Witchcraft

Witchcraft (from wicca). The belief that human affairs and features of the environment can be ordered, controlled, and changed by skilled practitioners whose powers are usually believed to be innate. Witchcraft is closely associated with magic, but its techniques are derived from within or given by a supernatural agent, rather than (as often with magic) learnt. The belief that the agent was the devil led to ferocious persecution of witches in medieval Christian Europe. Although witchcraft thus has had, in the past, a strongly negative connotation, it has been reassessed more recently in increasingly positive terms, in two main ways. First, anthropologists have described its positive role in small-scale societies, in healing, reducing hostilities and social tensions, reinforcing social order, supplying plausible meanings to inexplicable events, providing surrogate action in crises (e.g. the evil eye). Second, the increasing emancipation of women from the control of men in religions has led to a reevaluation of the role of women as witches (since women have always far outnumbered men as witches), and to the postulation that ‘witchcraft’ represents an unbroken religious tradition which men opposed because it empowered women. This tradition is often known as Wicca (or Wicce, from the Old English, the root of which means ‘to bend’ or ‘shape’), but it is embedded in a wider neo-Paganism. According to Starhawk, a leader of the recovery of Wicca, ‘Followers of Wicca seek their inspiration in pre-Christian sources, European folklore, and mythology. They consider themselves priests and priestesses of an ancient European shamanistic nature religion that worships a goddess who is related to the ancient Mother Goddess in her three aspects of Maiden, Mother and Crone.’