All About Witches

Witches. All throughout the world, in cultures that have seemingly nothing to do with one another, the idea of witchcraft has been popping up for as long as there have been stories. There is a lot of overlap with vampires. …The first idea of witches may have also been the first vampires, referred to as “lillitu” or “lilims” in Ancient Sumeria. They could change shape into owls (a creature of the night that would later be replaced by bats), seduced men to feed off of them, and preyed on babies, either eating them or just killing them.

As October comes to a close, I want to cap things off by talking about witches. But I have to say, the concept of witchcraft is kind of weird. Werewolves and vampires can come in many forms, and even wendigos are surprisingly varied when you consider that they’re all exclusive to north America, but witchcraft is a subject that gets pretty bizarre when you start comparing different stories; you’d be forgiven for thinking that most versions don’t have anything to do with one another.

And in truth, some don’t, particularly anime witches who are really just girls in cute outfits with magical powers; a wizard, but female. And also more marketable. Although there may be some traits that come back to older ideas of witchcraft.

Okay, if we’re going to get anywhere trying to figure out witches, we need to go back. All the way back. To the very beginning.

I am of course talking about the Bible. Yes, I mentioned the lilitu of Ancient Sumeria earlier, but the lilitu acted more like ancient vampires than ancient witches, and unless you’re following a story where lilitu started out human and use witchcraft to become monsters, they really don’t quite fit the bill, even if there is some overlap. But if I get enough people in the comment section asking about it, I might talk about them more in the future.

No, I want to start with the biblical verse you are all probably familiar with: Exodus 22:18: “Though shalt not suffer a witch to live.”

Sounds simple enough – wait, what is a witch? Oh, it doesn’t say. Well, we all know from centuries of Roman Catholicism what a witch is, right? Those priests had a really long time to dedicate theological study to figure out what a witch is, didn’t they? A biblical witch is a woman (or rarely a man) who sells her soul to the devil for supernatural powers, right?

…No. That idea of witchcraft doesn’t show up anywhere in the Bible at all. Not the old testament, or the new, or even in any of the apocryphal texts, either. Selling your soul to the devil? Not in the Bible. The devil can give people magic powers? Not in the Bible. Witches being mostly female? Nope. Turns out, most of what we think of as a witch in terms of Judaism or Christianity has nothing to do with anything actually written in Jewish or Christian texts. It is mostly the result of mistranslations, misinterpretations, the Roman dole, and the published writings of a deranged, angry lunatic who nobody could stand.

So what was a witch according to Exodus? Well, looking at the context, the verses prior to this require a man who seduces a woman to marry her, and the verse afterwards condemns bestiality. No help there. I should note that some translations also condemn mediums, sorcerers, necromancers, and spiritists, again with no explanation as to what these are, and why they’re all supposed to be different. But it is noteworthy that different translations of this book suggest that they are different.

Since we’re not getting anywhere reading Exodus for a definition, I turn you now to Deuteronomy, chapter 18:10-12, which says: “Let no one be found among you who sacrifices their son or daughter in the fire, who practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft, or casts spells, or who is a medium or spiritist who consults the dead. Anyone who does these things is detestable to the Lord…”

I want to point out that one interpretation of divination in this passage might instead read “auger, or soothsayer”. Back then, an auger was someone who sacrificed animals and either tried to predict the future by examining the blood spatter of the slain animal, or burned their entrails and tried to interpret the future from visions in the smoke. There were other methods, but those two in particular stand out here.

Another verse I want to point out is in Leviticus, chapter 18: 21, which simply says “do not give your children up as sacrifices to Moloch.” At the time, we know that Moloch was worshipped in various cults, and that sacrificing your children to this guy was supposed to grant you supernatural boons of some sort.

There’s one more Bible passage I want to point to that might give us the pieces we need to solve this mystery, in the second book of Chronicles. Chapter 33: 1-6, accounting Manasseh, King of Judah:

“Manasseh was twelve years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem for fifty-five years. He did evil in the eyes of the Lord, following the detestable practices of the nations the Lord had driven out before the Israelites. He rebuilt the high places his father Hezekiah had demolished; he also erected altars to the Baals and made Asherah poles. He bowed to all the starry hosts and worshipped them. He build altars to idols in the temple of the Lord. In both courts of the temple of the Lord, he built altars to all the starry hosts. He sacrificed his children in the fire in the Valley of Ben Hinnom, practiced divination and witchcraft, sought omens, and consulted mediums and spiritists. He did much evil in the eyes of the Lord, arousing his anger.”

Since “starry hosts” seems to have meant “the sun, the moon, and the stars,” it seems that king Manasseh worshipped the heavenly bodies, and practiced some kind of witchcraft and divination. And in some translations, that word “auger” comes up again. In any translation, sacrificing ones children to the fire, in this case the fire in the Valley of Ben Hinnom, makes another appearance. The Valley of Ben Hinnom was an ancient site where several kings of Judah sacrificed their children by fire, and in at least one theory, the purpose was to predict the future. Remember when I said that sometimes augers would sacrifice animals and burn their entrails to make their predictions? I can’t be certain, but I believe that witchcraft in this time had something to do with sacrificing children in the same way. And by children, I mostly mean babies, because childhood didn’t last very long in the ancient world. We just read about a king ascending the throne at age twelve.

So, an ancient witch, as far as Exodus is concerned, sacrifices children to predict the future, or perhaps to perform some other supernatural ritual.

It’s worth noting here that, unlike the Salem witch trials, where the local authorities openly admitted that there would be no evidence to use for convictions, this sort of witchcraft would leave physical proof that could show if someone was sacrificing babies or not. A miscarriage or infant mortality wouldn’t be enough; you’d need evidence that the baby had been burnt, or at least disemboweled, which isn’t something that just happens on its own.

I do have to take a step back and appreciate how reasonable this command actually was back then.

I think we can all agree that sacrificing babies would and should get you thrown in prison today, and there’s actually hard evidence to look for, which really puts a spin on how we normally think of witch hunts.

I have to stress that this is just one theory on what witchcraft might have been, but the fact that it keeps showing up next to auguries, sacrificing children with fire, and worshipping false gods, it at least explains why some versions of the Bible single out witchcraft especially to receive the death penalty, whereas sometimes mediums and sorcerers are treated purely as charlatans to be avoided.

Thing is, the Bible doesn’t stay entirely consistent with this interpretation.

The New Testament differs from the Old in that, while the Old Testament was written in Hebrew, the New Testament was written in Greek.

This means that some things don’t quite translate right, so when subjects like sorcery and witchcraft come up again, they don’t necessarily mean the same thing.

Galatians talks about idolatry, sorcery, and hatred, among other works of the flesh. What’s worth noting here is that the Greek word for sorcery was pharmikeia, and literally meant taking drugs to see visions that were supposed to show you the future. As the Roman culture and empire started going into decline, more and more businessmen started turning to supernatural fortune tellers to form the basis of their business decisions, and this seems to have played a small, but noteworthy part of the empire’s collapse.

 

On the other hand, “hatreds” may have been slang for “hatreds of humanity,” which is what the Romans called witchcraft. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find out anything else about this. Did Romans equate witchcraft with misanthropy? Was it only hatred of ethnic Romans they were worried about? Is this a mistranslation? We don’t know.

 

The Eastern half of the empire, which survived the fall and became the Byzantine Empire, banned these kinds of sorcerers as they adopted Christianity. Yes, believe it or not, Christianity got its start as a religion opposed to superstitious nonsense supported by the government. Until they became the government.

But now, I promise you, we are done with biblical sources on witchcraft. So now let’s talk about the Catholic church.

The idea of witchcraft being something women are more prone to was not made up by Christianity.

That belief is at least as old as Ancient Greece, and possibly as old as Egypt, since a similar pattern of black magic being used more by women than men shows up in goddesses like Isis. It was the Greeks who really fashioned the idea, though, and not just in the more negative connotations. Sure, philosophers like Aristotle and Socrates had nothing pleasant to say about women, but even historians like Pliny the Elder and Tacitus made note that women were more likely to believe in superstitions.

I can’t help but think of how in the modern world, women are more likely than men to believe in astrology, ghosts, crystal healing, and other superstitious things like espers. Now, maybe women are onto something. Maybe ghosts are real, but they’re all mauve colored. But, maybe this trend of women buying into this stuff, at least more so than men, lead to scholars of the ancient world believing that women are more likely to dabble in the supernatural, and then jumping to conclusions.

Another thing that might have played a role is the fact that sometimes we imagine witches as knowing all manner of spells and rituals with knowledge acquired over a long period of time. The sort of things one only gets to know if they’ve been around long enough to have grandchildren or great grandchildren. Since people who lived long enough to die of old age back then were almost exclusively women, some of our beliefs about witches being female might just be because women lived longer.

But it’s only cultures that can trace their roots back to Roman Catholicism that really cling to the gendered notions of witchcraft. The Catholic church is primarily responsible for most western cultures and even some non-western ones viewing witchcraft almost exclusively as female, to the point of making up the word “warlock” to refer to male witches and in the modern world just use “witch” to refer to any magic female magic user. However, the Eastern Orthodox church did not apply this logic, and many eastern European cultures still think of both sexes as being equally likely to practice witchcraft, with characters like Koschei the Deathless occasionally referred to as a witch. Pre-Catholic European cultures, such as the Vikings in the north, believed that witchcraft was a cowardly and in some cases womanly way to harm people, but men could be witches as much as women; it was just seen as more of a social taboo when men did it.

So why did only one half of the early Christian church make this association?

Well, some of this has less to do with the “Catholicism” and more to do with the “Roman” part. One issue that contributed to the fall of Rome was the dole. The concept of “going on the dole” comes from Rome, and was basically a form of welfare. The overwhelming majority of dole recipients were women, while the majority of taxpayers putting money into this system were men. This particularly became bloated under Emperor Nero, who many early Christians associated with Satan or the antichrist, and early churches started looking at the dole as a sort of deal with the devil; give up your capacity to make moral decisions for earthly or material benefit. This also seems to be the origin of the word “witch” gaining its gendered connotation, and the reason why non-Europeans don’t ascribe witchcraft as feminine, instead using the word “witch” to refer to both evil male and female spellcasters. This also appears to be where we get the idea of witches selling their souls for power; a woman agrees to cast her vote for senators who promise her more dole benefits, and once she becomes dependent on the dole, she can no longer say “no” to the Roman government (read: the devil) and has given up her ability to make moral decisions, a.k.a., her “soul.”

It didn’t take long for people who depended on the dole to become incapable of surviving without it, especially single mothers, and soon people who couldn’t live without the dole couldn’t really choose to stop supporting politicians who kept the gravy train running, at least until it ran the empire into the ground.

This definitely had some impact on how the Roman Catholic church viewed the idea of deals with the devil. But not all such deals led to witchcraft. That comes primarily from a very, very disturbed weirdo named Heinrich Kramer.

To call Heinrich Kramer a misogynist would imply that he got along with men, which was not really true. He was one of those people who kind of hated everybody, but he hated some people noticeably less than others. He did, however, believe that women were inherently evil. Like, more evil than men. Not really sure how he measured that, but as a clergymen, he decided to write the Malleus Maleficarum, the Hammer of the Witches. This book…was insane. On multiple levels.

Bear in mind, Kramer was an inquisitor of the Catholic church at the time, and was thus aware of the rules regarding what kinds of inquisitorial methods the church was allowed to use, and also the accepted demonology of the church.

And his book pretty much ignored all of that and strongly suggested using torture methods banned by the inquisition at the time for being inhumane, ignored the inquisitorial system for seeking evidence, and actually got added to the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, meaning that the church thought it was so bad it was actually considered heresy to even read this rag.

And yet, as is so frustratingly often the case, while the priests, monks, and even the inquisitors condemned the book for promoting unethical, illegal, and outright heretical practices, the common folk who got ahold of this thought “Wow, this is what we should be doing!”

Abandon the rather progressive and fair-for-its-day evidence-seeking practices of the time? Sign us common-folk up!

Use barbaric torture methods that are illegal even by inquisition standards? Absolutely!

Burn women for being so lustful that they secretly steal men’s wieners to cause impotency? Can’t see the flaw in that logic!

Okay, as a lawyer, I cannot hide the fact that I hate this book. The Catholic Inquisition is responsible for coming up with the inquisitorial system we use today, and the fact that the church in the 1600s actually got something together resembling rights for the accused should be remembered as a great accomplishment. And this lunatic took all of that, along with anything that smelled remotely of logic, reason, or even sanity, and used it as kindling to burn any woman who committed the crime of having red hair.

To be fair, we cannot blame everything about the witch hunts on Kramer or the hysterical masses that bought into this book. Other treatises on witch-hunting did exist prior to that, but the general belief was that witchcraft practitioners were really just deluded by the devil into thinking that they had supernatural powers.

On that subject, I should probably tell you how we got the idea that witches ride brooms, since it directly relates to the idea of crazy people driven mad by the devil. Mandrake root can apparently be ground into a powder, mixed into a…well, let’s call it a magic potion, and when applied properly, make a person extremely high, with symptoms including, but not limited to, believing that you are outside when you are actually in your house, and believing you can fly. The broom part? Well, that has to do with how the potion is applied, and this is another reason why women were said to be more prone to witchcraft than men, since this whole system doesn’t work with boy parts.

So, between Heinrich Kramer, the mandrake root, and all of the details we have on witchcraft up until this point, I think we now have a pretty good idea on where Western European witchcraft beliefs came about. So now I want to look at some examples from outside of Western Civilization.

To start off, I want to look at the skin walkers of Norther American Tribes, particularly the Algonquian and Navajo myths. Most people think a skin walker is simply a person who can shapeshift into an animal, like a werewolf who chooses when to change, but this is only scratching the surface. There is a lot of overlap with the wendigo here, and in some myths, they are one and the same, particularly where the skin walker is a witch who gains their powers by committing cannibalism and can switch between monster form and human form. Other versions, however, gain their powers either by committing incest, or by sacrificing a member of their own family, preferably a sibling. Sometimes, one dark ritual is enough. Other times, smaller sacrifices are needed for each ritual, which often leads to the repeated sacrifice of children, since once a skin walker runs out of siblings, they need to produce more family members, which means having multiple children to sacrifice. This is one rare case where the witch was more often male than female, for fairly obvious reasons, but there’s that sacrificing of infants again.

Skin walkers are sometimes rumored to have other powers, like voice changing, telepathy, the evil eye, or creating diseases. Killing one is sometimes as easy as publicly accusing someone of being a skin walker (they die in three days if they really were a witch) or might involve a lengthy ritual to ensure the witch stays dead. This is one case where witches would be burned not as a form of execution, but to make certain the witch didn’t come back as an even greater monstrosity.

Note that, like the wendigo, the tribes that these myths come from do not actually like talking about these witches by name. Don’t expect a warm welcome if you bring the subject up among elders of any of these tribes. Interestingly, the modern interpretation of a skin walker actually has more to do with Medieval versions of werewolves than Hollywood versions. Werewolves in the Middle Ages were often tried for witchcraft, because the idea that werewolves suffered from a curse that spread like a communicable disease was completely made up in the last century or so. In Medieval tales, werewolves were either evil people who got their powers from deals with demons that allowed them to wear animal skins to take their forms, letting them commit crimes without being caught in human form, or in eastern cultures like Transylvania, they might be pricolici, who were dead souls of murderers sent back by the demons in hell to cause mischief on Earth. The stigoi are a similar story, and I might need to do another discussion on that topic another day.

In Japan, on a completely different note, we have the concept of familiars. These were not like a witch’s black cat as a pet in western Europe; rather, they were the source of the witch’s powers. They were often some kind of spiritual being with limited ability to affect the material world, needing a human agent to do things for them. Depending on the nature of the spirit, this might be something like taking care of the spirit’s living descendants (if the spirit were the ghost of a dead person), or it could be something like maintaining an important place of worship, such as a sacred grove, or similar important place. In return, the familiar would provide the human magical assistance, with powers that depended upon the nature of the spirit. Note that here, witchcraft was not inherently good or evil; it all depended on the kind of spirit. In fact, even the Phantom Thieves of Persona 5 and some of the other installments from that series could be called witches by this standard, although it is a bit of a stretch.

Finally, we have some more examples from Eastern European cultures, which are pretty similar to Western Europe, but noticeably deviate from a lot of Catholic dogma. Two particular characters I’ve mentioned already are Baba Yaga and Koschei the Deathless; the former is usually portrayed as a child-eating witch, while the other is an early example of a proto-lich, and is usually defined by having fancy magical powers, but ultimately he’s a coward so scared of death that he sacrifices everything that makes life worth living just so he can live. Baba Yaga, on the other hand, is occasionally helpful to people who pay her the proper respect, and is instrumental in defeating Koschei in both of the stories where he finally dies, although in one tale, she’s still pretty evil. In Soviet Russia, witch hunt you.

Note how with Baba Yaga, the child-eating pops up again. Other fairy tales that aren’t exclusive to Europe maintain this as well, like Hansel and Gretel or Rapunzel. In Fairytales, witches show up as often as villains as wolves. With wolves, this makes sense; wolves in the wilderness will gladly eat children, and stories about dangerous wolves are meant to warn kids not to go wandering out into the forest so that they don’t get eaten. So why would witches show up so often as a similar enemy to all children?

Well, the powers that witches posses might have something to do with it. A witch usually has no physical strength to attack their victims with, unless the child is very small. Instead, the witch casts spells, usually through verbal curses, or by conjuring spirits to go after their intended targets. These spells are often some form of illusion; very rarely will a witch be able to turn a person into an animal completely. Instead, the person’s body is turned into an animal, but they still have the mind of a human. Breaking the curse is the same as breaking an illusion; they were never really turned into a frog or a pig, just made to look like one. Adults are better equipped to handle these sorts of problems, while children are easier to fool.

Another common goal of witches might give us a clue; to become beautiful, or regain beauty lost from age, and this is often achieved by killing younger girls or stealing their youth and beauty. It seems that in many cases, beauty is power to a witch, and this isn’t hard to figure out. A beautiful woman has the power to make things she wants happen more easily than an ugly woman. Since a woman’s beauty is largely connected to youth, the idea of an older witch trying to regain lost youth at the expense of younger women makes a lot of sense.

As to the idea of the witch often targeting children, it seems like a stand in for child abuse, or child manipulation. Tricking children into doing what she wants could be how an older woman (witch) continues to get favors she might have received when she was younger from men who are no longer interested in her. Since children are easier to manipulate, the illusions work better on a child’s mind.

Finally, this brings us to some modern interpretations of the witch, who is usually a hip, sexy, new-age young woman who doesn’t need to manipulate children, because she has thirsty guys to do things for her. Believe it or not, the cute anime girl-witch hasn’t really broken away from the trope at all, as we all know what kinds of stuff guys are willing to do for attractive young women; it’s a supernatural power in its own right. The more dangerous version is the sexy, western incarnation that might wear fishnet stockings and a “come hither” expression, but like the Greek sorceress Circe, any guy with a shred of wisdom should run in the opposite direction.

Wow, this was a long one. There are a lot of other things I could cover, and I might need to come back to some of these topics in the future, but for now, I’m leaving it at that. I hope this extra post this month tides you over for a while. I’m going to be working hard on my next book this November with NaNoWriMo, and won’t be posting again during November.