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Stereotypes of witches

The stereotypical look of a witch is reminiscent of 15-17th century Brewsters.

“In the dark ages, brewsters, women who brewed beer, had some rather odd advertising methods. To be noticed in crowded markets, they tended to wear tall, pointed hats. To indicate when a brew was ready, broomsticks would be placed in the doorways of alehouses. Images of frothing cauldrons full of ready product and six-sided stars to indicate the quality of the brew also abounded. Lastly, out of manifest necessity, cats would be kept in the brewhouses to protect the grains from mice.“

“It would also be dangerous to be a woman with extensive knowledge of how herbs and plants could mix well together to provide nourishment and healing to the drinker when the inquisitions were at their height across Europe. As the production of beer would require these very skills, it wouldn’t be difficult to confuse the local alewife with a witch without malice.”

“Many of the women and men tried as witches in Europe during the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance practiced midwifery or medicine. Doctors were scarce, and for members of Europe’s lower classes, local healers were often the only option. When medicine started to be regulated around 1200, women were barred from formal medical training at universities, and those that continued as physicians or midwives were sometimes labeled witches. A few were even tried for illegally practicing medicine.”

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Familiars

“The concept of magical spirit creatures has resonated throughout history in creation myths, tribal traditions, and religions, but it’s only relatively recently that magical animals and familiars became re-imagined as evil or dangerous companions. Historically, familiars or spirits were often seen as a type of guardian angel rather than an evil demon.”

“Most people conjure up thoughts of the witch with a cat or toad when speaking of familiars. In the days of widespread persecution of witches in Europe and North America during the Medieval and Early Modern periods, women accused of magic use and witchcraft were assumed to have a familiar, most often in the form of cats, dogs, owls, mice, newts, or toads. These servants to witches were considered low-ranking demons, or even fairies.”

“Because of the assumed dangerous nature of the familiars, many animals were massacred, especially cats . These killings resulted in a tragic situation. In the middle of the 14th century the Black Death was ravaging Europe. Some scholars suggest the huge reduction in cat numbers allowed rat and rodent populations to boom, in turn increasing the number of plague-carrying fleas, and ultimately leading to the near-decimation of the human population.”

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Spells, charms, etc

Witches bottle:

“A witch or folk healer would prepare the witch's bottle. Historically, the witch's bottle contained the victim's (the person who believed they had a spell put on them, for example) urine, hair or nail clippings, or red thread from sprite traps.

“Folk magic contends that witch bottles protect against evil spirits and magical attack, and counteract spells cast by witches; they are counter-magical devices, the purpose of which is to draw in and trap harmful intentions directed at their owners.”

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They also filled them with herbs, nails, blades, (sharp or broken things stuff)

If a witch thought they were already cursed they sometimes threw the bottles into fire so that it would explode.

You can get other information on witch bottles here

Talisman [art]

Amulets, Charms and Talismans [2]

Incantation

A brief history

“Want to get rid of an unwanted husband? Coat yourself in honey, roll naked in grain and cook him up some deadly bread with flour milled from this mixture. Want to increase the amount of supplies in your barn? Leave out child-sized shoes and bows-and-arrows for the satyrs and goblins to play with. If you’re lucky, they might steal some of your neighbour’s goods for you in return. These unusual charms and medical tips, which featured in medieval books, sound suspiciously like magic.”

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This is a post about witchcraft which includes talk of the trails, and how witches were executed, so please only click the read more if you are okay with reading that.

Myths and facts

Witches were burned at the stake. “Not in English-speaking countries. Witchcraft was a felony in both England and its American colonies, and therefore witches were hanged, not burned. However, witches’ bodies were burned in Scotland, though they were strangled to death first.”

“The common image of a witch’s execution shows a large group of hysteric people surrounding the guilty person on a burning pyre—but immolation was not the primary means of execution used for those accused of witchcraft. During the Salem Witch Trials, no one was burned to death; all of the accused that pled their cases and were found guilty during the Trials in 1692 were hanged. In fact, no one found guilty of witchcraft was ever executed by burning in the American colonies—immolation wasn't permissible by English law. But one person was pressed to death by large stones: Giles Corey, a man who refused to plead guilty or not guilty for charges of witchcraft during the Trials. The court found Corey guilty despite staying mute by using the French legal precedent of “peine forte et dure.” Corey is the only person in US history to be pressed to death by court order.“

Nine million witches died in the years of the witch persecutions. “About 30,000–60,000 people were executed in the whole of the main era of witchcraft persecutions, from the 1427–36 witch-hunts in Savoy (in the western Alps) to the execution of Anna Goldi in the Swiss canton of Glarus in 1782. These figures include estimates for cases where no records exist.”

Once accused, a witch had no chance of proving her innocence. “Only 25 per cent of those tried across the period in England were found guilty and executed.”

Millions of innocent people were rounded up on suspicion of witchcraft. “The total number of people tried for witchcraft in England throughout the period of persecution was no more than 2,000. Most judges and many jurymen were highly sceptical about the existence of magical powers, seeing the whole thing as a huge con trick by fraudsters. Many others knew that old women could be persecuted by their neighbours for no reason other than that they weren’t very attractive.”

But...

“ During the Salem Witch Trials, most of the legally-recognized evidence used against those accused of witchcraft amounted to spectral evidence, or “witness testimony that the accused person's spirit or spectral shape appeared to him/her witness in a dream at the time the accused person's physical body was at another location,” which was accepted “on the basis that the devil and his minions were powerful enough to send their spirits, or specters, to pure, religious people in order to lead them astray.” Other evidence used against them were so-called “Witch’s Marks” on their skin that allegedly proved they had made pacts with the devil. Contemporary research suggests these marks were possibly small ordinary lesions or supernumerary nipples.”

The Spanish Inquisition and the Catholic Church instigated the witch trials. “All four of the major western Christian denominations (the Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist and Anglican churches) persecuted witches to some degree. Eastern Christian, or Orthodox, churches carried out almost no witch-hunting. In England, Scotland, Scandinavia and Geneva, witch trials were carried out by Protestant states. The Spanish Inquisition executed only two witches in total.”

King James I was terrified of witches and was responsible for their hunting and execution. “More accused witches were executed in the last decade of Elizabeth I’s reign (1558–1603) than under her successor, James I (1603–25).

The first Witchcraft Act was passed under Henry VIII, in 1542, and made all pact witchcraft (in which a deal is made with the Devil) or summoning of spirits a capital crime. The 1604 Witchcraft Act under James could be described as a reversion to that status quo rather than an innovation.

In Scotland, where he had ruled as James VI since 1587, James had personally intervened in the 1590 trial of the North Berwick witches, who were accused of attempting to kill him. He wrote the treatise Daemonologie, published in 1597. However, when King of England, James spent some time exposing fraudulent cases of demonic possession, rather than finding and prosecuting witches.”

Witch-hunting was really women-hunting, since most witches were women. “In England the majority of those accused were women. In other countries, including some of the Scandinavian countries, men were in a slight majority. Even in England, the idea of a male witch was perfectly feasible. Across Europe, in the years of witch persecution around 6,000 men – 10 to 15 per cent of the total – were executed for witchcraft.

In England, most of the accusers and those making written complaints against witches were women.”

“Historically-rooted misogyny led many to believe that women were somehow more susceptible to the dark arts or temptation by the Devil, and therefore more likely to be witches. For instance, the Laws of Alfred, written by King of Wessex Alfred the Great in AD 893, specified witchcraft as an expressly female activity. But men practiced, too, and were called many different names, including a wizard, a warlock, or a sorcerer. Countless women and men were indiscriminately persecuted for witchcraft throughout history. During the Trier Witch Trials in Germany, which lasted from 1581 to 1593, a total of 368 people were executed—and many of the victims were leading male figures of the cities and surrounding villages, including judges, councilors, priests, and deans of colleges. In the Würzburg Witch Trial, which stretched from 1626 to 1631, 157 men, women, and children were burned at the stake for such random reasons as allegedly humming songs with the Devil to being a vagrant unable to give an explanation as to why they were passing through the town of Würzburg.”

Witches were really goddess-worshipping herbalist midwives. “Nobody was goddess-worshipping during the period of the witch-hunts, or if they were, they have left no trace in the historical records. Despite the beliefs of lawyers, historians and politicians (such as Karl Ernst Jarcke, Franz-Josef Mone, Jules Michelet, Margaret Murray and Heinrich Himmler among others), there was no ‘real’ pagan witchcraft. There was some residual paganism in a very few trials.

The idea that those accused of witchcraft were midwives or herbalists, and especially that they were midwives possessed of feminine expertise that threatened male authority, is a myth. Midwives were rarely accused. Instead, they were more likely to work side by side with the accusers to help them to identify witch marks. These were marks on the body believed to indicate that an individual was a witch (not to be confused with the marks scratched or carved on buildings to ward off witches).”

All witches were bad. “Even though we’ve got that common image of an evil witch—a warty old woman dressed all in black, riding a broomstick, with a pointy hat—anybody familiar with The Wizard of Oz knows that there can be good witches too! Glinda the good witch was a representation of the benevolent half of witchcraft, known as white magic. Historically, practitioners of white magic were known as white witches, and they were more folk healers than devious people out for double, double toil and trouble. However, writer C.S. Lewis reversed the notion for The Chronicles of Narnia saga, making one of the main antagonists the icy and evil White Witch.”

We don’t know where the word "witch" came from. All the etymology geeks out there may or may not be surprised to know that the word “witch” is of indeterminate origin. The closest and most obvious possible origin is the Old English word wicce, which means “female sorceress,” and is the basic linguistic root for the modern day pagan religion, Wicca. Another more specific possibility is a split meaning coming from the Old English wigle, meaning “divination” and wih, meaning “idol,” both coming from the Proto-Germanic word wikkjaz, which means “necromancer,” or “one who wakes the dead.”

People wrote entire books dedicated to witch hunting. “In the 15th century, witchcraft was of grave concern to a lot of people, and major pieces of literature were written about witches. The most famous was the Malleus Maleficarum, a legal and theological document that became the de facto handbook on how to deal with witches and witchcraft, and spurred the nascent hysteria caused by witch-hunting in Europe that would last well into the 18th century. The book was written by two clergyman of the Dominican Order—Jakob Sprenger, the dean of the University of Cologne, and Heinrich Kramer, a theology professor at the University of Salzburg—and used Exodus 22:18, “You shall not permit a sorceress to live,” as its basis to detect and persecute any and all witches.

Even people as important as kings got in on the action. James I of England’s 1597 book, Daemonologie, was a treatise that threw his support behind the importance of the practice of witch hunting. James himself even presided over the 1590 North Berwick Witch Trials when he believed a devious Earl plotted to overthrow the then-King of Scotland with the help of a coven.”

A Pope Once Confirmed that Witches Exist. “The Catholic Church saw witchcraft as a threat to all of its followers. In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII issued a papal bull titled “Summis desiderantes affectibus” (“Desiring with supreme ardor”) that recognized the existence of witches, saying, “many persons of both sexes, heedless of their own salvation and forsaking the Catholic faith, give themselves over to devils male and female,” and that they “afflict and torture with dire pains and anguish, both internal and external, these men, women, cattle, flocks, herds, and animals, and hinder men from begetting and women from conceiving, and prevent all consummation of marriage; that, moreover, they deny with sacrilegious lips the faith they received in holy baptism; and that, at the instigation of the enemy of mankind, they do not fear to commit and perpetrate many other abominable offences and crimes, at the risk of their own souls, to the insult of the divine majesty and to the pernicious example and scandal of multitudes.” The papal bull effectively gave Kramer and Sprenger—the writers of the Malleus Maleficarum—the God-given authority to begin their Inquisition.”

Laws About Witchcraft were in place in the mid-20th Century. Technically, England’s Witchcraft Act of 1735 was still official and on the books until 1951, when it was replaced with the Fraudulent Mediums Act. The language of the original Act wasn’t about persecuting witches per se, but rather made it illegal for people to claim that others were witches. Yet being legally convicted meant that you purported to have the powers of a witch—and in fact, a woman named Jane Rebecca Yorke was found guilty in 1944 under the law, though she was convicted mostly because she was defrauding people with bogus séances.

Witches really did "fly" on broomsticks, in a way. “The origins of the broom as a witch's preferred mode of transportation is ... pretty weird. People who practiced witchcraft experimented with herbs and potions in rituals that may have used the mandrake plant. Mandrake contains scopolamine and atropine, two alkaloids that cause feelings of euphoria in low doses and hallucinations in higher doses.The rituals—performed in the nude—called for the participants to rub an herbal ointment containing the mandrake on their foreheads, wrists, hands, and feet as well as on a staff that they would “ride.” The friction of the ointment-coated staff on the witches', uh, lady parts would absorb the ointment into their system and cause a floating sensation—and their description of that feeling is what perpetuated the symbol of the witch flying on a broomstick.”

[Source] [Source]

I honestly didn’t believe the last one so I decided to do a quick look around before adding it to the list and it turns out it is true, there’s more on it: Here

But this wasn’t the only use they found for herbs as I bet you have already guessed. A lot of today's medicine is thanks to people who were believed to be witches.

“From nightshade, 19th-century chemists isolated atropine—a muscle relaxant that was later used to calm patients during surgery before the administration of anesthesia.”

“Atropine also remains the go-to antidote for nerve gas poisoning.”

“Tropane alkaloids continued to prove useful as chemical backbones in 20th-century drug design, most notably producing the anti-psychotic drug haloperidol.”

Willow bark would have been used to treat inflammation, because we now know it contains salicin, a compound that eventually gave rise to salicylic acid and later aspirin.”

“Garlic was used to treat a variety of maladies from snakebites to ulcers, and today some garlic compounds have been marketed as blood clotting inhibitors.

“Foxglove plants were also in the mix. Seventeenth century herbalist Nicolas Culpepper recommended it for epilepsy. But it’s a Scottish doctor named William Withering who is credited with pioneering the use of the plants’ extracts for heart problems. In 1775, a patient with “dropsy”—a term for swelling probably caused by heart disease—came to Withering’s Birmingham practice. No treatment seemed to work, so the patient sought a second opinion from a local Gypsy woman. She prescribed a potion containing an estimated 20 different plant ingredients, and he was cured.

“Keen to learn its properties, Withering tracked down the healer and figured out that the active ingredient in her potion was purple foxglove (Digitalis purpurea). He then performed a clinical trial of sorts, testing different doses and formulations on 163 patients. Withering ultimately determined that drying and grinding up the leaves produced the best results in small doses. Digitalis plants gave us the modern heart failure drugs digoxin and digitoxin.

“Plenty of traditional remedies have produced the staple drugs of today. Traditional Chinese medicine gave the world ephedrine for asthma. The Quechua people of Peru gave western medicine quinine for malaria.”

“As is evident from trial records from the late fifteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, and folklore sources and court cases in the modern era, the diagnosis and cure of witchcraft were an important element of the popular understanding and experience of medicine.” [Opens article]

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Witchcraft in different region/communities

Africa [wiki page]

Americas

Asia

Catalan

Europe

Oceania

Russia

Salem

Deities

1) Abonde (also known as Perchta), 2) Aradia, 3) Nicneven, 4) Leonard, 5) Cernunnos, 6) Oya, 7) Cerridwen, 8) Circe, 9) Diana, 10) Hekate

Links to tumblr post that might be helpful

Salem witch trails and again Hexs

(And thats it :D I hope this helps some of you)

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