A lot of media portrays witches and witchcraft in a positive manner.
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.
it seems the likelihood that witches live and behave within the realm of good and evil.
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.
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.
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.
