quotations about witches & witchcraft
Those old hypocrites. They talk about killing witches but the Good Book's full of magic. Turning the Nile to blood and parting the Red Sea. What's that if it's not good old-fashioned magic? Want a little water into wine? No trouble! How about raising the dead man Lazarus? Just say the word!
CLIVE BARKER
Days of Magic, Nights of War
A wise witch knows the shadows come from the light.
DACHA AVELIN
Embracing Your Inner Witch
Because witchcraft is a craft, that means that it doesn't need religious belief. You can believe in no god at all and still use witchcraft effectively, you can still be a witch. This also means that you can couple witchcraft with your religious practice. So yes, this means that you can be a Jewish witch, a Christian, Muslim, or Pagan witch. Anyone can be a witch.
JAMIE WEAVER
It's Witchcraft
The last thing you wanted a witch to do was get bored and start making her own amusements, because witches sometimes had famously erratic ideas about what was amusing.
TERRY PRATCHETT
"Discworld: The Sea and Little Fishes", Legends: Short Novels By The Masters of Modern Fantasy
O father, what a hell of witchcraft lies In the small orb of one particular tear.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
A Lover's Complaint
I am mistress of all the sciences. I go so far beyond all else that my work is called magic. I manipulate noumena, regarding monads as points of entry tangential to hylomorphism. As to the paradox of Primary Essence being contained in Quiddity, the larger in the smaller, I have my own solution. The difficulty is always in not confusing Contingency with Accidence. Do you understand me?
R. A. LAFFERTY
Space Chantey
Witchcraft is said to be the oldest religion in the world. It is the indigenous shamanistic religion of Europe that has, in spite of ferocious persecution from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, survived in the folk tradition of many lands and through families who kept alive the old beliefs and worship of the Earth and the Moon Mother.
DAVID COLON
What Is Witchcraft?
Witchcraft's current popularity as an aesthetic movement raises another question: How will the emoji spell fare when the iPhone is obsolete?
KATIE FUSTICH
"Why Is Digital Witchcraft So Appealing to Young Women", Pacific Standard, October 28, 2016
There must have been good grounds for belief in witchcraft; otherwise Parliament would not have legislated against it.
LORD COKE
attributed, Day's Collacon
Any divinity that can't see me as a good witch in street clothes has no business hanging up a shingle as a god.
THOMM QUACKENBUSH
Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft
It gets old hearing from certain segments of the Witching World that I'm not allowed to use the word Witch to describe my practice or that I'm somehow using it improperly. I'm using it as it was originally used by the first modern public Witch, so I think my my use of it is quite correct thank you very much.
JASON MANKEY
"Witchcraft and Wicca Can Be the Same Thing", Patheos, March 7, 2017
The youngest of the witches was five, the eldest nearly eighty. A daughter accused her mother, who in turn accused her mother, who accused a neighbor and a minister. A wife and daughter denounced their husband and father. Husbands implicated wives; nephews their aunts; sons-in-law their mothers-in-law; siblings each other. Only fathers and sons weathered the crisis unscathed. A woman who traveled to Salem to clear her name wound up shackled before the afternoon was out. In Andover -- the community most severely affected -- one of every fifteen people was accused. The town's senior minister discovered he was related to no fewer than twenty witches. Ghosts escaped their graves to flit in and out of the courtroom, unnerving more than did the witches themselves. Through the episode surge several questions that touch the third rail of our fears: Who was conspiring against you? Might you be a witch and not know it? Can an innocent person be guilty? Could anyone, wondered a group of men late in the summer, think himself safe?
STACY SCHIFF
The Witches: Salem, 1692
Witchcraft offers the model of a religion of poetry, not theology. It presents metaphors, not doctrines, and leaves open the possibility of reconciliation of science and religion, of many ways of knowing.
STARHAWK
The Spiral Dance
Perhaps I am the only person who, asked whether she were a witch or not, could truthfully say, "I do not know. I do know some very strange things have happened to me, or through me."
NORAH LOFTS
Bless This House
Now, it's common knowledge that most towns of a certain size have a witch, if only to eat misbehaving children and the occasional puppy who wanders into her yard.
JOHN AUGUST
Big Fish
All magic, all witchcraft, depends on the Devil, and is fundamentally evil.
MONTAGUE SUMMERS
Witchcraft and Black Magic
Witches, just like Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, or Buddhists, come in many different packages.... Witches are big and small, short and tall. Some witches are fat and some are thin. Some are brunettes, some blond, some have purple hair, and some have no hair at all. The very young can be witches, and so can the very old.
DENISE ZIMMERMANN
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Wicca and Witchcraft
Witches never existed, except in people's minds. All there was in the olden days was women and some men who believed in herbal cures and in folklore and in the wish to fly. Witches? We're all witches in one way or another. Witches was the invention of mankind.
IAN RANKIN
The Flood
A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
letter to John Taylor after the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts, June 1798
I am no more a witch than you are a wizard. If you take my life away, God will give you blood to drink.
SARAH GOOD
Edward W. Knappman's Great American Trials