By Austin Price, Editor-In-Chief
Warning: This article contains mentions of torture, death, sexual misconduct, and abuse. Please read at your own discretion.
Hocus Pocus. Double, double toil and trouble. Abracadabra. Expeliarmus. Bippity Boppity Boo. I’m sure you’ve all heard one or more of these phrases before. The above phrases are in connection to witchcraft and sorcery seen in different forms of media including books, movies, television, and entertainment industries. What are now known as common, everyday phrases that are populated throughout the year, primarily in the time of Halloween, the origins of these phrases all lead to the Holy Bible.
King Saul Seeks a Witch
The term, witch, comes from the Bible in the book of 1 Samuel, thought to be written between 931 B.C. and 721 B.C. It tells the story of when King Saul sought the Witch of Endor to summon the dead prophet Samuel's spirit. This dawn of a fascination of witches and sorcery is tainted with evil connotations and demonic roots.
According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word witch is defined as “a woman supposed to have dealings with the devil or evil spirits and to be able by their cooperation to perform supernatural acts.” With this assigned label and universal understanding of witches as humans in cahoots with the devil, their exile from society was inevitable. Human beings have always struggled with feelings of inferiority to their peers. Despite their prime features of apparent connections with the devil, witches were envied by and threatening to the rest of society.
With these magical powers and accusations of close contact with the devil, witches were targets of ridicule, violence, and mockery. This outside behavior from their communities often lead to the beating, torture, and ultimate death of many witches. Witchcraft, sorcery, and execution of people with unnatural abilities originated in Europe. The English Heritage reports that in the entire span of witch hunts and persecutions, “About 30,000–60,000 people were executed in the whole of the main era of witchcraft persecutions, from the 1427–36 witch-hunts in Savoy (in the western Alps) to the execution of Anna Goldi in the Swiss canton of Glarus in 1782. These figures include estimates for cases where no records exist.”
The First Witch, Alice Kyteler
The origins of witchcraft and sorcery begin with a seemingly normal woman, Alice Kyteler. Dame Alice Kyteler was the first recorded person condemned for witchcraft in Ireland. Alice began her life as a seemingly normal young woman. She carried on the traditional practice of marrying young and giving children to her husband. Ronan Mackay of the Royal Irish Academy writes that Alice was probably from a Kilkenny family, though nothing is known of her life prior to marriage
Between 1280 and 1285, Alice married her first husband, William Outlaw, a successful moneylender and merchant of Kilkenny. William died from unknown circumstances and Alice went on to marry 3 more men. Mackay reports that by 1303 Alice had married a second time, to Adam le Blunda of Callan, and by 1309 she had married her third husband, Richard de Valle, and between 1316 and 1324 she married her fourth husband, Sir John le Poer. With a total of 4 husbands throughout her life, it’s easy to conclude that these continuous deaths were not a coincidence due to misfortune or bad luck. Rather, accusations of murder point to Alice.
By the year 1302, Alice had been accused (and acquitted) of murder and other crimes. Alice’s plethora of stepchildren from her multitude of marriages suspected her of being the cause of the loss of their fathers. They became convinced that she had access to supernatural powers and had used these powers first to beguile, and then to dispose of, her husbands. They labeled these powers as maleficium, meaning the ability to harm one's neighbors through occult powers supplied by the devil. With these accusations, Alice’s stepchildren reported her and her suspicious, countless marriages to the zealous Franciscan bishop of Ossory, Richard Ledrede, in 1324. According to History Ireland, Ledrede was an infamous opponent of witches and sorcery. In 1324, Richard Ledrede, bishop of Ossory, declared that his diocese was a hotbed of devil worshippers.
This venomous belief of Richard was emphasized and fueled by the accusations against Alice. The news publication, History Ireland, says, “It was the first witchcraft trial to treat the accused as heretics and the first to accuse a woman of having acquired the power of sorcery through sexual intercourse with a demon, features which later became common in the famous witchcraft trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,”. As the trial concluded, History Ireland reports, “This outlandish theory became a major confrontation between secular and ecclesiastical authority. Seven charges were brought against Alice Kyteler and her associates: that they were denying Christ and the church; that they cut up living animals and scattered the pieces at cross roads as offerings to a demon called the son of Art in return for his help; that they stole the keys of the church and held meetings there at night; that in the skull of a robber they placed the intestines and internal organs of cocks, worms, nails cut from dead bodies, hairs from the buttocks and clothes from boys who had died before being baptized; that, from this brew, they made potions to incite people to love, hate, kill and afflict Christians; that Alice herself had a certain demon as incubus by whom she permitted herself to be known carnally and that he appeared to her either as a cat, a shaggy black dog or as a black man, aethiopis, from whom she received her wealth; and that Alice had used sorcery to murder some of her husbands and to infatuate others, with the result that they gave all their possessions to her and her son, William Outlaw, thus impoverishing her stepchildren.” Upon these convictions and the impending doom of death and destruction, Alice fled the country to either England or Flanders, and there is no record of her after her escape from persecution.
The Amplified Hysteria of Witchcraft and Sorcery
After this initial demise of Alice and upon her disappearance, the fuel behind the fire of witchcraft grew and expanded. According to The History Channel, “Witch hysteria really took hold in Europe during the mid-1400s, when many accused witches confessed, often under torture, to a variety of wicked behaviors. Within a century, witch hunts were common and most of the accused were executed by burning at the stake or hanging. Single women, widows and other women on the margins of society were especially targeted,”.
With these minority female figures being targeted and ruined by a vengeful and ignorant society, the torture and unending harassment of witches was fueled by religious figures. The publication of “Malleus Maleficarum” a book written by two well-respected German Dominicans in 1486, usually translated as “The Hammer of Witches,” was essentially a guide on how to identify, hunt and interrogate witches. It quickly became the authority for Protestants and Catholics trying to flush out witches living among them.
Devil Worshippers and Demon Carriers
As witches became more and more popular throughout society, suspicions and possible explanations surrounded the reasoning behind the power of witches. Demonic possession and devil worshiping became the prime theory behind the immense, supernatural power of witches. According to the English Heritage, “leaps of logic concluded that demons wanted to produce offspring. So, they haunted monastic dormitories to steal human seed to impregnate women with demon children... this is when the Roman idea of the witch and her manifestation as the embodiment of winter in Alpine regions catastrophically came together to allow the first generation of demonologists to formulate an exact identity for the recipients of the seed,”.
The Witches’ Sabbath
These demonic ties began to produce the Witches’ Sabbath. Witches’ Sabbath was a nocturnal, communal gathering of witches. These sabbaths could be as small as groups of 3, or as large of groups as 10,000. Popular locations for these gatherings include the Harz Mountains, Germany; the Bald Mountain, near Kiev, Russia; the Blocula, Sweden; and the Département du Puy-de-Dôme, Auvergne, France.
According to Briticanna, “Witches reputedly traveled to the sabbath by smearing themselves with special ointment that enabled them to fly through the air, or they rode on a goat, ram, or dog supplied by the devil.” These blasphemous practices were furthered by occurrences at the sabbath including were represented by inquisitors as including obeisance to the devil by kissing him under his tail, dancing, feasting, and indiscriminate intercourse,”.
Witchcraft continued to develop and expand, eventually blending into Satanism, but that’s a story for another time. Through the collaboration of the occult, animals, rituals, minerals, nature, gatherings, sex, murder, and unexplained, paranormal experiences, witchcraft and sorcery were once a dangerous label and talents, but have now become a unique and fascinating history that combines violence, beauty, and magic.
To learn more about the origins of witchcraft and sorcery, visit the following sources: