The Witches Almanac: Sorcerers, Witches and Magic from Ancient Rome to the Digital Age

By Charles Christian

Real Witches. Real Lives. Real Magic. Real History. Take a magical tour through the lives and times of 359 of the most important sorcerers and witches throughout history.

For millennia there’s been a fascination and a fear of people possibly wielding magical powers and a stigma surrounding practitioners of ancient rituals and practices. Yet, in the last 70 years, witchcraft, as well as Wicca, have gone from taboo beliefs pursued by a handful of eccentrics and misfits to major global, spiritual movements. Meet the troublemakers and rebels who pushed for change in The Witches Almanac: Sorcerers, Witches, and Magic from Ancient Rome to the Digital Age. You’ll be introduced to the history, persecutions, conjurings, and magic of some of history’s most consequential witches, sorcerers, wizards, and mavericks, including … 

• Circe, Medea, Hermes Trismegistus, the Chaldean Magi, and other Ancient Roman and Classical Greek witches
• Merlin, Morgana le Fey, Nimue, the 10 Queens of Avalon, and sorcery and witchcraft in the Arthurian legends
• San Cipriano, the obscure 4th century bishop whose influence today still plays an important role in folk magic and Hoodoo practices
• Baba Yaga, Joan of Arc, Gilles de Rais, Alice Kyteller, Lord Soulis, Michael Scott, the Golem of Prague, and medieval witchcraft
• King Henry VI, Anne Boleyn, King Henry VIII, Catherine de Medici, John Dee, Queen Elizabeth, and witchcraft in the British royal court
• Isobel Gowdie, illusive Scottish witch whose voluntary confessions provided the template for traditional witchcraft beliefs
• Isaac Newton, Friar Roger Bacon, Nicholas Flamel, Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa, Robert Boyle, and other alchemists
• The Burning Times of the late 16th to early 18th centuries
• The Berwick witch trial
• The Salem witch trial
• Aleister Crowley, W. B. Yeats, MacGregor Mathers, Eliphas Levi, the Golden Dawn, Thelema and ritual magic, and the rise of esoteric movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries
• Jack Parsons, described as the “Jet-Propelled Antichrist” whose life of sex, rockets, and magic ended prematurely in a mysterious explosion
• Gerald Gardner, Old Dorothy Clutterbuck, Alex Sanders, Robert Cochrane, Raymond Buckland, Lady Sheba, Marjorie Cameron, and others in the modern Wicca and witchcraft movement
• And much more!!

You’ll get a deeper understanding of the obscure history of witches with this enchanting and bewitching tome! The Witches Almanac brings you their rich histories and extraordinary biographies, plus it includes a helpful bibliography, an extensive index, and numerous photos, adding to its usefulness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Visible Ink Press
• Release date: Feb 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781578598144

Charles Christian

Charles Christian is an English lawyer and a Reuters correspondent-turned-writer, editor, award-winning tech journalist, and sometime werewolf hunter. Charles was born a chime-child with a caul and grew up in a haunted medieval house by the harbor in the Yorkshire seaside town of Scarborough. According to folklore, a caul-shrouded chime-child can’t drown at sea but can see and talk to faerie folk and also has protection against spells cast by malevolent witches and sorcerers. His father’s side of the family was related to Fletcher Christian, the leader of the infamous 18th-century mutiny on HMS Bounty, while his mother’s side was descended from Anne Hunnam (or Marchant) the “Witch of Scarborough,” who was acquitted of casting a fatal spell on a child in 1652. And “yes,” an English newspaper once really did commission Charles to take part in a werewolf hunt on the night of a full moon. Spoiler alert: he didn’t find one. He lives in Waveney Valley, England.

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INTRODUCTION

The Witches Almanac: Sorcerers, Witches and Magic from Ancient Rome to the Digital Age is, as the subtitle explains, an almanac of witches and sorcerers, a biographical dictionary of the best-known practitioners and exponents of magic from the earliest times through until the present day, as well as a collection of essays. Sadly, when it comes to the mass persecutions and witch trials of the Burning Times, this definition includes a lot of innocent women and men—mainly women—who had nothing whatsoever to do with witchcraft and sorcery but still went to their graves accused of being witches, so they also earned a place in this book.

This is primarily a book about people, but instead of the traditional approach of a biographical dictionary with all entries in strictly alphabetical order, I’ve opted to split the text into separate chapters, each dealing with a particular theme or chronological era containing a brief explanatory narrative discussing the historical context and issues of that theme/era followed by the relevant biographical entries.

That said, this book is not a history of witchcraft. There are plenty of other titles that cover that territory. Similarly, this is not another guide to witchcraft as a magical, occult, spiritual or religious, practice. Nor will you find in it any spells for hexing your enemies or handy practical tips for creating love potions and similar witches’ brews.

I use the words witches and sorcerers because I wanted a definition that included not just older witchcraft and more recent Wicca folk but all practitioners of magic, whether high ritual magic or low folk magic, and ditto whether black or white magic. I also wanted to get away from the are witches always female and male witches warlocks? thing, as well as avoiding the word wizard, which these days is a bit too Harry Potter.

Basically, I am looking at all practitioners of magick with a k, as Aleister Crowley preferred, to distinguish them from stage magicians. Contrarily, I am sticking to the conventional spelling of magic rather than magick, which can come across as a distracting affectation when used excessively.

I’m also primarily focussing on the Western/English-speaking world’s tradition of magic, so the United Kingdom and North America are emphasized, with some Continental European content added when relevant, but I will not be looking at the local indigenous witchcraft traditions of Africa, Native Americans, Central Asia, the Far East, Australia, and Oceania. To do so would take us into the realms of comparative anthropology: is it witchcraft, healing (the witch doctors you read about in older history books), shamanism, folklore, magic, or religion? Where do the boundaries between the different elements begin and end? I’m not an anthropologist, and for me to comment on this would be taking me well outside my comfort zone and area of expertise.

All the characters mentioned in this book are real people in that they appear in the historical record or in legends stretching back, in some instances, thousands of years. What you will not find here are purely fictional characters of relatively recent invention. So, sorry, there are no entries for Prue, Piper, Phoebe, Paige or any other Halliwell sisters from the television series Charmed, nor do I include Willow and Tara from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Also absent are Sabrina and Samantha, and definitely nobody from the Harry Potter books and movie franchise are to be found.

Having said all that, once you go back to the Dark Ages (more correctly termed the Early Medieval period/Early Middle Ages) and beyond, the sources become unreliable, and we encounter what can best be termed semi-legendary people. These are people who are hard to verify in terms of historicity—or historical accuracy and actuality. These are the individuals occupying the borderlines of history, myth, legend, and fiction.

These are people who may have been real or else are based upon real people but with their identities changed. They may be the models or prototypes for types of witches and sorcerers that are encountered throughout history. They may be composite characters based on two or more historical characters whose identities are now lost and indelibly merged, or they may be real people but over the years creative liberties have been taken to embellish their stories so their subsequent legends far surpass anything they actually did in their lives.

In terms of stylistic conventions, I use the B.C.E./C.E. method of historical dating, although once we enter the Early Middle Ages (around 476 C.E.) I drop the C.E. suffix.

In the biographical sections, the dates given relate either to the lifetimes of the individuals or the time period when the first accounts of them appeared. Individuals who are the subject of biographical entries or crossreferenced in the book are highlighted in boldface. You’ll also find some sidebar entries about individuals, groups, or incidents that do not fit neatly into the narrative and biographical sections but still merit mentioning.

When it comes to gods, goddesses, demons, angels, and other elementals or supernatural beings, I use the relevant proper nouns. The two exceptions are the god of the Jewish and Christian religions (spelled with a capital G) and the Devil of Christianity, also with a capital letter.

Except where mentioned in passing, the theologies of Satanism, Devil worship, Wicca, and other variants of twentieth-century (and earlier) Neopagan religious innovations are outside the scope of this book. I position Wicca (and related belief systems) as a modern pagan religion followed by some witches, whereas witchcraft and sorcery is the practice of magic by both Wiccans and witches and sorcerers who do not subscribe to the Wiccan religion.

Universal Themes

In writing this book, I was struck by the almost universal themes, trends, and tropes that consistently appear down through the ages from ancient times to the present day.

For example, since the days of the classical Greeks some 2,500 years ago, as part of the character assassination that might be poured down upon some unpopular ruler, politician, or general, along with allegations of sexual misconduct and financial corruption (some things never change, and these two are still popular today) they might also find themselves accused of witchcraft and sorcery.

It was not necessary that their accusers really believed they were practicing sorcery in order to make such damaging allegations; it was a useful tool since such allegations were almost impossible to disprove. Sometimes the allegations were so preposterous they defied logic, plausibility, and the laws of nature, but that didn’t stop people believing them. This is also a feature of the witchcraft trials of the late sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries—the Burning Times. The accused went to the gallows or the stake convicted of actions common sense said couldn’t possibly have taken place.

Before we shrug our shoulders and say, What do you expect from a bunch of ignorant, superstitious peasants? it’s worth remembering that in recent decades we had the Satanic Ritual Abuse panic of the 1980s sweeping across the United States and the United Kingdom. And, even more recently, the Pizzagate conspiracy theory (now part of the wider QAnon/Deep State mythology) of a cabal of cannibal pedophile politicians operating a global sex-trafficking ring out of a pizzeria in Washington, D.C. Apparently, this was so they could achieve eternal youth by drinking the adrenochrome-rich blood of children slain in their Satanic rituals.

Four hundred years previously, the alleged Hungarian serial killer Countess Elizabeth Bathory was accused of bathing in the blood of murdered virgins to retain her youthful looks. As we will often see in this book, history does, sadly, repeat itself.

Another ongoing theme is the number of witchcraft trials in the seventeenth century when children were the star prosecution witnesses and their testimony went unchallenged. No adults stopped to ask, Are you sure you are not making this up? The phenomenon of the child accusers as unreliable witnesses is a good example of the old adage that the principal lesson of history is that nobody learns the lessons of history.

Perhaps the most repetitive (and depressing) theme is the sexist, antifeminist, male chauvinistic, misogynistic, patriarchal attitudes that prevail throughout much of the historical ground I cover in this book. It was not just that women were treated as second-class citizens (although their lot was not as bad as that of slaves and serfs, who undoubtedly occupied the lowest rung in society in ancient, medieval, and even relatively recent times) but men were suspicious, if not positively terrified, of women possessing secret powers or hidden knowledge they did not understand.

This was particularly the case with wise women and healers who were both feared and respected because they understood the secrets of plants and other substances that could cure and kill. (Midwives were also feared—and frequently persecuted as witches—because they understood the mysteries of childbirth.) As we shall see, for a long time, poisoning was synonymous with the practice of witchcraft and sorcery.

There is also a distinctly Freudian agenda behind some of the attitudes displayed by men towards alleged witches. This is particularly the case with Heinrich Kramer, the principal author of Malleus Maleficarum (or Hammer of Witches, first published in 1486) who had an unhealthy obsession with the sexual habits of witches performing filthy carnal acts with demons and whose prejudices effectively lit the fires that consumed so many witches at the stake during the Burning Times.

Women in general—and female witches in particular—are also criticised (by men) for enslaving and bewitching men through their magic potions in the form of perfumes and cosmetics. From here it is only a short step to the ultimate witchcraft cliché of the sorceress as an enchantress. We first encounter this in the Greek legends of Circe and Medea, which go back at least 2,750 years to Homer. They are the archetypical predatory females, notorious both as magicians and dangerous, sexually free women. For the modern equivalent, just Google sexy Halloween witch costumes.

From earliest times, it would seem that men have been torn between wanting to sleep with or slay female witches and sorcerers.

MAGIC

Before we look at where it all began, let’s just spend a few moments considering the nature of magic.

According to Professor Ronald Hutton of the University of Bristol (a leading authority on ancient, medieval, and modern paganism, as well as the author of excellent books on witchcraft and Wicca), magic is any formalised practices by human beings designed to achieve particular ends by the control, manipulation and direction of supernatural power or of spiritual power concealed within the natural world.

An alternative definition was provided by Aleister Crowley, who described magic as the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will. MacGregor Mathers, another practitioner of ceremonial magic and a contemporary of Crowley, said magic is the science of the control of the secret forces of nature. According to the late Leo Martello, who took a more contemporary perspective, magic is not about the supernatural; it is an as yet not fully understood law of nature involving the superpowers that reside in the natural.

That said, there are many witches and sorcerers today who do not claim to understand how magic works but believe it does because they say they have experienced it. Perhaps magic will be discovered to be another aspect psi (or psychic phenomenon) along with extrasensory perception, telepathy, psychometry, precognition, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis/telekinesis.

But does magic actually work? Unlike stage magicians, who perform in front of audiences so there is no missing the moment they pull the rabbit from the hat. The audience knows it is all done with smoke and mirrors. In the case of witches and sorcerers, their rituals are typically conducted in private, so we only have their word for it.

Perhaps, like religion, magic requires a leap of faith, and if the magician believes the magic has taken place, then in their reality it really has taken place. Alternatively, it may be more psychological, and if, after conducting a ritual alone or in a coven, a witch or a sorcerer feels empowered, enlightened, fulfilled, relieved, released, revenged, or more at one with the universe, then is that magic?

In terms of the scope of magic, the two traditional flavors are white and black magic. White magic, sometimes called the right-hand path, is best understood as benevolent magic performed with good intentions; and black magic, or the left-hand path, is associated with evil and malevolent intentions.

Another key distinction is between high and low magic. Also known as ceremonial or ritual magic, high magic is traditionally the domain of sorcerers. Low magic, also known as natural magic, folk magic, or rootwork, is more about healing and is typically associated with witchcraft.

As you will see within the course of this book, the changing attitudes and tolerance of the powers that be, whether religious or secular, towards these different forms of magic, directly influenced policy on whether witches and sorcerers were tolerated or persecuted.

Staying with that point, while not wishing to take a deep dive into the history of magic (as already mentioned, there are plenty of other books that already do that), for the first three sections of this book you will read some historical background by way of general scene-setting

We start with classical antiquity going back to the earliest Sumerian citystates (about 4000 B.C.E.) through the era of ancient Greece and on until the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the mid-fifth century C.E. Although this period embraces the time when both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible were being compiled (and, as you will see, for many centuries the Bible was the determining factor as to whether a witch or sorcerer lived or died) these were essentially pagan times. It is interesting to see how many of our beliefs about magic we inherited from our pagan ancestors of 6,000 years ago.

The second epoch embraces the Middle Ages, starting in the so-called Dark Ages (or Early Medieval period) and on into the High Medieval period, ending in the final years of the fourteenth century. While these years saw Christianity triumph over paganism across Europe (the Lithuanians did not fully convert to Christianity until 1387), the attitude of both the secular and religious establishments, particularly the Roman Catholic Church, was distinctly ambivalent toward witchcraft and sorcery. There were some examples of persecution, but for the most part the Church was prepared to tolerate magic as pagan superstition.

All this was to change in the third epoch, embracing the Early Modern period, including the Renaissance and the Reformation, when the attitude of the Church dramatically shifted from largely laissez-faire to an implacable opposition that encouraged witch hunts, leading to the Burning Times.

WITCHCRAFT AND SORCERY IN CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY

The starting point for any discussion of the earliest influences on the Western tradition of witchcraft and sorcery takes us back to around 4000 B.C.E. to an area of the Middle East called Mesopotamia (or the Fertile Crescent) lying between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates.

Today, the modern state of Iraq broadly occupies Mesopotamia, but starting 6,000 years ago, it was the location of the earliest city-states, including what came to be known as Ur of the Chaldees and the later successive empires of the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, and Assyrians. At various times, these empires’ boundaries overflowed into the territories of what we now know as Iran, the Gulf States, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel.

The overlap with Israel (in ancient times, from around 1000 B.C.E., this comprised the two kingdoms of Judah and Israel) is important, as it meant that many of the Mesopotamian attitudes toward magic and practitioners of magic found their way into the books of the Old Testament and from there on into the Christian Bible. Ur of the Chaldees, incidentally, is credited with being the birthplace of Abraham, the common patriarch of the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Excavated in 1927, the city of Ur in ancient Mesopotamia may have been Abraham’s birthplace.

What did the ancient Mesopotamians think about magic? The large numbers of clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform texts that have been excavated from archaeological sites in the area reveal that the Mesopotamian peoples believed in magic and witchcraft and also in the use of counterspells to fight curses. They also believed that magic was the only defense against ghosts, evil sorcerers, and demons. In fact, the Mesopotamians were obsessed with demons, blaming them for all manner of afflictions, ailments, and woes.

These demons included Pazuzu, who, thousands of years later, many people believe is still with us. He is the demon in the 1971 novel and subsequent movie The Exorcist. More recently, the North Carolina serial killer, Satanist, and cannibal Pazuzu Algarad (originally John Lawson) claimed that he was possessed by the Sumerian demon and committed his crimes to appease Pazuzu. Before he could stand trial, in October 2015, Algarad was found dead in his prison cell. The death was ruled to be a suicide, although it has never been established how he self-inflicted his fatal wounds.

Other legacies of Mesopotamian magical beliefs still with us include the widespread use of love spells, the use of amulets and charms for protection, and the use of effigies and poppets, which would be burned or buried in order to destroy an enemy or rival. One cuneiform text even prescribes the use of a wax poppet to kill an enemy; as it gradually melted in the sun or before a fire, so the victim’s life would also melt away. Centuries later, the use of a wax poppet in this way would be featured in the celebrated early 15th-century English trial of Margery Jourdemayne, the Witch of Eye.

Some legacies of Mesopotamian magic were less than admirable. These included the fact that official benevolent magic rituals were conducted by a hereditary caste of priests, scribes, and physicians called asipu (all men), whereas women were believed to be the main practitioners of malevolent magic. And in the Code of Hammurabi (one of the most respected Babylonian kings, who ruled until c. 1750 B.C.E.) is the first instance in history of a law providing for the swimming of suspected witches.

The code provides that if a person has accused another of placing a spell on him but not proved it, the accused shall go to the sacred river and jump into it. If the accused drowns, then they are guilty of witchcraft, and the accuser shall inherit all of their property. If the accused survives, the sacred river has proved their innocence, and the accuser shall be put to death, with the accused taking the accuser’s property.

In this book’s introduction, I mention the trope of the Sexy Sorceress; however, we also have the Mesopotamians to thank for the concept of the Sexy Demon in the form of Lilith or Lilitu, who, according to some traditions, was Adam’s first wife prior to Eve. The Burney Relief, also known as the Queen of the Night, is an almost 4,000-year-old terra-cotta plaque in the British Museum in London depicting a nude, female figure with wings and birdlike, clawed feet. The archaeological provenance is unclear (but it is believed to have been created at Ur), and an ongoing debate remains as to whether it depicts Lilith or the ancient Sumerian goddess Inanna (also known as Ishtar and Astarte), who was worshipped as early as 4000 B.C.E.

Current British Museum research suggests that it may actually depict Inanna’s sister Ereshkigal, the goddess of the underworld. Although the name Ereshkigal may be unfamiliar, the ancient Greeks incorporated her into their pantheon as Hecate, the goddess of crossroads, magic, witchcraft, knowledge of herbs and poisonous plants, ghosts, necromancy, and sorcery. Hecate is frequently depicted in Greek statues as a triple goddess, which once again brings us full circle to the present day and the popular Wiccan/neo-pagan concept of the Maiden–Mother–Crone triple goddess.

Before we move on to look at some of the other ancient civilizations’ magical beliefs, long after the old Mesopotamian kingdoms had been eclipsed by the Persian, Greek, and Roman empires, the reputation of the Fertile Crescent’s magicians—now known as Chaldeans—lived on as masters of all forms of incantation, sorcery, witchcraft, astrology, astronomy, and other magical arts.

ANCIENT GREECE AND ROME

During the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.E., many of the ideas in circulation in Mesopotamia found their way into the culture of classical Greece, which was in those times still a mixture of city-states and independent kingdoms. But inevitably, some mistakes occurred in translation and geography.

For example, the Greeks believed that Zoroaster (also known as Zarathustra), the ancient Persian (modern-day Iran) prophet who founded the Zoroastrian religion, was actually the Chaldean inventor of both magic and astrology, with magic then being brought into Greece during the military campaigns of the Persian king Xerxes. The Greeks, like the Romans, were impressed by the alien wisdom of foreigners. Certainly, the priests in Zoroastrianism were known as the Magi, and from here, via ancient Greek word magos, we derive the modern words magic, magus, and magician, not forgetting the Three Wise Men, or Magi, who feature in the Christian nativity tale.

Another aspect of the Greek approach—one that would continue through into the Christian era and the Burning Times—was the distinction between religion and magic. This is in contrast to Mesopotamia, where no distinction was made between religion, magic, or even science. As a consequence, Greek (and later Roman) literature depicts religion as a noble cause practiced in public temples by priests, whereas magic is the preserve of charlatans and cults acting in secret. This view is echoed in the biblical view of priests as prophets who perform divinely inspired miracles, whereas magic rituals are the work of witches and sorcerers working in conjunction with demons.

The prophet Zoroaster was believed by some to be with the gods to learn the secrets of the the originator of magic as we know it.

The Greeks, particularly in the Hellenistic era when Greek culture, in the wake of Alexander the Great’s conquests (he died in 323 B.C.E.), dominated the whole of the eastern Mediterranean, including Egypt, also developed a distinction between theurgy and goetia, or high and low magic. The former equates to ritual magic, with a priest or philosopherlike figure attempting to communicate universe, whereas the latter, practiced by witches and sorcerers, has more common, everyday objectives, such as helping to locate stolen property or creating love potions and charms.

Although clearly, an element of class snobbery is at work here (the Romans, in particular, lived in a heavily stratified society where patricians did not associate with the plebs, and both sneered at slaves), the sheer number of curse tablets that have been excavated at archaeological sites across Greece and the later Roman Empire indicate that low magic was very popular. In fact, it was so popular that many of these curse tablets were mass produced using standard wording templates, with blanks left for a scribe or an individual to customize with the details of the curse.

In Roman times, curse tablets, or defixio, were typically made of lead and inscribed with a prayer to a god to deliver a particular remedy. For example, on a personal note, about 15 miles from where I live in the east of England are the remains of the Roman town of Venta Icenorum. In a nearby river, a lead tablet was found asking the god Neptune to help the supplicant recover some items of stolen clothes. It ended with the promise that if Neptune could make the thief pay in blood, the supplicant would give the god a pair of leggings. It’s a good thing that the god in question was not Triton, who had a fishtail, as the leggings would have been as much use to him as a bicycle.

One of the other legacies of both Greek and Roman attitudes was that certain types of magic were regarded as serious criminal offenses, punishable by death. One Greek city-state decreed capital punishment for anyone who used destructive pharmaka against its citizens. The definition of pharmaka in this context has been lost over the centuries, but it would appear to mean magical potions, so we can assume that the destructive variety were poisons. Sadly, accounts from the fourth century B.C.E. have been found of women accidentally poisoning men with what they thought were innocent love potions. Perhaps, therefore, the law was also intended as a quality-control incentive for sorcerers to ensure that the potions and philters they sold were unadulterated?

The Romans had a similar policy, being very concerned about veneficium and maleficium (or maleficia); again, the precise definitions are no longer clear, although the former seems to have meant killing by stealth, which could include killing by poisoning and/or magic, whereas the latter means intentionally causing harm to others. The concept of maleficia would also long outlive the Roman empire and become a key factor in the earlier European witchcraft trials, with practitioners of magic performed with good intentions receiving far more lenient treatment than those accused of black magic or malevolent magic.

A curse tablet found in the Roman province town Aquae Sulis, modern day England’s Bath.

It is also the Romans who were responsible for effectively the first mass persecution of witches in recorded history, albeit our only chronicler is the historian Livy writing some 300 years after the event. The year was 331 B.C.E., and an epidemic (possibly the plague or a COVID-like form of influenza) was sweeping through the city of Rome, killing hundreds. At some point, a group of women, known only to history as the Matrons, were observed making potions that were then administered to city elders and officials. Unfortunately, these people—all men, it should be noted—subsequently died, in some instances very quickly.

In what is probably the first plea bargain in history, in return for a reward and immunity from prosecution, an enslaved girl, belonging to one of the Matrons reported the actions of the Matrons to the authorities. When challenged and accused of veneficium, a group of 20 women admitted that they had been preparing drugs and potions but argued that they were entirely wholesome and believed that they would help cure the men. Protesting their innocence, the women agreed to drink their own medicine to prove that it was harmless. Unfortunately, it was not, and all 20 women died.

The authorities then rounded up a further 170 women who were known to be associates of the dead women, and they, too, all died as a result of drinking their own potions or being executed or exiled. This mass poisoning outbreak was later attributed by Roman authorities, presumably wanting to cover up an embarrassing incident, to all 190 women being insane.

So, was it a deliberate attempt, almost a coup, by the Matrons to kill off a large section of the patriarchal Roman society with poison? Or was it a well-meaning attempt by women during an epidemic to find a remedy, only they accidentally created a toxic potion instead by using the wrong herbs, drugs, and dosage? At this time, aconite and hemlock, both lethally poisonous in excess, were popular ingredients in curative potions for respiratory illnesses. This would not be the last time in history that women dabbling in herbal remedies would be made into scapegoats and put to death by men.

THOU SHALT NOT SUFFER A WITCH TO LIVE

One ancient civilization I’m conscious of not having mentioned so far is Egypt, where magic and religion were inexorably linked for thousands of years; however, the true nature of Egyptian magical arts was not fully understood by the outside world until the 19th century, when Western archaeologists, historians, and what we’d now call Egyptologists started deciphering all the hieroglyphics on the statues, tombs, and papyri being unearthed in excavations along the Nile Valley. In fact, by Hellenistic times, when the Ptolemaic dynasty (305–30 B.C.E.), Cleopatra’s family, were ruling Egypt, Egyptian magic had taken on many of the features of Chaldean, Greek, and Roman magic.

One further ancient civilization needs to be looked at: that of the Israelite kingdoms of Israel and Judah, along with the influence of their Judaism, Mosaic law, and what we now call the Old Testament.

Jewish sources, including the Talmud, Torah, and Mishnah, approved of the miracles performed by the prophets, even distinctly bloodthirsty prophets such as Elisha, but condemned impure magic performed by people outside of the priestly elite. Looked at through modern eyes, this does seem like the application of double standards, particularly in the wider world of witchcraft, where a distinction has always existed between benevolent and malevolent magic, yet the Old Testament prophets are never criticized for using magical forces to vindictively smite their personal enemies. Take this example, involving the prophet Elisha, in 2 Kings 2:23–24:

The prophet Elisha, right, looks on as the insulting youths are torn apart by God-sent bears, as depicted in a medieval French manuscript.

And he went up from thence unto Bethel: and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head.

And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the Lord. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tore forty and two children of their number.

Or, to put it into modern parlance, as Elisha departed the city of Bethel, some naughty children followed him on his way, jeering and rudely shouting the equivalent of Get out of town, Baldy! The prophet responded by cursing them and summoning up two bears, which then proceeded to rip the children into pieces.

The ancient Israelite kingdoms also had an apparent obsession with divination and soothsaying, with Deuteronomy 18:10–11 stating: Let no one be found among you … who practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft, or casts spells, or one who consults ghosts or familiar spirits or who inquires of the dead.

Depending upon which translation of the Old Testament you read, these verses may also condemn association with witches, wizards, necromancers, and mediums. Why the obsession? One reason was the desire to keep the Jewish faith pure and undivided. In other words, only officially temple-sanctioned prophets were to be observed, and this definitely excluded amateur soothsayers who told fortunes for money.

But a more practical agenda was also at work here in that the Israelite kingdoms were constantly fighting for survival against other states and empires and, therefore, needed to avoid having their populations be panicked or demoralized by dangerous, unofficial prophesies along the lines of We’re all doomed, the Philistines are going to defeat us in battle tomorrow, and the king will be killed.

In another example of history repeating itself, in 1944, the last person to be convicted and imprisoned under the English Witchcraft Act 1735 was the clairvoyant Helen Duncan, who had revealed at a séance in 1941, during World War II, that the battleship HMS Barham had been sunk by the enemy.

The Old Testament also contains the most notorious condemnation of witches in ancient times, one that undoubtedly condemned tens of thousands of witches to death across Europe and, to a lesser extent, in the United Kingdom and the North American colonies during the mass persecutions of the Burning Times. This is the command in Exodus 22:18: Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.

The King James Version of the Bible, first published in 1611, certainly says this, but other translations say different things, including you shall not tolerate a sorceress, you must not allow any woman to do evil magic, and you shall not permit a female sorcerer to live. The earliest translations talk about a mekhashepa (or a mekhashefah) not being permitted to survive.

Unfortunately, all we know about mekhashepas is that they were women (not men) who practiced some form of magic, but we’re uncertain exactly what kind of magic. Was it maleficia or all magic, including what we’d now call white magic? Was it poisoning, the biblical equivalent of the Greek pharmaka? Or was it even divination and soothsaying?

Some academic debate also exists as to whether not suffering a witch to live (or the even milder not tolerate a sorceress or not allow any woman to do evil magic) means they should be killed or merely not permitted to live within the community but instead be driven out into exile, although for practical purposes, this would also be a death sentence for