I'll put a spell on you...

My granddaughter dressed up as a witch for Hallowe'en and we got talking about witchcraft and I spent most of the time trying to correct her assumptions which (no pun intended) were for the most part based on modern misinformation.  An awful lot of the supposed "history of witchcraft" has been reverse-engineered as it were.  Yes there were pagan religions in this country well pre-dating Christianity but there is no evidence that any of these were called witchcraft or wicca or anything like that. The idea of witchcraft was essentially a Christian invention designed to (a) demonise those who didn't subscribe to Christian beliefs and (b) help explain (at least to the satisfaction of Christians) the existence of evil and suffering  - these were clearly the work of the Devil and as they happened in the real world required real-world agents of the Devil to bring them about, hence witches (and to a lesser extent warlocks) were born.  There was also a healthy dose of misogyny here - the Church was (and to a certain extent, still is) terrified of the idea of women having power and so any woman who "put herself about" or who seemed to the Church to be trying to usurp it's claim to have all the answers ran the real risk of being accused of witchcraft just as a way of keeping them under control.