Talk:Witchcraft (feminist)

Possible references and sources for expansion
Trinity College Digital Repository: Hexing the Patriarchy: Witchcraft and Feminism as a Rebuttal to Capitalism

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2836218/ The “virtue” of the saludador stands in contrast to the evil or venom of the witch. It is therefore hardly surprising that, just as witchcraft was seen as something that essentially concerned women, the role of the saludador was very much a masculine one, as borne out by the belief that the only true saludadores were the seventh sons of couples who had hitherto produced only male offspring.

Significantly, a high number of midwives were accused of witchcraft—as the kind of medical assistance given to pregnant women became a lucrative activity rather than a service rendered by friends and neighbours, power conflicts were triggered, accompanied by that common feature of the age, the demonization of the person against whom one held a grievance.

 None of the accused women were practicing witches, Mitchell said, but the Scottish government used women as scapegoats to explain away the country’s adversities.

“I absolutely believe the accusations of witchcraft are a feminist issue,” she said. “It was always women to a greater degree that were accused of witchcraft.”

Practicing witches are using past mistreatment to inspire a new feminist movement among their ranks globally, with a goal of erasing the stigma surrounding witchcraft. In the U.S., 1 million people are estimated to identify as pagan or Wiccan, according to a 2014 study by the Pew Research Center; not all of those who practice witchcraft are Wiccan.

“We’re starting to see people re-appropriate ‘the witch’ and redefine the witch as this rebellious, feminist being who is a conductor of feminine power,” she said.



Today’s witches — those who identify more with feminism than burnings at the stake — are a part of the collective consciousness.

Ms. Grossman, who keeps a statue of the Roman goddess Diana the Huntress on her altar, said witches are having a resurgence among feminists who want authority over their own lives. But they continue to be persecuted in places like Papua New Guinea, where angry mobs have recently accused vulnerable people, often women, of sorcery.

The witch is a feminine archetype who has authority over herself. She doesn’t get power in relationship to other people. She has power on her own terms. And because of that she is, I believe, the ultimate feminist icon.

With every wave of feminism, there is a renewed interest in the witch. This started as early as the 19th century with the suffragists. Matilda Joslyn Gage, who was a contemporary of Susan B. Anthony, wrote a book in 1893 called “Woman, Church and State.” In that book, she talked about how she believed those who were accused of being witches were, in fact, brilliant minds of their age and a threat to the patriarchy. Now, actually, her history is dicey. Not every woman killed in the name of witchcraft was brilliant. But there was a romantic notion of these people who were victimized. And that sentiment has stayed with us.

Witchcraft is one means for women to be able to step into their power. It is not the only means. And people are gravitating toward this archetype not just for spiritual reasons. There are a lot of people calling themselves witches in a political way, in a tongue and cheek way. And that is empowering for them, too. They might not actually practice magic.

 "I challenge the notions that witchcraft and sorcery invariably lead to violence, that there is only one type of witchcraft and sorcery, and that what is labelled witchcraft and sorcery in English is entirely superstitious nonsense."

"Despite early Christianisation, belief and practice of witchcraft continues to be prevalent in this primarily matrilineal province. Even outside the province, the flying witches of Milne Bay are legendary and Milne Bay itself has been described anecdotally as the witchcraft centre of PNG. In contrast to other chapters from PNG in this volume which speak of witchcraft and sorcery accusations that generate brutal violence on the accused, violence against women is much less in this province where witchcraft is highly articulated, and it is said to empower and contribute to the status of Milne Bay women."

Witchcraft, Sorcery, Violence:Matrilineal and Decolonial Reflections, Salmah Eva-Lina Lawrence

"Witchcraft beliefs, though a long-standing part of European folk tradition, are generally agreed to have been qualitatively transformed during the 16th century. As Cohn (1975:197) has observed, “Until the late fourteenth century the educated in general, and the higher clergy in particular, were quite clear that these nocturnal journeyings of women, whether for benign or for maleficent purposes, were purely imaginary happenings. But in the sixteenth and still more in the seventeenth centuries, this was no longer the case.” [...] Russel (1972:25, 279) regards the age of classical witchcraft as having its beginnings in the preceding century, when accusations began to manifest a marked bias against women (see also Monter 1976:24) [...] As Larner points out, until the early 14th century witchcraft trails largely tended to revolve around indictments for sorcery and only occasionally involved the charges of diabolism which we associate with classical witchcraft. The imputation of diabolism slowly increased in incidence during the course of the 15th century [...] although ‘’belief’’ in witches was endemic"

 European fears of witchcraft performed by Andean and African women and New Christians, filtered as they were through Iberian ideologies of gender and religion, were transferred to the New World in ways that were not grounded in the reality of Spanish held Peru, but nonetheless had significant implications for the lives of New Christians and Andean women in the New World.

Spanish anxiety about Jews and indigenous witches in early colonial Peru was based in the imagined threats that these groups posed to the colonial order: in being non-Christian, both Jews and Andean women were antithetical to the logic of colonization and were imagined to threaten Christianity and colonial state formation. Despite the fact that New Christians in the New World were principally trying to assimilate into Christian, colonial society and hide their Jewishness, and that Andeans did not have a concept of the devil or witchcraft and as a result did not understand themselves to be practicing witchcraft, the Spanish colonial imaginary perceived New Christians and indigenous women as serious dangers to the foundation of the colonial state.

The Spanish uniformly understood Andean religion entirely in terms of their own Christian religion. Andean religion, thus lacking any internal coherence as a result of the Spanish separation of Andean religious tradition from its beliefs and history, was construed as superstition.35,36 In the Andean devotion to huacas and their ancestors, the Spanish saw devil worship, and not the religious beliefs that made such a worship make sense.37,38 Consequently, both the Spanish who understood Andean religion as in some way united to Christianity and ancient Mediterranean religion and the Spanish who saw Andean religion as totally unlike Christianity tried to understand Andean worship in terms of demonic illusion.

If Andean worship was indeed devil worship, then indigenous witches were simply manifestations of Andean women’s denunciation of Christianity and their practice of their traditional religion.

European witch-hunts, which accused primarily women of being agents of the devil, are generally considered a backlash both to women’s increasing independence from men and motherhood and to the Church’s fading authority.

[W]itch hunts explicitly targeted women and midwives in an attempt to incite fear in women who were using birth control and going against the gender order and to eliminate knowledge of birth control.62 The period of the most intense witch-hunts, moreover, was concurrent with the Church’s waning power in the post-Reformation era, and it took advantage of Europe’s most marginalized population (poor, old women) to reclaim its authority. Finally, this period marked the first time that the Church possessed the technology and the capacity to Christianize the European masses, which were thought to have been practicing pre-Christian sorcery. The European witch craze of the mid-sixteenth through the mid-seventeenth centuries was a fear-based reaction both to the new independence of women and to old, pre-Christian manifestations of spirituality in Europe. The fear that the idea of witches brought about for Christian Europe, thus, was simultaneously based in an understanding of Christianity as the only true religion, one that was so distinct from the pagan religions of Europe’s peasantry that mass forced conversion was required, and in new fears that were being engendered by a loss of Church control and by women’s empowerment. Though the witch craze in Europe arose from specifically European circumstances and fears, the European understanding of the devil working in religious and cultural traditions not well understood by the Church was at the heart of the witch hunts and Autos de Fe in Peru at the same time.

Spain’s witch hunts and Inquisition sought to bolster the authority of the Church and the state through the public condemnation of marginalized groups (namely women and Jews) who were, or were perceived to be, accruing their own empowerment and threatening the power of the state.

Andean women were not only stripped of their roles in organizing their own political and religious institutions, but were economically exploited in ways that were unprecedented under the Spanish system of tribute. Moreover, the equality they had enjoyed with their male counterparts was expunged as the Spanish colonial state and ideology enforced a subordination of indigenous people to the Spanish and a subordination of women to men. Consequently, and because of the power that the Spanish vested in Andean women as a result of their own European fears of powerful women, Andean witches used the Spanish ideology of witchcraft to reclaim their culture, religion, and their female autonomy.

By the very definition of witchcraft that the Spanish created in the Andes, the practice by Andean women of their religion and the maintenance of their culture was construed as witchcraft.

Both the Andean women who stayed in the reducciones and those that fled to the puna to create radical communities that rejected Christianity, colonization, and patriarchy in absolute terms were construed by the Spanish colonial state as witches simply because of their maintenance of their culture and religion.91 In fact, a Spanish priest who publicly whipped three Andean witches claimed that he punished these women not ‘“so much because of the fact that they believed in superstitions and other abominations, but rather because they encouraged the whole village to mutiny and riots through their reputation as witches.”’

Collapsed for space management. Darker Dreams (talk) 23:29, 31 July 2023 (UTC)


 * “Witchcraft is often associated with marginalized people, particularly women,” she said. “There’s a whole body of women’s ritual that tends to be called witchcraft simply because it is women’s ritual.” Darker Dreams (talk) 12:49, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

Merge proposal
Dianic Wicca is the main manifestation of Feminist witchcraft and should be merged here. That article starts "Dianic Wicca, also known as Dianic Witchcraft..." so has the same topic as this article professes. Skyerise (talk) 16:30, 2 August 2023 (UTC)


 * No merge Dianic Wicca is the main organized expression of feminist witchcraft. Conflating the two makes the mistake of equating Wicca with witchcraft in unrelated cases. Expressions of feminist witchcraft may not be associated with religion at all. Darker Dreams (talk) 16:43, 2 August 2023 (UTC)


 * This article should just be redirected to Dianic Wicca. It's the same topic. As Skyerise said, that article starts " Dianic Wicca, also known as Dianic Witchcraft ..." . – Asarlaí  (talk) 18:22, 2 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Dianic_Wicca using the same name does not mean the same thing. Even if, as in this case, they are related it does not mean they are same, nor that it must be one article. Darker Dreams (talk) 20:10, 2 August 2023 (UTC)


 * Redirect to Dianic witchcraft FFS, enough of this. 2603:7000:C00:B4E8:EC58:3376:B2D3:9579 (talk) 13:42, 20 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Redirect to Dianic witchcraft, per nom. Hey man im josh (talk) 17:32, 16 October 2023 (UTC)


 * Redirect to Dianic witchcraft/Merge with Dianic witchcraft I agree with the nomination, this is a duplication of content. It should be merged with Dianic Wicca. Netherzone (talk) 08:13, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

Material from Russian Witchcraft
The history of witchcraft had evolved around society. More of a psychological concept to the creation and usage of witchcraft can create the assumption as to why women are more likely to follow the practices behind witchcraft. Identifying with the soul of an individual's self is often deemed as "feminine" in society. There is analyzed social and economic evidence to associate between witchcraft and women.

Text from European witchcraft page at. Darker Dreams (talk) 03:37, 5 September 2023 (UTC) Darker Dreams (talk) 03:37, 5 September 2023 (UTC)