Witching Theory, Part II: The Roots of Witchcraft — Folklore & Fear

If Part I of this Witching Theory blog series asked why witches must read, Part II asks what we find when we do. The earliest accounts of witchcraft are steeped in folklore and distorted by fear. To understand our inheritance as witches, we must first reckon with both.

Reflection Through Land, Love & Liberty

Land: Folklore is how the land spoke through story—storms, rivers, and harvests made into myth.
Love: To study these tales, even the fearful ones, is to love our heritage with honesty.
Liberty: Fear once silenced witches; learning this history is an act of reclamation, ensuring our freedom to practice openly today.

Folklore: The Witch as Story

In folklore, witches appear everywhere: the solitary figure at the edge of the village, the healer with too much knowledge of herbs, the one who walks the hedge by night. These tales are often cautionary. They carry the anxieties of their time—failed crops, sudden illness, stillbirth, or misfortune.

But folklore is not only superstition. It is cultural memory. Beneath the exaggerations, it preserves fragments of real practices: charms for healing, rites for fertility, prayers for protection. Folklore kept the crooked path alive, even as official religion and law tried to erase it.

Fear: The Witch as Threat

Fear magnified these folk figures into monsters. In early modern Europe, witchcraft was imagined as the enemy of God and crown. Storms, plagues, and political unrest were often blamed on witches.

Ronald Hutton, in The Witch: A History of Fear, describes how accusations reflected deeper cultural anxieties: fear of women’s power, fear of outsiders, fear of the unknown. The witch became a scapegoat, a vessel for all that society could not control.

The witch trials of the 16th and 17th centuries reveal this vividly. Communities that once relied on cunning folk for healing could, under pressure, turn against them in suspicion. Folklore fed fear; fear fed persecution.

Folklore and History Together

Taken separately, folklore and history give us incomplete pictures. Folklore shows us how witches were imagined. History shows us how those imaginations were weaponized. Together, they explain why the word “witch” still carries both enchantment and dread.

Emma Wilby’s study of cunning folk highlights this tension. Many accused witches claimed visionary experiences with spirits or the faery folk. To neighbors, these practices were familiar. To authorities, they were proof of devilry.

Lessons for the Modern Witch

For witches today, folklore and fear offer critical lessons:

Folklore roots us. It connects us to practices that survived in story even when outlawed in life.
Fear warns us. It reminds us that witchcraft was once dangerous to claim openly, and that our craft still carries cultural weight.

I find it most interesting to see in modern witchcraft theory how many people claim the title "witch." For many, it is a word which comes immediately to make sense of a newfound spirituality. For others it is even a battlecry. For some though, it comes to them much later into their practice-- or even not at all.

I once had my own fears around claiming to be a witch. And now that I'm older, 5 years into this spiritual journey, I have found myself not caring anymore to be called anything. At first I did, and although I was scared to use the label, I was deconstructing from my time in the Independent Fundamentalist Baptist cult. My fear was more about the deconstruction than my transformation into something so forbidden. Likewise, I'd adamantly sworn off calling myself a Christian. As time went on, I used witch and pagan interchangeably. Early this year, however, I decided it was very important to decide what type of which I was, know it deeply, and title myself that way or not at all. I was reckoning with it all.

Surprisingly, what I gathered from that rather extreme requirement of myself was a willingness to be ambivalent toward my spirituality. Which I'd never entertained before. It became okay to call myself nothing. For a little while, that was a safety all its own.

Nowadays I could be called a witch, and more specifically a Hedge & Hearth witch. But I also could be called a Christian, a Pagan, an Animist, or just 'spiritual.' I've learned to stop letting fear or anxiety rule this component of my identity, going with my intuiting and trusting what feels authentic. Which is easier said than done. Especially after trying to sort out what I believed because I was brainwashed to believe it, and what I believed because I'd chosen it. At this time, I'm just comfortable, rooted in many beliefs that I've found a way to harmonize. And this is exactly why I stress reading or developing one's own Witching Theory!

Reading is reclamation. To study these accounts is to take back what was distorted and to honor those whose practices were misrepresented.

Folklore preserves fragments of practice; fear distorts them. To study both is to recover truth from distortion, honoring the past while claiming the right to practice without apology.

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