To understand how witchcraft became what it is today, we must look back into the past, first. The beginning of our story starts with the emergence of the Christian church within local pre-modern cultures in Europe (1100 - 1700 AD).

To be clear, this is not an anti-Christian rant. This article is a brief history of the witch hunts committed by the Christian church. These historical events led to the modern idea of witchcraft and the use of the word "witch" today.

Outlining the factual history of something is not a form of disrespect or an attack on a belief. We all have a responsibility to know the history and heritage of our beliefs and practices, and it’s our choice what to make of it. If history offends you, I encourage you to leave my site.

This also lays the fundamental groundwork for what I personally believe and practice, which influences my writing on the topics of folk witchcraft.

As an article, this will be an intentionally brief overview of a complex part of history. If you want more detailed accounts, I recommend the pioneering work of microhistorians such as Carlo Ginzburg, Claude Lecouteux, Eva Pocs, and Emma Wilby (amongst others).

Up until the 1970s, most historians of the witchcraft trials took the stance that the trials were a result of religious superstition, mental illness, and a public need for a scapegoat when bad events happened (such as plagues) which could not be explained at the time.

Yet, this was only part of the story.

Let's go back… Back to the beginning…

Let’s go back to the pre-modern era of 1100 to 1700 AD in Europe. The Christian church is starting to spread in Europe because of the falling Roman Empire's conquests.

During that time, most Europeans were not familiar with Christianity, its morals, beliefs, or theology. In fact, a definitive Christian theology was still a work in progress. The development of Christian theology was actually partially driven by the conflicts the church faced from common folk beliefs.

Imagine for a moment what this was like. Christianity has deeply influenced Western culture, shaping the modern Western world in ways we may not fully realize.

But, at the beginning of the pre-modern era, none of this was present. As a new religion, Christianity was championed by the highly privileged who were educated, literate, and financially resourced.

Common people, aka folk people, did not have any of these luxuries. Folk people of Europe were not formally educated, let alone literate. They were also not financially secure, nor did they have much power or agency. More importantly, they did not know much about Christianity.

Instead, they had their own stories and beliefs. These were orally transmitted through generations and embedded into their culture of craftsmanship and farming.

The folk and fairy stories were bursting with magical and spiritual symbolism. They also encoded important animistic beliefs about their local place.

Amongst these common people there were specialists who dealt with this spectrum of interconnected spiritual-mundane life. Someone became a specialist through visionary experiences while in spirit flight, a type of ecstatic meditative sleep.

During their spirit flight, they would visit Otherworlds and meet spirits. They would then form relationships with these spirits (become "familiar" with them). Spirit flight facilitated the spontaneous development of magical skills. Relationships with spirits trained and empowered the practitioner in their magic. Folk and fairy tales are encoded with these beliefs and practices.

The complex ceremonial sorcery and magic in books accessible to the privileged elite, such as the clergy of the church, had little in common with these practices. In fact, many scholars assert that the spiritual folk customs of pre-modern people are remnants of European shamanism (or something similar).

At this time the common (non-Christian) belief was that there were countless wide variety of spirits. The belief and propitiation of land spirits, fairy folk, and ancestors was common practice. The mundane and spiritual were intertwined and parallel rather than distinct and separate. The world was living and it was important to learn the best way to interact with it. Even the soul had many different parts and could separate and then return to the body.

The practitioners who acted as spiritual mediators for the community went by many names: benandanti, cunning people, fairy doctors, pellars, wise people, and more.

Why would someone not call themselves a witch?

The pre-Christian idea of the witch seems to be a supernatural entity, sometimes the unwell dead, trying to undermine society through spiritual means. This is evident not only in early witch trial records, but also in folk and fairy tales. Very rarely is a human person a witch--it is instead a supernatural spirit of some sort. So it wouldn’t be a name people voluntarily called themselves.

Many of the practitioners accused of witchcraft would state in their initial unmanipulated testimonials that much of what they did was to protect the community from witches. (For example, the benandanti were spiritual mediators who battled in spirit flight against witches for a good harvest every year.)

It was not until the late 1600s that church indoctrination had saturated common culture enough for people to voluntarily use the term "witch" for themselves. (For an example of how this occurred in society, I recommend the book The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries by Carlo Ginzburg.)

This gives us the lens which the common folk people saw the world and responded to it. It also begins to explain the reason the church was in continual conflict with the common people throughout the pre-modern period.

Much of the common folk beliefs contradicted the authority of the church. Then again, in order to be considered an authority the common people would have to understand the theology of the church, at all.

The Struggles of the Early Church

From the beginning the church's prime focus was the state of the soul and what happened to it after death. The Christian concept of the soul was contradictory to the widely accepted folk belief of the soul. And the Christian concept of death was contradictory to the widely accepted folk belief of death.

These folk beliefs had been around a lot longer than the newly introduced Christian church. Passed down from generation to generation. This spelled a recipe for conflict. And it was because of the ongoing conflict with folk beliefs that the church began to fully flesh out it's theology.

A few examples of how this ended up shaping Christian theology:

There was a long extant cult of the dead and ancestral veneration throughout Europe. Even the newly educated clergy had concerns regarding the dead that the church failed to address. In response to this spiritual service gap, the 12th century church created the concept of purgatory and performing Mass for the dead.

A more commonly known example is how the church created saints. They were originally folk spirits and gods that were relative to their local areas. The church absorbed them into itself to create canonical saints. They also often built their churches around the places of power associated with these old spirits and Gods. And of course they rewrote the related folk stories through the Christian lens. (This is highly prevalent in the country I live in: Ireland.)

Another issues is that the early church didn't really address earthly and material matters. At the time, it was actually considered heretical to pray to God, Jesus, Mary, saints, or angels for earthly matters. However, everyone, including the wealthy, had everyday worries that required regular assistance.

It was typical belief (even in the church) that illness was not merely physical, but also spiritual. Common folk could not afford to pay for the medical doctors of their time. So they would go to a cunning person to not only receive herbal cures, but spiritual remedies as well.

A pressing concern was when objects went missing. The harsh conditions of the pre-modern era meant that when your plow disappeared you might starve. In most cases it was too costly to merely replace the object. Unfortunately, the local constables did not normally assist people who lacked money or power. As a result, common people would ask a cunning person to help them locate and regain the lost object through divination and magic.

Some other examples include: accidentally disturbing local spirits, being plagued by the remnant dead, a desire to know the future, the desire to gain someone's love, wanting to know if your partner was cheating, punishing those who screwed you over, needing a better crop or harvest, getting your cow to produce more milk, diagnosing and curing the sickness of your farm animals, and much more.

These were things the church either did not address or outright condemned. But they were the concerns of most people, the common and nobility alike... and they weren't going away anytime soon. So, people kept relying on their traditional customs and spiritual mediators for these challenges.

Laying the Groundwork for Persecution

Leading up to the witch hunts in Europe there were a few defining events that would set the tone going forward.

An example of one, is that there was a shared conspiracy between the church and local governments. They believed that lepers who were supposedly sponsored or led by the Jews, who were in turn supposedly sponsored and led by the Muslims, were attempting to poison the water. In doing so, they hoped to effectively cause the entire population to become ill. This would allow the lepers, Jews, and Muslims to step into positions of power and destroy the Christian church.

Some of this conspiracy was a money grab both on the church and local governments part. In the 1300s there was a significant famine. During that time the Jews became financially powerful as creditors and money lenders. The church hoped to disrupt the Jewish credit monopoly for their own gain. The local governments hoped to take the craft items made by the lepers for their own gain.

This conspiracy that the lepers, Jews, and (by proxy) Muslims were trying to disempower European society became known by the common population. Shortly after there was an outbreak of a plague-like disease. The disease was killing everyone, including the lepers and Jews. Because everyone knew about the conspiracy, the lepers and Jews got blamed. As a result, the locals circumvented the authority of the government and church, and held pogroms where they burned groups of lepers and Jews alive.

(This is a super condensed summary. For a detailed account, I recommend the book Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches Sabbat by Carlo Ginzburg.)

This event, and others, set a dangerous precedent leading to the witch hunts. The local government and the church thought that people who weren't Christians were plotting against Christian society. When regular people heard these stories from others, they started to blame and harm innocent people whenever something bad happened that they could not explain.

Vitriol against Jews in particular fueled what became a doctrinal framework for the witch hunts. As far back as the time of the early Egyptians there was written antisemitic propaganda. The literate elite of the church republished and spread this amongst their clergy.

This propaganda stated that Jews were shapeshifters who sucked the life out of people, desecrated the sacred host and decried baptism, engaged in blood drinking and cannibalism (especially of babies), had unholy congress (sex) with the devil, committed incest, bestiality, and pedophilia… Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Between this antisemitic propaganda and the interactions of the church with local folk beliefs, the witch hunt doctrine emerged.

Double Double Toil and trouble

The church began to assert there was an organized conspiracy of witches.

The definition of witch changed from what the common people believed (see above). The church said anyone who practiced non-Christian beliefs or spirit communication was a witch. If a spirit wasn't approved by the church, it was seen as a demon from the devil. According to the church, witches made pacts with these demonic familiar spirits and attend group Sabbats.

These Sabbats included cannibalism, bestiality, sex with the devil, desecrating the sacred host, and worse. This was allegedly an attempt to overthrow and destroy Christian society. The Christian church was very focused on proving that the Sabbat were meetings where witches gathered in person and performed these diabolical deeds.

This is very particular wording and differences in belief to pay close attention to.

As stated earlier, the regular people accused of being witches didn't know the church's definition of witchcraft. Regular folk didn't call themselves witches until the late 1600s, after church indoctrination was common knowledge. They instead called themselves cunning people, fairy doctors, wise people, sin eaters, and other names.

Common folk also did not use the specific word “pact”. Establishing that a perpetrator had a pact with the devil was key to the church's ability to persecute someone. If they could confirm that someone had entered a voluntary agreement with a non-Christian spirit, that basically made the entire case. So any implied agreement between a person and a non-Christian spirit was labeled as a pact.

For example, if you met a spirit while in spirit flight and they asked you to trust it and you said yes, that was considered an explicit agreement. That explicit agreement in turn meant that you had sold your soul to the devil, according to the church.

This was a slippery slope. The belief in land spirits, fairy folk, and ancestors were widespread amongst the common population. More importantly, the uneducated did not know the church considered all of it to be devilry.

When the church became aware of folk stories regarding being taken away to Otherworlds to dance and feast, this cemented their idea of the witches Sabbat. In folk and fairy tales it is common that people are whisked away to Otherworlds to dance and feast. This iconography was also a commonly described experience when someone had taken spirit flight. As the church became aware of these beliefs and ideas, they folded it into their idea of the witches Sabbat.

Going to an Otherworld and feasting with spirits becomes unholy communion with the devil. Dancing in the Otherworld is conflated with blood-bath orgies with the devil. Eventually the church had twisted many fairytale motifs into diabolical meetings with the devil.

(For a book on how fairy beliefs were turned into theological demonology, I recommend Elf Queens and Holy Friars: Fairy Beliefs and the Medieval Church by Richard Firth Green.)

At one point this causes such a craze within the church that they attempt to outlaw almost any revelry whatsoever, in daily life. You can imagine how well that was accepted by the population.

The Order of a Witch Trial

The usual order of events for someone being put on trial as a witch, were the following:

First, someone would become upset with or scared of a local practitioner and report it to their local government or church. Typically the church would call that person in for interrogation.

Interrogation would usually start unmanipulated. There was no violence or coercion. Instead the accused witch would be asked to describe the work they do in their own words. Little did they know that this was a trap. Because their beliefs were not the same as the church, and they did not know that. (It is from these initial confessions that we gather a surprisingly consistent framework for pre-modern folk witchcraft, especially given it's individual and unorganized nature.)

The next stage of interrogation was the church taking the initial confession and asking leading questions. These questions were designed to entrap the accused within the framework and language of the Sabbat the church had created (see description above).

If they couldn't confuse someone into confessing the diabolical things described by the church, they would torture them. The accused would eventually change their story. The accused would inevitably match the blueprint narrative and specific language of the church. Or die.

Depending on the area this was taking place in, a prosecuted witch might go to jail for a period of time. Or they might die in some horrendous fashion, such as burning at the stake.

Despite their great efforts to prove there was an organized witch cult working to undermine the church, there was never any substantial evidence to prove it.

The initial uncoerced testimonies explicitly describe a state of spirit flight or spirit communication that is non-corporeal. In this spirit flight the accused may gather with other disembodied practitioners or spirits in an Otherworld. But this was never in physical reality. There were never any confirmed in-person gatherings of witches. And there certainly was never an organized effort to destroy Christian society.

By the mid 1600s into the 1700s the testimonies of the accused changed. The church had effectively disseminated its doctrine of witchcraft to scare the population. Suddenly the accused are openly and immediately using the language of the accuser from the beginning of the interrogation process. One of the best examples of this is Isobel Gowdie. (You can read her detailed confessions in the book The Visions of Isobel Gowdie by Emma Wilby.)

However, it's important to note that for the grand majority of uncoerced testimonials, the accused rarely used the language of the church. The common people simply do not use the wording related to devilry, pacts, or Sabbats. By communicating their actual beliefs in their own words, this puts them at a distinct disadvantage when trying to prove their innocence.

The Final Nail in the Coffin

As the Enlightenment unfolds (1700s to 1800s) the church changes its approach to witchcraft. At this point they have accomplished what they set out to do. The beliefs and practices of common people have relegated itself to hiding in the shadows. The overwhelming majority of the population takes on the beliefs and customs of the church. The church effectively undermined and delegitimazed folk beliefs and customs throughout Europe.

Instead of continuing to pursue witches violently, they take a new approach to delegitimizing and stigmatizing folk practices. They begin to say that people who claim to have a witchcraft practice are mentally ill and need help. Which is certainly an effective way to destroy non-Christian beliefs.

Sadly, academics in the 1800s and 1900s who began to study the witch hunts took up this same perspective. This is why witch hunts are still widely described as the church's "uneducated" response to mentally ill people (as one example).

This completely ignores and erases the rich consistency of belief and practice described in non-coerced witch testimonials. It also fails to connect the dots between the folk stories and beliefs of a people with their actual practice. But it’s also par for the course as it pertains to the early studies of non-dominant belief systems.

Thankfully, Carlo Ginzburg pioneered a new academic approach to the topic in the 1960s. This is what has allowed the flourishing niche of witchcraft microhistory. It's also what has given the understanding that my (and your) non-Christian ancestors deserve.

It is a revival that empowers us to study, understand, and find connection with the experiences, beliefs, and practices of our pre-modern European ancestors.

What is in the word Witch?

To conclude: the witch hunts were essentially a war of differing belief cultures between the educated and resourced elite church, and the culture of the uneducated and poorly resourced common European people. The intensity of this war varied based on the given area and the zealousness of the clergy in that area.

The result of this war was an iconography and vocabulary of diabolical activity for anyone practicing folk beliefs or honoring folk customs outside of the approval of Christian theology. Today this practice and belief system is simply called witchcraft.

It also resulted in many versions of a “dual faith” and folk Christianity. This is a synthesis of folk belief and customs with Christian saint veneration found throughout Europe (and many other places).

(My articles won't focus on folk Christianity or saint veneration, as they're not part of my practice.)

Words are like myths. They are promiscuous. They change with time and use and context, not to mention dominate culture and the way it molds our language like clay.

I don't think we can or should avoid using the word "witch" today. It has changed meaning and the charge it carries; and yet it also has not. This paradox in itself is powerful.

However, I still believe that it is otherwise important to separate witchcraft from the language of it's oppressors.

In this article I specifically define what made someone a witch, based on the many unaltered un-Christianized initial testimonies that pre-modern people recorded during the witch trials. They were surprisingly consistent across regions and time, though details may vary. Today, some modern people today describe the same experiences in their own life (Lee Morgan’s book, Deed Without a Name provides some modern examples).

In these two other articles I specifically define what differentiates a witch from other occult practitioners:

Recommended Additional Sources:

Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath by Carlo Ginzburg
Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries by Carlo Ginzburg
The Visions of Isobel Gowdie by Emma Wilby
Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits by Emma Wilby
Elf Queens and Holy Friars: Fairy Beliefs and the Medieval Church by Richard Firth Green
Witches, Werewolves, and Fairies: Shapeshifters and Astral Doubles in the Middle Ages by Claude Lecouteux
Phantom Armies of the Night: The Wild Hunt and the Ghostly Processions of the Dead by Claude Lecouteux
The Hidden History of Elves and Dwarfs: Avatars of the Invisible Realms by Claude Lecouteux
Demons and Spirits of the Land: Ancestral Lore and Practices by Claude Lecouteux
The Tradition of Household Spirits: Ancestral Lore and Practices by Claude Lecouteux
Return of the Dead: Ghosts, Ancestors, and the Transparent Veil of the Pagan Mind by Claude Lecouteux
Travels to the Otherworld and Other Fantastic Realms: Medieval Journeys into the Beyond by Claude Lecouteux
Between the Living and the Dead by Eva Pocs
Fairies and Witches at the Boundary of South Eastern and Central Europe by Eva Pocs