A lot of media portrays witches and witchcraft in a positive manner. I was taught to avoid any religious consideration outside of Christianity. So as not go astray and support the Christian traditions. Sort of like living blinders on. it seems the likelihood that witches live and behave within the realm of good and evil. Evil bequeath evil and so it goes. If true then a good hearted witch is not evil? Therefore how is it assumed that witches in general are in league with the devil. In truth I've lived a sheltered life, somewhat naive in many things, but also shielded from world harm. I grew up going to church because my dad was a preacher, sometimes it is best not knowing everything. I believe everything I know and the time in which it was learned was timed perfectly as it is today.
Depends on how the word is used, I'd say. If used as a slur to denigrate people one considers bad, then in that context all witches are bad. There are practitioners of folk Western folk traditions (often revived or reconstructed ones), who self-identify as witches. I know a few, and they have truly good hearts by my book. Chances are, you would like them, too. There are also some very twisted ones I came to know. But then I also know a few church-going Christians whom I wouldn't want to associate with because of what words and actions are provoked by their hearts. Over the years, I came to realize that outer appearances are misleading, and that no tradition or religion has a monopoly on truth and goodness.
Fair do's ... they've had a bad press for a long time. A lot of YA media treat vampires and werewolves as romantic creatures. A sociologist can probably sketch out the curve, I'd suppose it's an offshoot of NA thinking? Don't know, really. I think the template was set in the Middle Ages by some bonkers Dominican monk, if memory serves, who wrote a 'manual' on the subject, basically inventing it, as it's commonly known. Well you've made me chase down that reference now. It's the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches), written in 1487 by a discredited Dominican monk and inquisitor Heinrich Kramer. If you follow his link, you'll see treatises against witchcraft actually predate him. So that led me European witchcraft, and that's quite an interesting read, it touches on how 'magic' was a broad definition, and the clergy practiced religious rituals which were little more than 'baptised classical magic' (my quote), eg rites for crop fertility, etc., which followed the classicalpattern but were accompanied by readings from relevant Bible texts. Every convent and monastery had its herbal, and no-doubt they were aware of the benefit of picking certain plants at the full of the moon, etc... It's worth a read, it's quite interesting. As for witches, to be a witch requires the willing consent to entering a pact with the devil, a vastly different thing to, say, possession, where the 'victim' is essentially innocent. Witches, by definition, were not innocent and bent on serving evil. My girls had warts when they were kids. An old Norfolk countrywoman 'cured' them by rubbing Euphorbia sap on the warts. She insisted the girls had to do it daily, and might even have given them a little rhyme. Obviously, a witch. Or, evidently, euphorbia is an irritant. A wart is isolated cells the body wraps up and forgets about. Euphorbia reminds it, and it gets to work dispersing the irritating wart... Modern witchcraft — Wicca — is largely the invention of Gerard Gardner. This was the Golden Age of the upper middle class English dabbler in all things foreign and exotic. Gardner had encountered magic in Africa, and the Grandmother of Wicca, Margaret Murray, was from the same upper middle background and an Egyptologist. I should think there are scores of educated, elite-minded, upper middle class English who made their names as explorers and adventurers in acceptable fields as well as the less acceptable such as Occultism, Wicca, Magik, the Esoteric, etc. Look at men like T.E. Lawrence and his less well-known contemporary Harry St John Bridger Philby, both infatuated Arabists. I ran into witches in my cultist days, when two turned up at an open night in an affluent part of North London when they made it evident they were there to 'check out the opposition'. All in all, historically, they've had a bad press.
In a way the devil is what leads to death. All that is natural dies. All nature is subject to gravity. The devil is gravity, in a way? What's good for the lion isn't good for the zebra. To me witchcraft implies nature magic, as opposed to Spirit. And of course a difference between unselfish 'white magic' and sorcery, which is selfish 'black magic? In the sense wicca is working short-term with inferior natural forces, instead of with the higher and eternal spiritual forces that 'weave' nature?
Nature spirits are tricky and mischevious. Trying to work with them can lead to obsessive behaviour and mental problems. Best to give things like tarot and wicca a miss. Ask God for what you need. He will place you in the hands of spiritual angel beings. Imo
If you look at the world literature of faeries, they are always capricious if not downright dangerous and malevolent beings. It was only with authors of the 18th/19th century Romance movement that the literature of fairies are they're commonly perceived today comes to exist. A bit like the literature of vampires and werewolves today.
curious how time and man distort truth. it angers me that history is lost and forgotten. I feel everyone should have truthful access to what has been covered and moved away from sight.
Regarding dangerous nature spirits: They embody natural phenomena after all. A poisonous plant is dangerous to eat. It takes respect for this danger and knowledge of what it behaves like to interact with it safely. Take the spirit of alcohol. When you distill it, don't be greedy, or you'll go blind. When you drink it, be courteous, take small sips, don't hog the bottle, or you'll be miserable. If you know the entity well and behave yourself, you get to have a good time. It will enslave you over the long run, and it can team up with personal demons to kill you. Money has a spiritual side, too. Mammon is a powerful entity, and can be both destructive as well as bountiful. It wants to move, it thrives when let loose, but it is also capricious...
