Witchcraft is Focused in Africa

Most witchcraft is focused in Africa. Witchcraft is the use of supernatural powers to control people and/or events using magic and sorcery. Witches, along with sorcerers and magicians, try to influence the world through hidden ways. People who practice witchcraft are often called 'Wicca' which meant 'someone who practices sorcery' in old English (1).

Even though movies present the idea of witches as old females, there are witches of every age and gender. They also provide fake ideas about the religion. Black masses- a copy of an Orthodox mass but in a satanic way for Satanists and Wiccans- is almost wholly made up and witch doctors- a doctor whose job is to free people from evil and harming spells- rarely existed in the west. There were many ideas and stories about the Wiccans based on culture. According to the traditional Navajo belief, when a witch traveled at night, they cover themselves with the skin of a dead animal so that they transform into that animal. They then have nighttime meetings where they wear masks and sit among corpses. In the west, witchcraft was considered to consist of meetings at night, cannibalism, rituals with the devil, and use of black magic. Early Wiccans worked in secret for their hirers and did not publically practice the religion. They were typically seen active at night and after dusk when ordinary mortals are asleep. Sometimes they considered their magic to work as if it was just technology. As an example, it was believed that as a result of ritually slaughtering an animal, you could increase a field's fertility rate. But the magic was often used as an effort to build symbolic reality. There were witch hunts who were believed to kill millions and were supposedly led by males, priests, judges, or doctors. Since witches did not exist, the persecuted in the early modern period were victims that were forced to die for something that did not exist. Almost no religion shares the same beliefs as witchcraft. These include magic, sorcery, religion, folklore, theology, technology, and diabolism. Until the fourteenth century in the West, witchcraft had the most in common with sorcery. Sometimes sorcery was considered a withdrawal from a god's power leading to the belief that Wiccans used demons in their work. These sorcerers were feared but also respected. Before then witchcraft was similar all over the world. However, they did not change due to cultural problems or from a secret cult, but because of the want to reach a goal in either a hidden or open way. They used a variety of ways to reach their goal. Some examples are incantations, chants used to invoke evil spirits; divination and oracles to predict the future; amulets and charms to keep away evil spirits; potions and salves, and dolls and other figures to represent their enemies. They tried to: gain or preserve health, get or keep land, get protection from natural disasters and evil spirits, help friends, and seek revenge (1).

Wiccans have many ideas about gods. They believe in a duo-theistic deity structure: a goddess and a god(3). Still, they are mostly goddess-centered (4). They might also believe that there are many gods such as Isis, Osiris, Herne, Cerridwen, Apollo, and Athena (5). They could believe that everything is a god (Pantheists), or that there are many gods but they only worship a small group (Henotheists), or that there is only one god who is beyond gender (Monotheists), or that the Divine is in all things, or just believe that there are many gods (polytheists) (7). Since there is no real belief about one specific god, Wiccans also don't have a real belief about creation. Some believe in evolution (4). The following is the most common belief about the creation of the earth: "at the beginning of time, all of the matter and energy in the universe was concentrated in a very dense state, from which it exploded, with the resulting expansion continuing until the present. This big bang is dated between 10 and 20 billion years ago. In this initial state, the universe was very hot and contained a thermal soup of quarks, electrons, photons, and other elementary particles. The temperature rapidly decreased, falling from 1013 degrees Kelvin after the first microsecond to about one billion degrees after three minutes. As the universe cooled, the quarks condensed into protons and neutrons, the building blocks of atomic nuclei. Some of these were converted into helium nuclei by fusion; the relative abundance of hydrogen and helium is used as a test of the theory. After many millions of years the expanding universe, at first a very hot gas, thinned and cooled enough to condense into individual galaxies and then stars." They also believe that when the atoms were created, atoms formed cells, which then formed mankind and animals (6). The religion does not have a right or wrong because it is an experimental religion (6,8). There are only a few spiritual truths or rules: harm none; be yourself; whatever you do returns to repeatedly; when you resist something, it keeps persisting; we are all one; and that your thoughts and emotions create the reality that you live in. Christianity, on the other hand, is hugely different. They believe that there is only one God who, as Jesus said, is the Father (12). They say that the Bible is God's Word which is written by men with the Holy Spirit's guidance and that they should follow what it says.

Cite this page