I’m not a big fan of Witch School. And their stock with me fell even further this morning when I found out about this: WitchSchool.com World’s Largest Witch School for Sale.

That’s right, Witch School is for sale to the highest bidder, be it responsible pagans or a Christian evangelical group. And the winner gets access to the private information of every Witch School student, as well as the right to award degrees in one of the flavours of Correllian Wicca. Sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.

This, of course, is another in a long line of fun and exciting happenings at Witch School. There was the split between leaders that has lead to competing traditions (more about that at The Wild Hunt: Correllian Crack-Up). And there is the proposed Sci-Fi channel series (more here). And, of course, the expose by Nonfluffypagans.

I have to say I was annoyed to find out about this from sources other then Witch School itself. I am not pleased with the idea of someone else having access to my private information, and I have written to [email protected] asking to have my account closed and my information deleted. (I haven’t used my account in years, but it is the principal of the thing; I don’t want an unknown entity having my email address and name.)

Of course, access to private information isn’t the only issue. There is also the cheapening of Wiccan teaching, which, admittedly, Witch School was doing anyway before this auction. The ability to hand out degrees is not something that should be offered for sale on eBay. The graceful and proper thing to do would be to shut down the school and sell the proprietary software without the Wiccan content. Hopefully Ed Hubbard will wake up and realize that what he is doing will likely damage the Wiccan community in the long run.

You can read more about this at The Wild Hunt – Wanna Buy Witch School?.

I’ve written a few times in the past, either here or on The Lotus Pond, about how Wiccans seem to disagree amongst themselves about whether or not they perform magic. I usually say that I am not a witch because I do not perform magic, meaning I do not cast spells. But, there are those that make the argument that Wiccan ritual practice, specifically Circle casting, is a work of magic, and therefore Wiccans can be seen as witches. Without getting into the whole Wiccan/witch debate, I thought it might be interesting to figure out if casting a Circle really is working magic.

After reading Ronald Hutton’s long discussion about the definitions of magic and religion in his book Witches, Druids, and King Arthur, I’ve finally found definitions of magic and religion that make sense to me. So, I am defining religion to be the act of praising or worshiping deities, or asking them for favours. Magic, on the other hand, is manipulating supernatural powers to achieve one’s Will, often involving threats or entreaties to deities or other beings.

So, with those terms defined, I believe it is safe to say that the meat of a Wiccan ritual, where the Lord and Lady are honour and the Sabbat or what-have-you celebrated, is clearly an act of religion. The Circle, on the other hand, involves the cleansing and setting apart of the ritual space from the ordinary world. The practitioner is focusing their Will on this task, and using powers of one sort or another to fulfill it. Often the Elements, either themselves or embodied in spirits or other beings, are asked to be present and to help with the creation of the Circle. So, it would seem that the casting of the Circle is a magical act performed in a religious situation.

So, perhaps I do work magic, but that still doesn’t make me a witch.

The number of people killed during the witch hunts is often misrepresented as 9,000,000 (with at least one site claiming that 85% of which were women).¹ Many sites, though, now represent the number as between 50,000 to 200,000 people, including the ever popular Wikipedia. So, where did the larger number come from, and why do many scholar and Pagans now believe the number to be so much smaller?

According to Ronald Hutton², a historian in the small German town of Quedlinburg first reported the number of dead as 9,442,994 in 1793. The historian arrived at this number by taking the number of executions in his own village and assuming they would reflect the number of executions in all other villages in Europe. A few calculations later, he declared that 9,442,994 people had been executed as witches.

This number was later picked up by a Viennese professor of the Old Testament, and rounded down to the easier to handle 9,000,000 figure we are most familiar with. In 1893, the figure was used by Matilda Joslyn Gage in her book Woman, Church, and State, one of the earliest books to try to provide a reimagined women’s history. Gage claimed that most of the women killed were pagan priestess and healers, who the Church feared were too independent.

Gage was read by many members of the growing Pagan revival movement, including Gerald Gardner and Margaret Murray. Her ideas helped to inform their works, and were further propagated to more modern authors, like Starhawk.

Thankfully, many new works by Pagans and scholar include the more realistic numbers, ranging from 40,000 in Ronald Hutton’s Triumph of the Moon to 60,000 in Brian Levack’s The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe. These new, smaller, numbers come from a reexamination of the number of trials and their outcomes, as well as a realization that in a population of about 20,000,000 people, it is unlikely that 9,000,000 were executed with no significant outcry.

1. http://realmagick.com/articles/27/127.html
2. Witches, Druids and King Arthur, Ronald Hutton