It's pretty interesting, really, in that belief in witches and witchcraft is widespread throughout human culture. In Europe, they fly about on broomsticks, while in parts of Asia, witches fly overhead in spinning baskets.

Modern adherents of witchcraft are not really witches at all, so says the Encyclopaedia Britannica, because of an article which had appeared in one of its earlier editions. It seems the article described research, since discredited which claimed that witchcraft was merely the ;last remaining vestiges of an earlier religion which predated christianity. Apparently, the article inspired a whole generation of “good witches” (see below) who enjoy the trappings of witchcraft, but who do not actually practice the evil traditionally associated with this culture. A real witch, EB continues, invokes weird powers to inflict harm and evil upon hapless humans.

But nobody really knows what witchcraft is/was, where it came from, and how it came to be so widely conceptualized throughout the many human cultures.

In closing, one tiny sliver from the EB, a magnificent but severely flawed electronic encyclopedia:

“Among the Germanic peoples, who spread throughout Europe during the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, fear of witches was widespread. Here, too, the gods were sponsors and practitioners of sorcery, as well as subject to its power, while kings practiced and suffered from malevolent magic. Types of witchcraft were assigned to whole social classes or families. As in the Greco-Roman world, such powers were especially attributed to women, and the old-woman witch type that was to become central in later European witch scares was a frequent figure in literature. Similar themes appear in the literature of the ancient Slavic peoples.”

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