Witches of Romania

Witches of Romania

 

Medieval Witchcraft

Witchcraft refers to the use of certain occult and spiritual practices to seek the assistance of the supernatural powers in resolving the problems whose solutions can not be achieved through the known rational means. The process involves reciting prayers and performing rituals in a certain specific format or craft. Prayers and rituals when performed with utmost sincerity and faith do quite often fructify into the desired results. Since there is no reasonable explanation for the manifestation of the result, they are termed miracles or magic. Witchcraft is therefore considered synonymous with magic.

Witchcraft has existed since man was born and he had to struggle for his survival against the unpredictable and unmanageable forces of nature such as famines, rains, floods, epidemics or some other occurrences at personal level  which could not be easily explained. Witchcraft had all the more reason to exist in the medieval times when human knowledge was still at a rudimentary stage and there appeared no other solution to day-to-day problems that confused and befuddled the people of those times.

In their desperation to seek the desired results, some times the practitioners of the witchcraft went out of the way of prayers and resorted to certain extreme practices and rituals such as the use of blood and so on or invoking evil spirits for help. Moreover witchcraft, like every other branch of knowledge, was manipulated and misused by vested interests. A few such cases here and there  gained  wide spread notoriety and provided the ecclesiastic powers, which commanded influence in formulating the secular policies of the kings and rulers of those times, an excuse to brand the witches or wizards as agents of  the evil or Satanic  powers. Now Satan is considered the greatest enemy of the Church and therefore God. Consequently any person who was suspected to be indulging in witchcraft was hounded out and persecuted with the punishment of death through hanging or burning at stake.
Persons accused of practicing the witchcraft were labeled as heretics. Once caught, the victim was coerced into confessing his crime through inhuman tortures and was either hanged or burnt alive during the inquisition. The law against the witchcraft was further exploited by the vested interests to score personal vendetta or to snatch the property or land of victims. Some influential persons in the society, in collusion with the priests, would manage to arouse suspicions against their targets as being witches or wizards. They victims were arrested, made to confess and killed.

Witches were generally portrayed as ugly old hags so as to make them the target of dislike and hatred, but the matter of fact is that they were and still are quite normal men and women and in some case witches were and are quite pretty and presentable ladies.

The witches used scrolls for witchcraft in those times. Some of them survive even today. Besides the spells, the witches also used some herbs and animal parts to make potions to cure some diseases and heal the wounds. Potions were brewed in cauldrons in order to combine them properly. Cauldrons were often made of wood, but other materials such as stones were also used. These potions, though denigrated as superstitious, were quite efficacious in those times as they are equally efficacious now.

THE MUSEUM OF WITCHCRAFT

THE MUSEUM OF WITCHCRAFT Nestled the harbour of the picturesque North Cornish village of Boscastle, is the world famous Museum of Witchcraft. This extraordinary museum houses the world’s largest collection of witchcraft related artefacts and regalia. The museum's history is as fascinating as its collection. It was first founded on the Isle of Man By Cecil H. Williamson in 1951. Cecil's lifelong interest in witchcraft and magic began with his first encounter with old West Country witchcraft as a child in the Devon village of North Bovey. He was befriended by the local witch, after defending the elderly woman from a group of thugs who suspected her of bewitching cattle. As an adult, he investigated the Craft of African Witchdoctors whilst working on a tobacco plantation in Rhodesia. He continued his fascination in Britain in the 1930's, mixing with leading experts of the day and even worked as an agent for MI6, collating the Occult interests of the Nazis. In 1951 Cecil first opened the museum in the ‘Witches Mill’ on the Isle of Man. Gerald Gardner, who he had first met in 1946, was employed as ‘Resident Witch’. Having very different ideas from one another about Witchcraft, and the direction in which the museum and its collection should be taken, their working relationship and friendship broke down. In 1954, Williamson sold the building and some of the collection to Gardner, who continued to run the Witches Mill as a museum until it was bequeathed at his death in 1964 to Lady Olwen (Monique Wilson), who unfortunately sold the collection in 1973 to ‘Ripley's Believe It Or Not’ in America. Wonderfully, a small proportion of this collection has recently found its way home to The Museum of Witchcraft – read details here. Following his parting of company with Gerald Gardner, Cecil moved his museum and its fascinating collection to Windsor, however Royal officials were not happy with the idea of a witchcraft museum in the area and suggested that perhaps it should be located somewhere else... So Cecil relocated again to the Cotswold village of Bourton-on-the-Water, where local Christians subjected him to death threats, strung dead cats up in his garden trees and repeatedly fire-bombed his museum. The final relocation took Cecil and his museum to Cornwall and in 1960 to Boscastle where it remains today.

Rebecca Nurse

Rebecca Nurse

Rebecca Nurse was an elderly and respected member of the Salem Village community. She was accused of witchcraft by several of the "afflicted" girls in the Village in March of 1692. Although a large number of friends, neighbors and family members wrote petitions testifying to her innocence, she was tried for acts of witchcraft in June, 1692. The jury first returned a "not guilty" verdict, but was told to reconsider, and then brought in a verdict of "guilty." Governor Phips pardoned her, but was later persuaded to reverse his decision by several men from Salem. She was excommunicated from the Salem church and hanged on July 19, 1692. Her house in Danvers, the former Salem village, still stands and is open to visitors. A large monument also marks her grave in the Nurse family cemetery on the grounds.

Elly Kedward

Elly Kedward 

n the winter of 1785, Elly Kedward was banished from the town of Blair after several local children accuse her of performing witchcraft. She was presumed dead from exposure, but the next year, all of her accusers have vanished. The residents of Blair fear she's cursed the area and abandon the town, vowing never to utter the name "Elly Kedward" again. 
In 1825, a year after the town was rediscovered and founded as Burkittsville, the villagers held the first annual Wheat Harvest Picnic. During the picnic, ten-year-old Eileen Treacle wandered off towards Tappy East Creek and drowned. Eleven eye-witnesses claimed to have seen a ghostly white hand reach up and pull her into the shallow water. Her body was never found, and for thirteen days afterward, the creek became contaminated with oily bundles of sticks, rendering the water useless. 

Townspeople noted the possible supernatural characteristics of the Treacle disappearance and were quick to blame the death on the Blair Witch.
In 1886, eight-year-old Robin Weaver alledgedly followed a woman who's feet didn't touch the ground into a house the woods. She took Robin into a house, where the woman locked her in basement and said she'd return later. Distressed, Robin escaped through a small window. A search party was dispatched, but while Robin later returned, the search party didn't. A second search party found the group disemboweled at Coffin Rock. When they returned to the site with help, the bodies had vanished without a trace. 

In late 1940, a hermit named Rustin Parr began abducting children from Burkittsville. He kidnapped eight children total and brutally murdered seven of them, letting Kyle Brody go. Parr confessed to the crimes in May of 1941, claiming he was doing what an old lady ghost told him. Parr was convicted and hanged later that year. 

Margaret Murray

Margaret Murray (1863-1963)

Why she’s on this list: If there’s a surprise inclusion on this list it’s Murray. Talking to friends the last 48 hours she was the one figure that everyone trying to figure out my “Top 5″ seemed to forget about. Murray was a well respected Egyptologist and mostly a serious academic (books like God of the Witches were obviously meant for a general audience) but is a major figure in the Modern Pagan Revival because of her books on Witchcraft and the Horned God.

It’s easy in retrospect to dismiss Murray’s Witch-cult in Western Europe (1921). Murray’s hypothesis that the innocents killed in Europe’s “Witch Trials” represented a secret underground pagan religion has been dismissed by a majority of scholars today, but the theory continues to hold a lot of power in Modern Paganism. Regardless of how factual the Murray hypothesis is, it became one of the founding myths of Witchcraft, and as a result Modern Paganism. In addition to providing a mythology, Murray provided the terminology that would become a part of many Pagan traditions. We use words like coven and esbat because they were words that Murray used.

Murray redeemed and legitimized the word “witch.” After reading Murray you want to practice Witchcraft and you want to be a Pagan. Her history of the Horned God in God of the Witches is everything you want a Pagan archetype to be. She traces the worship of Old Horny back to the Cave of the Three Brothers in France and its portrait of “The Sorcerer” to Pan and Cernunnos and then later Robin Hood. Murray’s Witch Religion is a faith of joy and exuberance and I’m certain that it influenced countless people to want to be Witches. She also endorsed Gardner’s version of Witchcraft writing the introduction to Witchcraft Today back in 1954.

Why she’s not higher: There’s only one person who could be number one on this list, but it’s important not to overlook Murray. Without Murray it’s possible that early Pagans might have all called themselves Druids or Heathens and the empowering mantle of witch would have never been worn in Contemporary Paganism. Certainly the influence of Murray’s “Witch-cult Hypothesis” will continue to fade in the coming decades, but her other contributions to Modern Paganism will continue. Besides even if Murray’s theory isn’t exactly true in the literal sense I think many of us will continue to feel a kinship with the women (and men) who were needlessly murdered in the name of religion centuries ago.

Gerald Gardner

Gerald Gardner (1884-1964)

Why he’s here: I don’t think there was any real suspense about the number one spot on this list. Even Gardner’s detractors (and there are many) can’t deny his accomplishments. To put it simply Gardner was the first person to share with the world what would become a long-lasting religious and/or magickal tradition that most of us today would recognize as Pagan. His “Wica” had four quarters, a magick circle, a Goddess, a God, and a High Priestess. All of those elements existed before Gardner, but had never endured together for decades until Gardner.

It also doesn’t matter if Gardner was initiated into a coven back in 1939 or completely made his Witch Religion up. If he was initiated and his faith tradition traces back to that group then he’s the great revealer, sharing a new religion with the rest of the world. If he simply assembled the various pieces that make up Modern Witchcraft then he’s the great architect, the creator of a religious tradition that has now taken a seat next to the other great religions of the world. If you were to ask my opinion, I think Gardner exists somewhere between revealer and architect, someone who was probably initiated into something back in 1939 and then added to it.

I know my Top 5 is rather “Wicca-centered” but that’s only because Wicca has been the most dominant branch of the Pagan tree for the last 70 years. If it makes any of you feel better, Gardner himself was no doubt influenced by Druids like Ross Nichols and most likely encountered New Orleans Voodoo when he visited the United States back in 1947-48. Gardner’s interests were wide-ranging and he absorbed influences from various spiritualities. Gardner’s version of Witchcraft was the first public and long-lasting religion Pagan religion of the 20th Century, as such it’s going to have a high place on lists such as this one.