History of witchcraft: A summary.
I recommend to new practitioners to do their own research; however, I will leave this summary I did from what I have in my grimoire and what I studied about this. :D
It’s well known that witchcraft has born long time ago, and, thanks to the christian church, witches are catalogued as “The Devil believers” (which is not true, since the devil was, in fact, made by the church to represent the evil forces).
There’s not a certain date we can say “Witchcraft starts from here”, but it’s almost sure it exists since “world’s called world”, when the first humans started to use medicinal herbs, crystal properties for the same cause, the moon cycle for agriculture or fertility, among other things.
What is witchcraft?
It’s a practice, not a religion. However, they can work together as the wiccan case, or even catholic one (Yes, there are catholic and christian witches. Hi, friends! If you’re reading this :) ). It’s based on beliefs about nature and how its forces could “work” on our purpose.
In ancient times, witches were the wise people who healed others; most of them used to live isolated from the village, but some lived into it with the rest.
Those women (there were men, but women were most part of this community) knew how to cure ailments, injuries, about contraceptive and abortion methods, sometimes they were midwives, all with herbal mixtures and techniques that worked really well.
When the church appeared, and people noticed things didn’t work as well as with the wises (and went back with them), church accused these wise people of being “heretics”, doing spells and pact with Satan, causing the well-known witch hunt.
The witch hunt:
A lot of women were tortured by the church followers under the accusations of being witches; a mark in the middle of the back could be a reason to be burned alive, as much as knowing how to read or “so much”. Even if you conceal a witch but you’re not one, you’d be tortured too.
So many innocent women were murdered by the church accused of being “witches” from 15th to the 18th century, and this is the cause why witches have a book of shadows; the real practitioners used to have a notebook where they wrote some of the knowledge they had and it used to be hidden or “in the shadows”, so they wouldn’t be discovered and murdered.
When the accusation was declared “illegal”, witch hunt stopped, but even now there are some cases of murdering on suspicion of someone being a witch.