Why is all the talk about witchcraft centered around demons and deities? – Non-Fiction

It’s the patriarchy playing its perennial trick of re-framing everything as diabolized. Try reading authentic pre-Christian texts such as The Metamorphoses of Ovid and The Golden Ass of Lucius Apuleius. They are superior to most Books of Shadows and Grimoires — David Smirh

Now I’m really curious — what did it use to be?

With regards to deities, the now-inextricable link between witches and theurgy comes mainly from Wicca. In 1951, an Englishman called Gerald Gardner created the religion of Wicca. Wicca is, in brief, an amalgam various occult traditions, Celtic paganism, and a lot of late-nineteenth/early-twentieth-century psuedo-history. One of the most egregious examples of this pseudo-history is a, “Theory” put forth by anthropologist Margaret Murray, claiming that the accused, “Witches” in the early modern period were persecuted because they were practicing a pre-Christian pagan religion. This is completely false, but Wicca originally claimed to be a survival of this religion, and its practitioners call themselves witches. That cemented the association between witchcraft and paganism in the popular consciousness.

Wiccans primarily worship two deities, one male and one female. These two deities are typically portrayed as a Moon Goddess, with three distinct aspects, and a “Horned God” associated with the wilderness. But despite these common archetypes, all god or goddess from ancient cultures are thought to be aspects of these two “Universal” deities. There are various problems with this (gender essentialism and cultural appropriation being two of the big ones), but that’s the reason why Wicca-derived systems of modern witchcraft often center around relationships with deities from various cultures. Most pop-witchcraft is a watered-down version of Wicca.

The association between witches and pagan deities is therefore relatively new, but the association between witches and demons is far older. In the early modern period, the prevailing idea about witches in Europe was that they were humans who had made a pact with the Devil in exchange for magical powers. They were essentially the human equivalent of demons, servants of Satan who worked evil magic just for the hell of it. In Britain, it was believed that Satan would assign a demon to a witch to be her servant. The witch’s demonic minion was called a, “Familiar,” and it usually took the form of an innocuous animal. It was also believed that witches would ride these familiars (or their broomsticks) to a gathering called the, “Witches’ Sabbath,” where they would feast on human flesh and have sex with demons. King James I’s book on witchcraft is called Demonologie, so there was hardly a meaningful difference between the two.