Witchcraft, demonology and magic

Witchcraft and magic are topics of enduring interest for many reasons. Chief among these is their extraordinary interdisciplinarity: anthropologists, folklorists, historians, and more have contributed to build a body of work of extreme variety and consistence. Of course, this also means that the subjects themselves are not easy to assess. In a very general way, we can define witchcraft as a supernatural means to cause harm, death, or misfortune, while magic also belongs to the field of the supernatural, or at least esoteric knowledge, but can be used to less dangerous effects: such as for divination and astrology. In Western civilization, however, the witch hunt of Late Medieval–Early Modern times has set a very peculiar perspective in which diabolical witchcraft, the invention of the Sabbat and the persecution of many thousands of (mostly) female and (sometimes) male presumed witches, gave way to a phenomenon that is fundamentally different from traditional witchcraft, even if many case studies conducted in South America or Africa present similarities, especially in contemporary times (see Wachtel 1992; Geschiere 1997). Another peculiarity of magic and witchcraft in Western civilization is given by the number of writings that detailed their nature, techniques, and effects: these include technical treatises about how to perform magic, such as in the case of necromancy (see Kieckhefer 1998; Gal et al. 2017), or the many writings explaining the powers of witches from the point of view of judges and inquisitors.