Word Finder - witchcraft

definition

The practice of witches; magic, sorcery or the use of supernatural powers to influence or predict events.

example

Wiccans believe in a modernised form of witchcraft.

definition

Something, such as an advanced technology, that seems almost magical.

synonyms

• wizardry

Andover was a prominent centre in the witchcraft trials of 1692.

Witchcraft and the influence of fairies are still often believed in.

Under the general law against heresy their books were burnt by the hangman, they were searched for signs of witchcraft, they were imprisoned for five weeks and then sent away.

Native courts may not deal with murder, witchcraft, cannibalism or slavery.

Autos-da fe were rare events; their victims were not as a rule serious thinkers, but persons accused of sorcery or Judaizing, nor were they more numerous than the victims of the English laws relating to witchcraft and heresy.

While the Franciscans rejected the belief in witchcraft, the Dominicans were most zealous in persecuting witches.

But these beliefs are far from being confined to the uncivilized; Greek philosophers like Porphyry, no less than the fathers of the Church, held that the world was pervaded with spirits; side by side with the belief in witchcraft, we can trace through the middle ages the survival of primitive animistic views; and in our own day even these beliefs subsist in unsuspected vigour among the peasantry of the more uneducated European countries.

Having been thrown into prison by her father, who was afraid of being injured by her witchcraft, she escaped by means of her art and fled to the temple of Helios the Sun-god, her reputed grandfather.

To the beginning of the 13th century the popular superstitions regarding sorcery, witchcraft and compacts with the devil were condemned by the ecclesiastical authorities as heathenish, sinful and heretical.

All these trials were conducted in accordance with the English law of the time; there had been an execution for witchcraft at Charlestown in 1648; there was a case in Boston in 1655; in 1680 a woman of Newbury was condemned to death for witchcraft but was reprieved by Governor Simon Bradstreet; in England and Scotland there were many executions long after the Salem delusion died out.

He attended the trials, investigated many of the cases himself, and wrote sermons on witchcraft, the Memorable Providences and The Wonders of the Invisible World (1693), which increased the excitement of the people.

The great blot on his memory is his cruelty, which at times was frightful, and showed itself in its full fierceness in the punishment of persons accused of witchcraft, soothsaying or magical practices.

Again imprisoned, this time on a charge of witchcraft, he escaped from captivity in 1 59 1, and was deprived by parliament of his lands and titles; as an outlaw his career was one of extraordinary lawlessness.

The familiar, who is sometimes replaced by the devil, commonly figured in witchcraft trials; and a statute of James I.

A fantastic and elaborate doctrine of symbolism existed which comprised all nature; witchcraft, alchemy and medicine were its practical expressions.

Under the influence of the touchstone of strict inquiry set on foot by the Royal Society, the marvels of witchcraft, sympathetic powders and other relics of medieval superstition disappeared like a mist before the sun, whilst accurate observations and demonstrations of a host of new wonders accumulated, amongst which were numerous contributions to the anatomy of animals, and none perhaps more noteworthy than the observations, made by the aid of microscopes constructed by himself, of Leeuwenhoek, the Dutch naturalist (1683), some of whose instruments were presented by him to the society.

The witchcraft delusion of 1692 centred about Salem Village, now in the township of Danvers, but then a part of Salem.

The latinized form of the Greek word was corrupted into nigromantia, connecting the word with niger, black, and so was applied to the "black art," "black magic," in the sense of witchcraft, sorcery.

In native cases the chiefs have civil jurisdiction in disputes among their own tribesmen and criminal jurisdiction over natives except in capital cases, offences against the person or property of non-natives, pretended witchcraft, cases arising out of marriages by Christian rites, &c. An appeal lies to a magistrates' court from every judgment of a native chief, and from the magistrates' judgment on such appeal to a native high court.

The Corwin or "Witch" house, so called from a tradition that Jonathan Corwin, one of the judges in the witchcraft trials, held preliminary examinations of witches here, is said to have been the property of Roger Williams. The Pickering house, built before 1660, was the homestead of Timothy Pickering and of other members of that family.

On a bluff projecting into South river is the old "Burying Point," set apart in 1637, and the oldest cemetery in the city; its oldest stone is dated 1673; here are buried Governor Simon Bradstreet, Chief-Justice Benjamin Lynde (1666-1745) and Judge John Hathorne (1641-1717) of the witchcraft court.

Sir Walter Scott mentions a belief in the banshee as existing in the highlands of Scotland (Demonology and Witchcraft, p. 351).

Mar was arrested on a charge of magic, and died, whether murdered or from natural causes is uncertain, while his accomplices are said to have been the protomartyrs of witchcraft, scarcely heard of in Scotland till the reformers began to burn old women.

One of them had to do with black witchcraft.

There is much faith in dreams, and in the utterances of certain "wise men," who practise an embryonic magic and witchcraft.

It is also notorious for its many witchcraft trials.

Witch A person, normally a woman who practices witchcraft.

The book also brings to bear on this material current scholarship on the history of European witchcraft.

They are an intelligent and industrious people, growing their own crops, manufacturing their own cloth and mats, and building their own boats, while many read Arabic more or less fluently, although still believers in magic and witchcraft.

Not till 1736 were the statutes against witchcraft repealed; an act which the Associate Presbytery at Edinburgh in 1743 declared to be" contrary to the express law of God, for which a holy God may be provoked in a way of righteous judgment."The recognition and condemnation of errors in religious belief is by no means confined to the Christian Church.

Although punishment by whipping and by standing in the pillory was prohibited by an act of Congress in 1839, in so far as the Federal government had jurisdiction, both these forms of punishment were retained in Delaware, and standing in the pillory was prescribed by statute as a punishment for a number of offences, including various kinds of larceny and forgery, highway robbery, and even pretending " to exercise the art of witchcraft, fortune-telling or dealing with spirits," at least until 1893.

A witchcraft scare (at its worst in 1691-1697, though the earliest Connecticut case was in1646-1647and the earliest in Boston in 1648) led to another tragedy of ignorance.

Lowell are two on " New England two Centuries Ago " and " Witchcraft."

He took refuge in St Andrews Castle, where " a wise woman," Alison Pearson, who was ultimately burned for witchcraft, cured him of a serious illness.

Island Magee had, besides antiquarian remains, a notoriety as a home of witchcraft, and was the scene of an act of reprisal for the muchdisputed massacre of Protestants about 1641, by the soldiery of Carrickfergus.

Albert then declared she was his lawful wife; and subsequently, during his absence, she was seized by order of Duke Ernest and condemned to death for witchcraft.

The church and church theology, to whose guidance the masses now surrendered themselves, took in along with them their superstition, their polytheism, their magic, their myths, and all the machinery of religious witchcraft.

The suit was purposely protracted, and at length, in 1620, the unhappy woman, then in her seventy-fourth year, was arrested on a formal charge of witchcraft.

The young king regarded him with an affection which the superstition of the time attributed to witchcraft.

Moreover the bull contained no essentially new regulations as to witchcraft.

These leaders skilfully seized upon every breach of tradition to inflame popular passion, attacking especially the medical work as a pretext for mutilation, the schools as hotbeds of vice, and the orphanages as furnishing material for witchcraft.

But to these were quickly added subjects of allegory, of classical learning, of witchcraft and superstition and of daily life; scenes of the parlour and the cloister, of the shop, the field, the market and the camp; and lastly portraits of famous men, with scenes of court life and princely pageant and ceremony.

But the martyrs were few, compared with the numbers of people whom the reformed kirk burned for witchcraft.

It was said that after leaving the cloister he studied the black art in Toledo, which had a great reputation in the middle ages as a school of witchcraft.

This corrupted form is common in English to the 17th century (see Magic and Witchcraft).

When Erik Blood-axe, son of Harold Haarfager, visited Bjarmaland in 922, he found Gunhild, daughter of Asur Tote, living among the Lapps, to whom she had been sent by her father for the purpose of being trained in witchcraft; and Ivan the Terrible of Russia sent for magicians from Lapland to explain the cause of the appearance of a comet.

It was the scene of the last execution for witchcraft in Scotland (1722).

Together with this idolatry there is also a firm belief in the power of witchcraft and sorcery, in divination, in lucky and unlucky days and times, in ancestor worship, especially that of the sovereign's predecessors, and in several curious ordeals for the detection of crime.

But if the progress of physical science has not prevented the rehabilitation of much of ancient alchemy by the later researches into chemical change, and if psychology now finds a place for explanations of spiritualism and witchcraft which involve the admission of the empirical facts under a new theory (as in the case of the diviningrod, &c.), it is at least conceivable that some new synthesis might once more justify part at all events of ancient and medieval astromancy, to the extent of admitting the empirical facts where provable, and substituting for the supposed influence of the stars as such, some deeper theory which would be consistent with an application to other forms of prophecy, and thus might reconcile the possibility of dipping into futurity with certain interrelations of the universe, different indeed from those assumed by astrological theory, but underlying and explaining it.

In 1615 there were only ten instances of witchcraft accusations traced across the country, including Jonet and Katherine.