Witchcraft

Belief in witches and witchcraft has existed and the active pursuit and persecution of people accused of practicing witchcraft have occurred throughout human history and in many different types of societies around the world. Both the historical and ethnographic records are rich with accounts of witchcraft from the ancient Near East, in the early modern period in Europe, among Native American peoples, and in traditional and contemporary ethnic groups in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. While the specific meanings associated with witchcraft vary over time and place, a general definition (excluding the neopagan Wiccan movement) is that a “witch” is a person who participates in maleficia, the use of supernatural power to perpetuate harm against others. Witches are often accused of causing sickness, injury, or death (of a person or livestock), sexual impotence, adverse weather, or crop failure. From a sociological perspective, witchcraft can be explained as a form of scapegoating, a way by which to explain social misfortune or perceived injustice and to relieve community stress. Often, those who are accused of being witches are individuals who are different from others in the community and are viewed as disruptive to the social order: unmarried women, old women or men, hostile people, those who live apart from others, adulterers, and those from other religious or ethnic groups. Witchcraft [Page 1711]must be distinguished from the practice of sorcery. The key difference is that witches are inherently evil and possess supernatural power, while sorcerers are experts in harnessing supernatural power for good or evil. One of the main functions of sorcery is to reverse the harmful consequences of witchcraft.

Although witchcraft has been well-documented over time and across cultures, the most careful study has focused on only a few times, periods, and places, including the witch craze in early modern Europe, the Salem witch craze in Puritan New England, traditional and modernizing societies in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, and traditional Native America, with special attention to the Navajo nation of the U.S. Southwest.