Witchcraft. Encyclopedia Of American Folklore

The use of magic to cause harm; more broadly, the practice of magic. The words
“sorcery” and “witchcraft” usually connote evil intent. Magic, however, can he helpful as
well as harmful. Before the advent of the scientific method, people all over the world
believed that an action performed on one thing could cause a similar effect on another
thing. According to the British anthropologist Edward B.Tylor, this “sincere but
fallacious” belief came from the confusion of the ideal (imaginary) and the real. James
George Frazer, also a British anthropologist, coined the term “sympathetic magic” for
this notion, because the two disparate things—which had once been in contact or
consisted of one thing meant to represent the other—were expected to act in sympathy
with each other. Frazer differentiated magic from religion on the principle that magic is
diought to work direcdy, rather like technology, while in religion spirits are invoked to
mediate the process. This can, however, be a difficult distinction to make.
It follows from Frazer’s analysis diat the practice of magic ought to be democratic: It
should work for anyone. And, in fact, many people experiment with do-it-yourself magic.
Whether or not a person has ever done so, everyone at least recognizes the purpose of
image magic, in which a doll, representing an enemy, is attacked with a pin, or a picture
of the enemy is torn or burned, because the symbolism is both obvious and vivid.
Evidence of such practices is to be found in most collections of American superstitions,
and knowledge of them is also conveyed through the media of popular culture.
Such malicious rituals, fortunately, often fail in their intended purpose. However, in
America, as in other parts of the world, it is believed that certain individuals who
specialize in magic are better able than the rest of us to make it work. After the Middle Ages in early-modern Europe, the Catholic Church equated the practice of magic with the
power of the devil—taking what has been magic, according to Frazer’s definition, and
turning it into something that corresponded to his idea of religion. A layer of beliefs in
accordance with those of the Catholic Church’s position was superimposed on the
existing strata of folklore, and, with time, these religious ideas became part of the popular
tradition. In Catholic countries, witches were considered heretics and were persecuted by
the Inquisition in a craze that lasted from the 15th through the 17th centuries.
In Britain and in New England, heresy was not an issue, and witches had to be
convicted of particular crimes such as theft and assault. The notion that a mark on a
witch’s body confirms a (private) association with the devil was more common in British
than in European tradition. Toward the end of the witch craze (1692–1693), accusations
in Danvers, Massachusetts led to the infamous Salem Witch Trials (see Demos 1982). As
George Lyman Kittredge has shown (Kittredge 1972; see Leventhal 1976), belief in
witchcraft was then an integral part of a prescientific worldview that included belief in
such occult practices as divination and astrology. Accusations of witchcraft continued in
the American colonies during the 18th century and sporadically thereafter.
In addition to witches, colonial America harbored several other kinds of practitioners
of magic (Leventhal 1976:107–125). Among the Germans in Pennsylvania were a few
magi, men in the Renaissance scholarly tradition who sought to understand “natural
magic,” and many more brauchers, or “powwow doctors,” who used incantations and
other magical practices for divination, to treat sickness, and to ward off evil. This
tradition, which relies on such books as John Hohman’s The Long-Lost Friend (The Sixth
and Seventh Books of Moses, in contrast, are considered diabolical), still exists. The
British counterpart of brauchers, called “cunning-folk” or “white witches,” consisted of
men and women who claimed to be able to ward off and cast spells, find lost or stolen
property, and tell fortunes. They generally claimed not to be witches, but rather that they
worked against witchcraft. Slaves brought with them African magical practices (one of
the Salem witches was an African from Jamaica) and conjure doctors who sought, on
behalf of their patients, to combat them.
The most important characteristic of witches in traditional beliefs is the damage that is
attributed to them: A witch can be blamed when people or animals sicken or die, when
crops fail, or for any other sort of bad luck, including a faithless lover and inclement
weather. They are thought to steal milk from cows and to prevent the butter in the churn
from “coming.” Evidence such as mysterious balls of hair, and feather crowns in the
pillow of the bewitched, point to witchcraft, as do fits (convulsions) that seem to result
from the beating or pinching of an invisible attacker.
Traditional remedies for these problems include identifying and harming (often
magically) the witch and protecting the victim or the house, stable, or churn with an
amulet. Iron knives, horseshoes, and silver coins are popular amulets. A pin in a chair is
supposed to immobilize any witch who sits there. Objects such as sieves with their many
holes, and brooms with their many straws, are thought to keep the witch busy counting (it
may be significant, though, that European witches fly on brooms, and those of central
Africa fly in winnowing baskets that look very much like sieves, so counting may not the
the whole explanation). Both salt and mustard seeds are numerous and are also irritants.
The Bible invokes divine protection and, in addition, has to’o many words to count.
Turning one’s clothes inside-out is thought to thwart witchcraft. Bottles are used to ward off and also to trap witches. Witches are believed to be impervious to ordinary bullets,
but they can be shot—killed or banished, both in person and in effigy—with silver ones.
It is difficult to restrict the idea of witchcraft to harmful magic because the same
principles apply to helpful magic: As in many other arenas, one person’s help is another
person’s harm. Witches are thought to use sympathetic magic against their victims, and
the victims—or their representatives—use the same methods both to counteract the
witchcraft and to attack the witch. Witches are sometimes identified, in accordance with
the principles of contagious magic, by means of their victims—for example, enclosing
the victim’s urine in a bottle inflicts strangury on the witch, and burning a bewitched
animal also burns the witch.
As noted above, it is generally recognized that the religious, demonological aspects of
witchcraft represent a layer of beliefs that has been superimposed on popular traditions of
sympathetic magic. What has not been noticed is that the popular tradition itself consists
of two strands: one of sympathetic magical practices, which is used by witches and also
by cunning folk and witch doctors, and another of bizarre narrative motifs. Witches in
Europe and America are the subject of persistent legends, undoubtedly based on ancient
beliefs, that credit them with peculiar powers. In the night, a sleeper is saddled, bridled,
and ridden by the witch. This phenomenon is the origin of the word “nightmare” (this
“mare” originally meant a goblin, not a horse) and is also the source of the phrases
“witches’ stirrups” and “mare’s nests” for tangles in the hair. In one legend, the victim is
able to bridle the witch, thus turning her into a horse, which he has shod; the witchwoman is discovered, with horseshoes nailed to her feet, in the morning.
In addition to riding on sleepers, witches are thought to fly not only up chimneys but
also through keyholes. They are said to travel in eggshells, causing storms and other
mischief (so it is a good idea to crush all eggshells). The ability to fly and the ability to
change shape into an animal are points diat witches share with shamans. In one popular
legend, a witch or a pair of witches smear themselves with salve and fly out into the
night. They are witnessed by a man who tries to copy them but makes a mistake and gets
into trouble. Witches are supposed to be able to change themselves into animals, and if
diey are harmed in their animal form, the injury appears on the human. After the paw of a
certain cat is cut off, a woman’s hand is found to be missing. A man shoots a hare diat
stole milk from his cow and then discovers a neighbor with a similar wound. Especially
in New Mexico, witches (brujos) take the form of owls. Especially cats, but also hares
and owls, have been cast in the role of witches’ familiars, demons diat associate with
them.
In contrast to the Inquisition’s notion that witches meet together in covens, traditional
American witches are usually portrayed as loners. The idea that they are allied with the
devil is evident in oral tradition primarily in instructions for becoming a witch, which
often include cursing God in rituals involving sunrise, crossroads, circles, threefold
repetitions, and the like. Knowledge of white witchcraft is passed from one practitioner to
another, sometimes only between those of opposite sexes, sometimes from parent to
child.
The devil as a religious figure is less of a presence in African American witchcraft
(called “conjury” and “hoodoo”). Instead, this tradition focuses on the power of the dead
as manifested in such evocative things as graveyard dirt, bones (especially bones of
ritually killed black cats), and rabbits’ feet. In an American witch legend with African antecedents, the witch takes off her skin before she flies away. When a man, observing
this, rubs the skin with salt and pepper, the witch cannot put it back on and either sickens
or makes a bargain with the man so he will wash the skin.
Nevertheless, in the American South it can be difficult to distinguish European
witchcraft from African conjury: They were similar to start with, and each has borrowed
from the other. Native Americans also have traditions of witchcraft, with witches that fly,
take on animal forms, cause various kinds of trouble, and have to be ritually overcome.
The same is true of Latin American witches and, although the evidence is scant, probably
also of Asian ones—for example, Japanese foxes are thought to be able to bewitch and
also to change into human form. This unanimity may be the product of an ancient set of
beliefs about supernatural powers, which crystalized into a rather stereotyped pattern in
Europe and into other patterns, unaffected by the Inquisition and its Protestant
counterpart, elsewhere.
Today, while no “rational” person would admit to believing in the efficacy of
witchcraft, there are still amateur and professional spell casters. Moreover, there is
considerable interest in cults, particularly in satanism, which, whether practiced or only
imagined, continues to be publicized by tabloids and horror films and even by respectable
news media. Most of its motifs derive not from folklore, but rather from the Inquisition
and other formal proceedings against witches.
The image of a witch as an ugly crone, which goes back to the 14th century, is
immortalized in well-known films, such as Snow White (1937) and The Wizard of Oz
(1939), and it is revived every year in Halloween costumes and decorations, so all
children know that witches are scary. More recently, the image is the witch as a beautiful
woman—for example, in the play and film Bell Book and Candle (by John van Druten,
[1951]) and in the television series Bewitched (1964–1972). Fictional books about
witchcraft are popular, especially with girls aged eight to twelve; their appeal seems to be
the idea of having the power to do what one wants and to revenge the wrongs one has
suffered. Girls, who also tell fortunes and entice spirits at slumber parties, are much more
exposed to folklore of the supernatural than boys are. This difference in levels of
awareness promises to prolong the stereotype that witches are usually women.
Feminists have responded to the flagrantly misogynistic idea of the Euro-American
witch by insisting that witches were falsely condemned: They were wise women (white
witches) persecuted by hostile agencies. Feminism is also prominent in the goddessworshiping religion of self-proclaimed witches, founded by Gerald Gardner and called
Wicca after the Old English word for witch. Wiccans and other New Age pagans are
highly social, meeting regularly for celebrations, and most are conscientious, loath to use
magic to do harm. In that respect, they resemble the cunning folk more than the
stereotypical witch.
The idea, so attractive to feminists, that witches were part of a secret pre-Christian
fertility cult has been around since the middle of the 19th century. Until quite recently,
the evidence for it was entirely fabricated. For example, Charles Godfrey Leland’s
Aradia, The Gospel of Witches (1899) is based on material from a single informant who
was determined to tell the author what he wanted to hear. The evidence in Margaret
Murray’s book The Witch Cult in Western Europe (1921) has long been known to be
inadequate. Nevertheless, Murray’s entry on witchcraft, which popularized her belief in
the fertility cult, was printed in the Encyclopedia Britannica from 1929 until 1969,
influencing a great many people, including such scholars as Robert Graves and Aldous
Huxley. The historian Carlo Ginzburg has recently brought the idea of a fertility cult, this
time directed against witches, into the realm of scholarly respectability (Simpson 1994).
Christine Goldberg
References
Demos, John. 1982. Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Goldberg, Christine. 1974. Traditional American Witch Legends: A Catalog. Indiana Folklore
7:77–108.
Hand, Wayland. 1980. Magical Medicine. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 215–237.
Kittredge, George Lyman. [1929] 1972. Witchcraft in Old and New England. New York:
Atheneum.
Leventhal, Herbert. 1976. In the Shadow of the Enlightenment: Occultism and Renaissance Science
in Eighteenth-Century America. New York: New York University Press.
Puckett, Newbell Niles. [1926] 1975. Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro. New York: Negro
Universities Press.
Russell, Jeffrey B. 1980. A History of Witchcraft: Sorcerers, Heretics, andPagans. London:
Thames and Hudson.
Simpson, Jacqueline. 1994. Margaret Murray: Who Believed Her, and Why? Folklore 105:89–96.

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