Liber XXXV · Witchcraft & Wicca · Chapter IV: History of Witchcraft
History of Witchcraft: From Antiquity to the Modern Revival
The history of witchcraft from Mesopotamian anti-witch rites and the Canon Episcopi to the Malleus Maleficarum, the great witch-hunts, Salem and modern Wicca.
The history of witchcraft is mainly the history of a fear: the belief that some people harm their neighbours by secret supernatural means. That fear is attested in the earliest written laws of Mesopotamia, but in late medieval Europe it was fused with Christian demonology to create the figure of the Devil-worshipping witch, leading to the great witch-hunts of roughly 1450–1750. Only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did the witch become a romantic rebel and then the self-chosen identity of a new religion.
Witchcraft in the Ancient Near East, Greece and Rome§
The earliest evidence for witchcraft belief comes from Mesopotamia. The Code of Hammurabi (c. 1750 BCE) opens with a provision for a person accused of sorcery to undergo a river ordeal. Assyrian and Babylonian scribes copied the Maqlû ("Burning"), a lengthy ceremony in which a priest burned figurines of unknown witches while reciting incantations to reverse their spells. Here the witch, kaššāptu in Akkadian, is a hidden enemy, and the remedy is ritual.
Greek and Roman culture shared the fear. The Twelve Tables, Rome's early law code, prohibited enchanting away a neighbour's crops, and later Roman law punished poisoning and magic together. Literature supplied memorable witches: Medea and Circe in Greek myth, the Thessalian witches who drew down the moon, and the terrifying necromancer Erichtho of Lucan's Pharsalia. Thousands of lead curse tablets show ordinary people commissioning binding spells against rivals in love, lawsuits and chariot races, practices discussed in Maleficium, Curses and Protective Magic.
Early Medieval Scepticism and the Canon Episcopi§
As Christianity spread, theologians reinterpreted pagan gods as demons and magic as a dangerous dealing with them. Augustine of Hippo (354–430) argued that all magic depended on pacts, explicit or tacit, with demons, an idea that would later prove decisive.
Yet early medieval authorities were often sceptical about the more spectacular claims of witch belief. The Canon Episcopi, recorded by Regino of Prüm around 906 and later included in canon law collections, condemned as a delusion the belief of certain women that they rode out at night on beasts with the goddess Diana. In the eleventh century Burchard of Worms's penitential questioned penitents about similar beliefs. Laws of Charlemagne even punished those who killed alleged witches. Harmful magic remained a crime, and individual sorcerers were prosecuted, but there was no idea of a witch sect.
The Invention of the Diabolical Witch, c. 1400–1500§
Between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries several developments converged. Scholastic theology developed a detailed demonology; the Church fought heretical movements accused of secret nocturnal rites; and learned necromancers were tried for invoking demons, as described in Necromancy in the Middle Ages. In 1324 the Irish noblewoman Alice Kyteler was accused of sorcery and demonic sacrifice in an early and unusual case.
In the 1420s and 1430s, in the Valais, Savoy and the region around Lake Geneva, trials began to describe a new kind of criminal: witches who renounced Christ, paid homage to the Devil, flew to gatherings, killed infants and worked harm in league with demons. Treatises such as the Errores Gazariorum, Johannes Nider's Formicarius and Claude Tholosan's writings set out this "cumulative concept". In 1484 Pope Innocent VIII issued the bull Summis desiderantes affectibus supporting the inquisitor Heinrich Kramer, whose Malleus Maleficarum ("Hammer of Witches", 1486) became the most notorious witch-hunting manual. Its co-authorship by Jacob Sprenger is now doubted by many historians. The Malleus was reprinted many times, though its practical influence varied by region.
The Great Witch-Hunts, c. 1560–1650§
After a lull in the early sixteenth century, prosecutions surged from about 1560, during a period of religious war, economic hardship and the climatic downturn often called the Little Ice Age. Historians estimate around 90,000 prosecutions and some 40,000–60,000 executions in Europe and its colonies across the whole period.
The persecutions were very uneven. The worst occurred in parts of the Holy Roman Empire, where small prince-bishoprics such as Würzburg and Bamberg conducted mass trials in the late 1620s and early 1630s, and in Switzerland, Lorraine and Scotland. In Scotland the North Berwick trials of 1590–1591 involved King James VI, whose Daemonologie appeared in 1597. England, where torture was not normally permitted, saw fewer executions, though the activities of the self-styled Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins in 1645–1647 led to around a hundred deaths. In New England the Salem trials of 1692 resulted in nineteen hangings and one man pressed to death.
Most of the accused were women, often older and poor, though men made up a substantial minority and a majority in a few regions. Accusations typically grew out of quarrels between neighbours, illnesses and deaths, and were magnified when courts used torture to extract the names of accomplices. For case studies see European Witch Trials.
Sceptics, Decline and the Last Trials§
Sceptical voices were present from the start. The physician Johann Weyer argued in De praestigiis daemonum (1563) that many supposed witches were melancholic women deluded by the Devil rather than guilty of crimes. Reginald Scot's The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) attacked witch belief as fraud and superstition; the catalogue preserves its magical appendices at Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft. In Spain the inquisitor Alonso de Salazar Frías, after investigating the Basque witch panic of 1609–1614, concluded that he had found no real witches, and the Spanish Inquisition subsequently restrained prosecutions.
From the mid-seventeenth century, courts across Europe demanded stricter proof, central governments curbed local panics, and educated opinion increasingly doubted demonic witchcraft. The last executions in England probably took place in the 1680s; in Scotland Janet Horne was executed in 1727; Anna Göldi, beheaded in Glarus in 1782, is often described as the last person executed for witchcraft in Europe. Britain's Witchcraft Act of 1735 replaced the crime of witchcraft with that of pretending to exercise magical powers.
From Folklore to Revival: Witchcraft in the Modern Age§
Belief in witches did not vanish with the trials. Villagers continued to suspect neighbours, consult cunning folk and use protective charms into the twentieth century, as Owen Davies has documented. Meanwhile Romantic writers reimagined the witch. Jules Michelet's La Sorcière (1862) portrayed her as a priestess of nature and rebel against church and lord; Charles Godfrey Leland's Aradia (1899) claimed to record an Italian witch gospel; and Margaret Murray's The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) argued that the accused had been members of a surviving fertility religion.
Murray's theory, though rejected by historians, inspired the modern religion of witchcraft. After the repeal of the Witchcraft Act in 1951, Gerald Gardner published Witchcraft Today (1954), and Wicca grew into a worldwide movement; see Wicca and Gerald Gardner and the overview What Is Witchcraft?.
How Historians Explain the Witch-Hunts§
No single cause explains the witch-hunts, and historians have proposed many contributing factors:
- Social tensions in village communities, as argued by Alan Macfarlane and Keith Thomas for England, where refused charity could lead to guilt and accusation;
- Legal procedure, especially inquisitorial trial and torture, which multiplied accusations (Brian Levack);
- Religious reform and confessional rivalry, which heightened concern with the Devil and moral discipline (Stuart Clark);
- Gender, in which fears about female power, motherhood and sexuality shaped the stereotype (Lyndal Roper, Diane Purkiss);
- Climate and crisis, with crop failures and epidemics raising demands for scapegoats.
Older ideas, such as the claim that millions of women were killed or that the victims were mostly midwives or pagan priestesses, are not supported by the evidence. The history of the devil figure behind the trials is explored in The History of Satan and the Devil.
Frequently asked questions§
When did witch-hunting begin?§
Isolated sorcery trials occurred throughout the Middle Ages, but witch-hunting in the sense of prosecuting a supposed Devil-worshipping sect began in the western Alps in the 1420s and 1430s. It reached its height between about 1560 and 1650.
How many people were executed as witches?§
Most historians estimate between 40,000 and 60,000 executions in Europe and its colonies, from roughly 90,000 prosecutions. Earlier claims of millions of victims are not supported by the surviving records.
What was the Malleus Maleficarum?§
It was a treatise on identifying and prosecuting witches, written by the Dominican inquisitor Heinrich Kramer and printed in 1486. It argued that witchcraft was real, demonic and especially associated with women.
When was the last witch execution in Europe?§
Anna Göldi, executed in Glarus, Switzerland, in 1782, is usually described as the last person legally executed for witchcraft in Europe, although the charge was officially framed as poisoning.
Sources and further reading§
- The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe — Brian P. Levack, 1987
- Witches and Neighbours: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft — Robin Briggs, 1996
- Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe — Stuart Clark, 1997
- Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England — Alan Macfarlane, 1970
- Religion and the Decline of Magic — Keith Thomas, 1971
- Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany — Lyndal Roper, 2004
- The Witch: A History of Fear — Ronald Hutton, 2017
- Witchcraft in Europe, 400–1700: A Documentary History — Alan Charles Kors & Edward Peters, 1972
- Malleus Maleficarum — Heinrich Kramer, 1486