The word "witch" comes from Old English — wicce for a woman, wicca for a man — and its roots go back further, into Proto-Germanic and beyond, into Proto-Indo-European, the ancient root language that gave birth to most European languages including Latin, German, and Old English. One of the most linguistically credible proposed roots is the Proto-Indo-European *weid — meaning "to see" or "to know." This is the same root that gives us the Latin videre ("to see"), the English "wit" (knowledge), the German wissen ("to know"), and the Sanskrit vidya (wisdom). Throughout the Indo-European language family, seeing and knowing have always been bound together — and this root would make the earliest meaning of "witch" something close to: one who sees, one who knows, one with wisdom.
This isn't the only theory — the etymology is genuinely debated among linguists, and the word's exact origin isn't fully settled. But it is one of the most credible paths, and it changes everything about how we understand what was lost.
And so it makes complete sense that for centuries, "witch" and "wise woman" were used as the same thing — because they meant the same thing. One historical record from the 1600s puts it plainly: it was "indifferent" — meaning it made no difference — whether you called someone "a witch" or "a wise woman." They meant the same person. The herbalist. The midwife. The healer. The one who knew which plants eased a fever, which ones helped a woman through childbirth, which ones could ease someone's passing when nothing else could be done.
What happened to that meaning wasn't a natural evolution of language. It was a deliberate burial. The church systematically reframed "witch" — a word that originally described wisdom, sight, and knowledge — into something sinister, something to be feared and prosecuted. That reframing took centuries and cost countless lives.
So when modern voices talk about reclaiming "witch" as meaning "wise woman," they're not inventing something out of nothing. They're recovering what the word actually meant before it was weaponised. The reclamation isn't a romantic reinterpretation — it's the original definition.
One of the people who's done the most to bring this reclamation into the mainstream is Mia Magik, founder of Witch School. She grounds her teaching in these older roots — describing the witch as "one who sees, one who knows, one with wisdom" — and frames the "witch wound" as the inherited wound of having that wisdom suppressed and demonized. She's not rewriting history. She's pointing back to it.
Who actually got accused
The people accused of witchcraft during the witch hunts — which ran for centuries across Europe and later in the colonies — were overwhelmingly women, though men were killed too. More than three-quarters of those accused were women, and it wasn't random. There was a pattern. The men who were accused tended to be those closely associated with accused women, healers and cunning folk in their own right, or simply those on the social margins — poor, elderly, or in some way outside the norm. The machinery worked on anyone who was vulnerable; women were just far more vulnerable, far more often.
Many were herbalists and healers — the village's go-to person for medicine, long before anything like a hospital existed. Many were midwives, present at births and deaths, holding knowledge about the body that no one else had. And their healing went beyond herbs. These women practiced what we would now recognise as holistic healing — touch-based energy work, ritual and ceremony, chanting and sound, dream interpretation, and the use of psychoactive plants that were indigenous to Europe long before anyone imported anything from elsewhere. Belladonna, henbane, mandrake, ergot, and fly agaric mushrooms were all known and used in European folk medicine and ritual — the infamous "flying ointment" associated with witches is now believed by historians and ethnobotanists to have been a psychoactive salve, and the "flying" a description of the visionary experience it produced. The tradition of working with plant consciousness for healing and ritual is as ancient and European as it is Egyptian or Eastern.
Many were also seers and diviners — women who read signs, interpreted dreams, communicated with spirits, or simply seemed to know things they had no ordinary way of knowing. The Old English glossaries actually used wicca and wicce to translate Latin words meaning diviner, soothsayer, and seer. What we might now call intuition, psychic ability, or mediumship was a recognised role in these communities. These weren't women pretending to powers they didn't have — they were women whose gifts were real enough to be sought out, and later real enough to be feared.
Many were widows or unmarried women who, by circumstance, happened to own land — and an accusation of witchcraft was sometimes simply the easiest way to take that land. Upon conviction, the state seized all property. It then had a habit of being quietly reassigned to the men who had helped bring the accusation in the first place. Older women living alone were especially vulnerable. And some were accused for nothing more than having red hair, or a birthmark, or a mole — any unusual mark on the body could be called a "devil's mark" and used as proof. Others were accused simply for being outspoken — for speaking their mind, questioning authority, or refusing to be quiet. There are documented cases of women being accused of witchcraft specifically for voicing doubt about the trials themselves. Being a woman who didn't stay silent was, in itself, considered suspicious.
In other words: it was often women with knowledge, women with independence, or women with property — and sometimes all three — who ended up on trial.
Why the church
It's worth being direct about this: the witch trials weren't carried out by some vague "society." They were, to a very large degree, instigated, legitimised, and run by the church. The peak of the persecution ran roughly from 1480 to 1700 — two centuries that feel distant until you realise they ended less than 350 years ago. Church courts — not secular ones — developed many of the legal procedures used to identify and prosecute witches, and papal authority directly enabled and legitimised the persecutions across Europe. The most influential witch-hunting manual ever written, the Malleus Maleficarum, was authored by a Catholic clergyman in 1486 — and crucially, it was one of the first books to be mass-produced using Gutenberg's printing press. That technology, barely decades old, meant that instructions for identifying, interrogating, and executing witches could be distributed across the continent on a scale that had never been possible before. The printing press didn't just spread the Bible — it spread this.
And the theological justification went straight back to Eve. Church doctrine held that women carried the inherited guilt of Eve's "original sin" — weaker in faith, more susceptible to the Devil, the reason suffering entered the world in the first place. This wasn't an abstract idea. Major churches taught that the pain of childbirth was specifically God's punishment for that sin — which meant a midwife easing that pain wasn't just doing her job, she was interfering with divine punishment. Menstruation, too, was framed as part of Eve's curse — widely referred to as "the curse" across Christian cultures, and treated as evidence of women's inherent impurity. The author of the Malleus Maleficarum believed women were intrinsically more prone to evil, and that belief was baked into the entire system of accusation and trial.
Underneath all of it sits a simple structural fact: the church's authority depended on being the sole channel to salvation — God the Father, Christ the Son, the Holy Spirit, with the church as gatekeeper to all of it. A woman who could heal you, deliver your child, or ease your dying without going through that channel at all was, whether anyone framed it this way explicitly or not, a quiet challenge to that entire system. Women with real, independent power — spiritual, medical, or otherwise — simply didn't fit the narrative the church needed to maintain its authority. The persecution of "witches" and the construction of women as inherently sinful and subordinate were two sides of the same coin.
The takeover of medicine
This wasn't only theological — it was also, in a very real sense, a turf war over who was allowed to heal.
As universities and medical schools developed across Europe — institutions controlled by the church and run entirely by men — women were systematically excluded from formal medical training. At the same time, midwives and herbalists kept doing what they'd always done: treating the people university-trained physicians had no interest in, and often doing it more effectively, with remedies that worked.
That effectiveness became part of the problem. A healer working outside the church-approved system, whose methods weren't sanctioned and whose results couldn't easily be explained away, was a direct challenge to the institutions trying to bring all healing — spiritual and physical — under one roof. Over a few centuries, the entire field of medicine shifted from something rooted in plants, practical experience, and knowledge passed down mostly through women, into something formal, male, and institutional. It wasn't until the mid-1800s that women were even allowed to qualify as doctors in Europe again.
But even that wasn't the end of the story. The displacement of herbal and natural healing didn't stop with the witch trials — it continued, and was eventually completed by a very different kind of power. Not the church this time, but money. That part of the story — how the systematic removal of natural medicine was engineered in the modern era — is something I've already written about.
What was actually done
This is the part that's hardest to write — and the part I think matters most to say out loud, clearly, without softening it. Because what happened to these women wasn't abstract. It was methodical, documented, and horrific.
The swimming test is probably the most well-known method, and it is exactly as brutal as it sounds. The accused would be stripped, her hands bound to her feet, and thrown into a river or pond. If she floated, she was a witch — guilty. If she sank, she was innocent. But sinking meant drowning. A rope was sometimes tied around the waist so the accused could theoretically be pulled out, but drowning deaths were not uncommon. Floating was also ironically quite likely regardless of guilt, due to air trapped in clothing. It was an impossible test by design.
Torture was used routinely to extract confessions — and once a confession was obtained, it was often used to implicate others, spiralling outward. The strappado was one of the most common methods: the victim's wrists were bound behind her back, she was hoisted up by a rope and then repeatedly dropped from a height, dislocating her shoulders. Sleep deprivation was also widely used — particularly in Scotland, where groups of accused women were ordered to be kept perpetually awake until they confessed. There were thumbscrews to crush fingers, the rack to stretch the body, and needles used to "prick" the skin in search of a so-called devil's mark — a spot that didn't bleed or feel pain, which could be declared proof of a pact with the Devil.
Some forms of torture were specifically devised for women and were sexual in nature. Rape occurred within the confines of witches' prisons. This is documented. It was not an accident or a side effect — it was part of the machinery of degradation and control.
Burning at the stake is the image most associated with witch executions — and across much of Europe, that's exactly what happened. Throughout France, Germany, Switzerland, Scandinavia and beyond, burning was the standard method of execution. In Britain, hanging was more commonly used instead — but the scale and brutality of what happened across the rest of the continent was immense. Because burning alive evoked sympathy from crowds, victims were often strangled or killed before being consigned to the flames — a detail that says everything about how calculated this machinery was.
All of this was written down. Manuals existed. King James I of England — the same king behind the King James Bible, still widely read today — wrote his own treatise, Daemonologie, effectively justifying the hunting and torture of the accused. The instructions for inflicting suffering on another human being were recorded, distributed, and followed, in writing, by the institutions of the time. Torture during witch hunts expanded the number of victims, as "confessions" extracted under pain implicated more and more people — lies told to stop the suffering, spiralling into mass persecution.
The scale
Vandana Shiva and other ecofeminist writers have described the witch hunts as a deliberate destruction of people who taught a fundamental truth: that we are part of nature, not separate from or above it. She has called it "a killing of the ecological mind," and has put the number of people killed across roughly two centuries as high as nine million. The historian Silvia Federici, in her book Caliban and the Witch, makes a related argument — that the witch hunts were also tied to a war on land, on the commons, and on the ecological and communal knowledge that women in particular carried. Different lenses, same underlying story: the persecution wasn't separate from the destruction of a way of living in relationship with nature — it was part of it.
Historians working from court and parish records tend to land on lower documented figures — tens of thousands of confirmed executions — though many acknowledge the true number, including undocumented deaths, was almost certainly higher than the records alone show. Both things can be true at once: the documented number is horrifying, and the true scale may have been far greater still.
The cats — and the familiars
Cats were part of this story too — but so were animals more broadly. One of the most documented features of witch trial accusations was the concept of the "familiar": an animal with whom the accused was believed to have an unnaturally close bond. Cats, dogs, toads, birds, mice, even insects appear in the trial records. What made an animal a "familiar" wasn't its species — it was the closeness of the relationship. An animal that had been given a name, that was treated with affection, that seemed to respond to its owner in ways that appeared intuitive — that was suspicious. The intimacy itself was the evidence.
Cats appear more than any other animal in the surviving trial records — partly because they were the most common companion animal for women living alone, and partly because their independent, perceptive nature seemed, to fearful observers, to suggest something beyond ordinary animal behaviour.
But there's more to the cat connection than fear and superstition. Cat purrs sit in a frequency range — roughly 25 to 150 Hz — that overlaps almost exactly with the frequencies used in medical vibration therapy for healing bone fractures and tissue damage. Some researchers believe purring evolved as a built-in self-healing mechanism, since cats often purr when injured or in pain. Add to that their famous intuition — alert to things long before humans notice — and it's not hard to see why a woman who kept cats close might have been seen as keeping a kind of healing presence nearby, whether or not anyone around her understood why.
There's so much more to say about cats — their healing properties, their role in ancient Egypt, their connection to the spirit world — and that's going to be its own post. Watch this space.
What we lost
What got destroyed in those centuries wasn't just lives. It was knowledge — generations of herbal wisdom, passed down and refined, much of it never written down because it didn't need to be; it was simply known, the way you know your own home. When the people who held that knowledge were killed, a huge amount of it died with them.
Why this matters now
It would be easy to read all of this as history — something distant and done with. But I don't think it is.
The concept of the "witch wound" describes exactly this: the inherited cultural fear of women's power, knowledge, and independence that was systematically encoded into European society over those two centuries of persecution. We absorbed, generation after generation, the message that a woman who knew things, who healed people, who spoke freely, who lived independently, who had a close relationship with the natural world — was dangerous. That message didn't disappear when the trials ended. It became part of the fabric.
And it may go even deeper than culture. The science of epigenetics — the study of how trauma and experience can alter gene expression and be passed to future generations — is beginning to show that what our ancestors lived through can leave biological as well as cultural imprints. Whether two centuries of mass persecution left that kind of mark is a serious question, not a fringe one.
What we do know is this: the suppression of women's knowledge, independence, and connection to the natural world was not a passing episode. It was sustained, deliberate, and total. Reclaiming the word "witch" — reclaiming the identity of the woman who sees, who knows, who heals, who speaks — is not nostalgia. It's a restoration. And understanding where that wound came from is the first step to healing it.
If you want to go deeper
These are some of the voices and sources that have shaped my own understanding of this history:
Caliban and the Witch — Silvia Federici. A historian's analysis of how the witch hunts connected to the rise of capitalism and the systematic dismantling of women's communal and ecological knowledge.
Witches, Midwives and Nurses — Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English. A short but powerful read on how women were pushed out of medicine and healing.
Vandana Shiva — ecofeminist, activist, and author. Her framing of the witch hunts as "a killing of the ecological mind" is one of the most clarifying descriptions of what was actually lost.
Mia Magik — modern teacher and founder of Witch School, whose work on reclaiming the word "witch" and healing the "witch wound" has brought this history to a new generation.