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Apr 29, 2024 · In September 1922, Swedish filmgoers settled in for the most expensive Scandinavian film of the era: Häxan, later known as Witchcraft Through the Ages. At the Stockholm premiere, audiences...
- Gavia Baker-Whitelaw
The Last Witch Hunter: Breck Eisner: 2015 [231] [232] Left Bank: Pieter Van Hees: 2008 [233] [234] [235] The Legend of the Christmas Witch (La Befana vien di notte) Michele Soavi: 2018 [236] The Lego Batman Movie: Chris McKay: 2017: Lilly the Witch: The Dragon and the Magic Book (Hexe Lilli: Der Drache und das magische Buch) Stefan Ruzowitzky: 2009
- Overview
- Meanings
- Sorcery
witchcraft, traditionally, the exercise or invocation of alleged supernatural powers to control people or events, practices typically involving sorcery or magic. Although defined differently in disparate historical and cultural contexts, witchcraft has often been seen, especially in the West, as the work of crones who meet secretly at night, indulg...
The modern English word witchcraft has three principal connotations: the practice of magic or sorcery worldwide; the beliefs associated with the Western witch hunts of the 14th to the 18th century; and varieties of the modern movement called Wicca, frequently mispronounced “wikka.”
The terms witchcraft and witch derive from Old English wiccecraeft: from wicca (masculine) or wicce (feminine), pronounced “witchah” and “witchuh,” respectively, denoting someone who practices sorcery; and from craeft meaning “craft” or “skill.” Roughly equivalent words in other European languages—such as sorcellerie (French), Hexerei (German), stregoneria (Italian), and brujería (Spanish)—have different connotations, and none precisely translates another. The difficulty is even greater with the relevant words in African, Asian, and other languages. The problem of defining witchcraft is made more difficult because the concepts underlying these words also change according to time and place, sometimes radically. Moreover, different cultures do not share a coherent pattern of witchcraft beliefs, which often blend other concepts such as magic, sorcery, religion, folklore, theology, technology, and diabolism. Some societies regard a witch as a person with inherent supernatural powers, but in the West witchcraft has been more commonly believed to be an ordinary person’s free choice to learn and practice magic with the help of the supernatural. (The terms West and Western in this article refer to European societies themselves and to post-Columbian societies influenced by European concepts.) The answer to the old question “Are there such things as witches?” therefore depends upon individual belief and upon definition, and no single definition exists. One thing is certain: the emphasis on the witch in art, literature, theatre, and film has little relation to external reality.
False ideas about witchcraft and the witch hunts persist today. First, the witch hunts did not occur in the Middle Ages but in what historians call the “early modern” period (the late 14th to the early 18th century), the era of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution. There was neither a witch-cult nor any cult, either organized or disorganized, of a “Horned God” or of any “Goddess”; Western “witches” were not members of an ancient pagan religion; and they were not healers or midwives. Moreover, not all persons accused of witchcraft were women, let alone old women; indeed, there were “witches” of all ages and sexes. Witches were not a persecuted minority, because witches did not exist: the people hurt or killed in the hunts were not witches but victims forced by their persecutors into a category that in reality included no one. The witch hunts did not prosecute, let alone execute, millions; they were not a conspiracy by males, priests, judges, doctors, or inquisitors against members of an old religion or any other real group. “Black masses” are almost entirely a fantasy of modern writers. “Witch doctors,” whose job it was to release people from evil spells, seldom existed in the West, largely because even helpful magic was attributed to demons.
Britannica Quiz
A sorcerer, magician, or “witch” attempts to influence the surrounding world through occult (i.e., hidden, as opposed to open and observable) means. In Western society until the 14th century, “witchcraft” had more in common with sorcery in other cultures—such as those of India or Africa—than it did with the witchcraft of the witch hunts. Before the...
- Ethan Doyle White
6 days ago · About. Historian Mikki Brock joins WIRED to answer the internet's bubbling cauldron of questions about witches, witchcraft, and witch hunting through the ages. Can men be witches or only...
- The Witch (2016) Director: Robert Eggers. From its first moments, The Witch strands us in a hostile land. We watch (because that’s all we can do, helplessly) as puritan patriarch William (Ralph Ineson) argues stubbornly with a small council, thereby causing his family’s banishment from their “New England” community.
- Suspiria (1977) Director: Dario Argento. Dario Argento’s 1977 Suspiria is the director’s best-loved movie, but it’s also his most atypical work. Unlike the rest of his peak-era filmography (its direct, uneven 1980 sequel Inferno excepted), it’s not strictly a giallo—the lurid murder mysteries Italian directors churned out in the mid-20th century—but instead an abstraction of the genre, removing the procedural narrative layer to replace it with pure aesthetic wonder.
- Spirited Away (2001) Director: Hayao Miyazaki. What is it about Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away that makes it one of his greatest—if not the greatest—films he has ever made?
- The Wizard of Oz (1939) Director: Victor Fleming. You can’t exactly put together a list of witch movies without the most iconic witch in the history of cinema, can you?
v. t. e. A witch hunt, or a witch purge, is a search for people who have been labeled witches or a search for evidence of witchcraft. Practicing evil spells or incantations was proscribed and punishable in early human civilizations in the Middle East. In medieval Europe, witch-hunts often arose in connection to charges of heresy from Christianity.
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Sep 1, 2019 · Contrary to popular belief, the earliest witch hunts in America actually took place in Hartford, Connecticut, not Salem, Massachusetts. In 1642, Connecticut made witchcraft a crime punishable by death, and, in 1647, a woman named Alse Young became the first supposed witch executed in America.
