Witchcraft is a word with an excess of baggage, a term that as we shall see, has been used to label (and therefore denigrate) social groups, provide an excuse for mob actions and to create an enemy (or a scapegoat) to destroy where none existed. It has also been used in relation to imagined religious and occult practices of those outside of the societal norm, whatever that may mean in a particular instance. In fact, an important point to be made in the discussion of Witchcraft is to point out that for the most part, witchcraft can be defined as being roughly equivalent, in its common usage, to black magic . While this is not the only definition of the word, by far, as we will see, it quite often used in this manner. Further, witchcraft has also been romanticized, the Witch (at least as imagined) the subject of the darker fantasies of those who, safely within the confines of civilization, dream of a life outside of the firelight. The word has also suffered from redefinition over the years, such as in the Middle Ages when the lone hag of Antiquity became the Devil worshipping coven.

All of these things have fallen, at times under the name witchcraft. Remarkably, the only thing they all have in common is that they are phantoms, never having any reality outside of the morbid imaginations of those who believed in them. To be sure, real people were accused and persecuted as Witches; magicians were prosecuted under Roman Law, midwives and outcasts were tortured, imprisoned and burnt by the thousands in Europe along with many more who were the victims of what can only be described as an hysteria that even today breaks through the veneer of rationality that we are pleased to call civilization. It is, in fact, often the case that historians writing about Witchcraft are liable to attribute the entire subject to delusion and malice. This is not without justification. One can hardly consider the history of the witch craze of the Middle Ages without revulsion at both the incredulity of the times and brutality suffered by those who were, clearly, innocent of the ‘crimes’ they were condemned for.

That is not the end to our difficulties, however. Complicating the issue that much more is the phenomena of those who would reclaim the Witchcraft for various reasons. In the 19th century, as noted, the Romantic writers and artists restored some of the glamour of the sorcerer or witch from the ancient sources. Gothic literature, the forefather of the modern horror novel, gleefully wallowed in the occult and strange. There were the beginnings of the social sciences. The collection and study legends and folklore acquired a respectability it has enjoyed since. With that came the revisionists. Most of the work done in this vein was based on political concerns. Jules Michelet saw the witch as a figure of rebellion, C. G. Leland found a proto-communist, anarchic paganism that was also, conveniently, an alternative to the Catholic Church. A somewhat different perspective was arrived at by Margaret Murray , who saw in the witch trials the persecution of a genuine religion, a pagan survival, though degenerate, from pre-Christian times.

Then came, inevitably, the reconstructionists. After the repeal of the Witchcraft act in Britain it was only a matter of time before the first “real” witches appeared. As it turned out, it was not much time at all . The movement continues today, having embraced (or been embraced by) feminists, hippies and assorted others. It has inspired several theories of pseudo-history , gained the status as a legal religion in the United States and become as much apart of the cultural background as any other “subculture” co-opted by mass media . They are drawn to what they see as romantic but one has only to read their books to know they are playing dress up. They have no mysteries to teach .

After all this, still, we have not found anything relevant to our present study. Though it is certainly true that a large part of the persistence of the idea of Witchcraft can be attributed to the irrational nature of the human mind, which can erupt at times of social stress and repression as well as the perverse attraction of the outsider, it cannot account for all of it. Underneath it all, there is a reality, however obscured by myth and fantasy, a world where magic does exist, where gods and demons are very real and perhaps, with the proper knowledge can be controlled and bargained with. Beyond this, even, there is specter of the Ancient world, the mysteries of the Egyptians, the Chaldeans and the Greeks. Archeology reveals entire civilizations, such as the Maya who built a culture of incredible complexity and depth that rose up, flourished and died, forgotten until we dug up its bones. There are the Grimoires of the Middle Ages, the spell tablets of the Late Roman Empire and the treasures of Roman Egypt consisting of, among other more mundane items, papyrus fragments from Oxyrhynchus containing spells, rituals and heterodox Christian documents. Then there are the religions of the African slaves, brought to the new world and surviving the Empires that brought them here, mixing with the religions of their captors, producing Voudon and Santeria. Finally, there is the terrible beauty of nature itself and the fact that, while we may have found ways to control certain aspects of it, still towers over our accomplishments threatening, always, with the possibility of disaster, plague and inevitably, death.

There is something within the human mind that recognizes the wild, irrational nature of being. It knows, underneath it all, that life is based on the taking of life. That civilization is knee deep in blood and built upon mountains of corpses. That death is the only certainty. Television, lottery tickets and new cars cannot hide this reality; at most they are a distraction. For some, it is enough. For some of us, the bread and circuses wear out quickly. It only takes a moment, to look out at the world and see it for what it is; alive, irrational, dangerous. Nothing is the same after that. No doubt it is this which causes those who cower within empty religions and lives filled with trivialities to howl for blood around the gallows or in front of the television.