In ancient Greece you can find some of the roots of witchcraft as a pagan religion. In ancient Greece, an important part of the religion was ceremonies known today as the "mysteries"--ceremonies that some modern witches say form the basis of their own rituals. The ancient Greek mysteries may have come from Egypt. The most famous are the Eleusians mysteries.
Witches have to be trained and initiated into rituals. Witches worship gods of nature, fertility , and sometimes the moon.
It was Rome, both before and after the birth of Christ, which probably had more laws against witchcraft than any other place in the ancient world. This was especialy true after Rome became an empire and people tried to predict the emperor's death.
Many Roman emperors banned diviners, seers, and other future-tellers--and witches--from Rome, unless they were members of the emperor's own household. Rome's first emperor, Augustus, ordered something like 2,000 grimoires, or books of spells, burned because he was afraid about how people might use them. Another emperor, Tiberius, banished astrologers and other magicians from Rome (all but one, that is, whom he kept to consult himself). This banishment caused 4,000 people to flee Rome.
Toward the end of the empire, a ruler named Valens, who was in charge of the eastern province, ordered all people who practiced magic to be killed--and one of the first witch hunts began. Even a good luck charm got a person killed. This happened several hundreds of years after the birth of Christ.
By then Christianity had come to the Roman Empire and Europe. A new era had begun in the history of witchcraft as well as in the history of the Western world.
Christianity had been vying with other religious beliefs for supremacy ever since becoming Rome's state religion. It's main rivals at that time and for centuries to come were religions in which the forces of evil were considered equal in power to the forces of good, and pagan religions in which magic played an important part.
The Druid religion in Britain was one of the Church's main pagan rivals. Like other pagan rituals, Druids met imn deep caves and thick forests for their worship which involved mysteries and sacrifices. Druids were said to be expert astrologers and future-tellers and many, it was believed, had powers later attributed to folklore witches--the ability to turn into animals, to heal the sick and control the weather, to raise mists, and perform image magic.
Other rivals to the early Christian Church were the magicians of the Anglo-Saxons, tribal people who lived in Britain before William the Conqueror arrived there. They called the magicians wicca (or wicce, the feminine form), a word thought to mean "wise." Modern witches who follow what they believe to be rituals dating fromthat era in Britain use the same word, calling both themselves and thier craft Wicca.
The Anglo-Saxons had numerous superstitions about evil witches. For instance, like the Greeks, they believed witches could cause madness and could fly. Witches, they thought, could use spells to take hay from other people's fields and make it grow in their own, and they could bring fish into nets or keep them away. They could make lovers jealous and could send demons into people--make them "possessed."
Another Anglo-Saxon and early medieval belief that was closely related to witchcraft was the belief in fairies. All the wee people could do many of the same things witches could. At best, they were mischievous; at worst, evil--and evil won out in the minds of the people. Eventually, anyone found having so much as talked to a fairy was in grave danger of being accused of working witchcaft, especially true in Scotland.
There were also legends about witches, mostly in Oriental countries, who were believed to be animals who could assume human shape. Witch beliefs from African and native American tribes mingled with Caribbean and European ones to form the witchlore of the United States. African legends and religions brought here by black slaves, often via Caribbean islands, probably had the strongest influence.
ece you can find some of the roots of witchcraft as a pagan religion. In an
Home