Witch

A witch is a Femme Adepte or considered as such of a form of Sorcellerie.

Indicated in Greek stryx , in Latin striga - ae from where drift the term Médiéval striated , strega in Italian, estrie in French. The French witch , female word of wizard , drift of the Vulgar Latin sortarius properly teller of fates , the traditional Latin leave , left , indicating initially a process of Divination, then intended , leaves . The word which indicates them in German is Hexe derived from the old Greek Aix , Chèvre, obvious reference to a world Pastoral. Bruja , in Spanish comes from the term Ibère bruixa , and more precisely from the Galician bruxa . The word English witch has more discussed origins but appears well to come from a radical wik of origin as well Celte as Germanique.

At the dawn of the History

A witch is a Femme Chaman. The Scandinavian sagas called them Völva .

See also: Shamanism

The Wicca asserts being oldest Religion of the world by affirming that the witches are the heiresses of a Culte whose origin goes back to the Préhistoire.

According to holding of a continuation between a worship of the Goddess and the Sorcery, and while being located in a vision where hunting would have been a male activity and the gathering a female activity, the women had a religiosity which had its own methods.

See also: Worship of the Goddess, Large Goddess

If Horned God were the divinity of the hunters, the female divinity of cueilleuses was the Grande Goddess-Mother whose worship, starting from the Neolithic with the sedentarisation due to the beginnings of the Agriculture, will become dominating lasting of the millenia, perdurant in the first large ancient civilizations in the form of agrarian worships returned to goddesses such Déméter or Cybèle. The existence of the Goddess-Mother is attested in all the primitive cultures then antiquated. The women, heiresses of cueilleuses, were the promotrices of agriculture. When, with the Mesolithic , following climate changes, the game is done rare and that the man is done fishing than hunter, and than the food resources of the gathering would not have been sufficient any more to allow the survival of a clan, the contribution of agriculture was determining. If the man lived more in Symbiose with the lasting animal world of the millenia, the woman it, lived more in symbiosis with the vegetable world. The knowledge which it could have of the plants and their properties, and the empirical knowledge that it could withdraw were the mystery major of a tradition which will be transmitted until our days.

Fécondité of the woman depends the continuation on the species, the woman is obstetrician since the world is world. Midwife , healer , that which gives the life and which knows the secrecies of the life and dead as well as the effect of the plants on the physical Bien-être, health, is at the origin of this character who is the witch . In fact, during the two centuries which the persecutions will last, it is often the term of herbalist who is used in the official reports of the Inquisition to indicate it.

Witch and magicians in Antiquity

The Culte S of these antiques Goddess-Mothers bequeathed by the Préhistoire are found in Greece with Éleusis. There remains the original proximity and the empathy with the Nature in the agrarian Culte which is returned to the two goddesses Déméter and Perséphone on which the element orphic comes to be grafted, and its opposite the dionysiaque worship , more antiquated still, where the Sacrifice of the god, Androgyne in the beginning, is ritually and recurringly perpetrated, and symbolically devoured again by the Ménades, marking the regression, all in all, of cooked with vintage . As many characteristics which will survive, diluted, amalgamated in the Culte of Diane of the late Antiquité and during all the Moyen-âge where will come to be grafted new elements coming from the local Folklore from the various countries from Europe.

Égérie, Circé, Médée especially is as many prototypes, and are not very different from the biblical Lilith , the Assyrian Lilitu of the S.

Circé and Médée are near the Héros Ulysses and Médée, in turn Adjuvant and Opposant. After having brought to Jason a help essential to its survival and the success of its search, Médée is given up by his/her lover and is avenged for terrible way. From a feminist point of view, the destroying madness of Médée testifies to a Female condition where, if it is neither wife nor Hétaïre, the Femme does not have any more any right, plus any method existing if not that to become entirely negative, devastating what surrounds it, until coming to the elimination of the children whom it had of the man who gives up it after him to have taken his life and to be itself been used for about it to satisfy her ambition. Médée is avenged for the yoke which the man imposes to him, and who is that of a patriarchal company from now on .

In an opposite evolution, Circé starts by transforming the men of Ulysses into animals before releasing them then to give critical councils for the continuation of the voyage.

Beautiful Greek witches, Circé retain Ulysses and Médée allured Jason. Contrary, Baba Yaga of Slavic mythology is ugly like the stereotype of the old witch and uses like it domestic ustensils to move, a mortar and a Pilon, the Balai being used to erase its traces.

The book of Enoch - chapter 7

The Livre of Hénoch is a writing allotted to Hénoch, great-grandfather of Noah. It belongs to the gun of the orthodoxe Ethiopian Church but is regarded as apocryphal book by the other Christians and the Jews. The text is not included either in the Seventy.

  • 1 When the children of the men had multiplied in these days, it arrived that girls were born to them elegant and beautiful.

  • 2 And when the angels, the children of the skies, had seen them, they became in love about it; and they said the ones to the others: we choose women of the race of the men, and have children with them.
  • 10 And they chose each one a woman, and they approached some, and they cohabited with them; and they taught to them sorcery, the enchantments, and the properties of the roots and the trees.
  • 11 And these women conceived and they gave birth to giants…

The time of great persecutions

Flying in the airs with - califourchon on its handle with Brush, thus is represented the witch in the popular iconography, Image of Épinal , recovering a historical reality complexes, made of knowing chamanic and persecutions. Belief S old in which survive the pagan Culte S of the fertility of the ancient world, which some, whose Wicca, make go up at the end of the Paléolithique.

Historians and researchers estimate today the number of their victims between 50 and: 100000 over the two centuries when as well courts the Inquisition as those of the Réforme lead them to the Bûcher. A figure raised in proportion of the European population of the time. And it is, for 80% of these victims, of the women. The 20% remainders were men raising for the majority of the category of wandering . Poor wretches and vagrants, Travelling entertainers , Jewish S or homosexual.

These women (and some times their children, especially if it acted girls), generally belonged to the popular classes. A very small minority of them could be regarded as being authentic criminal (it was the case of the Voisin, under Louis XIV, for example the) guilty ones of homicide, or mentally ills. The great majority was contrary to all ages and of all conditions, and various religious confessions, often Sages-femmes or healers. Their remedies were based on a traditional Pharmacopée, beverages, Infusion S or Décoction S of roots and grass, them Simple . The population, primarily rural, hardly had other recourse to be looked after. All tortured, and burned alives, because young people, because old women, because women, largest of the sins which was reproached to them by the authorities of time. A means horrible to know if a Femme were a witch consisted to throw it naked to water, the hands and feet attached together to prevent it from surviving. A witch being - in theory lighter than water, if it floated, it was fished out at once and burned alive. If it drowned, it is that it was innocent dead. H.P. Duer, professor of ethnology German, in its work Nudity and decency , estimates that this practice, if shocking by the exhibition which it caused, was used little. But there are several texts and drawings showing that existed several tens of years to the Moyen-âge.

If, during the Middle Ages, persecutions are especially directed against the Hérétique S (Cathares or Vaudois), it is, curiously, starting from the Modern times , after the discovery of Americas, at the moment when starts to sting the Humanisme and where printing works makes its appearance, which begins this persecution that as aucuns and particularly the feminist described sexist (probably the only one of the history), that others called Génocide. It should be noted that the estimates of the number of the victims of the historians of today take into account only the people died during the meetings of torture or on the bûchers and not those which died of the continuations of the Torture, agreed and even explicitly required in several pontifical bubbles by, and which could have been several hundreds of thousands. It is, to some extent, when the world of the time globalize, would say one today, that the phenomenon becomes extensive. It seems that the fear that this globalisation causes cannot be the single reason which pushes with diaboliser a sex and to use it like Scapegoat.

If the fact in addition is noticed that at the same time two trade associations will play a greater economic part, those of the doctors and clerks, it is understood that the women, who enjoyed a freedom larger than one could not it believe as for the exercise of a trade until the end it the Middle Ages, can be aimed by the threat of possible persecutions, convainquant them to withdraw themselves in their hearth and to give up any activity apart from this one. If the term genocide is apparently not most suitable, of many feminists define today this tracking in the witch like a Crime against humanity, some, such as for example on the Sisyphus site, specifying that it is a Gynécide. A handbook written by two Dominicain S was published in the 16th century to establish the criteria making it possible to perpetrate it, the Malleus Maleficarum or Hammer of the witches. This one repudiated forever, just as never so far this crime was officially recognized as such by the religious authorities which made it.

The women of the privileged classes escaped persecutions, even if the scandal splashed sometimes the Court, as it was the case at the time of the Affaire of the poisons, and Catherine de Médicis did not hesitate to use some to eliminate some characters politically awkward from his entourage.

witch hunts know two waves: the first of 1480 to approximately 1520, then the second of 1560 to 1650. But as of the years 1400-1450, the portrait of what will become one image of Épinal thereafter takes shape, and last persecutions finish towards the end of the 17th century. The last burned in Europe are Anna Göldin in the canton of Glaris of Protestant Switzerland in 1782, and one or two others in 1793 in very catholic Poland, at the 18th century thus. Whereas one associates generally more readily Moyen-âge and Sorcellerie, knew them the most horrible waves of the persecutions. Previously the wizards are men and women, the lawsuits in sorcery become almost exclusively against the women. Paroxysm is reached when the civil courts supplant this monopoly of church.

German Pasteur Anton Praetorius of the reformed church of Jean Calvin published in 1602 the book Of the thorough study of sorcery and the wizards ( Von Zauberey und Zauberern Gründlicher Bericht ) against persecution with the witches and the Torture.

Change from point of view at the time modern

The first to rehabilitate the witches was Jules Michelet which devoted a book in to them 1862. He wanted this book like one anthem with the woman, beneficial and victim . But he does not recognize truly the right to the emancipation to them. It is necessary to await the feminist movements Années 1970 to see appearing the topic under one day positive. Representing these movements seized some and asserted it like symbol of their combat. One will note for example the Sorcières review of Xavière Gauthier, which studied them practices subversive of the women .

The witch is shown under one day favorable through many works of fiction and the members of the Wicca assert themselves as the heirs to a Culte to which the witches of the time of persecutions would have belonged.

Some of the Chrétiens attached to a literal interpretation of the Bible can not share this passion because of the command requiring to put at dead the magicians.

Witch of the legends and carnivals

Fictitious witches

Witch in works of fiction

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