User:Snshne/Witch(Sorceress)

The witch is usually portrayed in the popular imagination as an old-fashioned woman, with a big wrinkled nose, determined and excellent manipulator of black magic and endowed with a terrible laugh. The word comes from italian verb bruciare, which means to burn (brucia). At the time of the Inquisition, the foreigners of Italy, when they heard Brucia shouting, associated a word with the reverse. It is undeniable between this view and a view of the Hag or Crone of Anglophones. Also popularized is the image of the witch as a woman sitting on a flying broom, or with the same stride between her legs, walking on heels. Some authors use the term, however, to designate wise women who possess knowledge about nature and, possibly, about magic.

Some witches who previously acquired some notoriety, as is the case of the calls Salem Witches, the Witch of Evora and Dame Alice Kyteler (English witch). They are also quite popular in fiction literature, as in the books of the popular Harry Potter series in the books of Marion Zimmer Bradley (author of The Mists of Avalon, which deal with a vast community of wizards and witches who mostly prefer to avoid black magic) or Anne Rice's Mayfair trilogy.

Witches are often associated with black cats, which among wizards we now believe are called Puckerel, often considered guardian spirits of witchcraft, who in habit the body of an animal. These are generally referred to in the literature as relatives..

Witches were said to fly on brooms at night, and especially on full-moon nights, which cast spells and turn people into animals, and which were evil

Nowadays these old superstitions like that of the old broom witch on the full moon have already been softened, due to the greater tolerance between religions, religious syncretism and the spread of paganism. Gerald Gardner stands out in this scenario as the father of Religion Wicca, the religion of modern pagan witchcraft, made up of people who are wizards but who use the "Art of the Wise" or the "Old Religion" mixed with the practices and knowledge of others traditions. The classification of magic as black and white does not exist for witches, because they are based on the concepts of good and evil, which are not part of their beliefs, so, as they say, all magic is gray.

The Art of the Witches as was done before is called Traditional Witchcraft, still remaining to the present day in select groups, usually hidden. Today you can also find a vast amount of books and websites that explain the "Old Religion" but are usually Wicca, since members of Traditional Witchcraft groups often prefer ostracism, revealing themselves publicly only on special occasions or for new candidates to locate them..

History
The assertions of the existence of witches portrayed in the records of the Middle Ages include stories in which they are found today, a caveat is admitted: they seem to have existed only in a popular imaginary as an old woman maddened by enigmatic spells, time of a year dominated by fears, when any diverse manifestation or even a nonexistence of witches of the form portrayed by the clerical authorities was relentlessly persecuted by the Church.

Witchcraft had already been quoted from the earliest centuries of our era. Authors such as the Greek philosopher Lucius Apuleius (123-170) alluded to a creature that appeared in the form of an owl (Hecate) that was actually a descending form of certain women who flew at dawn, eager for human flesh and blood.

To the intellectuals, these events were nothing more than the popular imagination, dreams, nightmares, and thus they refused to admit the existence of witches. But this was not the case among many peoples: the edicts of the Salian Franks spoke of Estrige as if it existed in fact. The penitents attested to the belief in these lusty women. At the beginning of the eleventh century, Bishop of Worms, asked the priests to ask the penitents questions in order to find out if they were followers of Satan ... if they had the power to kill with invisible baptized Christian weapons. , forty days of fasting and seven years of penances.

Until the thirteenth century the church did not severely condemn this kind of belief. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the concept of magical practices, heresies and witchcraft became confused in the judgment of popular ignorance. They were, in general, women accused. Hereges, Cathars and Templars were violently condemned by the Inquisition, in turn the powerful and ancient, the first of the first inquisition (13th century). Curiously, it was from the very first inquisition that a female iconographer came to represent the "Decayed Archangel," but with a pagan-like appearance, like Pan and Cernunnos. The reason led, the marriage, the supposition of witches were worshipers of the devil, which is not the main Christian book. The alternative use of the name Lucifer to designate the incarnate evil, in the Christian view, has aggravated an ignorance about the cultures of witches, since the name Lucifer, by the Latin root, represents the bearer / maker of light (Lux Ferre), inescapable similarity to the Greek myth of Prometheus, who took the fire out of the heavens to bring it to men. The movement of repression to witchcraft, begun in the Middle Ages, reached its highest intensity in the fifteenth century, in the second half of the seventeenth century its flame diminished: the number of witchcraft processes in northern France increased from 8 in the 15th century to 13 in the first half of the sixteenth century, and 23 in the second half, reaching 16 in the first half of the seventeenth century, decreasing to 3 in the second half of that century and a single in the next. (Claude Gauvard - member of the Institut Universitaire de France).

In 1233 Pope Gregory IX admitted the existence of the sabbat and esbat. Pope John XXII, in 1326, authorized a persecution of witches at the risk of heresy. The Council of Basel (1431-1449) is called for the suppression of all evils that impede the Church

A psychosis settles. Communities in the center-west of France have increased their witchcraft members. In Aquitaine (1453) an epidemic caused many deaths that were attributed to the women of the region, preferably as very thin and ugly. Fangs, subjected to interrogators and the paper made in the year with their children and the condemned the mission at the child. As they did not confess they were often lynched and burned by the crowd, irritated by the lack of condemnation.

The associated demonic and magical processes multiplied around 1430, marking a new phase in the pre-Enlightenment history of tragic dimensions. In 1484 Pope Innocent VIII promulgated a Bull Summis desiderantes affectibus, confirming the existence of sorcery. In 1484, the publication Malleus Maleficarum ("Hammer of the Witches") is a search for witches with greater violence than the previous works, associating heresy and magic with witchcraft.

The Inquisition, instituted to combat heresy, aggravated a variety of followers inspired by Satan. Still, a sexist component. Witches existed, but they were like women, above all, who were burned in medieval fires.

See too
Les Lavandières Witchcraft Wicca