Witchcraft, in various historical, anthropological, religious and mythological contexts, is the use of certain kinds of supernatural or magical powers. Witchcraft can refer to the use of such powers in order to inflict harm or damage upon members of a community or their property. Other uses of the term distinguish between bad witchcraft and good witchcraft, the latter involving the use of these powers to heal someone from bad witchcraft. The concept of witchcraft is normally treated as a cultural ideology, a means of explaining human misfortune by blaming it either on a supernatural entity or a known person in the community. A witch (from Old English wicce f. / wicca m.) is a practitioner of witchcraft.

Belief in witchcraft, and by consequence witch-hunts, are found in many cultures worldwide, today mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa (e.g. in the witch smellers in Bantu culture), and historically notably in Early Modern Europe, where witchcraft came to be seen as a vast diabolical conspiracy against Christianity, and accusations of witchcraft led to large-scale witch-hunts, especially in Germanic Europe.

The "witch-cult hypothesis", a controversial theory that European witchcraft was a suppressed pagan religion, was popularised in the 19th and early 20th centuries. From the mid 20th century on Witchcraft has become the self-designation of a branch of neopaganism, especially in the Wicca tradition following Gerald Gardner, who claimed a religious tradition of Witchcraft with pre-Christian roots.

Terminology

see: witch (disambiguation) The terms 'witch' and 'witchcraft' have slightly different meanings in different fields of study.

Social anthropology

Social-anthropological interpretations were pioneered in E. E. Evans-Pritchard's 1937 study of 'witchcraft' among the Azande. By such interpretations, witchcraft accusations are seen as a means of explaining human misfortune and regulating community conflicts, whereby calamities are blamed on someone within the community believed capable of causing harm by supernatural powers. This model identifies a web of functional relationships between malefactor, bewitched, witch identifier and healer. Those individuals who consciously and verifiably performed some physical 'bewitching' act (positive or negative) are normally termed 'sorcerers' rather than 'witches'; for the remainder of cases, the question of whether the accused person performed such an act or had any awareness of being a 'witch' is generally treated as irrelevant.

Witchcraft historiography

Historians of European witchcraft have found the anthropological definition difficult to apply to European and British witchcraft, which doesn't match African models. The presence or absence of magical techniques seems to have been of little concern to those participating in witch trials, and some of the accused really had attempted to cause harm by mere ill-wishing.