The European Witch is an extraordinarily diverse umbrella term for a phenomenon whose meaning, identity, and connotations have continually shifted over the centuries. What we now call “the witch” stands at the intersection of numerous, often very different traditions: folk belief and folk magic, older religious traditions, ecclesiastical definitions and demonology, folklore and fairy tale, modern Wicca and other forms of contemporary witchcraft, and even twenty-first-century online identity politics. This article therefore approaches the European witch not as one historical phenomenon with a single origin, but as a point of convergence. It traces the different historical, religious, magical, folkloric, and supernatural lines that gradually flowed into – and continue to reshape – the central concept we call the witch.

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From Night-Flying Predators and Folk Magicians to the Witches’ Sabbath and Modern Wicca

The European witch has never been one thing. Behind the familiar image of the woman flying through the night to attend a witches’ Sabbath lies a far older and considerably more complicated history. Across Europe, people described magical healers, village sorcerers, diviners, night-flying women, animal shapeshifters, nightmare spirits, milk thieves, supernatural sexual visitors, followers of mysterious female nocturnal processions, and dangerous beings that attacked sleeping people or preyed upon children. Medieval and early modern demonology did not invent all these traditions. It did, however, bring many of them together and increasingly interpret them through a Christian framework of demons, heresy, the Devil, and the witches’ Sabbath.

Consequently, there is no single historical phenomenon that can simply be called “European witchcraft.” The German Hexe, Hungarian boszorkány, Italian strega, Basque sorgin, village cunning person, night-riding follower of Diana, Mahr-like nocturnal attacker, accused Devil-worshipper, and modern Wiccan are not merely different names for the same person. They belong to traditions that sometimes intersect dramatically but can have very different origins.

Understanding European witchcraft therefore requires us to separate these strands before putting them back together.

The European witch was at various times and places a healer, magician, diviner, night-wanderer, shapeshifter, spirit-double, sexual transgressor, supernatural predator, agricultural thief, heretic, Devil-worshipper, folkloric being, and eventually a consciously adopted religious identity. Sometimes several of these identities existed simultaneously. But they did not all originate from the same source.

The history of the European witch is, above all, a history of convergence.

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Magic Before the Medieval Witch

Magic in Europe is considerably older than the medieval Christian concept of the witch. Greek, Roman, Etruscan, Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Baltic, Finnic, and other European cultures possessed practices involving divination, healing, protective magic, curses, love magic, communication with supernatural powers, manipulation of weather or fertility, and relationships with the dead.

This distinction is fundamental. The history of European magic is not identical to the history of the European witch.

A person who healed illness with herbs and charms, identified a thief through divination, protected cattle against supernatural attack, or performed a love spell did not necessarily belong to a coherent social class called “witches.” Nor did all forms of forbidden magic originally imply allegiance to an evil supernatural power.

Christianization introduced new theological interpretations while older practices and supernatural concepts continued, changed, or became incorporated into Christian folk religion. Magic could be condemned as superstition, interpreted as demonic, tolerated as customary practice, or even practiced alongside prayers, saints, holy objects, and Christian formulae.

The boundaries remained surprisingly unstable.

Strix, Striga and Strega: The Witch as Night Predator

One of the oldest roots of the European witch complex leads not to the village magician but to the supernatural night predator.

Classical literature knew the strix or striges: ominous nocturnal creatures associated particularly with attacks upon infants and, in some accounts, the consumption or extraction of blood and bodily substance. Their identity was unstable even in antiquity. They could be imagined as birds, bird-like monsters, or women capable of assuming a predatory nocturnal form.

This ancient vocabulary proved remarkably persistent.

Across later European languages and traditions appear words such as striga, stria, strega, štriga and related forms. Their meanings are not identical, and linguistic descent should never be confused with an unchanged survival of belief. Nevertheless, their history demonstrates something extremely important about European witchcraft: the boundary between the supernatural female predator and the human woman believed capable of becoming such a predator could disappear.

A night monster could become a witch.

Or, conversely, a witch could go out at night in the form of something that was no longer entirely human.

This ancient strix–striga complex forms one of the most important bridges between the history of witchcraft and the history of vampires, nightmare beings, child-killing demons, and other supernatural predators.

The Witch Who Leaves Her Body

A second major strand becomes particularly visible in Central and Eastern European folklore. Here the witch does not necessarily travel physically.

Something leaves her.

Numerous traditions recorded during the early modern and nineteenth-century periods describe witches whose soul, spirit, double, breath-like essence, or animal manifestation departs from the sleeping or entranced body. This exteriorized component may travel considerable distances, enter houses, attack sleeping people, oppress them, ride them, steal vitality or agricultural abundance, or appear in animal form.

The distinction is profound. The witch is simultaneously a human being and the source of a supernatural entity.

This is one of the places where the categories Hexe, Mahr, Mara, Trude, Alp, bosorka and succubus-like visitor begin to overlap. They should not simply be declared identical. Regional traditions preserve different beings, names, mechanisms, and histories. Yet European folklore repeatedly produces the same ontological problem: is the thing attacking the sleeper an independent supernatural being, or is it a living person who has left the body?

Sometimes folklore explicitly answers: it is a witch.

This creates what might be called the exteriorized witch — a human supernatural predator operating through a detachable nocturnal self.

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Hexe, Mahr and Mara: The Witch as Nightmare

The nightmare traditions of Europe provide perhaps the clearest example of categories flowing into one another.

The Mahr, Mara, Mare and related beings belong to an enormous European complex of nocturnal oppression. The victim awakens or becomes partly conscious while unable to move. Something presses upon the body, sits on the chest, interferes with breathing, rides the sleeper, exhausts the victim, produces terrifying sensations, or enters into an explicitly sexual encounter.

In some traditions the attacker is an independent being. Elsewhere it is identified with a particular living person. A woman suspected of witchcraft may therefore not merely send the nightmare: she may become the nightmare.

Central European Hexe traditions repeatedly approach this boundary. The witch’s physical body may remain elsewhere while her attacking manifestation enters the victim’s bedroom. Comparable ideas occur among the bosorka/boszorkány traditions of Central and Eastern Europe, where witch, shapeshifter, night attacker, vitality predator and supernatural double can become difficult to separate.

This intersection is crucial because it demonstrates that the historical European witch cannot be understood exclusively through witch trials. Long after the great persecutions had declined, nineteenth-century folklorists were still recording a supernatural witch who belonged as much to the world of the Mahr and nightmare as to the world of spells and sorcery.

Milk Stealing and the Theft of Vitality

The same predatory model extends beyond the human body.

One of the most widespread accusations against witches concerned the supernatural theft of milk, butter, fertility, crop abundance, or the productive power of livestock. At first sight this appears far removed from the nightmare attack. Structurally, however, the resemblance is striking.

The witch does not always steal the physical object. She steals the capacity to produce it.

A cow remains in the stable but ceases to give milk. Another person’s cattle mysteriously flourish. Butter will not form. Crops fail. Animals become exhausted. Reproductive or agricultural vitality appears to have been transferred from one household to another.

In this sense the milk-stealing witch belongs to a broader European conception of supernatural extraction. The object of predation can be blood, breath, bodily strength, sexual vitality, milk, fertility, or agricultural abundance. The underlying principle is the appropriation of life-producing power.

Animal transformation and the exteriorized double frequently enter this complex as well. Hares, cats, birds and other animals may represent the witch herself, her projected form, or an assisting supernatural being. What looks superficially like agricultural superstition therefore connects directly with the nocturnal and predatory witch.

Bosorka and the Witch-Predator of Central and Eastern Europe

The bosorka and related Central and Eastern European traditions provide an exceptionally rich example of this ambiguity.

Depending upon region and source, the figure may combine traits of the living witch, night attacker, shapeshifter, milk thief, supernatural rider, vitality predator, sexual visitor, and sometimes the dangerous dead. A person feared during life could remain dangerous after death, further eroding the boundary between witch and revenant.

This is precisely why the vocabulary of witchcraft cannot safely be translated into a single universal category. A bosorka encountered in a nineteenth-century ethnographic account may occupy a supernatural position quite different from the accused witch appearing in a sixteenth-century Western European trial record.

The label is only the beginning of the investigation.

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Diana, Herodias and the Women Who Ride at Night

Another branch of the European witch complex leads into a very different world: mysterious nocturnal companies of women.

The medieval Canon Episcopi preserves one of the most famous ecclesiastical descriptions of women who believed that during the night they rode with the pagan goddess Diana — in other versions or later traditions associated also with Herodias — accompanied by a multitude of women and traveling across great distances.

What makes the passage particularly important is the Church’s interpretation. The nocturnal journey was not originally presented in this text as the physical witches’ Sabbath familiar from later demonology. The women were condemned for believing that the experience was real; ecclesiastical authorities explained it as a demonic illusion. This produces an extraordinary contrast with later witch theory.

An older ecclesiastical position could effectively say: You are wrong because you believe you actually travel at night.

Later demonologists increasingly had to accommodate accusations that witches really did travel to supernatural assemblies. The changing interpretation of nocturnal flight therefore provides one of the clearest windows into the historical construction of the European witch.

From the Night-Riding Women to the Witches’ Sabbath

By the late Middle Ages and early modern period, a much more sinister synthesis had developed.

Night flight, supernatural gatherings, harmful magic, heresy, sexual transgression, demon worship and allegiance to the Devil increasingly became parts of a single demonological system. The witches’ Sabbath was not simply an unchanged pagan ceremony that Christian writers happened to discover. It emerged within a complicated interaction between folklore, theological speculation, accusations of heresy, judicial interrogation, learned demonology, and existing beliefs about nocturnal supernatural activity.

The result was enormously powerful.

A village woman suspected of causing a neighbor’s cow to stop producing milk could now theoretically belong to the same hidden conspiracy as witches flying through the night, copulating with demons and worshipping Satan. Local misfortune had become evidence of cosmic rebellion.

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Flying Ointments: When the Witches’ Flight Became a Drug-Induced Journey

Not every historical account of witches flying through the night needs to describe a physical journey. Early modern sources themselves occasionally suggest a very different mechanism.

Witches were said to rub mysterious ointments upon their bodies and subsequently fall into an unusually deep sleep or trance, awakening convinced that they had traveled enormous distances, attended nocturnal gatherings, or performed magical acts elsewhere.

Bartolommeo Spina, writing in 1525, relates cases in which women were discovered profoundly unconscious and later claimed that they had been “traveling.” Pedro Ciruelo similarly wrote in 1628 of witches who anointed themselves before supposedly flying to distant countries, yet maintained that they actually remained behind in an insensible, corpse-like condition before awakening and reporting what they believed they had experienced.

Such accounts have long encouraged the hypothesis that at least some traditions of witches’ flight originated in, or were reinforced by, pharmacologically induced altered states of consciousness.

Historical flying-ointment recipes and later reconstructions have been associated with highly toxic psychoactive plants of the nightshade family, including belladonna (Atropa belladonna), henbane (Hyoscyamus niger), mandrake (Mandragora) and thorn apple (Datura), whose tropane alkaloids can produce delirium, vivid hallucinations, confusion, amnesia, sensations of movement and profoundly altered perceptions of the body.

Amanita muscaria and ergot have also entered discussions of intoxicating or visionary experiences associated with witchcraft, although their specific historical role in European flying ointments is considerably less certain and should not be treated as established fact.

This provides a remarkable possible bridge between folklore and experience. A person lying physically unconscious could nevertheless experience an overwhelmingly convincing nocturnal journey, encounter supernatural beings, participate in assemblies, fly, transform, or engage in sexual experiences while apparently remaining elsewhere.

To observers, the body had never moved; to the experiencer, the journey might have been completely real. The early ecclesiastical insistence that women who claimed to ride with Diana were deluded into believing that they had physically traveled therefore becomes particularly intriguing when read beside later descriptions of ointments, trance and unconsciousness.

Rather than reducing the witches’ flight to either “pure fantasy” or literal aerial transportation, these sources leave open a third historical possibility: at least some traditions of supernatural flight may have incorporated deliberately induced visionary or out-of-body states.

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The Sexual Witch: Incubi, Succubi and Demonic Intercourse

Sex became central to learned demonological constructions of witchcraft.

Medieval and early modern writings discuss intercourse between humans and supernatural beings, especially incubi and succubi. Older traditions of sexual night visitors, fertility spirits, nocturnal oppression, dreams, and encounters with local spirits provided a vast reservoir of material that theologians could reinterpret within Christian demonology.

The Malleus Maleficarum, published in the late fifteenth century, is one of the most notorious products of this development. It systematically connects sorcery with demonic cooperation and devotes extensive attention to incubi, sexuality, reproduction, bodily transportation and the supposed activities of female practitioners.

For historians, however, this creates a methodological trap.

The Malleus is invaluable evidence for what demonologists believed witches to be. It cannot automatically be treated as an ethnographic description of what European magical practitioners actually did. The distinction is essential.

A theologian could take an ambiguous nocturnal sexual experience and explain it as intercourse with an incubus. A local spirit could become a demon. A magical practice could become evidence of a demonic pact. An alleged nocturnal journey could become transportation to the Sabbath.

The demonological witch was therefore partly a work of systematization: previously separate phenomena were made components of a single supernatural crime.

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The Devil’s Witch

The figure most familiar from popular culture emerged from this convergence.

The demonological witch renounced Christianity, made a pact with the Devil, received supernatural powers, attended nocturnal assemblies, practiced harmful magic, participated in sexual transgression, profaned Christian rites, and belonged to a secret community of other witches.

The Devil might appear as a man, animal, monstrous figure, or goat-like being. Later demonological and occult literature added increasingly elaborate names, ranks and personalities to this supernatural hierarchy.

This is also where caution is required with figures such as Leonard, subsequently described as a presiding demon of witches’ assemblies. The age of a demonological name, its first textual appearance, and the antiquity of the practices later attached to it are separate questions. Early modern, nineteenth-century and modern occult demonologies are frequently projected backward onto the Middle Ages.

The famous Devil-worshipping witch therefore represents one historical layer of European witchcraft — an enormously influential one, but not its universal starting point.

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Britain, Scotland and the Coven

British and particularly Scottish witchcraft traditions produced rich material concerning meetings, the Devil, familiars, animal manifestations, supernatural journeys and groups of witches. The concept of the coven eventually became inseparable from modern ideas about organized witchcraft.

Yet here too historical layers must be separated.

Trial testimony, elite demonology, folklore, confessions obtained under coercive conditions, and later interpretations do not automatically describe the same phenomenon. The twentieth-century theory that European witch trials preserved evidence of an organized pre-Christian fertility religion — famously associated with Margaret Murray — exerted enormous influence on modern understandings of witchcraft and subsequently on emerging forms of modern Paganism.

The attractive simplicity of an ancient underground witch religion, however, should not replace the far more complicated historical evidence.

Europe undoubtedly preserved pre-Christian customs, supernatural figures, ritual practices and magical traditions. That does not require the existence of one continuously organized, continent-wide witch cult.

Italy: Strega, Diana and the Problem of Stregheria

Italy occupies a particularly fascinating position because several strands converge there: the linguistic inheritance of strix/striga/strega, ancient Roman and Etruscan religious material, regional folk magic, traditions concerning supernatural female companies, and later claims concerning stregheria.

The nineteenth-century folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland became enormously important to the modern discussion. His works on Italian and Etruscan magic culminated in Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches (1899), which presents a witchcraft tradition centered upon Diana, her daughter Aradia, and Lucifer.

Aradia has generated more than a century of controversy. Treating the problem as a simple choice between “ancient witch scripture” and “Leland invented everything” obscures the more interesting historical questions. Which elements can be independently paralleled in Italian folklore? What did Leland receive from his informant Maddalena? How much did he arrange, interpret or reshape? Which traditions genuinely preserve older material, and how far backward can continuity responsibly be demonstrated?

The same caution applies to modern stregheria. Italian folk magic, historical strega traditions, Lelandian material, modern Pagan reconstruction and contemporary religious witchcraft may interact, but they should not simply be collapsed into a single unbroken tradition extending back to the Etruscans.

Continuity can exist without uniformity.

The Basque Sorgin and an Older Religious Landscape

Basque witchcraft requires equally careful treatment because it developed within one of Europe’s most distinctive linguistic and cultural environments.

The sorgin exists within a much larger Basque supernatural landscape involving figures, places, caves, mountains, animals and powers that cannot be understood adequately by simply translating everything into Christian demonological terminology.

The famous term akelarre, now closely associated with the witches’ Sabbath, illustrates the problem. Likewise, the goat accumulated profoundly negative meanings within Christian representations of witchcraft, while goats could have very different functions and associations within local custom and belief.

When inquisitors encountered indigenous concepts, they did not record them from a neutral anthropological position. They interpreted testimony through concepts already available to them: Devil, demon, heresy, apostasy and Sabbath.

A historical trial record therefore contains at least two potential voices: the local culture being questioned and the institutional language through which that culture was recorded.

Recovering the former from the latter is one of the central challenges of European witchcraft research.

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Walpurgis Night: When the Witches Gathered on the Mountain

No night became more closely associated with the European witch than Walpurgis Night (Walpurgisnacht), the night of April 30 to May 1. Its Christian name derives from Saint Walburga, an eighth-century Anglo-Saxon missionary and abbess whose feast became associated with May 1.

Yet the position of the night at the threshold of summer placed it within a much broader seasonal landscape of fires, protection rituals, fertility customs, supernatural danger, and beliefs concerning the heightened activity of spirits. Over time, particularly in German-speaking Central Europe, Walpurgisnacht became increasingly identified as the night on which witches traveled to their great nocturnal assemblies.

The most famous destination was the Brocken, the highest mountain of the Harz in northern Germany. Witches were imagined flying there from distant regions, riding broomsticks, animals, or other extraordinary conveyances to participate in dancing, feasting, magic, sexual license, and eventually the great Sabbath presided over by the Devil.

Yet here again different historical layers must be distinguished. The date itself, seasonal customs surrounding the beginning of May, beliefs about dangerous supernatural activity, and the fully developed demonological image of a Satanic witches’ Sabbath did not necessarily originate together. Walpurgisnacht became a magnet for traditions that accumulated around the same night.

By the early modern and especially the nineteenth century, folklore and literature had transformed the Brocken into the quintessential mountain of the witches.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust gave this imagery extraordinary cultural power through its famous Walpurgisnacht, in which Faust and Mephistopheles ascend the Brocken amid a fantastic multitude of witches, spirits, supernatural beings, erotic encounters, music, and grotesque revelry.

Goethe did not create the association between witches and the Brocken, but his treatment helped turn a regional German tradition into one of the internationally recognizable images of European witchcraft.

Walpurgisnacht therefore illustrates the central argument of this history exceptionally well. It cannot simply be labeled either an unchanged pagan festival or a purely Christian invention. Seasonal custom, folk belief, protective magic, Christian calendrical tradition, demonology, witch lore, local geography, and literary imagination accumulated around the same night.

What emerged was something characteristically European: an ancient seasonal threshold repeatedly reinterpreted until the night before May Day became, in the popular imagination, the night of the witches.

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The Village Witch Who Solves Problems

Far removed from the spectacular Sabbath stands another magical figure: the person people actually visited when they had a problem.

Across Europe, cunning folk, wise women and men, healers, diviners, charmers and other magical specialists could be consulted to cure disease, identify thieves, locate missing property, discover who had cast a spell, remove curses, provide protection, assist with love or marriage, protect livestock, or counter another magical practitioner.

These people expose one of the central contradictions in European attitudes toward magic.

A community might fear magic while simultaneously depending upon it.

The same practitioner could be respected by one household and accused of witchcraft by another. Someone capable of removing supernatural harm might logically also be suspected of knowing how to cause it. Reputation could shift with circumstance.

This ambiguity is especially important in Central and Eastern European folk magic, including Polish and broader Slavic traditions, where practical magical specialists survived long after learned demonologists had constructed their universal image of the satanic witch.

The opposition between the “good healer” and “evil witch” is therefore often much cleaner in modern classification than it was in village life.

The Shapeshifting Witch

Transformation into animals is another recurring component of European witch traditions.

Cats, hares, wolves, birds, toads and other creatures appear repeatedly. Yet “the witch turns into an animal” can conceal several fundamentally different ideas.

The witch may physically transform. Her soul may leave her body in animal form. She may project a double. The animal may be a familiar or assisting spirit rather than the witch herself. Alternatively, an ordinary animal may be interpreted retrospectively as the disguised witch after being injured or behaving strangely.

These distinctions matter.

A wounded hare followed by the discovery of a similarly wounded woman provides a very different supernatural mechanism from a witch whose sleeping body remains immobile while her animal double travels outside it.

Once again, the witch is not a single supernatural species. She is a point at which different European theories of personhood, soul, transformation and supernatural agency intersect.

The Witch and the Dead

Witchcraft also repeatedly approaches the boundary between living and dead.

European magical traditions made use of graves, bones, corpse materials and the perceived powers of the dead. Necromantic practices sought knowledge or assistance from deceased persons. Conversely, individuals considered dangerous during life could remain dangerous after death.

This creates one of the most important intersections between European witchcraft and vampire traditions.

In some regions the suspected witch could become a dangerous corpse. Elsewhere characteristics normally associated with witches and revenants overlap so strongly that classification becomes difficult. The same cultural logic that explains a living person’s ability to leave the body, steal vitality or assume animal form can continue to operate after physical death.

The question “Can a witch become a vampire?” therefore has no universal European answer. In particular regional traditions, however, witchcraft and revenant belief unquestionably intersect.

The vampire and the witch are not separate boxes. Along their historical margins, they repeatedly bleed into one another.

How Europe Created “The Witch”

By the beginning of the early modern period, European culture possessed numerous supernatural and magical traditions that could be brought together:

The Night Predator — strix, striga and related beings.

The Night Presser — Mahr, Mara, Alp, Trude and related nightmare beings.

The Exteriorized Witch — the living person’s soul or double operating outside the body.

The Shapeshifter — human, animal, double and spirit merging.

The Agricultural Predator — thief of milk, fertility and productive vitality.

The Magical Practitioner — healer, diviner, curser and counter-magician.

The Night Traveler — women riding with Diana, Herodias or supernatural companies.

The Sexual Supernaturalist — encounters involving incubi, succubi and other spirits.

The Heretic — the theological enemy of Christian orthodoxy.

The Devil-Worshipper — participant in pact, Sabbath and demonic conspiracy.

These traditions did not originate together.

But increasingly they could be interpreted together.

That convergence produced the early modern European witch complex.

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The Witch Hunts: When Magic Became Conspiracy

This synthesis had lethal consequences.

If a person merely harmed a neighbor through magic, the alleged crime was terrible but essentially local. If that same act proved membership in a secret society allied with Satan, the implications changed completely.

A dead cow could become evidence of diabolism. A sexual dream could become evidence of an incubus. A nocturnal experience could become a journey to the Sabbath. A traditional charm could become evidence of demonic cooperation. The imagined witch was no longer simply someone who possessed dangerous powers. She could be construed as a participant in a supernatural conspiracy directed against Christian society itself.

Judicial systems, theological assumptions, local disputes, social tensions, genuine folk beliefs and coerced testimony interacted differently across Europe. Consequently there was no single European witch hunt any more than there was a single European witch.

Modern historical research estimates that approximately 40,000–60,000 people were executed for witchcraft in Europe, primarily between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. Burning at the stake was common in parts of continental Europe, particularly within the Holy Roman Empire, but it was by no means the universal method of execution.

In England, convicted witches were normally hanged, while in Scotland they were commonly strangled at the stake before their bodies were burned. The popular image of tens of thousands of witches all being burned alive therefore considerably simplifies a much more varied historical reality.

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The Witch Hunts are NOT something of the past…

It is tempting to regard the persecution of alleged witches as a closed chapter of European history, but witchcraft remains a matter of criminal law and sometimes life and death in the twenty-first century. In a number of countries, witchcraft, sorcery, “black magic,” or the alleged harmful use of supernatural powers is still prohibited, while elsewhere fortune-telling and related practices remain criminalized.

Saudi Arabia has executed people for witchcraft and sorcery in the twenty-first century, Afghanistan has reintroduced the death penalty for sorcery under Taliban rule, and countries including Cameroon, the Central African Republic and Tanzania retain criminal provisions concerning witchcraft.

The reverse legal response is equally revealing: several countries have made accusing another person of witchcraft an offense, precisely because such accusations can lead to persecution and violence. India, for example, has introduced anti-witch-hunting legislation in several states.

The long history of witchcraft legislation has therefore not simply ended; its legal form has changed. Whereas older European laws often treated supernatural power itself as a punishable reality, later legislation increasingly reframed it as fraud, while some modern states criminalize either the supposed practice or the accusation.

The witch hunt, in other words, belongs not only to history: the struggle over who may be defined as a “witch,” and what society may legally do to such a person, continues today.

For a country-by-country historical overview, see our detailed article: Laws Against Witchcraft in the 21st Century.

The Witch After the Witch Trials

The decline of large-scale witch prosecution did not cause the supernatural witch to disappear.

She survived in folklore.

This becomes exceptionally clear in nineteenth-century collections from Germany, Central Europe, Scandinavia, the Baltic region, Poland and the Slavic world. Here we again encounter the Hexe as night attacker, Mahr, shapeshifter, milk thief, weather manipulator, supernatural double and dangerous village figure.

These traditions are historically invaluable precisely because they do not always resemble the sophisticated demonology of the Malleus Maleficarum.

The Devil may recede while the nightmare remains. The Sabbath may disappear while the witch still enters the bedroom. The theological conspiracy may vanish while cattle still mysteriously lose their milk. Beneath the demonological superstructure, older and more localized supernatural models continued to live.

The Nineteenth-Century Rediscovery of the Witch

The nineteenth century simultaneously transformed the witch again.

Romanticism, folklore studies, comparative mythology, archaeology, occultism and an increasing fascination with Europe’s pre-Christian religions encouraged writers and scholars to look behind the demonological witch for something older.

The witch could now be reimagined as a remnant of pagan religion, custodian of folk knowledge, representative of suppressed female spirituality, practitioner of ancient magic, or survivor of an underground religious tradition.

Leland’s writings belong to this intellectual environment. So, eventually, did Margaret Murray’s witch-cult hypothesis.

Although many historical claims produced during this period would later be challenged, this reinterpretation accomplished something culturally profound.

For centuries “witch” had predominantly been an accusation.

Increasingly, people began to claim the word for themselves.

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Margaret Murray and the Witch-Cult Controversy

Margaret Murray’s famous witch-cult hypothesis remains one of the most controversial attempts to explain European witchcraft. In The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) and The God of the Witches (1931), she argued that behind at least part of the material preserved in witch trials lay the remains of an older pre-Christian religion.

Her reconstruction of a highly organized and remarkably uniform underground cult has been heavily criticized, and many of its specific claims have not survived later historical scrutiny. Yet the rejection of Murray’s complete model should not be confused with the disappearance of the historical problem she attempted to explain.

Long before Murray, European sources repeatedly associated nocturnal companies of women with Diana, Herodias, or other supernatural female rulers.

Medieval ecclesiastical authors condemned beliefs that women traveled by night with Diana; Burchard of Worms described women crossing great distances upon animals with their goddess, while the Canon Episcopi tradition attacked the belief that certain women joined Diana or Herodias during nocturnal journeys and served their supernatural mistress.

Later medieval evidence continued to associate Diana with nocturnal societies, including a Milanese inquisitorial case of 1390 in which a woman reportedly acknowledged belonging to the Company of Diana and receiving the goddess’s blessings.

Such evidence does not prove Murray’s model of a single organized witch religion surviving intact across Europe. It does, however, make an equally sweeping opposite conclusion problematic.

Between the hypothetical pan-European witch-cult and the assumption that the entire religious dimension of witchcraft was a fabrication of demonologists lies a large and insufficiently simple historical territory: localized survivals, nocturnal cults and companies, ecstatic or exteriorized journeys, folk-magical practices, supernatural female leaders, and older religious concepts that could subsequently be translated into the Christian language of demons, Devil worship, and the witches’ Sabbath.

Murray may have attempted to connect too many of these fragments into a single system, but the fragments themselves cannot be dismissed merely because her reconstruction became academically unfashionable.

Her twentieth-century influence was in any case immense. Murray changed the question. Instead of asking only why Europeans imagined servants of Satan, she asked whether Christian demonology might sometimes have been superimposed upon older indigenous traditions.

That question profoundly influenced popular conceptions of witchcraft and provided an important intellectual bridge to Gerald Gardner and the emergence of Wicca. Gardner’s Witchcraft Today (1954), for which Murray herself wrote the foreword, appeared in a cultural environment in which the witch could consequently be reimagined not merely as the demonologist’s criminal, but as the possible inheritor—or modern reclaimer—of a suppressed religious past.

Gerald Gardner and the Birth of Modern Wicca

Modern Wicca emerged in Britain during the twentieth century, particularly through the work of Gerald Gardner and the religious movement that developed around him.

Wicca drew upon multiple streams rather than simply preserving a medieval witches’ religion unchanged. Ceremonial magic, occultism, folklore, contemporary ideas about ancient pagan religion, the witch-cult theories associated with Margaret Murray, ritual experimentation, naturism, and other currents contributed to the environment in which Gardnerian Wicca emerged.

This does not make Wicca somehow “inauthentic.”

Religions do not require prehistoric continuity to be religions.

The historically important point is that Wicca represents another transformation of the witch rather than the uncomplicated survival of every witch tradition described in earlier centuries.

The change is extraordinary.

The medieval and early modern witch was overwhelmingly an identity attributed to somebody by others: neighbor, priest, demonologist, inquisitor or judge. In modern religious witchcraft, witch could become a deliberately chosen and positively valued identity.

Accusation became reclamation.

Wicca Is Not the Same as Witchcraft

Modern witchcraft should not be reduced to Wicca either.

Wicca is a specific family of modern Pagan religious traditions. Contemporary people identifying as witches may instead practice traditional witchcraft, regional folk magic, occult magic, modern stregheria, reconstructionist traditions, solitary witchcraft, eclectic magical systems, or practices having little relationship to Wicca.

The modern witch is therefore once again plural.

Curiously, this brings us back to where the history began.

There was never one European witch.

The European Witch as a Convergence

The history of European witchcraft becomes clearer once we abandon the search for a single origin.

The strix does not explain everything.

Diana does not explain everything.

The Mahr does not explain everything.

Village magic does not explain everything.

The Devil does not explain everything.

Nor does Wicca.

Each belongs to a different part of an enormous historical network. At particular moments these traditions met, merged, borrowed one another’s vocabulary, or were forcibly joined by outside interpreters.

A supernatural night predator could become a witch. A living woman could become a Mahr. A healer could become a suspected sorcerer. An animal double could become evidence of shapeshifting. A nocturnal company could become a Sabbath. A local spirit could become a demon. Agricultural misfortune could become maleficium. Maleficium could become heresy. Heresy could become Satanic conspiracy.

Centuries later the process reversed direction. Folklorists, occultists and modern Pagans dismantled the demonological witch and searched among its fragments for older magical and religious traditions.

This is why asking “Where did witches come from?” has no simple answer.

The European witch did not come from one place.

She emerged where many different worlds met.

European Witchcraft: Frequently Asked Questions

What is a witch?

Historically there is no single definition. The word can refer to a practitioner of magic, an alleged worker of harmful sorcery, a supernatural night attacker, a shapeshifter, a folk-magical specialist, a figure constructed by Christian demonology, or a modern person consciously identifying with witchcraft. The meaning depends upon period, language and region.

Where does the word “witch” come from?

English witch derives from Old English wicce and wicca, traditionally referring respectively to female and male practitioners. Its precise deeper etymology remains debated. It should not be assumed that the English word describes every European magical practitioner equally well.

Were European witches originally pagans?

Some traditions later incorporated into European witchcraft unquestionably preserve or reflect pre-Christian religious and folkloric material. This does not demonstrate that all accused witches belonged to a single surviving pagan religion.

Did witches really worship the Devil?

Christian demonologists increasingly claimed that witches entered into relationships or pacts with the Devil. Whether individual accused people actually understood themselves in these terms is a separate historical question. Trial testimony must be evaluated within the context of interrogation, theology, judicial procedure and local belief.

What is the difference between a witch and a cunning person?

Cunning folk were commonly consulted for healing, divination, finding stolen property, protection and counter-magic. A witch was more often accused of causing harm. In actual communities, however, the distinction could become blurred because someone believed capable of removing magic might also be suspected of causing it.

What is a strega?

Strega is an Italian term for a witch. It belongs to a linguistic family ultimately connected with Latin strix, a supernatural nocturnal predator. The historical development of the word does not mean that every Italian strega retained all characteristics of the ancient strix.

What is a sorgin?

Sorgin is the Basque term commonly translated as “witch.” Basque sorgin traditions developed within a distinctive indigenous cultural and supernatural landscape and should not automatically be reduced to the demonological witch described by inquisitors.

What is a bosorka or boszorkány?

These Central and Eastern European witch terms belong to a complex in which the human magical practitioner can overlap with the night attacker, shapeshifter, milk thief, supernatural double and other predatory figures.

What is the connection between witches and the Strix?

The ancient strix was a nocturnal predator particularly associated with attacks on humans, including infants. Related terminology developed into later words for witches in several European languages. This represents one important historical strand of European witchcraft, not the origin of every witch tradition.

Why were witches believed to fly at night?

European traditions of supernatural nocturnal travel are old and diverse. Medieval texts describe women who believed themselves to ride at night with Diana or Herodias. Later demonology incorporated supernatural flight into the witches’ Sabbath complex.

What is the connection between witches and Diana?

Medieval ecclesiastical texts describe beliefs about women traveling at night with Diana and a company of women. Diana subsequently became important in later interpretations of Italian witchcraft, most famously in Charles Godfrey Leland’s Aradia.

What was the witches’ Sabbath?

The witches’ Sabbath was an alleged nocturnal gathering at which witches were believed to meet, practice magic, feast, dance, engage in sexual activity, worship or meet the Devil, and participate in inversions of Christian ritual. The stereotype developed gradually and incorporated several older traditions.

What is an akelarre?

Akelarre is a Basque word that became strongly associated with witches’ gatherings and the Sabbath. Its historical and linguistic background is more complicated than the familiar image of a Satanic witches’ meeting suggests.

Why is the goat associated with witchcraft?

Goats carried multiple symbolic meanings in European cultures. Christian demonology increasingly connected goat-like imagery with lust, demons and the Devil, while local and pre-Christian traditions could assign goats very different associations. These layers should not be treated as identical.

Were witches believed to have sex with demons?

Yes. Medieval and early modern demonologists devoted considerable attention to alleged sexual relations between witches and incubi or other demonic beings. Such descriptions must be distinguished from evidence that actual magical practitioners understood their experiences in the same theological terms.

What is the connection between witches and incubi and succubi?

Both traditions concern supernatural interaction with human beings, particularly during the night. Demonologists incorporated incubi and succubi into witch theory and sometimes presented sexual relationships with demons as fundamental to witchcraft.

Could a witch become a Mahr or nightmare spirit?

In some European folk traditions, yes. A nocturnal oppressor identified elsewhere as a Mahr, Mara or related being could be understood as the exteriorized manifestation of a living person or witch.

Were witches believed to leave their bodies at night?

Numerous European traditions describe the soul, spirit, double or animal form of a person leaving the physical body during sleep or trance. Such concepts are particularly important for understanding the overlap between witches, nightmare beings and shapeshifters.

Why were witches accused of stealing milk?

Milk represented both material wealth and biological productivity. Witchcraft traditions frequently describe the supernatural transfer of milk, butter-making ability, fertility or livestock vitality from one household to another. The witch effectively steals productive power.

Could witches turn into animals?

European folklore frequently attributes animal transformation to witches, but the mechanism varies. The witch may physically transform, project an animal double, send out her soul in animal form, or work through a familiar spirit.

What is the relationship between witches and vampires?

The categories overlap in several regional European traditions. Witches can attack vitality, blood, breath, fertility or sleeping victims, while persons feared as witches may sometimes become dangerous dead. The relationship varies considerably by region.

Could a witch become a vampire after death?

Some European traditions associate persons suspected of witchcraft with dangerous postmortem return. This is not a universal rule, but it forms an important part of the historical witch–revenant intersection.

Were all accused witches women?

No. Women constituted a large majority of those prosecuted in many European regions, but men were also accused and executed. The gender balance varied substantially according to place and period.

How reliable is the Malleus Maleficarum as a source for historical witchcraft?

It is an extremely important source for late-medieval demonology and the intellectual construction of witchcraft. It should not be read uncritically as a neutral ethnographic account of the beliefs and practices of ordinary Europeans.

Did medieval witches form covens?

Evidence for organized groups matching the later standardized concept of the coven is considerably more problematic than popular representations suggest. Accusations of collective witchcraft, supernatural assemblies and conspiracies existed, but these cannot automatically be equated with the organized covens of modern witchcraft.

Was there an ancient European witch religion?

Europe preserved numerous pre-Christian religious, magical and folkloric traditions, some of which became associated with witches. Evidence does not support reducing all European witchcraft to one continuous, organized underground religion surviving unchanged from antiquity, but there is a lot of anecdotical historical proof some form of Diana cult survived at least until the 19th century.

Is Aradia an authentic witchcraft text?

Charles Godfrey Leland presented Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches as material received through his Italian informant Maddalena. Its origins, degree of editorial intervention and relationship to genuine Italian folklore remain subjects of debate. Individual elements should therefore be examined independently rather than accepting or rejecting the entire text as a unit.

What is Stregheria?

Today Stregheria can refer to modern religious or magical traditions drawing upon Italian witchcraft, folk magic and related material. Modern Stregheria should be distinguished from the entire historical range of Italian practices described as stregoneria or associated with the strega.

What is Wicca?

Wicca is a modern Pagan religion that developed primarily in twentieth-century Britain and became internationally influential. Gerald Gardner was central to its early public development.

Is Wicca an ancient religion?

Wicca in its recognizable modern form is a twentieth-century religion. It incorporates and reinterprets older magical, folkloric, occult and Pagan material, but this is different from demonstrating the continuous institutional survival of Wicca from antiquity or the Middle Ages.

What is the difference between Wicca and witchcraft?

Wicca is a particular modern religious tradition. Witchcraft is a much broader category encompassing historical accusations, folk magic, supernatural beliefs, modern magical practice and numerous traditions that are not Wiccan.

Does traditional European witchcraft still exist?

European folk-magic traditions, regional customs, modern traditional witchcraft, reconstructed practices and inherited magical traditions continue in various forms. Claims of direct unbroken transmission from a particular ancient or medieval tradition must be evaluated individually.