Witchcraft

• 1. Introduction

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  Witchcraft sits at the intersection of fear, misfortune, and human imagination. Across recorded history, in cultures separated by oceans and centuries, people have believed that some individuals could cause supernatural harm to their neighbors. The belief in malevolent magic traces back to ancient Mesopotamia and classical antiquity in Europe. It has prompted mass executions, shaped legal codes, and driven communities to turn on their own members.

  Why has this belief proven so durable? What does it tell us about how human beings make sense of illness, bad luck, and social conflict? And how did a concept rooted in fear of harmful magic also come to describe a modern spiritual movement of practitioners who call themselves witches by choice? These are the questions this documentary will examine.

  The word witchcraft itself is more than a thousand years old. Old English formed the compound wiccecræft from wicce, meaning witch, and cræft, meaning craft. The masculine form was wicca. What began as a word describing feared harm would, over centuries, take on meanings its original speakers could never have anticipated.

• 2. A Concept Across Cultures

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  Historian Ronald Hutton outlined five key characteristics that most cultures ascribe to witches: the use of magic to cause harm; directing that harm against their own community; acquiring power through inheritance or initiation; being seen as immoral and in communion with evil beings; and being vulnerable to counter-magic or physical punishment. These characteristics appear, with variations, from sub-Saharan Africa to Polynesia to pre-colonial North America.

  Anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard produced one of the most influential studies in this field with his Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande, published in 1937. His definitions of witchcraft and sorcery became a convention in anthropology for decades, though later researchers found them difficult to apply to European contexts, where witches were believed to use both physical techniques and thought alone to cause harm. The distinction he drew has largely been abandoned in current scholarship.

  Historians and anthropologists view the concept of witchcraft as one way humans have tried to explain strange misfortune. A 2022 study found that belief in witchcraft, defined as the use of malevolent magic, is still widespread in some parts of the world, ranging from 9% of people in some countries to 90% in others. That study found stronger belief correlates with lower economic development, weaker institutions, lower education, and high religiosity.

  Not all cultures have feared witchcraft equally. The Gaels of Ireland and the Scottish Highlands historically held a strong belief in fairy folk as the source of supernatural harm, and witch-hunting was rare in those regions compared to the rest of the British Isles.

• 3. The Mechanics of Harm

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  Curses, the most familiar weapon of the witch, could take many forms in popular belief. Inscribing runes or sigils on objects, burning or binding a wax or clay image called a poppet, or mixing herbs and animal parts into potions: these were the methods communities across Europe attributed to witches.

  In European belief, the most common harm attributed to witchcraft was illness or death, striking adults, children, and animals alike. Certain ailments were particularly associated with it, among them impotence in men, infertility in women, and lack of milk in cows. Edward Bever writes that witchcraft was especially suspected when a disease arrived unusually swiftly, lingered unusually long, could not be diagnosed clearly, or presented unusual symptoms.

  A widespread belief across Europe, Africa, South Asia, Polynesia, Melanesia, and North America is that witches use something taken from their target's body. Hair, nail clippings, clothing, and bodily waste were all considered dangerous in the wrong hands. Indigenous peoples in Africa and North America additionally believed witches could introduce cursed objects into a victim's body, such as small bones or ashes. James George Frazer described this kind of magic as imitative.

  Witches were also commonly believed to gather at night when ordinary people slept. Hutton writes that across most of the world, witches at these gatherings were thought to transgress social norms by engaging in cannibalism, incest, and open nudity. Rodney Needham identified the witch's association with animals as a defining feature of the archetype worldwide. In some regions, this took the form of shapeshifting; in others, the witch was believed to possess a familiar, an animal-form helper described in English traditions as a demon that had taken an animal shape.

• 4. Cunning Folk and Healers

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  Alan Macfarlane wrote that cunning folk went by many names: 'blessers', 'wizards', 'white witches', or 'good witches', depending on the community. Historian Owen Davies notes the term 'white witch' was rarely used before the 20th century, while Ronald Hutton prefers the general term 'service magicians'.

  These practitioners offered services that communities genuinely needed: breaking spells, healing sickness, finding stolen goods, and providing love magic. In Britain and parts of Europe, they occupied a recognized role. In the early years of the European witch hunts, cunning folk were widely tolerated by church, state, and general populace. Some hostile churchmen tried to brand them as witches, but the masses largely rejected this framing and continued to use their services.

  The English skeptic Reginald Scot wrote in The Discoverie of Witchcraft in 1584 that in common English usage, calling a woman a witch and calling her a wise woman had become nearly interchangeable.

  The line between healer and accused witch was not always firm. Emma Wilby argues that some English witches convicted of consorting with demons may have been cunning folk whose fairy familiars had been recast as demonic. Still, the evidence suggests most folk healers avoided prosecution. Hutton notes they seem to have made up a minority of those accused in any area studied. Davies confirms that relatively few cunning folk were prosecuted under secular statutes. The pattern varied sharply by region: Éva Pócs found that half the accused witches in Hungary appear to have been healers, while Kathleen Stokker found the vast majority of accused witches in Norway were folk healers.

• 5. Witch Trials in Europe

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  The Malleus Maleficarum, written in 1486 by German monk-inquisitors Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, became the handbook for secular courts across Europe. It outlined how to identify a witch, why women were more susceptible than men, how to conduct a trial, and how to carry out punishment. The book defined a witch as evil and typically female. It became the most sold book in Europe for more than a hundred years after the Christian Bible, and was used by both Catholics and Protestants for several centuries. The Inquisition itself, however, did not use it and even cautioned against relying on it.

  The scale of executions is difficult to absorb. Tens of thousands of people were executed across Europe during the early modern period of witch trials. Accusations typically came from neighbors and followed from social tensions. The accused were often women, the elderly, and those who did not conform to social norms, though in some regions the majority were men. In 17th-century Iceland, for instance, most of the accused were male.

  Scotland was exceptionally severe. During the 16th century through the mid-18th century, Scotland saw between 4,000 and 6,000 prosecutions, a rate far higher than the European average.

  Ancient Rome had been there centuries earlier. In 331 BCE, a deadly epidemic struck Rome, and at least 170 women were executed for causing it through veneficium, the Latin term for harm by magic or poison. In 184-180 BCE, another epidemic led to roughly 5,000 executions for the same offense. Historian Ronald Hutton writes that if the reports are accurate, Republican Rome hunted witches on a scale unknown anywhere else in the ancient world.

• 6. Witchcraft Today

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  In Saudi Arabia, practicing witchcraft and sorcery remains a crime punishable by death, and the country executed people for this offense as recently as 2014. Witch-hunts and the killing of suspected witches continue in parts of Africa and Asia.

  In Tanzania, a 2014 World Health Organization report estimated that around 500 older women are murdered each year following witchcraft accusations. In Papua New Guinea, it is estimated that between 50 and 150 people are killed annually as a result of such accusations. In 2008, reports indicated that more than fifty individuals were killed in just two Highlands provinces alone. Papua New Guinea repealed its Sorcery Act in 2013, which had previously allowed sorcery as a defense in murder cases, but enforcement of protective laws remains inconsistent.

  In Britain, witchcraft-related violence has also occurred within immigrant communities, including the widely reported murder of Victoria Climbié.

  Witchcraft accusations are closely linked to violence against women, the elderly, and children in many regions. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions has noted the difficulty of defining 'witches' and 'witchcraft' across cultures, given that the terms can encompass an array of traditional or faith healing practices.

  At the same time, a very different understanding of witchcraft has been growing since the 1930s, when occult neopagan groups began to emerge who reclaimed the term for a spiritual tradition they were building. The largest movement to emerge from this is Wicca, pioneered in Europe by Gerald Gardner, drawing inspiration from ceremonial magic, historical paganism, and Margaret Murray's now-discredited witch-cult hypothesis.