Short answers, pulled from the story.
Belief in witchcraft stretches back to ancient Mesopotamia, where clay tablets from the Maqlû ritual outline anti-witchcraft practices dating to the first millennium BCE. The Code of Hammurabi from the 18th century BCE prescribed the death penalty for those found guilty of harmful magic-practice.
Ancient Roman history records at least 170 women executed during a deadly epidemic in 331 BCE for causing it through veneficium. Another epidemic between 184 and 180 BCE led to about 5,000 executions for the same crime.
The Malleus Maleficarum was written in 1486 by German monk-inquisitors Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger. It became the most sold book in Europe for over 100 years after the Christian Bible and defined a witch as evil and typically female.
In Tanzania, an estimated 500 older women are murdered each year following accusations of witchcraft according to a 2014 World Health Organization report. These killings represent modern witch-hunting that continues in parts of Africa and Asia.
Wicca was pioneered by Gerald Gardner in the 1940s as the biggest religious movement to emerge from occult neopagan groups. Today, some Wiccans and members of related traditions self-identify as witches and use the term for their magico-religious practices primarily in Western anglophone countries.