Fantasy Friday

With the premeire of Secret Circle airing last night (I did not watch it, though I wanted to.) I thought the perfect topic for my first Fantasy Friday would be the topis of the changing roles of witches. Today they can be found everywhere, from televison, books and movies to your local Borders (Errr.... Maybe not anymore, but that's where they used to meet here...). My, Boomhilda, how you've changed. So how did we as a society move from mass killing in the name of religion to Samantha and the Halliwell sisters?

Witches have been around for as long as there have been men struggling to understand the world around him. In the bible (Exodus 22:18) it states "Suffer not a witch to live." And the word witch appears in seven other scriptures, all declaring witches as an evil force to be gotten rid of. And witches have played the villain countless times throughout history, both in fiction and real life. Whether the play that must not be named (*cough*Macbeth*cough*), the witch-goddess that turned Odysseus's men into pigs, or a green faced hag after her pretty, witches were believed to have struck a pact with the Devil in return for unholy powers.

So how did we make the move from die, witch die to which witch to watch? In the middle ages some "white witches" or "wise men or women" (You, one belief on the Biblical travelers is that they practiced white magic), so there have always been good witches. But the shift didn't really start in force until the 19th and 20th century, with the rise of neo-paganism, or Wicca. 

A change in thinking, a fall off in rabid religious views and a young country where people were free to practice whatever religion they chose brought the witch out of the shadows and began to paint her as the misunderstood hero. We still get evil witches, but now there's just as many if not more good witches. It has been a long and terrifying journey, but the witch is back and i don't think she's going anywhere anytime soon...

Edit:  Sorry, stupid Blogger didn't actually post this this morning...