Where do I find those witches?

After Layla has helped me explore witchcraft for almost a year now, I want to collect what I could find out about witches so far.

Most of my readers might have certain ideas about witches. I have had most of them myself, because we can find them everywhere in art and literature.

Some of those ideas may include witches as the preservers of sophisticated knowledge from pagan times, as feminists being hunted down by priests, or even as early scientists understanding things about this world that the church did not want people to know.

So far, I can tell that looking for witches has not much to do with these things.

The classical witch hunts appeared in Europe in early modern days, marking the end of the middle ages between the 15th and the 18th century.
Looking into that period of time, were would I find witches, if not involved in rituals and potions?

One place to look for witches in history is within small towns in mountain areas worried about surviving the next winter.
In many of those towns unlucky individuals could be found that were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, when Dystopia arrived. This could have been crop failure, death of cattle – things that made surviving a bit more unlikely. These unlucky individuals may have looked unusual, or had a suspicious profession as for example practicing as a midwife (I‘m serious). Also, other former incidents, such as once haven given birth to a child with any kind of deformation, might have put this person under suspicion. Thanks to intellectual voices of their time, such as Heinrich Kramer in „Malleus Maleficarum“, witchcraft became a problem dominantly searched for in women, but also men were not safe.

Here we see that witch hunts were not a political practice of the church to suppress sexuality or intellectual developments, but rather a private matter in small towns facing serious problems and not being able to explain them properly. Fun fact: Witches were mostly hunted in specific. areas and mountains in the surroundings were obligatory, for otherwise the devil had not party location (I’m serious again!).

Of course, there also is another version of witches to be found.
There were all kinds of weird and lonely people selling secret and tempting solutions to all kinds of personal problems, love potions and eternal youth being only a few very popular examples. Those things happened all the time, but never were a sophisticated leftover of pagan times, and more similar to things as dream catchers and horoscopes today. Dancing through the backyard while burning your ex lovers shirts is not a crime, but gathering dead animals and the flesh of an executed murderer instead of really solving your issues is not cool.

When looking for witches, you will either find a very unlucky individual within a small town facing Dystopia, or a lonely weirdo selling a magical solution to a really embarrassing problem.

Isn‘t it interesting to imagine how someone like you and me would have ended up as either one of those only a few centuries earlier? Yes, I thought so, too, which is why I began drafting this novel about a normal woman having really bad luck a few times and ending up as the lonely weirdo in description.

(Oh, and I’m writing this, because the pandemic challenges my will to live everyday.)