Witchcraft

Witchcraft is the practice of magic and craft to shape events, to heal, protect, harm, or divine, expressed through charms, herbal lore, ritual, and the working of will. But the word carries at least three distinct meanings that must be kept apart. In its oldest and broadest sense it names the folk magic and cunning craft found across cultures: the everyday work of village charmers, healers, and "cunning folk" who used spells, herbs, and simples for practical ends, a largely benign and ubiquitous feature of pre-modern life. In a second sense, the one at the heart of the European witch-hunts of roughly 1450-1750, "witchcraft" was a demonological construction: the imagined crime of maleficium worked through a pact with the Devil, for which perhaps tens of thousands of people, overwhelmingly women, were tried and executed on the basis of a theory that modern historians regard as a lethal fantasy rather than a description of any real sect.

In a third and modern sense, "witchcraft" (or the Craft) names a living religion: Wicca, developed in mid-twentieth-century England and expanded since, and the broader modern Pagan witchcraft movement, which reclaim the word for a nature-venerating, magic-practising spirituality with no connection to the Devil of the witch-hunt imagination. Understanding witchcraft thus requires distinguishing the anthropological reality of folk magic, the historical tragedy of the witch persecutions and the false beliefs that drove them, and the contemporary religions that have taken the name as their own.

The two articles above concern the word and the history. This one concerns the present, because accusations of witchcraft and sorcery are still being made and people are still being killed after them.

The documentation is not folkloric. In 2021 the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted a resolution on harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks. UNICEF has published field research on children accused in central and west Africa, where accusation leads to beating, forced exorcism, expulsion and abandonment. The United Nations mandate on the rights of persons with albinism records mutilation and killing driven by beliefs about body parts in charms. In Papua New Guinea researchers and government use the term sorcery accusation related violence. India's national crime statistics record murders under a witchcraft motive, and several Indian states have specific legislation against witch-hunting.

The single most important thing to say is the same thing the European record says. The people harmed are, overwhelmingly, not practitioners of anything. They are older women, widows, orphans and stepchildren, people with disabilities, people with albinism. An accusation of occult harm becomes a licence to act against someone who has no way to refuse, and research repeatedly finds material pressure underneath it: drought, displacement, poverty, and disputes over land.

None of that is a survival of the European trials, and none of it belongs beside modern Pagan witchcraft, which is a different subject entirely.

Three quite different things share this word and running them together is the commonest error in the subject.

The first is the European witch trials of roughly 1450 to 1750. Tens of thousands of people were executed, most of them women, on charges assembled by prosecutors from a mixture of learned demonology and local suspicion. The historical consensus is that the crime as charged did not exist and that the confessions were produced by the process. That is a finding about the trials, not about whether anyone practised anything.

The second is the folk practice that did exist alongside them: cunning folk, charmers and healers who cured, found lost property and lifted curses, and who were often the people villagers went to for protection against witchcraft. Their trade is well attested and it was not the thing being prosecuted, though practitioners were sometimes caught up in it.

The third is modern Wicca. Margaret Murray argued in the 1920s that the trials had persecuted a surviving pre-Christian religion, a thesis historians have comprehensively rejected. Gerald Gardner nevertheless built on it, and after the repeal of the Witchcraft Act in Britain in 1951 published an account of a religion he presented as that survival. Its elements are traceable to ceremonial magic, folklore and Gardner's own composition.

Wicca is a genuine modern religion with real adherents. Its claim to descend from the people burned in the trials does not hold.

WitchTok names the loose community of witchcraft and Pagan content on TikTok, built around short videos teaching spellwork, tarot reading, herbalism and seasonal ritual to an audience the platform's own recommendation algorithm assembles rather than any single teacher or publisher choosing who sees what. Scholar Christy Miller's 2022 study of the phenomenon argues it should be read as a real site of religious transmission entangled with consumer and material culture, not as one or the other: the same videos that teach genuine practice sit beside, and are often produced by the same creators as, witchcraft-branded merchandise, candles, decks and courses sold directly through the platform.

That entanglement is the phenomenon's most distinctive feature next to older transmission forms this atlas documents on Witchcraft's own page, covens, published books, and direct in-person teaching. A book's author and a coven's initiator both make a visible, accountable choice about what to teach; a recommendation algorithm optimizing for watch time makes a choice too, but not one aimed at accuracy or lineage, which means the version of witchcraft that reaches the largest audience on a given day is not necessarily the version most representative of how practitioners have historically practiced.

None of this makes WitchTok content false as religious practice, and this atlas does not treat it that way. It documents a genuinely new and unusually well studied case of how a platform's own incentives actively shape which version of an existing tradition a new generation encounters first, the same dynamic the Digital Religion discipline page elsewhere on this atlas names as the field's defining question.