witchcraft

witchcraft can take many forms. Anthropologists distinguish between ‘sorcery’, the manipulation of spells and potions, and ‘witchcraft’, supernatural aggression based on an innate power. There is also a distinction between the belief in an ability to do harm by magic, universal in European popular culture, and the more specific concept, developed into an elaborate mythology by church and state, of the witch whose power derived from a pact with Satan. Ireland provides, in the Kyteler case, a particularly well‐documented early example of a legal trial for witchcraft as devil worship. There are also a handful of later cases, notably those of Florence Newton, executed at Cork in 1661, and the nine people from Island Magee, Co. Antrim, imprisoned and pilloried in 1711. In general, however, Ireland, whether because of its peripheral location or the alternative outlets found for its communal tensions, largely escaped the great European witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries. (Bridget Cleary, burned to death by relatives in Co. Tipperary in 1895, is often referred to as a witch but was in fact attacked as a changeling, a simulacrum left behind when the real Bridget was supposedly abducted by the fairies.) Belief in witchcraft in the wider sense was common among both Catholics and Protestants. Means of inflicting harm included the evil eye, whose possessors brought bad luck on whatever they complimented, reversals of the normal procedures followed at holy wells, and the use of charms and potions.