What Is Witchcraft? History, Beliefs and Modern Practice

Witchcraft is a word with several distinct meanings. Historically and in most of the world's cultures, it means the use of hidden, supernatural power to harm others, a belief that fuelled the European witch trials and still provokes accusations today. Since the mid-twentieth century it has also become the name of a modern religion and spiritual practice, most famously Wicca, whose followers call themselves witches and understand the craft as nature-centred spirituality and benevolent magic. Telling these meanings apart is the key to understanding the subject.

Defining Witchcraft: Harmful Magic, Heresy and Religion§

Scholars distinguish at least four overlapping senses of the word.

1. Harmful magic. In most societies that have the concept, a witch is a person, often a neighbour or relative, believed to bring illness, death, crop failure or bad luck through hidden power. The historian Ronald Hutton, in The Witch: A History of Fear (2017), identified recurring features: the witch harms by non-physical means, acts against people in their own community, works by learned or inherited power, is widely hated, and can be resisted, whether by counter-magic, by persuading or forcing the witch to lift the spell, or by punishment.
2. The diabolical witch. Late medieval Christian theologians transformed the village witch into a member of a secret sect who made a pact with the Devil, attended nocturnal sabbaths and worked harm on his behalf. This "cumulative concept" made mass trials possible.
3. Folk magic. Healers, charmers and diviners, the cunning folk of England or the benandanti of Friuli, practised beneficial magic. They are sometimes called witches in modern writing, but in their own time the label was usually an accusation, not a self-description.
4. Modern religious witchcraft. Since the 1950s, many people have chosen to call themselves witches as followers of Wicca or other forms of Pagan or traditional witchcraft, reclaiming the word in a positive sense.

The anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard, in Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (1937), drew an influential distinction between witchcraft as an inborn, often unconscious power and sorcery as deliberately performed magic. The distinction works well for some societies and poorly for others, but his study showed how witchcraft belief can serve as a coherent explanation of misfortune.

Witchcraft in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds§

Fear of harmful magic is ancient. Mesopotamian texts include the Maqlû ("Burning"), a long ritual to counter witches by burning their figurines, and the Code of Hammurabi (c. 1750 BCE) set a river ordeal for anyone accused of sorcery. Greek and Roman literature imagined powerful witches such as Medea, Circe and the necromancer Erichtho, while Roman law punished harmful incantations. Many lead curse tablets survive from the ancient Mediterranean; see Maleficium, Curses and Protective Magic.

Early medieval churchmen were often sceptical. The Canon Episcopi, a text recorded around 906 by Regino of Prüm, declared that women who believed they rode at night with the goddess Diana were deluded by the Devil, implying that such flights were illusions. Harmful magic was still punished, but the idea of an organised witch sect did not yet exist. Our History of Witchcraft traces how that changed.

The Early Modern Witch and the Trials§

In the fifteenth century, especially in the western Alps, a new stereotype took shape: witches as a heretical conspiracy who renounced Christ, worshipped the Devil and flew to sabbaths. Treatises such as Johannes Nider's Formicarius (1430s) and the notorious Malleus Maleficarum (1486) gave it learned authority, and printing helped spread it.

The trials peaked between about 1560 and 1650. Most took place in the Holy Roman Empire, Switzerland, France and Scotland; England, Spain and Italy had fewer executions, partly because of different legal procedures. Around three-quarters of those executed in most regions were women, though men were the majority in some places, such as Iceland. The trials declined in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as courts demanded better evidence and elites lost confidence in the reality of the crime. For the trials themselves see European Witch Trials.

Cunning Folk and Popular Magic§

Alongside fear of witches there was a vigorous trade in helpful magic. Cunning men and wise women in England, Hexenmeister in Germany and similar figures across Europe cured illnesses, protected livestock, identified thieves, found lost property and, crucially, diagnosed and countered witchcraft. Owen Davies's research suggests that thousands of cunning folk were active in England alone in the nineteenth century.

Their tools included charms written on paper, herbal remedies, astrology, bottle charms and books of magic, sometimes including the grimoires discussed elsewhere on this site. Although Protestant and Catholic reformers sometimes condemned them as no better than witches, communities generally saw them as allies against witchcraft. Several modern traditions, discussed in Traditional Witchcraft, take inspiration from this world.

The Modern Revival: Wicca and Pagan Witchcraft§

The modern religion of witchcraft grew from nineteenth- and twentieth-century ideas about a surviving pagan cult. The French historian Jules Michelet romanticised the witch as a rebel priestess in La Sorcière (1862); the American folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland published Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches (1899); and the Egyptologist Margaret Murray argued in The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) that the trials had persecuted a pre-Christian fertility religion. Historians have since rejected Murray's thesis, but it was immensely influential.

In 1951 England replaced the Witchcraft Act of 1735 with the Fraudulent Mediums Act. Three years later Gerald Gardner published Witchcraft Today (1954), presenting what he described as a surviving witch cult he had joined in the New Forest. The tradition he promoted, later called Wicca, was refined by his priestess Doreen Valiente and spread through initiatory covens and books; see Wicca and Gerald Gardner. Its rituals honour a Goddess and a Horned God, follow the eight festivals of the Wheel of the Year, and use a magic circle, tools and spellwork. Ronald Hutton's The Triumph of the Moon (1999) remains the standard history of these developments.

From the 1970s witchcraft diversified: feminist and Goddess traditions associated with Starhawk and Zsuzsanna Budapest, solitary eclectic practice popularised by Scott Cunningham, traditional and folkloric crafts, and, more recently, a large online community. Surveys suggest that tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of people in North America and Europe identify as Wiccans, witches or Pagans, though figures are uncertain.

Witchcraft Beliefs in the Wider World Today§

Belief in harmful witchcraft is not a thing of the past. In parts of sub-Saharan Africa, Papua New Guinea, India and elsewhere, people accused of witchcraft, often elderly women, children or people with disabilities, still suffer violence, exile and murder. Human rights organisations document these cases, and in 2021 the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted a resolution calling for the elimination of harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks.

This gives the history of the European trials continuing relevance, and it is also why many modern Pagan witches emphasise that their religion has nothing to do with the harmful witch of accusation. Understanding witchcraft means holding both histories in view: one of fear and persecution, the other of a twentieth-century religion that chose the persecuted figure as its emblem.

Frequently asked questions§

Is witchcraft a religion?§

In its modern form it can be. Wicca and many other contemporary witchcraft traditions are religions with deities, rituals and festivals. Historically, however, "witchcraft" was an accusation of harmful magic, not a religion that people chose.

Is witchcraft the same as Wicca?§

No. Wicca is one specific modern religion of witchcraft founded in England in the mid-twentieth century. Many witches today follow traditional, eclectic, folk or non-religious forms of witchcraft that are not Wiccan.

Were the people executed in the witch trials real witches?§

Almost certainly not in the sense alleged. Historians find no evidence of an organised witch sect. Those accused were mostly ordinary people caught up in local conflicts, fears and legal procedures that encouraged confessions under pressure or torture.

Do witches worship the Devil?§

Modern Wiccans and most Pagan witches do not believe in the Christian Devil and do not worship him. The idea of the witch as Devil-worshipper was created by late medieval theologians and spread by the witch trials.

Sources and further reading§

• The Witch: A History of Fear — Ronald Hutton, 2017
• The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft — Ronald Hutton, 1999
• The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe — Brian P. Levack, 1987
• Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande — E. E. Evans-Pritchard, 1937
• Cunning-Folk: Popular Magic in English History — Owen Davies, 2003
• Witchcraft: A Very Short Introduction — Malcolm Gaskill, 2010
• Witchcraft Today — Gerald Gardner, 1954
• Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe — Stuart Clark, 1997