It is hard out here for a Witch

[IcyTerri]

But your photo is also on your blog.

I doubt any male can keep an erection while reading my blog, though!

[Warmian]

Witches aren’t fake nonconformists like yourself. My wife is a real witch and wouldn’t piss on you to save you from dying in fire.

[Óttar]

Hi Wadaad.

[sean]

A "witch" is just a shaman/sage/medician who uses methods not approved by the local religious authorities. It's only in newer times people self-identify as a witch. It's a similar term to 'heretic', just of the kind who would practice magic, herbalism, and healing.

In the Middle Ages, what we now call witches were just folk healers, midwives and medicine men. They helped deliver children, tried to treat common ailments and gathered herbs and incidental foods (berries, etc) in the woods. From time to time they may also have retained and told folk tales. That's what their role was, and by and large they were left alone because they helped their communities (even if most of what they did medically was hardly better than a placebo) and the Catholic Church saw them as simple con artists and quacks, not worth the cost of prosecuting.

In the Early Modern era, rumours and moral panics spread more easily through the printing press while religious chaos reigned in Europe. Protestant churches became extremely puritanical and doctrinal, while the Catholic Church sought to restore its moral authority in the areas where it was under threat. Witches finally fell out of mainstream society for good to this background. They had always been marginal figures, often unmarried, childless men and women who had something viscerally wrong with them (obesity, insanity, birth defects, etc.), but now they were considered moral enemies instead of con artists or quacks. As a result, their practices were largely stamped out by the time the Industrial Revolution started.

It had nothing whatsoever to do with actual spirit worship, but the dogma at the time was to treat diseases and famines with prayer. When that didn't prove effective anyone who seemed to possess the power to heal by non-faith based means was targeted.

Aside from ridiculous pagan practices, most "witches" were just women preserving their family recipes and folk remedies. A lot of times people had absolutely no idea why a given thing worked like eating certain plants could reduce a fever. They just knew if they put something in a pot then consumed it there would be a beneficial result.

There are a lot of 1700's cookbooks that contain recipes like this that even 100 years prior would have been found straight out of a short hand tome kept by a "witch." Early medicines often were things cooked up through trial and error, then passed down through generations. In the western world it became demonised for a while, but this didn't happen in other places like Asia.

They may have recited incantations as they administered potions, but these were more or less just a handy way to remember which remedies suited a certain condition. Keep in mind that reading and writing was anything but commonplace, so the only way to pass down knowledge was through stories and rhymes. Like the saying, "Feed a cold, starve a fever." That's been verified by actual science.

In England at the time, cunning craft was at its zenith, and 1 in 4 women were accused of being a witch in the colonial period. What's interesting is that the taboos of the Puritans extended beyond the usual "don't get caught" and encompass never even speaking of it to the point that there is nothing much in the way of stories of what these alleged witches were allegedly doing outside of trial notes.

"Real" witchcraft involving demons was sometimes practiced by the nobility but rarely in organised groups. Ancient magic was a lot more practical. Cast a spell, cause an effect. Ironically what modern magicians call "low magic". Seducing husbands, blighting crops, drying out cows, causing floods and droughts, etc. If you go back far enough to when the gods were in closer proximity to humans you have witches able to turn people into animals and bring wind into branches in order to glide through the air.

Also potions were a lot bigger of deal back then, but there is a lot of overlap between early magic and primitive chemistry and herbalism. The real question is whether there was a grimoire tradition, which is what was vogue in the period. That is a far more interesting question than asking if women were doing naked period rituals out in the woods as though that has ever not been a thing.