Most people think of the Witch Trials as the time when a lot of people in small English villages were persecuted for being elderly women, possibly suffering from mental health issues without families to support them, however, in actual fact, most witch trials happened in Scotland. Witchcraft has varied in legal status throughout the years; when James VI and I (note: one person) took the throne of England he changed their more tolerant attitude to match his home country. This, in turn, led to the founding of the Witch's Union of the Union of Crowns (WUUC), designed to provide legal defence for both genuine witches and those falsely accused of harmful witchcraft. WUUC (now named WUBI) successfully campaigned for the 1735 Act of Parliament which made false acts of witchcraft by con-artists a crime instead. Let no one tell you that union action doesn't make a difference.
Many of the modern depictions of witches come from Shakespeare's writings in the play Macbeth. While it is possible that Shakespeare confused the witches of his reality with the experiences of another Shakespeare that formed part of the I.B.M. (see link for further details) it is more likely that he neither knew nor cared about genuine witchcraft and simply portrayed them in a manner he thought fitting. (If any one of you unholy fuckers of mothers tries to tell me that Shakespeare's list of potion ingredients was actually an old-timey list of herbs, I will invoke the fullest extent of my wrath upon you. Admittedly that is not much, I am not a member of WUBI, but it's the principle of the thing)
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