A History of Witchcraft
Please understand as a preliminary note that this is, on the whole, the "folk" history of Witchcraft. Some of the more famous and easily refuted errors have been removed—the estimate of 9 million witches killed during the Burning Times, for example—but a number of aspects of this history remain controversial in the larger pagan and historical communities. It is not the purpose of this article to sort out all of the debates surrounding this subject, just to present the commonly accepted (within Wicca) history, with caveats pointing out where some of the controversies lie.
Witchcraft, like all nature religions, has its origins in the ancient practices of prehistoric humans. In Paleolithic times, humans began to conceive of a world of spirits, of an existence beyond death. Their first deity was a Goddess identified with the fertility of the earth and the source of all life. The dead were often buried in fetal position and covered with pollen to symbolize a return to Her womb, hopefully for rebirth. Another very early goddess was the Lady of the Beasts, who governed the lives of animals.
The concept of animism, the idea that everything that exists has a spirit, was an early development. Out of this grew the first sympathetic magic--hunters would pray to appease the spirits of the animals they hunted, and would actually perform rituals in which they identified with those animals. The powers of those animals could thereby be gained for the humans as well. These practices became the core of shamanism. Women, typically more involved in gathering than hunting, developed the lore of herbalism, as well as the women’s mysteries attached to the moon and the menstrual and birth cycles.
As people began to settle in cities and develop agriculture, the gods took on new forms. The Goddess became the Mother of Grain, usually one of the first crops created. The God, formerly seen in the spirits of food animals, became connected to the grain itself, retaining his miraculous cycle of death and rebirth that became the core of many mystery cults. In cities, political powers naturally developed to govern the distribution of resources among larger groups of people. For them, religion became more tied to codes of proper conduct, which would later become the first laws, and to propitiation of the spirit world through offerings.
At this point a shift began to take place from a generally egalitarian way of life to a more patriarchal one. (The idea sometimes put forward of a matriarchy, similar to a mirror of the harsh patriarchy of later times, probably never happened.) There are different theories of why this took place. Many blame the arrival in Europe of the Indo-European (Aryan) tribes, but this does not address why the change took place elsewhere, nor how the Indo-Europeans themselves became patriarchal. Starhawk theorizes that the shift was connected to the shift to the governmental system of kingship, and that the Goddess fell out of favor as over-irrigated lands became barren (as it would appear that She had withdrawn Her favor). Still others have said that women, at first protected as a city’s most valuable resource, were gradually restricted to the point where they held no power of their own, and were taken for granted by their "protectors." In any case, political power came to rest mostly with men, and the Gods gradually became more important in common worship than the Goddesses.
For a long time this was a stable situation. Typically there would be a city religion, in which all major local deities were accounted for and the focus was on offerings and proper behavior; and one or more mystery cults, which maintained more of the old practices. These would often revolve around the acknowledgement of spirits of nature (such as elves, nymphs, or the fey), prophesy, the practice of magic, some ecstatic practice of trance, and symbolic death and rebirth. In Greece, for example, the rites of Eleusis for Demeter and Persephone, the Orphic mysteries of Dionysus, and certain cults of Artemis or even Zeus fit this description. The two strata of religion were generally tolerant of each other, certain minor skirmishes aside.
The advent of Christianity changed this balance dramatically. At first, when it was simply a faction of Judaism, the effect was minimal. However, through the work of Paul and some other early Christians, the new cult took on more and more Greek converts. Christianity to this day bears the mark of the Greeks, as the virgin birth, the concepts of Hell and Heaven, the need for redemption of the "sinful" physical world, and the use of incense (for example) are all interpretations of Greek ideas, not inherent parts of Judaism. When Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in 313 CE and made it the official religion of the Roman Empire, Rome’s already established lust for conquest also became a zeal for converting foreigners to the new faith, a concept that was to become ingrained into Christianity.
As first the Empire and then the Catholic Church (of Rome) spread Christianity, often by force, across Europe and later parts of Asia, Africa, and North America, some pagan cults and practices were destroyed--as, indeed, were entire tribes. Others survived by moving underground, professing belief in Christianity while preserving what they could of the old practices. For their part, Catholic priests and monks were often happy to incorporate some of the sites and practices of the indigenous faiths, to an extent, in order to smooth the transition to Christianity. Most modern celebrations of Christmas (whose date was deliberately placed near the Winter Solstice, an important date in many religions, to encourage conversion) and Easter (how important is the bunny to the idea of crucifixion?) and many pieces of "folklore" are the result of this blending/hiding. The remnants of Druidry were hidden in the Irish Catholic Church; Italian stregheria, Mexican brujeria, and African voudoun (as Santeria) were also preserved in this way. As time passed, many people forgot the parts of the old faiths that were hidden, and became folk-witches who practiced magic and conversed with the spirits or fey while genuinely believing themselves to be Christians.
There is controversy over the extent to which this took place. Many scholars believe that memory of the pagan ways died out entirely, leaving only the folk-witches. Others believe that some always remained who remembered the gods who had come before--and in fact, some places, such as certain pockets in Eastern Europe, continued some overt pagan practices into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
In the High Middle Ages, the Church began to lose its hold over the political powers of Europe. In fact, the rediscovery of much Greek and Roman lore fascinated Western Europeans, to the point where the pagan gods were as much decorated in song and art as the Christian one. Ceremonial magic became a new passion for the intellectual elite, blending a mystical brand of Christianity with Greek and Roman pagan practices and the Jewish Qabala. Possibly as a response, the hunts began.
The witch-hunts, called in witch-history The Burning Times, moved through Europe in waves in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. There are many theories as to why: to eradicate the vestiges of pagan faith; to reestablish the dominance of the Church; as an expedient way to be rid of political or personal enemies; to gain monies and lands for the Church; as a pure result of a general mood of hysteria. The exact number of people who died in the hunts is also unknown: it is generally agreed to be above 100,000 but below the nine million claimed in modern witch folklore. The percentage of those killed who actually had any connection to what we would consider pagan practice is also debated; certainly many, and by some accounts most or all, of those brought to trial were not actually practicing any sort of Craft or any other heresy. Undeniably, the hunts, of which the Inquisition was only the largest part, ravaged certain parts of Europe. In Germany the hunts were especially fierce, and in at least one city there was only one woman left alive. What remained of pagan traditions was probably damaged severely--some think it was eradicated entirely, though others disagree.
In the nineteenth century, there was a renewed interest in "spiritualism," including a rebirth of ceremonial magic. Among the important figures in this magical renaissance were Madame Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society; A.E. Waite, creator of the most popular modern Tarot deck; Eliphas Levi; Dion Fortune; and Aleister Crowley, who eventually became the head of the OTO. The Golden Dawn, the training ground for most of these, remains an influential spiritual body. Leland's books, the best known of which is _Aradia, Gospel of the Witches,_ and Margaret Murray put forward the theory that pagan "cults" had survived the Burning Times. There was a renewed interest in folklore, resulting in influential books like _The Golden Bough_ by Fraser and later _The White Goddess_ by Robert Graves. Modern scholars, strangely hesitant to admit the existence of any non-Christian Europeans, have dismissed most of these books as inaccurate.
The first witch to come "out of the broom closet" in modern times was Gerald Gardner, the creator of the Gardnerian tradition. Skeptics believe that his entire tradition was a creation, based on his knowledge of folklore, ceremonial magic (particularly Crowley's writings), and material written by Doreen Valiente, who once worked as his High Priestess. Others maintain that these influences were added to an existent witch tradition to "fill in the gaps" that had faded over the generations. According to Gardner, he came forward because of a fear that witchcraft was going to die out unless new people, those who had the needed talents but did not belong to the traditional witch families, were brought into the faith. Gradually, as the Gardnerian tradition spread and other witches came forward, the old laws against witchcraft were challenged and repealed. Another early tradition was Alexandrian, founded by Alex Sanders, who claimed to have received it from his grandmother but probably found a Gardnerian Book of Shadows and altered it to make it his own. There are other British traditions that claim not to have been derived from either of these, but to be genuine survivals of the old lore.
In America, early influential witches include Ray Buckland, a Gardnerian-initiated witch, and Z Budapest, a hereditary witch from Hungary who founded the feminist tradition called Dianic in America (although the term has a different meaning in Europe). In America, influences from many other cultures were added, as were the feminist and egalitarian ideals held here. There are many more eclectics in America than elsewhere, and many other rules of traditional craft have been relaxed.