page_title: European witchcraft
section_title: Position of the church
hierarchical_section_title: European witchcraft / Position of the church
caption_attribution_description: Dessins de Martin van Maële.
context_page_description: Belief in and practice of witchcraft in Europe can be traced to classical antiquity and has continuous history during the Middle Ages, culminating in the Early Modern witch hunts and giving rise to the fairy tale and popular culture "witch" stock character of modern times, as well as to the concept of the "modern witch" in Wicca and related movements of contemporary witchcraft.
  The topic is a complex amalgamation of the practices of folk healers, folk magic, ancient belief in sorcery in pagan Europe, Christian views on heresy, medieval and early modern practice of ceremonial magic and simple fiction in folklore and literature.
context_section_description: Witches were not localised Christian distortions of pagans but people alleged to have both the ability and the will to employ supernatural effects for malignant ends. This belief is familiar from other cultures, and was partly inherited from paganism. The belief that witches were originally purely benign does not derive from any early textual source. However, the view of witches as malignant did stem from blatant misogyny of the time. The earliest written reference to witches as such, from Ælfric's homilies, portrays them as malign. The tendency to perceive them as healers begins only in the 19th century, with Jules Michelet whose novel La Sorcière, published in 1862, first postulated a benign witch.
  It was in the Church's interest, as it expanded, to suppress all competing Pagan methodologies of magic. This could be done only by presenting a cosmology in which Christian miracles were legitimate and credible, whereas non-Christian ones were "of the devil". Hence the following law:
  We teach that every priest shall extinguish heathendom, and forbid wilweorthunga (fountain worship), and licwiglunga (incantations of the dead), and hwata (omens), and galdra (magic), and man worship, and the abominations that men exercise in various sorts of witchcraft, and in frithspottum (peace-enclosures) with elms and other trees, and with stones, and with many phantoms.
  — Source: 16th Canon law enacted under King Edgar, 10th century AD
  While the common people were aware of the difference between witches, who they considered willing to undertake evil actions, such as cursing, and cunning folk who avoided involvement in such activities, the Church attempted to blot out the distinction. In much the same way that culturally distinct non-Christian religions were all lumped together and termed merely "Pagan", so too was all magic lumped together as equally sinful and abhorrent. The Demonologie of James I explicitly condemns all magic-workers as equally guilty of the same crime against God.
caption: Illustration by Martin van Maële, of a Witches' Sabbath, in the 1911 edition of La Sorcière by Jules Michelet
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