My first experience with the idea of a witch was the Halloween archetype of a green woman with warts and a crooked nose, in a black pointy hat, stirring a bubbling cauldron. She sometimes flew on a broom over a full moon and was often in the company of a black cat. She is probably a descendant of Shakespeare's weird sisters in Macbeth. She is the forerunner of J.K. Rowling's wizards in Harry Potter, at least in their aesthetic (though there is a significant amount of synthesis with medieval sciences like alchemy and astrology that only laterally fall under the witchy category).
There are a few other identifications that overlap in places and repel in others. The one that evangelicals favor is the late medieval to enlightenment figure of the Satan worshiper. These women (and sometimes men) were said to have signed a contract selling their souls to the devil. They worshiped in diabolical sacraments and ate and sacrificed children. I've yet to read a good history on the subject of the witch trials, but my precursory reading suggests that the panic around this type of witch arose due to a mixture of political and religious issues. Probably the most famous historical example is the Salem witch trials, especially after the playwright Arthur Miller likened those events to the Communist panic of 1950's America in "The Crucible." It is likely that the Puritan notion of witches blended with folklore to make the Halloween witch, sanitized to remove Satan from the picture.
The last and most complicated type of witch is the term used by the Neo-Pagans to designate a practitioner of a new age spirituality, the strains of which are as diverse as the people who claim the title. It tends to be closely aligned with nature, the seasons, and folklore. At its most formal, this modern witchcraft attempts to reconstruct European pre-Christian religion. At its loosest, it becomes a kind of Instagram aesthetic, emphasizing herbs, crystals, and spiritual ties to nature.
So it seems to me there are three types: the Halloween witch, a creation of American consumerism borrowed from the folklore of the famous melting pot; literal Satanists, as they were conceived of and mythologized heightening in the Enlightenment; and the Neo-Pagan religion/spirituality.
While there is definite cross-pollination between all three, I feel it is not appropriate to use them interchangeably. A good deal of the blame for their confusion can be attributed to the Egyptologist Margaret Murray, who mistakenly conflated folk beliefs as a remnant of pre-Christian paganism that culminated in the witch trials. This has since been thoroughly debunked, and no serious historian gives it any credence. Still, it has lingered in the western consciousness and one will find on social media a spectrum running from harmless "witchcraft" involving observance of the seasons and respect for nature, with near-diabolical imagery of naked women dancing in a bacchanal around bonfires with horned goats. One may make a distinction here between white magic and black magic, but it is not a clearly defined one.
Things get tricky when you are a fantasist drawing from the Middle Ages. Because of the entanglement of the types of witches in the twentieth century, modern people tend to think that wise women and cunning men were one and the same with current Neo-Pagans, just misunderstood and maligned as the child-eating type. In reality, they were typical people, thoroughly immersed in the dominant Christian culture, who continued to use folkloric wisdom in fields where science was yet to tread. Hence, we have St. Hildegard with plenty of herbal folk remedies and recommendations about the healing properties of gems. Advances in technology have since dispersed the mysticism around such items, and we know they don't work in the way that medieval people believed. But that does not in any way cast them at odds with the Church of their day.
Similarly, in the medieval agricultural society, the turn of the seasons was an integral part of everyday life; and the universal significance of the calendar year naturally makes for a matching significance in the liturgical one. Far from being antithetical to Christianity, the coincidence in shared festivals and rituals only served to highlight God's careful hand in creation. Ostara, the spring equinox, falls around Easter and also Lady Day (the Feast of the Annunciation). The feasts of Saint Brigid, Candlemas, and Saint Blaise are the Christian triune fulfillment of Imbolc. And so on and so on.
It is this misunderstanding of the Incarnation that leads American Christianity to repel medieval Catholic practice, which is a shame. And the common ground of the Catholic stewardship of the earth along with reverence for the seasons could be a bridge between Neo-Paganism and Christianity. I have often said that if I weren't Catholic I would be a Pagan reconstructionist, and this is precisely why. The people before the time of Christ saw God folded into the world and reached for Him, for better or worse. They made a distinction between good and evil. And when the missionaries came, as Saint Patrick did in Irleand, they embraced the Good News and carried everything good that they knew of beforehand into the faith.
For "Christ plays in ten thousand places." Everything true, and good, and beautiful, we have in Him and by Him. If the sage medieval Catholics and rural Catholic populations of modern times share commonalities with modern witches, it is because they belonged to Him first.
+JMJ+
Photo by Jessica Furtney on Unsplash
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