Witchcraft

Witchcraft is the practice of alleged magical powers, with specific elements, beliefs, and attitudes varying considerably between different cultures and societies and even between social groups within the same society. It is often connected to religious belief; the roots of the most widespread Western conception of witchcraft are based on biblical opposition to the practice. However, it should be noted that Western culture and Christianity are not the only sources of witchcraft beliefs, and many cultures have independent traditions stretching back to prehistoric magical beliefs. The concept survives in the modern world in a wide range of beliefs, from traditional superstitious apprehension to open practice as a formalized religion.

Witchcraft in the United States is historically associated with the Salem witch trials that took place in Massachusetts in 1692 and 1693. Those trials, in which young girls accused various townspeople of being witches, illustrate the dangers of mass hysteria and the rush to scapegoat or condemn innocent individuals based on spurious, uncorroborated eyewitness accounts. Before then, the idea of witchcraft was used by the ruling religious forces in Europe to control those in a community who did not conform to societal expectations of piety through witch hunts and witch trials. Witchcraft was commonly understood to mean that a person was involved in supernatural behavior brought on by consorting with evil forces or the devil himself.

By the late twentieth century, witchcraft was most often an entertaining subject for books, films, and television shows. The Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling, the first volume of which was published in 1997, about a group of young British witches and wizards, raised interest in all things magical to a new level, but most children were savvy enough to understand that supernatural beings and their magical spells were make-believe. While some modern people accept the validity of folk medicine, most do not believe, as did earlier generations, that practitioners of such medicine are witches or shamans. On the other hand, the practice of Wicca, a duotheistic religion based on a belief in a Moon Goddess and a Horned God in which witchcraft plays a key role, has become increasingly common since the mid-twentieth century, as have other neopagan groups. In the early twenty-first century in some African countries, women and children are still accused of being witches and live as outcasts, in refugee camps, imprisoned, or sometimes executed, as a 2008 Reuters report by Wangui Kanina stated.

Brief History

The Western conception of witchcraft is dominated by Christian belief, most commonly in the form of anti-witchcraft attitudes referenced in the Bible. For example, the Book of Deuteronomy includes a condemnation of witchcraft, sorcery, and other occult practices, while the Book of Exodus instructs that sorceresses should be killed. Witch hunts were common in Europe before the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. The Malleus Maleficarum (literally, “The Hammer of the Witches”) was a textbook of witchcraft written by the German Catholic Heinrich Kramer in 1486, which promoted the idea that witches were mostly women and provided a how-to for discovering them and bringing them to justice. The popularity of the book launched many witch hunts in France and Switzerland in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and in Germany beginning in the 1560s.

The earliest existing account of witchcraft by an English author is believed to be Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584). Scot did not accept the existence of witches and debunked their magic as nothing more than sleight-of-hand. He argued that ignorance and mental illness allowed myths about witchcraft to survive.

England criminalized the practice of witchcraft in 1641, contributing to accusations of witchcraft in the American colonies. Historical records indicate that the first formal accusations were made in the early seventeenth century, but most cases never came to trial. The first witch was hanged in Salem Village, Massachusetts, in 1688. The Salem witch trials began in 1692 with accusations from several young girls. Before it was over, 200 people were charged with witchcraft and imprisoned under horrible conditions and twenty-four people were put to death.

British historian and archaeologist Owen Davies, who has become an internationally acclaimed expert on witchcraft, devoted much of his life to perusing historical records of witch hunts. He contends that rather than ending with Salem, witch trials continued into the twentieth century often occurring during harsh economic periods and exacerbated by ignorance, racial and ethnic prejudice, and distrust of folk medicine and herbalists.

Beginning in the mid-1800s and continuing into the early twentieth century, spiritualism received considerable attention in Europe and the United States. Though not the equivalent of witchcraft per se, spiritualism is the belief that the deceased can communicate with the living. Its practice in the form of seances became especially popular in the wake of the devastation wrought by World War I, when millions of families lost loved ones at a very young age. During this time the number of mediums claiming to be able to communicate with the spirits of the dead rose significantly. In 1882, the Society of Psychical Research was established in London for the purpose of studying paranormal phenomena from a scholarly perspective.

In 1921 British anthropologist Margaret Murray suggested in The Witch-Cult in Modern Europe: A Study in Anthropology that modern witchcraft was rooted in European paganism. In the mid-twentieth century, Gerald B. Gardner (1884-1964), a British civil servant and an amateur archaeologist, used Murray’s findings to develop the belief system that formed the basis of contemporary Wicca. Practitioners focus on nature worship and goddess worship. Aleister Crowley, an eccentric Englishman, was a famous occultists and practitioner of ceremonial magic for decades in the early twentieth century, who claimed to have communed with ancient Egyptian gods. These beliefs coalesced into the religious philosophy of Thelema, whose practitioners engage in “magick” to make reality conform to one’s will. Crowley’s copious writings, including The Book of the Law (1904), and legacy continue to influence many authors and musicians.

Witchcraft Today

The 1960s saw a resurgence of interest in the occult in both the United States and Europe as a result of the astrology craze that accompanied the relaxation of societal and religious norms. That interest was heightened by the publication of books such as Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1967) in which a young woman is unwittingly impregnated by Satan, and William Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971) about the demonic possession of a young girl. Both books were turned into successful films. A light-hearted depiction of witchcraft was the basis for Bewitched, a situation comedy that starred Elizabeth Montgomery as Samantha Stephens, a witch who marries an unsuspecting mortal and lives in suburban New York. In the 1970s, interest in the occult crossed all social classes, age groups, and educational levels, and sometimes involved the use of satanic altars, voodoo dolls, crystal balls, and Tarot cards. Occult bookshops did a booming business and many traditional bookshops added occult sections.

The interest in witches as entertainment continued throughout the twentieth century. In 1984 John Updike portrayed a dark side of witchcraft in his novel The Witches of Eastwick about three women who make a pact with Satan in order to gain supernatural powers. The 1990s television show Sabrina the Teenage Witch, starring Melissa Joan Hart, depicted a young girl learning to control her witchy powers and continued the theme of the good witch presented in Bewitched. In Charmed, which became the longest-running television show in history featuring all female leads, three sister witches learn that they are the most powerful witches of all time. In all these depictions, the witches use witchcraft to summon up great power, a characteristic that has historically been denied to females.

Feminist scholars have devoted considerable attention to the historical aspects of witchcraft, noting that victims of witch hunts have almost always been female. Marion Gibson, a Renaissance and magical literatures professor at England’s Exeter University, suggests that representations of witches in US culture have often been the result of battles between liberals and conservatives. She notes that conservatives have accused Wiccans of being anti-family and promoting lesbianism. During the 2000 presidential campaign, Pat Robertson, a staunch conservative, labeled Democratic candidate and former First Lady Hillary Clinton “the Blair Witch” in reference to the 1999 horror film, The Blair Witch Project.

Twenty-first century, Salem, Massachusetts, has capitalized on its infamous history by acknowledging its role in the witch trials and honoring the 24 innocent victims who were executed there by erecting a memorial to them in 1992. Some 300,000 visitors come to Salem each October 31 to celebrate Halloween with fireworks and other events.

In 2000, 134,000 respondents in the American Religious Identification Survey classified themselves as Wiccans; by 2008 the number had risen to 342,000, signaling a gradual increase in recognition and acceptance of Wiccans. Modern-day witches such as Sybil Leek of Florida and Aidan Kelly of San Francisco have freely discussed their beliefs with members of the media. Contemporary Wiccans are likely to be white, middle-class, highly educated, supporters of environmentalism, and politically liberal. Two-thirds are female. The United States military and the Internal Revenue Service have both officially recognized Wicca as a religion, and some courts have granted it First Amendment protection.

While the contemporary focus on witchcraft in the West tends to center around entertainment or Wicca, this is not true for parts of the developing world. In April 2013, a crowd in the Delta State of Nigeria burned down a house, causing the deaths of three suspected witches. Subsequently, a 16-year-old girl was beaten to death, and 11 others died under mysterious circumstances. In June 2013, an elderly woman and her daughter-in-law were beaten to death in Jharkand, India, by a group of 19 women who believed they had used witchcraft to cause the deaths of several children. In Papua New Guinea, suspected witches have been decapitated and cannibalized since a 1971 law was passed that recognizes accusations of sorcery as a valid defense in murder trials. In 2015, the Islamic State (ISIS) militant group beheaded women in Syria on accusations of witchcraft.

Bibliography

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Kanina, Wangui. “Mob Burns to Death 11 Kenyan ‘Witches.’” Reuters.com. Reuters. 21 May 2008. Web. 17 July 2013.

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Shaheen, Kareem. "Isis Militants Behead Two Syrian Women for Witchcraft." Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 30 June 2015. Web. 1 Jul. 2015.