Studying the Witch Trials: A Complex Legacy
Author’s Note: The content of this blog reflects my personal experiences and perspectives on magic. Witchcraft is a deeply individual practice, and my approach may not align with everyone’s beliefs or traditions. I encourage readers to explore, question, and adapt what resonates with them. Nothing shared here is meant to serve as absolute truth or professional advice. Trust your intuition, do your own research, and walk your own path.
The witch trials are one of the most misunderstood aspects of so called ‘magical history’. For many witches, they evoke a visceral sense of injustice, persecution, and ancestral sorrow. But we have to be honest with ourselves: those who were targeted in the witch hunts were not witches. They were women and (less often) men—often poor, marginalized, elderly, mentally ill, or simply inconvenient to those in power—caught in the gears of religious fear, social control, and patriarchal violence.
There were no covens dancing under the full moon, no cunning women being hunted for their skill. The confessions extracted during these trials were not testimonies of magical practice. They were stories forced through torture, starvation, imprisonment, threats, and psychological cruelty. When we use phrases “we are the granddaughters of the witches they could not burn,” we participate in a romanticized fiction. And yet...the witch trials still matter deeply to many of us. And in some ways, they should.
So where, then, lies the value in studying these horrors? If they were not persecuting witches, why do we, as witches, care?
The answer is in the folklore. We do not study witch trials to find ancient lineages or secret grimoires. We study them to understand how people thought magic worked. The witch trials—grim and tragic as they are—preserve traces of pre-modern European cosmologies, fears, and beliefs about the supernatural. Hidden among the forced confessions and twisted accusations are fragments of genuine folk belief, oral traditions, and magical theory.
What Can We Learn?
1. Beliefs About Witchcraft and Its Signs
Witch trial documents are filled with lists of what were believed to be signs of a witch: the witch’s mark, familiars, flying ointments, pacts with the Devil, the use of charms and curses, weather magic, and more. While these were not real-life practices of those accused, they do reflect cultural ideas of what witches could do. Folk magic often leaves little written trace—so these documents, while filtered through violence and distortion, offer a rare look at what people feared and imagined magic to be.
2. Interactions with Spirits and the Devil
The Devil of the witch trials was not the theological devil of educated clergy; it was a folkloric figure, an amalgamation of spirits, tricksters, and otherworldly beings. In many confessions, the Devil acts like an Initiator or a liminal guide: appearing in the woods, offering gifts or instruction, teaching spells, or demanding strange rituals. These patterns echo older spirit traditions, fairy faiths, and folk beliefs about entering into relationship with the unseen.
3. The Structure of Magical Practice
The coerced confessions often follow a recognizable pattern: initiation (usually through a pact), naming a familiar spirit, receiving magical knowledge, using herbs or charms, and attending gatherings. These are not historical records of real events—but they reflect ideas that circulated at the time about how one might come into magical power. That pattern is culturally instructive, and in some folk and traditional witchcraft paths today, these frameworks are carefully studied and reclaimed, not as literal truths, but as ritual templates.
4. Magical Language and Formulas
Some confessions contain remnants of incantations, spellwork, or ritual formulas. Whether real or invented by interrogators, these phrases often reflect older magical beliefs. We find herbs used for healing or harm, charms and talismans, spoken words meant to control spirits or shift fate. For witches interested in historical magic, these are sometimes the only surviving fragments of older, oral folklore.
5. Folklore, Fear, and Cultural Memory
Perhaps most powerfully, the witch trials show us how deeply rooted magical thinking was in early modern life. Magic was woven into medicine, morality, weather, agriculture, and childbirth. The trials record community fears—of envy, illness, death, and unexplained suffering. By studying them, we better understand the psychological and cultural landscape of our magical ancestors—not because they were witches, but because their world was still filled with the presence of the sacred, the strange, and the supernatural.
Approaching the Trials with Respect
This isn’t easy material. It is painful, violent, and must be handled with care. We do not need to romanticize the witch trials to take them seriously. We can hold grief for the victims and still listen for the whispers of old belief beneath the cruelty. We can be students of history without claiming a false heritage of persecution. And we can choose to study the past in a way that honors the dead while nourishing our craft today.
Because our magic doesn’t tend to come from bloodlines or ancient spellbooks. It comes from choice, from study, and from listening closely—to what people feared, what they believed, and how the spirit world showed up in their lives.
