Fi's seen a lot of weird stuff on the road with her family! Here are some of her favorite weird stories.
PS: These stories are fictional and were created as episodes of a paranormal TV show back at the end of the 90s. All credit belongs to their writers at Disney.
Witches have been around for a long time in some form, all over the world, but they've been seen in a lot of different ways. In the ancient world, everybody pretty much believed in magic, and witches were thought to get their powers for conjuring or soothsaying from spirits, demons, or foreign gods. (In the Egyptian accounts of the Exodus, MOSES was a witch -- he did talk to a foreign god, after all. Of course, in the biblical account, the Egyptian guys are the witches.)
Witches were also big in ancient Greece and Rome; Thessaly, in Greece, was THE place to be if you were a Greek witch. The next big development in Witchery came in the middle ages -- that's when we get into the alleged cults of diabolical witches who were supposed to be in league with the Devil. That mostly started with the Summis Desiderantes -- this essay that Pope Innocent VIII wrote in 1484, in which he appointed a bunch of inquisitors to go out and get rid of the witches, who were now labelled as heretics.
Witch-hunting then became all the rage, and that went on until the end of the 17th century-- kids were supposed to inform on their parents, promises of immunity were quickly broken after confessions, and of course there was the water test: if a woman sank when thrown into the pool, she was innocent (well, drowned, but innocent) -- if she floated, she was guilty.
The third phase of witchcraft is the modern one, the neo-pagan movement, sometimes referred to as Wicca (from the Old English "wicce", meaning witch). Wicca is more about returning to the roots of the whole thing, which was about connection to the earth -- no devil worship or anything like that. (That's Satanism -- a whole DIFFERENT kettle of demons!)
Of course, a lot of people still believe in old-fashioned witchery and spells: check out the hex signs all over barns in Pennsylvania, for instance. And who knows, maybe that nice old lady next door is cooking more than soup in that pot...
Credit to Imagingings for the css & Credit to Disney Channel for the So Weird stories.
