plot against all Christendom. Witches were transformed from poor deluded old women who rode out at night with the pagan goddess Diana into devil-worshipping heretics who became the focus of a centuries-long, Europe-wide campaign determined to seek out and destroy this evil wherever it was to be found, regardless of whether any of its victims were actually guilty or not.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPocket Essentials
    Release dateSep 22, 2015
    ISBN9781843447962
    The History Of Witchcraft: Paganism, Spells, Wicca and more
    Author

    Lois Martin

    Lois Martin lives in Somerset, England, and hsa spent many years studying the history of European witchcraft, folklore and superstition.

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      Book preview

      The History Of Witchcraft - Lois Martin

      The History of Witchcraft

      Witchcraft has recently been undergoing a huge popular revival, but does modern pagan witchcraft really bear any resemblance to its historical antecedents?

      The witch in history was a very different creature from her modern counterpart, and this book sets out to explore the historical background to the European witchcraft phenomenon. It examines in detail the growth of the ideological, cultural and legal concepts that eventually led to the carnage of the Witch Craze in the 16th and 17th centuries, which, it is estimated, may have claimed the lives of around 40,000 people.

      For both Medieval and Reformation scholars alike the Devil and all his works were a very real threat. Their conviction that witches were the servants of Satan led to the formation of perhaps one of the greatest conspiracy theories of all time: a belief that witches were working in league with the Devil in a diabolical plot against all Christendom. Witches were transformed from poor deluded old women who rode out at night with the pagan goddess Diana into devil-worshipping heretics who became the focus of a centuries-long, Europe-wide campaign determined to seek out and destroy this evil wherever it was to be found, regardless of whether any of its victims were actually guilty or not.

      About the Author

      Lois Martin lives in Somerset, England, and has spent many years studying the history of European witchcraft, folklore and superstition.

      .

      The History of Witchcraft

      LOIS MARTIN

      POCKET ESSENTIALS

      For Dad

      Contents

      Introduction

      1: A Brief Guide to the Devil and All His Works

      2: The Pact

      3: The Sabbat

      4: Night Flight

      5: Legal Remedies

      6: Witchcraft in Britain and the Colonies

      7: The Search for Real Witches

      Further Reading

      Introduction

      Harry Potter is in the ascendant and Wicca is one of the fastest-growing religions in the world today; in the twenty-first century witches and witchcraft still have us under a timeless magical spell. Harry Potter’s phenomenal success owes much to author JK Rowling’s masterful ability to bring to life some powerful archetypal figures. The witch, the wizard, the magician; we all intuitively know who they are and what they can do. Transformers, shape-shifters, healers, soothsayers, challengers, destroyers; every culture has its witches and wizards and in every culture they are both admired and feared. Young Harry Potter and his school friends neatly sum up the Western fairytale vision of the witch and the wizard. They fly on broomsticks, wear pointy hats, cast spells with magic wands, brew up potions in cauldrons, refer to dusty grimoires of magical instruction, and keep toads and owls as helpful familiars. To board the Hogwarts Express is to leave reality far behind and to enter a world of fairytale dreamscapes and collective imagining, in which good and evil become a question of black and white and no one stops to ask how witches and wizards came to possess their awesome supernatural abilities.

      Back in the real world, however, it is just such questions of good and evil, of natural and supernatural, which have long been at the core of our perceptions of witchcraft, and have shaped the role of witches and witchcraft in our society, often with deadly consequences. This Pocket Essential Guide looks at the relationship between the witch and society in European history. It is time-bound, geography-bound, and, most importantly, reality-bound. It does not deal with fairytale witchcraft, modern pagan witchcraft or witchcraft in non-European cultures. That said, to avoid misunderstanding and confusion, we should perhaps stop for a moment and define exactly what we mean by historical witchcraft and, in particular, how it differs from the modern pagan religion of Wicca. There have been many misconceptions amongst modern pagan witches about the origins of their faith and its relationship to the witchcraft of history. Recently, the scholar Ronald Hutton, in his book The Triumph of the Moon, has undertaken the first professional historical analysis of the birth of what he calls ‘the only religion England has ever given the world’, and Wicca has finally been given a firm historical foundation on which to rest, one based on sound academic principles and not on half-truths and romantic myth.

      Perhaps the easiest way to approach the confusion and discrepancies that exist between modern pagan witchcraft and historical witchcraft is to look at the subject in terms of the two classical systems of thought that underpin each type of witchcraft. Whilst the magical element of Wicca is ultimately a child (or at least a great-, great-, great-, great-grandchild) of the Neo-Platonic Renaissance, historical witchcraft beliefs had their foundations in medieval Aristotelian thought. The Aristotelian scholars of the Middle Ages believed that magic could only be performed with the aid of demons, hence the accusation that all witchcraft was the work of the Devil. The Renaissance thinkers, however, postulated that magic was a natural science and that absolutely no demons were necessary in order for humans to relate magically to their environment. Whilst Neo-Platonism posited a natural explanation for magic, Aristotelianism posited a supernatural explanation.

      The Neo-Platonic system of thought became the dominant one amongst occultists who, since the Renaissance, have largely viewed the practice of magic in Neo-Platonic terms as an entirely natural phenomenon. In modern Wicca this Neo-Platonic occult philosophy of Natural Magic has found a bedfellow in the pantheistic pagan spirituality born out of the eighteenth-century Romantic movement. Wicca has given structure to a religious impulse that animates and imbues the whole of the natural world with a vital life force that moves in cycles of both generation and destruction and permeates and connects every living being. Gods, goddesses, faeries and spirits are viewed either as personifications of this holistic life force or as non-material entities arising from nature. There is no particular concept of good and evil, and man-made evils are generally seen as the result of alienation from nature and the life force that sustains it.

      This witchcraft is a whole world (and system of thought) away from the witchcraft that began to take shape under the dominant Aristotelian worldview of the Christian Middle Ages and eventually settled into its classic stereotypical form towards the end of the fifteenth century. It is this view of witchcraft with which we will concern ourselves throughout the rest of this book. In this view, the witch was believed to make a pact with the Devil, whom she worshipped at nocturnal gatherings known as the Sabbat (or Sabbath), which usually took place in some wild and remote area or cave. She flew to the Sabbat with her fellow witches, usually on a broomstick, and there they paid homage to the Devil, whom they worshipped. They invoked demons, cooked up gruesome feasts consisting largely of the flesh of unbaptised babies, and then extinguished the lights and copulated indiscriminately with whomever was closest to hand.The Devil himself, or one of his lesser demons, presided over these Sabbats, and he usually appeared in the form of a man described as being black or dressed in black. At other times he appeared in the form of a goat, a dog, a cat, a toad, or some other animal. The Devil baptised his witches with a special identifying mark, known as the Devil’s Mark, and they served him by committing various acts of maleficia, malicious and harmful sorcery, which usually took the form of bewitching their neighbours’ cattle or children, blasting crops, and causing illness and death in their local communities. The witches gained their magical abilities from the Devil and were often aided in their destructive work by demons, who frequently took the form of familiars, or magical pets.

      Whilst the ideological foundations for this witchcraft lie in the Middle Ages, it was not a medieval invention. It occurs both before and after the medieval era. Belief in witchcraft can be traced back into antiquity and the widespread persecution of witches popularly known as the Witch Craze did not get under way in earnest until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Most of us are familiar with the so-called ‘Burning Times’, in which those accused of witchcraft were tortured and burnt at the stake. The seemingly epidemic proportions of these executions has led to the term ‘craze’ being applied to these outbreaks of witch-hunting, which appear to the modern observer to have been the result of some form of mass hysteria. To a large extent, the Witch

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