What is a witch?

Historically, the understanding of women labeled as witches differed drastically from what it came to mean when Christianity became the dominant force in Europe. Historian P.G. Maxwell-Stewart notes:

In the world of late antiquity or the early Middle Ages, it is impossible to define someone as a witch (as opposed, for example, to an amateur herbalist, a heretic or a scold), and none of the legislation of the time attempted to do so. Offenders were designated offenders by virtue of their performing various actions or wearing certain objects declared by the legislation to be condemned or forbidden. For all practical purposes, the “witch” had not yet been invented. There were only practitioners of various kinds of magic, both male and female, who might belong to any rank of ecclesiastical or lay society, and whose actions might, or might not, bring them within the compass of canon or secular law, depending on external factors that were usually local but could, from time to time, be more general. ¹

There was no single word for witch in the ancient world. Latin, for example, has a number of words that often get (mis)translated as "witch"² and it was not uncommon for famous witches to be associated with divinity. Examples include Circe, who was a minor deity, and Medea, who was the granddaughter of the sun. Historian Hans Peter Broedel notes that “Prior to the fifteenth century, people spoke in terms of heretics, of maleficium, of monstrous female spirits the lamiae and strigae, but not of a single composite category, ‘witch’.^"3

Practice of magic was not an inherently evil or negative idea, as it came to be used by later Christian writers. The ancient Greeks in particular made no moral condemnation of magic and it was seen as something that anyone could do if they knew how. We have unearthed a number of ancient Greek binding spells created by people from all walks of life⁴ and a number of writers just seemed to view magical properties as being inherent in certain objects.

The idea of the witch as we have it today in the West was dramatically influenced by Medieval Christian beliefs, but none of those reflect any documented reality that historians are aware of. Much of what Medieval Christians ended up saying about those they labeled as witches were in fact things that had earlier been said about Christians.⁵ So what is a witch? The short answer is "it depends". The longer answer is "it depends on the sociohistorical context you're looking at. You'll find different answers in ancient Greece vs. Scandinavia vs. the Roman Republic, vs. etc.

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1. P.G. Maxwell-Stuart, “The Emergence of the Christian Witch,” History Today, November 2000, 40.

2. veneficia, saga, lamia, praecantrix, and incantatrix are a few of several different examples

               3. Hans Broedel,The Malleus Maleficarum and the Construction of Witchcraft: Theology and Popular Belief, 1st ed

(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 3.

4. John Gager, Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World, Oxford University Press; Revised edition (October 28, 1999)

5. WAGEMAKERS, BART. “INCEST, INFANTICIDE, AND CANNIBALISM: ANTI-CHRISTIAN IMPUTATIONS IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE.” Greece & Rome, vol. 57, no. 2, 2010, pp. 337–354. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40929483. Accessed 7 June 2020.