Talk:European witchcraft/Archive 1

Work on the article

I've done a little bit of work on rewriting this article already, but I wanted to go ahead and outline what I have in mind for it, if anyone would care to comment. Spectatrix 17:37, 2004 Aug 2 (UTC)

• Introduction to European witch trials (14th-17th centuries, primarily)
  • Main countries involved
  • Types of accusations made
  • Evolution of the accusations, from being aimed at heretics to being aimed at lower-class women
  • Some kind of tie-in to the American witch trials, to be more fully discussed in North American witchcraft
• Brief accounts of some of the more high-profile cases, chronologically ordered
• Real communities of witches (magic-practicing pagans)
  • Druidry (British Isles)
  • Ásatrú (Germanic countries)
  • Cunning Folk (England)
  • Any others I can think of

I'm not sure about the last part, as Druids and Asatru folk don't generally call themselves witches. —Ashley Y 09:49, 2004 Aug 15 (UTC)

They don't, admittedly (I personally know both Neo-Druids and Neo-Asatru), but they both claim to practice magic, which would be considered witchcraft. It really all comes down to the definitions of witches/witchcraft/pagans, which there are a multitude of views on. Some discussion along those lines may be appropriate, and I'll try to pin down some of my more knowledgeable pagan acquaintances to get their views (and historical views of their traditions) about such semantics. Spectatrix 14:43, 2004 Aug 20 (UTC)

Lots of factual inaccuracies

This page now contains a whole load of misinformation that was deleted from the main Witchcraft article - the first two sections in particular contain exactly the same misinformation. What is asserted about witches having originally been shamans is pure conjecture and contains many references that are simply wrong. There is nothing to say that a volva and a 'wicce' were the same thing - they belong to different countries and languages! - nor is the word 'wicce' ever used to mean a counsellor or advisor. The suggestion that 'the shamans of the German people were primarily female' is groundless, and the bit about 'transforming these socially important women' is modern-day revisionism, blatantly ignoring the fact that a great many accused 'witches' were male. See the Talk page of Witchcraft for a good deal of discussion on this sort of thing. Moreover, the spurious Pennick image is back! It looks like everything that was removed from Witchcraft because it was factually dubious or downright fallacious is, for some reason, now back in this article.Cavalorn 09:13, 11 May 2005 (UTC)

Not much actual information here

Why is there so much squabbling over witches, witchcraft, and witch-hunts? I've done a little research on the topic myself, and came along here to see what kind of contribution I could make... and all the related pages turn out to be a mass of edits and re-edits and people getting pissed off at each other. I'm new here, so tell me: is this normal for Wikipedia? NakedCelt 06:13, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

You can find a few areas of Wikipedia that aren't quite up to scratch. Teenage celebrity entries, for instance. When it comes to topics that are at all related to neopaganism, though, I think I can see the problem. You get large groups of people who have all read the same bad books (and I include Ronald Hutton's books in with those), who are all used to going with their 'feelings', and who all are very protective of their beliefs, being, as they are, members of a repressed minority religion.

This shouldn't be an insurmountable problem (my beliefs probably aren't hugely different): we should be making an attempt to follow historical documentary evidence and scholarly writing on the subject (and even writers like Hutton, occasionally). As a Wiccan I'm happy to hold my own theories in private - it's not a religion for the masses anyway, so who cares if the full beauty and splendour of what I do isn't perfectly reflected on the pages of the internet?

Fortunately there's beauty to be found in history (and almost anywhere else). There's also plenty still to discover in our area of history, including some pretty strange surprises. My experience of trying to get a more solid historical understanding of witchcraft has borne such wonderful fruit for me, I recommend it to any other Wiccan or Pagan! Fuzzypeg 09:57, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

Actual information?

I've got a factoid (unsourced, I'm afraid...) that claims Irish folklore gave a female witch 8 chances to turn herself into a cat before she couldn't turn back. Trekphiler 03:33, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

Modern neopagan witches reject concept of moral polarity?

I yanked out the following statement:

Modern neopagan witchcraft rejects the labels of 'black' and 'white' witchcraft, claiming that witchcraft has no moral polarity. This attitude is wholly modern and has no foundation in historical belief.

There are a few problems with this statement: First off, most modern neopagan witches hold strong ethical codes that would preclude them practising black magic. The term 'black magic' is well-known and well used in these circles. However some do reject the concept of moral polarity. These are generally Thelemic-influenced witches (whether they realise it or not), or else Satanists. Certain authors who claim to be 'traditional' witches have also taken this position (such as Paul Huson), but again, these are a minority.

Also, the claim that this attitude has no foundation in historical belief is really odd. Is this based on the beliefs of the general public? If so, might it not have been reasonably common to consider witches as amoral, rather than totally evil? If based on the supposed beliefs of witches, how can we tell what their beliefs were? The sources we have consist of the witch-trial documents, Charles Leland's Aradia and a few other sources, all of which are disputed regarding their authenticity, but most of which would lend support to the idea that witches were morally ambivalent.

Not seeing much I could salvage, I just pulled the whole thing out.

Factual Information

I'll be adding things from my college textbooks; I'm taking a class on paganism (both ancient and neo) and we're now about halfway done with a section on european witchcraft. Kuronue 15:55, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

Holy... ok, after leaving the note I just READ part of the article. Expect major overhauls; my book goes into detail about Sorcery versus Witchcraft, good versus bad magic in history, High versus Low magic, et cetera. I need more time than I have to sit down and reform the article. Kuronue 15:57, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

Done with my edits; all my information is from A History of Witchcraft by Jeffery B Russell. I also reorganized it for ease of reading. Kuronue 00:24, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

Witch-hunt duplication

A lot of the information here concerning witch-hunt already exists in the article "witch-hunt". It would be better to try and clean up the redundancy information. It would make this article more legible, and if any references are made, they could be made at one place only.DanielDemaret 09:47, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

I suggest this article discuss the actual phenomenon of witchcraft, the beliefs of the accused, and how the satanic sabbath stereotype developed; the witch-hunt article should deal more with specifics of the trials and executions, as well as details of legislation. Each will of course have to cover a little of the ground of the other article, since they are so closely interwoven, but most detail should not be repeated. If you want to have a go at this, you'd be most welcome. Fuzzypeg☻ 21:38, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

Sources?

Fresh from a visit to Salem, Massachusetts, USA, the site of the only recorded witch trials in North America, I have to challenge the following statement in the article:

Both in North America and in Europe thousands of people, men as well as women, were put to death as witches at various points in history.

What sources support this statement, for either North America or Europe? According to the Salem Witch Museum, 19 people were executed as witches in Salem in 1692, one was crushed to death for refusing to testify on his own behalf, and three died in jail. Some additional number languished in jail for some years, but were eventually released. That's it. There's no other record of witch trials or executions in North America. Rightlang 20:44, 05 August 2007 (UTC)

I've tried to improve the wording there to not be so misleading. Feel free to improve further... Fuzzypeg☻ 05:07, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

Offensive picture?

Someone removed the picture heading the article, claiming that this image of "old ladies banging" would offend "little kiddies" doing research. I think there are far more provocative and disturbing images on daytime television and billboards. Also, my imagination can't make out how these women could be "banging", despite their being naked. If some poor little dears do happen to stumble across this page they're not going to make head nor tail of it any better than me. Even if Wikipedia were aiming at being exclusively kiddie-safe, I would see no reason to censor this image.

Saying that, this image doesn't express much about witchcraft, or even the diabolical stereotype of witchcraft. It seems to be three women doing some kind of frenetic calisthenics, perhaps in the process of forming a human pyramid. If there are any images that better express either a) actual European witchcraft, or b) its diabolical stereotype, then we might want to use them instead. Fuzzypeg☻ 03:02, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

"Nudity=sex" again? Funny how some minds work. And of course wikipedia is not censored.

For a better picture, those old woodcuts are all copyright-free, there must be a usable, illustrative one somewhere. For the real thing, perhaps a "fair use" pic from one of those not-exploitative-at-all-honest seventies paperbacks? Or some volunteers? Totnesmartin 15:21, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

Dubious

There's a quote relating to Minucius Felix that isn't grammatical:

"accuses Christians of rejecting ancestral beliefs, accepting only the dregs of society, organizing nocturnal secret meetings, practicing indiscriminate sexual activity, worship the head of an ass, and initiate novices by making them kill infants and canabalize them."

We need an exact quote here, and I really doubt the grammar is like this in the original. Please fix this up. Cheers, Fuzzypeg★ 21:37, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for fixing that up. The extra information that was previously snipped out is actually really good to have, since it fleshes out the whole diabolical stereotype more fully. I've moved the mention of Minucius Felix into the footnote, since otherwise it's confusing: who was the author, Caecilius or Minucius? I presume Minucius is merely reporting the views of Caecilius, but can't tell from what Kors and Peters write. Fuzzypeg★ 21:27, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

Cleanup

this article needs to distinguish cleanly between

• pre-Christian antiquity (pre 300 in Rome, pre-600 north of the Alps)
• Late Antiquity, Christianization and Early Middle Ages (300 to 500 in the Roman Empire, 600 to 1000 north of the Alps)
• High to Late Middle Ages (say 900 to 1400)
• Early Modern witch-hunts (1400 to 1700)
• Modern depictions (Romanticism, literature, popular culture)

there is a constant danger of gravitating towards a generalization of the Early Modern witch-hunts. The early modern period is the only one which already has got its own dedicated article. Significant effort is needed to establish reasonable coverage of Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. --dab (𒁳) 18:49, 26 November 2008 (UTC)