Witchcraft in World Folklore: The Healer and the Monster
The single most important fact about European witchcraft is that the Church first declared it a delusion and only later a crime. Everything else — the trials, the broomsticks, the modern revival — turns on that reversal. This is the history of how the witch became the West's favourite monster, told as folklore and symbol, not as a craft to practise.
Reviewed & updated June 25, 2026 by the DreamTabeer Editorial Team
Quick answer
No — and this is the great reversal of the subject. For centuries the orthodox position, set out in the Canon Episcopi (preserved by Regino of Prüm around 906 and later in Gratian's 'Decretum'), was that the witch's night-flight with the goddess Diana was a delusion: the sin lay in believing it, not in doing it. Only across the fifteenth century did this flip into the conviction that witchcraft was a real, organized conspiracy with the Devil — a shift crystallized in the 'Malleus Maleficarum' (1486) and Pope Innocent VIII's 1484 bull. The witch-hunts followed that change of mind, not the other way round.
The two witches in one word
Our word carries its own argument. 'Witch' descends from the Old English wicce, the feminine, and wicca, the masculine — terms that named, depending on who was speaking, two opposite people. One was the cunning-woman, the village healer who set bones, delivered babies, found lost goods and read the weather; the other was the malefica, the worker of harm who soured the milk and withered the child. The same word held both, and the entire history of witchcraft is the story of the culture deciding, again and again, which one it was looking at.
Hold onto that doubleness, because it explains why the witch is so durable a figure. She sits exactly on the seam between power that helps and power that hurts — and a community under stress can flip her from one to the other overnight. The healer who is welcome in good years becomes the suspect in bad ones. The witch is less a kind of person than a verdict a frightened society passes on someone who seems to have power it cannot see.
The night-flight the Church first called a lie
Here is the reversal most people never learn. For centuries the orthodox Christian position was that witchcraft was largely imaginary. The key text is the Canon Episcopi, a church law preserved by Regino of Prüm around 906 and later folded into Gratian's 'Decretum,' which condemned as deluded the women who believed they rode out at night in the train of the goddess Diana. Crucially, the sin named there was the belief itself: to think you flew to the sabbath was to have been tricked by the Devil into a dream, not to have committed a real flight. The orthodox line, for a long time, was that the witch's ride was a nightmare.
The historian Carlo Ginzburg spent a career on what lay beneath that dream. In 'The Night Battles' he uncovered the benandanti, the 'good walkers' of sixteenth-century Friuli, peasants who claimed that their spirits left their sleeping bodies on certain nights to fight witches for the fertility of the crops — and whom inquisitors slowly, tragically, reinterpreted as witches themselves. In 'Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath' he argued that the whole image of the sabbath grew partly out of an old substratum of ecstatic, dream-borne folk belief. The flight, in other words, may really have begun as something experienced in trance and sleep — which makes the later insistence that it was physically real all the more catastrophic.
The inversion: when the dream became a crime
Then the position flipped, and it is hard to overstate the consequences. Across the fifteenth century the old idea that witch-flight was a delusion gave way to the conviction that it was a real conspiracy with a real Devil. The hinge document is the 'Malleus Maleficarum' (1486), the 'Hammer of Witches' compiled by the inquisitor Heinrich Kramer, which fused demonology, misogyny and legal procedure into a prosecutor's manual; two years earlier Pope Innocent VIII's bull 'Summis desiderantes affectibus' (1484) had lent the hunt official weight. What had been a sin of false belief became a capital crime of fact, and over roughly two centuries tens of thousands of people, overwhelmingly women, were tortured and killed across Europe and, in 1692, at Salem.
This chapter must never be aestheticized, and it is worth naming the people who said so at the time. Reginald Scot's 'The Discoverie of Witchcraft' (1584) argued, with fury and wit, that the accused were either harmless old women or frauds, and that the real credulity belonged to their accusers. To read the period now is to watch a delusion get promoted into a legal system — and to be grateful for the few who kept insisting that the flight had only ever been a dream.
The witch before Christendom: strix, Circe and Endor
The witch is far older than the witch-hunt, and the classical and biblical worlds had already drawn her. Roman folklore feared the strix — the screech-owl witch who flew by night to drink the blood of infants in their cradles, described by Ovid in Book 6 of the 'Fasti.' It is the same nocturnal cradle-terror that produced Mesopotamia's Lamashtu and the Hebrew Lilith, surfacing yet again in a new costume. At the dignified end of the spectrum stood the enchantress: Homer's Circe, in Book 10 of the 'Odyssey,' who turns Odysseus's men into swine with a drugged cup and a wand, and Medea, the sorceress-princess of the Argonaut cycle.
The Hebrew scriptures supply the most quoted scene of all: the medium of Endor in 1 Samuel 28, the woman Saul visits in disguise on the eve of battle to call up the ghost of the prophet Samuel — the so-called 'witch of Endor,' though the text calls her a mistress of a ghost, a ba'alat ov. She is the ancestress of a thousand later images, and notably the story treats her power as frighteningly effective. Long before Europe organized its panic, the witch already meant the same unsettling thing: a person who could reach across the boundary the rest of us cannot.
Witchcraft outside the West
Treat 'the witch' as a single global figure and you will misread most of the world. The decisive correction came from anthropology. In 'Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande' (1937), E. E. Evans-Pritchard drew a distinction that scholars still use: among the Azande of central Africa, witchcraft (mangu) is an innate, often unconscious power, a substance in the body that can harm without the witch intending it, whereas sorcery is a learned technique using spells and objects. One you are; the other you do. That single distinction dissolves the European muddle in which the two were fused.
The figure recurs everywhere but means something local each time. Slavic folklore gives us Baba Yaga — the ambiguous hag of the forest, in the tales gathered by Alexander Afanasyev, who lives in a hut on chicken legs and is by turns devourer and helper, the two witches again in one body. Read across cultures, witchcraft is less a thing people do than a frame societies use to explain misfortune, envy and unaccountable power — which is why the witch is so often a marginal figure, the outsider, the inconvenient old woman, the one a community can most easily afford to blame.
The invented tradition: Murray, Gardner and modern Wicca
The most surprising turn is the most recent. In 1921 the Egyptologist Margaret Murray published 'The Witch-Cult in Western Europe,' arguing that the people executed as witches had really been members of a surviving pre-Christian fertility religion, an organized 'Old Religion' driven underground. Historians have since thoroughly discredited the thesis — there was no secret pagan church — but its cultural influence was enormous. It gave Gerald Gardner the scaffolding for 'Witchcraft Today' (1954) and the founding of modern Wicca, a genuine and now widely practised new religious movement that reveres nature and the divine feminine.
The honest framing matters here, and the scholar Ronald Hutton supplied it in 'The Triumph of the Moon' (1999): modern pagan witchcraft is a real and serious twentieth-century creation, not the unbroken survival it once claimed to be. That does not diminish it; invented traditions are still traditions. But it means the line from the burned woman of 1600 to the self-described witch of today runs through a library, not a coven — through Murray's mistaken book and Gardner's imagination, not a hidden chain of initiates.
Witches in dreams
Bring all this to the dreaming mind and the witch becomes a remarkably precise symbol. She is the image of power that is hidden, transgressive and usually feminine — and a dream tends to recruit her for one of two roles. To dream of being cursed, hexed, or pursued by a witch usually dramatizes a fear of someone's hidden ill-will, or the sense that an influence you cannot name is working against you. To dream of being a witch — casting, brewing, flying — usually points the opposite way, toward your own unclaimed power, creativity, or anger looking for a channel.
The recurring props carry the meaning. The broomstick and the night-flight are threshold-images, about leaving the ordinary ground rules behind; the cauldron is transformation, the place where things are dissolved and remade; the familiar — the cat, the toad — is the part of the self that does the work you will not admit to. Read in the long tradition above, the witch-dream asks the question the whole history asks: is the power you are looking at coming at you, or out of you?
How to read a witch in a dream
Start with your role in the scene, because it changes everything. If you are the victim of the witch, ask where in waking life you feel the target of unseen hostility or envy — and then ask the older, harder question the folklore forces: is there really a witch, or have you, like a frightened village, gone looking for someone to blame for a bad season? If you are the witch, the dream is usually friendlier than it feels: it is showing you a capability — to influence, to create, to refuse — that you have disowned because it seemed dangerous or unbecoming.
Then notice what the witch in your dream is actually doing — healing or harming, helping or devouring — because that is the seam the whole tradition lives on, and your dream has chosen a side for a reason. The single most useful thing you can ask on waking is this: the power in the dream that frightened you — would you still call it dark if it were yours to keep?
A careful note
Everything above is folklore, history and symbol — the record of how cultures have imagined power, envy and the outsider, and how those images surface in dreams. None of it is instruction. No spell, curse, flight or summoning is described here as a working procedure, and nothing on this page is a method to harm, bind, or bewitch anyone.
The witch-trial chapter we hold with particular care, because real people — mostly poor women — were tortured and killed inside that imagination, and their deaths were not folklore but history's verdict on what fear does when it is given a courtroom. We also mean no disrespect to the many people who today practise modern pagan witchcraft as a sincere faith; it is described above as the genuine modern religion it is. A witch in a dream is a symbol to read with curiosity, not a being to fear or become.
Frequently asked questions
Did the Church always believe witches were real?
No — and this is the great reversal of the subject. For centuries the orthodox position, set out in the Canon Episcopi (preserved by Regino of Prüm around 906 and later in Gratian's 'Decretum'), was that the witch's night-flight with the goddess Diana was a delusion: the sin lay in believing it, not in doing it. Only across the fifteenth century did this flip into the conviction that witchcraft was a real, organized conspiracy with the Devil — a shift crystallized in the 'Malleus Maleficarum' (1486) and Pope Innocent VIII's 1484 bull. The witch-hunts followed that change of mind, not the other way round.
What is the difference between witchcraft and sorcery?
The cleanest distinction comes from the anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard's 'Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande' (1937). Among the Azande, witchcraft is an innate, often unconscious power — a substance in the body that can cause harm even without the witch intending it — while sorcery is a learned technique that uses spells, materials and rites. In short, witchcraft is something you are; sorcery is something you do. European folklore tended to fuse the two, which is part of why its idea of the witch became so confused and so dangerous.
Is modern Wicca the survival of an ancient pagan religion?
No, though it was once presented that way. The claim traces to Margaret Murray's 'The Witch-Cult in Western Europe' (1921), which argued that those executed as witches were members of a surviving pre-Christian fertility cult — a thesis historians have since discredited. Its influence, however, was real: it shaped Gerald Gardner's 'Witchcraft Today' (1954) and the birth of modern Wicca. As the historian Ronald Hutton showed in 'The Triumph of the Moon' (1999), modern pagan witchcraft is a sincere and serious twentieth-century creation rather than an unbroken ancient survival — an invented tradition, but a living one.
What does it mean to dream about a witch?
It depends on your role in the dream. Dreaming of being cursed or pursued by a witch usually dramatizes a fear of hidden hostility or an influence working against you that you cannot name; dreaming of being a witch — casting, brewing, flying — more often points to your own disowned power, creativity, or anger seeking an outlet. The classic props are symbolic: the broomstick and flight are about crossing thresholds and leaving the rules behind, the cauldron is transformation, the familiar is the part of you doing work you will not claim. The sharpest question is whether the power you see is coming at you or out of you.
Where does the classic image of the broomstick-riding witch come from?
It is assembled from very old materials. The night-flying, child-threatening witch predates Christianity — Roman folklore feared the 'strix,' the screech-owl witch of Ovid's 'Fasti,' a cousin of the Mesopotamian Lamashtu and the Hebrew Lilith — while the enchantress who transforms her victims goes back to Homer's Circe in the 'Odyssey.' The flight to the sabbath was, in the earliest church law, explicitly a dream. The broomstick, the pointed hat and the green-skinned hag are later popular and theatrical accretions, sharpened by Shakespeare's weird sisters in 'Macbeth' and finally fixed by film. The figure is a composite, not a portrait.
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