The Unsanctioned Power: How Practices Labeled “Witchcraft” Functioned as Tools of Survival, Justice, and Resistance for the Marginalized—and Why That Is Precisely Why They Were Persecuted

*As always, my posts are not intended to teach, but rather to challenge all to take a deeper, more honest dive. Never take my word for it. Search for yourself. The whole point is to not follow blindly.

The Question Behind the Condemnation

When institutional Christianity condemns “witchcraft,” it presents the prohibition as self-evident—a moral absolute rooted in divine command. But this framing collapses under scrutiny. A careful examination of the Hebrew Bible, the Greek New Testament, and the broader ancient Near Eastern context reveals something far more complex: the practices most often labeled “witchcraft” were not primarily condemned because they were spiritually dangerous or cosmically forbidden. They were condemned because they represented access to power that existed outside the control of centralized religious and political authority.

This article does not address divination, which warrants its own treatment. Instead, it focuses on the broader cluster of practices—protective workings, mirror and return work, binding, curse-breaking, healing, and intermediary access—that have been conflated under the umbrella term “witchcraft” across centuries of persecution. It examines who practiced these things, why, what the original texts actually say about them, and why the populations most associated with these practices have historically faced the most severe suppression.

The answer is not complicated, even if it is uncomfortable: these practices gave marginalized people recourse. And recourse, in the hands of those a power structure is designed to exclude, is a threat.

What the Hebrew Text Actually Says

The Problem of Translation

The English word “witchcraft” is a translation of several distinct Hebrew and Greek terms, each with different semantic ranges, different historical contexts, and different targets. The flattening of these distinctions into a single English word has done enormous interpretive damage.

The Hebrew kashaph (often translated “sorcerer” or “witch”) appears in texts like Exodus 22:18 and Deuteronomy 18:10–11. But the broader Deuteronomy passage is striking in its specificity: it is embedded in a list of practices associated with foreign nations in the context of Israel preparing to enter Canaan. The prohibition is not primarily about the mechanics of the practices themselves. It is about covenantal loyalty. The concern is about where you are sourcing your access to divine infrastructure—not whether such access exists.

The Hebrew ‘ob and yidde‘oni (translated “medium” and “spiritualist”) similarly appear in lists that are specifically about consulting foreign spiritual infrastructure rather than the Israelite divine council. The issue is loyalty and jurisdiction, not the reality of what is being accessed.

When Saul visits the medium at Endor in 1 Samuel 28, the text does not treat her practice as fraudulent. Samuel actually appears. The narrative condemns Saul’s desperation and his prior hypocrisy—not the medium’s competence. She is, in the text, effective. Her practice works. What gets her in trouble is the political environment, not the ontological status of her work.

The prohibition was about where you sourced your access—not whether such access was real.

Practitioners Who Were Never Condemned

A consistent pattern emerges when you trace individuals throughout the Hebrew Bible who operate using what would today be called extraordinary perceptual or energetic capacities, and who receive no condemnation for it.

Joseph uses a divination cup explicitly—he says so himself in Genesis 44:5–15. He practices dream interpretation. He is celebrated and elevated to the highest office in Egypt. The text presents this as divinely sanctioned, not spiritually suspect.

Miriam is called a neviah—prophetess—in Exodus 15:20. She leads ritual, she moves, she accesses something beyond ordinary cognitive processes. Her authority is presented as parallel to Moses’s, not derivative of it. The only time she faces consequence is when she challenges Moses’s unique relational status with God—a political transgression, not a spiritual one.

Deborah in Judges 4–5 operates simultaneously as judge, prophetess, and military strategist. She directs Barak based on access to knowledge he does not have. She is not condemned. She is celebrated as a mother of Israel.

Daniel operates within a full system of sign interpretation, dream reading, and discernment that is functionally identical to practices condemned elsewhere in the same canon. He is not condemned. He is elevated and his practice is presented as superior to that of Babylonian magicians—not because the category is different, but because his source of authority is aligned with the God of Israel.

The consistent differentiator across these figures is not the practice. It is the covenantal alignment of the practitioner. The same actions read differently depending on who you are serving and where your access originates. This is a critical distinction that centuries of institutional interpretation have actively obscured.

The Historical Record—Who Was Practicing and Why

Necessity as the Mother of Practice

Across the ancient Near East and into the Greco-Roman world, the practices that would eventually be consolidated under the term “witchcraft” were not fringe activities engaged in by unstable individuals. They were community infrastructure. They were the recourse available to people who had no access to formal legal, medical, or political systems—which, in the ancient world, was most people, and particularly women, enslaved persons, foreigners, and the economically marginal.

Healing work, protective binding, return work, curse work—these were the systems available when you could not afford a physician, when you had no standing in a court, when the person harming you faced no legal consequence for doing so. This was not superstition. It was a rational response to a structural gap.

Greek curse tablets (defixiones) have been found in enormous quantities across the Mediterranean world—thousands of them. Archaeological analysis reveals they were used by ordinary people navigating disputes with neighbors, employers, abusive partners, and legal opponents. Many of them are written by women in situations where formal legal recourse was either unavailable or designed against them. The tablets are not evidence of irrationality. They are evidence of need.

Africa, the Diaspora, and the Colonial Encounter

The suppression of “witchcraft” practices accelerated dramatically during the era of European colonial expansion, and it is impossible to understand the history of this suppression without centering that context.

African traditional religious practices—Ifa, Vodun, various forms of ancestor veneration and protective workings—were not primitive superstition that colonizers were obligated to correct. They were sophisticated systems of community care, spiritual infrastructure, and social accountability that had developed over centuries. They also represented, in the context of enslaved populations, the one domain that colonial power could not fully reach.

You can chain a body. You cannot as easily chain a practice that requires no institutional infrastructure, no building, no ordained practitioner, no visible ceremony. This is precisely why these practices were targeted so aggressively. Laws against African spiritual practices were among the earliest colonial legal impositions. Practicing them was punishable by death in many contexts.

What emerged from that suppression was not the elimination of the practices but their adaptation. Hoodoo, Candomblé, Obeah, Santería, Vodou—these traditions did not survive centuries of violent suppression by being ineffective. They survived because communities under extraordinary duress found them indispensable. They were protection, healing, justice, and dignity operating in a domain the oppressor could not fully colonize.

You can chain a body. You cannot as easily chain a practice that requires no institutional infrastructure, no ordained practitioner, no visible ceremony.

The European Witch Trials: Power, Not Piety

The European witch trial period, roughly 1450–1750, produced somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 executions, with women representing approximately 75–80 percent of those killed. The standard historical framing presents this as a period of mass religious hysteria. The more accurate framing is that it was a period of deliberate social control targeting specific populations who represented threats to consolidating power structures.

The women most frequently targeted were older, widowed, economically independent, or in possession of community knowledge—healing knowledge, herbal knowledge, midwifery knowledge—that existed outside church or guild control. They were often the community’s recourse for situations where official channels failed or were inaccessible. They had standing in their communities that did not derive from male authority or institutional sanction.

The Malleus Maleficarum (1486), the primary inquisitorial manual, is explicit in its misogyny. Women are presented as inherently more susceptible to demonic influence due to their inferior reason and excessive carnality. This is not theology. It is a political document justifying the targeting of a population that represented autonomous power.

The simultaneous suppression of midwifery, herbal healing traditions, and community-based care in favor of male-dominated medical guilds is not coincidental. The witch trials were, among other things, a hostile takeover of community knowledge systems. The women burned were frequently the competition.

The Architecture of Suppression

Centralization as the Through Line

Whether we are examining the Deuteronomistic reforms of the seventh century BCE, the consolidation of early Christian ecclesiastical authority, or the colonial suppression of indigenous spiritual practices, a single structural logic repeats: practices that allow individuals or communities direct access to spiritual power outside institutional mediation are a threat to institutional authority.

The Deuteronomistic reform under King Josiah centralized all legitimate worship in Jerusalem, eliminating the high places where local and community-based religious practice had occurred. This was presented as theological purification. It was simultaneously an economic and political consolidation. When legitimate spiritual access is routed through a single institution, that institution controls access, and therefore controls the population.

The early church replicated this logic as it accumulated institutional power. By the third and fourth centuries CE, the categories of acceptable and unacceptable spiritual practice were being defined in ways that conveniently mapped onto church authority. Practices that required no priest, no sacrament, no ecclesiastical mediation were increasingly coded as demonic. This is not coincidence. It is architecture.

The colonial encounter extended this architecture globally. Every indigenous spiritual system that provided communities with healing, protection, and access to something larger than themselves was targeted for elimination—because every such system was a parallel structure, an alternative source of power and coherence that did not require the colonial apparatus.

The Mockery and the Fear

There is a striking pattern across the history of this suppression: the same institutions that publicly mock these practices as primitive, superstitious, or ineffective dedicate enormous resources to eradicating them. Inquisitions, colonial legal codes, witch trial manuals—these are not the infrastructure you build around things you genuinely believe to be powerless.

The mockery serves a function. It discourages practitioners by framing their practice as beneath serious consideration. It discourages bystanders from investigating. It creates social shame that functions as a deterrent independent of legal enforcement. But the fear underneath the mockery is legible precisely because of the scale of the suppression.

You do not spend centuries burning people, writing detailed manuals about how to identify and prosecute them, passing laws across multiple continents specifically targeting their practices, and simultaneously believe those practices accomplish nothing. The violence is the tell.

The same institutions that publicly mock these practices as primitive dedicate enormous resources to eradicating them. The violence is the tell.

The Ethical Architecture Within the Tradition

Proportionality and Restraint as Indigenous Wisdom

It is worth noting that many of the traditions most heavily suppressed contain within themselves sophisticated ethical frameworks governing the use of these practices. This complicates the narrative that these were simply unleashed destructive forces requiring external regulation.

Ifa tradition, for example, contains extensive ethical teaching about the use of àse (spiritual power) and the consequences of its misuse. The practitioner’s integrity, the proportionality of the response to the situation, the alignment of the working with divine will rather than purely personal agenda—these are not modern additions. They are indigenous to the tradition.

Mirror and return work—one of the most ancient forms of protective practice—is ethically distinct from originating harm. The practitioner who returns what is sent is functioning as a reflective surface, not an aggressor. The practitioner who generates harm beyond what was received has moved into a different moral category. This distinction is preserved in traditions across cultures, often with significant teaching around where that line falls and what it costs a practitioner to cross it.

The persistence of these internal ethical frameworks across centuries of suppression—when practitioners would have had every incentive to abandon restraint given the violence directed at them—is itself evidence of the seriousness with which these traditions took the question of right use.

The Surrender Principle

Across many of these traditions, there is a teaching about the limits of the practitioner’s role. The practitioner does not determine outcomes. The practitioner aligns, releases, or returns—and what follows is understood to be in the hands of something larger: divine will, natural law, karma, the ancestors. This is not passivity. It is a deliberate ethical constraint on the practitioner’s ego.

This principle—the surrender of outcome specification to a higher adjudicating intelligence—maps directly onto the most sophisticated theological frameworks across traditions. It is functionally identical to the Ignatian concept of indifference, the Buddhist concept of non-attachment to outcome, and what the Hebrew prophets understood as the difference between acting from alignment with divine will versus acting from personal grievance.

The practitioner who specifies outcomes takes on authorship of those outcomes. The practitioner who surrenders to higher judgment distributes that weight differently. Both traditions and common ethical sense recognize this as a meaningful moral distinction.

Why This Matters Now

The Continuity of the Pattern

The mechanisms that suppressed these practices historically are not primarily historical. The populations most associated with these practices still face disproportionate dismissal, exclusion from institutional power, and retaliation when they attempt to access formal systems of justice or recognition.

The person whose ideas are dismissed until repeated by someone with institutional credibility. The person who requires social cover to be served in basic commercial contexts. The person whose expertise goes unrecognized while peers with a fraction of their competence are protected and promoted. These are not separate phenomena from the history described in this article. They are the same structure operating in contemporary form.

And the response—finding recourse in domains that cannot be easily colonized or criminalized—follows the same logic. When formal systems are structurally inaccessible or actively hostile, people develop parallel systems. This is not irrationality. It is adaptation. It is, in many ways, the most rational response available.

Reclaiming the Epistemology

The practices discussed in this article have survived not because the populations practicing them were unable to evaluate their efficacy, but because they consistently demonstrated efficacy across generations and under conditions specifically designed to suppress them. The empirical case for their persistence is strong, even by the standards of any other knowledge tradition evaluated on the basis of observed outcomes over time.

Reclaiming these practices requires reclaiming the epistemology that evaluates them honestly: observation, pattern recognition, outcome tracking, adjustment of methodology, and the building of confidence through accumulated evidence. This is not a different cognitive process from any other form of reliable knowledge generation. It is the same process, applied to a data set that institutional knowledge systems have chosen not to take seriously—for reasons that are, as this article has argued, political rather than epistemic.

These practices have survived not because the populations practicing them were unable to evaluate their efficacy, but because they consistently demonstrated efficacy across generations.

The Theological Rehabilitation

For practitioners who locate these practices within a monotheistic or henotheistic framework—who understand their work as operating within a divine council structure, surrendered to the Father’s judgment, routed through legitimate spiritual intermediaries—the biblical case for that framework is substantially stronger than the institutional condemnation suggests.

The figures celebrated throughout the Hebrew Bible who operated with capacities identical to what later gets called witchcraft were not anomalies. They were functioning members of a world in which the divine council was real, spiritual infrastructure was accessible, and competence in navigating that infrastructure was recognized as a legitimate gift. The later condemnations were not revealing a truth that had always been there. They were imposing a new political order onto a more complex original picture.

Understanding this does not require abandoning theological seriousness. It requires applying it honestly.

What the Suppression Tells Us

The history of witchcraft persecution is, at its core, a history of power attempting to eliminate parallel power. The practices targeted were not primarily dangerous to the people practicing them, or to the communities they served. They were dangerous to institutions that depended on monopolizing access—to healing, to justice, to spiritual recourse, to protection.

The populations most heavily targeted—women, enslaved persons, indigenous communities, racial minorities, economic outsiders—were targeted precisely because these practices represented, for them, the one domain where the hierarchy had limited reach. They could be excluded from courts, from markets, from churches, from formal power of every kind. They could not be as easily excluded from something that required no institutional sanction, no building, no credential, no permission.

That is what the suppression was about. And understanding that changes how we read both the history and the present.

The practices persisted. The suppression failed. And the people who maintained these traditions under conditions of extraordinary violence did so not out of stubbornness or superstition, but because the practices worked, the need was real, and no other recourse was available.

.

References & Further Reading

Biblical & Ancient Near Eastern Sources

Heiser, Michael S. The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible. Lexham Press, 2015. [Primary framework for divine council theology, the ben elohim, and the cosmological structure underlying Hebrew prohibitions on foreign spiritual practice.]

Heiser, Michael S. Demons: What the Bible Really Says About the Powers of Darkness. Lexham Press, 2020. [Contextualizes Hebrew and Greek terms for spiritual intermediaries and their relationship to sanctioned vs. unsanctioned practice.]

Smith, Mark S. The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel’s Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts. Oxford University Press, 2001. [Essential for understanding the pre-exilic religious landscape and the plurality of divine beings acknowledged in early Israelite religion.]

Smith, Mark S. The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel. 2nd ed. Eerdmans, 2002. [Documents the convergence process by which other deities’ attributes were absorbed into YHWH, illuminating the political rather than purely theological nature of later monotheistic enforcement.]

Walton, John H. Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament. Baker Academic, 2006. [Situates Hebrew practices within the broader ancient Near Eastern context, demonstrating that what was later condemned was contextually normative.]

Cryer, Frederick H. Divination in Ancient Israel and Its Near Eastern Environment. Sheffield Academic Press, 1994. [Comprehensive analysis of divinatory and related practices in ancient Israel, their social functions, and the gradual narrowing of what was considered acceptable.]

Nissinen, Martti, ed. Prophecy in Its Ancient Near Eastern Context. Society of Biblical Literature, 2000. [Demonstrates the continuity between Israelite prophetic practice and broader regional traditions, undermining the sharp categorical distinction later imposed.]

Greco-Roman World & Curse Tablets

Gager, John G. Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World. Oxford University Press, 1992. [Primary collection and analysis of defixiones from across the Mediterranean; documents demographics of practitioners, motivations, and the social function of binding spells for those without legal recourse.]

Faraone, Christopher A. and Dirk Obbink, eds. Magika Hiera: Ancient Greek Magic and Religion. Oxford University Press, 1991. [Scholarly essays examining magical practices in the Greek world and their relationship to official religion, demonstrating the continuum rather than sharp divide between sanctioned and unsanctioned practice.]

Graf, Fritz. Magic in the Ancient World. Trans. Franklin Philip. Harvard University Press, 1997. [Analyzes the social construction of “magic” as a category and how its definition was consistently used to marginalize practitioners operating outside elite institutional contexts.]

Ogden, Daniel. Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A Sourcebook. 2nd ed. Oxford University Press, 2009. [Comprehensive sourcebook of primary texts; tracks how the same practitioners were described differently depending on their social position and the political context of the describing author.]

European Witch Trials

Ehrenreich, Barbara and Deirdre English. Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers. 2nd ed. Feminist Press, 2010. [Classic analysis of the witch trials as systematic suppression of women’s independent healing knowledge; essential for the argument about hostile takeover of community knowledge systems.]

Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia, 2004. [Situates the witch trials within early capitalism and primitive accumulation; argues that persecution of women healers was integral to the enclosure of the commons and disciplining of labor.]

Levack, Brian P. The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe. 4th ed. Routledge, 2016. [Standard academic reference on the European witch trials; provides demographic data, regional variation, and prosecution pattern analysis.]

Krämer, Heinrich (Institoris) and Jakob Sprenger. Malleus Maleficarum (1486). Trans. Christopher S. Mackay. Cambridge University Press, 2009. [Primary inquisitorial source; the explicit misogyny framed as theological necessity is directly legible in the text itself.]

Barstow, Anne Llewellyn. Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts. Pandora/HarperCollins, 1994. [Foregrounds the gendered dimensions of the witch trials and argues for understanding them as a form of mass violence against women with lasting cultural consequences.]

Frankfurter, David. Evil Incarnate: Rumors of Demonic Conspiracy and Satanic Abuse in History. Princeton University Press, 2006. [Traces how demonization rhetoric functions as a tool of social control against marginalized groups across different historical periods.]

African & Diasporic Traditions

Chireau, Yvonne P. Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition. University of California Press, 2003. [Traces conjure, Hoodoo, and related traditions from Africa through the American slavery experience; documents how these practices functioned as survival infrastructure and resistance tools.]

Fett, Sharla M. Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations. University of North Carolina Press, 2002. [Documents enslaved healers and their practices, and how healing knowledge constituted a form of power that slaveholders systematically attempted to suppress.]

Matory, J. Lorand. Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé. Princeton University Press, 2005. [Examines how Afro-Brazilian traditions maintained African spiritual infrastructure through centuries of colonial suppression.]

Murphy, Joseph M. Working the Spirit: Ceremonies of the African Diaspora. Beacon Press, 1994. [Comparative study of Vodou, Candomblé, Obeah, Santería, and American conjure; situates all within shared African spiritual traditions surviving under conditions of enslavement and colonial suppression.]

Brown, Karen McCarthy. Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. University of California Press, 1991. [Landmark ethnographic account of Haitian Vodou practice in the contemporary diaspora; documents the ethical frameworks governing practice and the social functions of protective work.]

Colonial Suppression & Epistemic Justice

Federici, Silvia. Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women. PM Press, 2018. [Updates the argument of Caliban and the Witch for the contemporary moment, drawing direct lines between historical persecution and present-day violence against women and marginalized communities globally.]

Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford University Press, 2007. [Provides the theoretical framework for testimonial and hermeneutical injustice; applicable to understanding why practitioners’ accounts of their own traditions have been systematically discredited.]

de Sousa Santos, Boaventura. Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. Paradigm Publishers, 2014. [Theorizes the destruction of non-Western knowledge systems as “epistemicide” and argues for recognition of suppressed traditions on their own epistemic terms.]

Rives, James B. “Magic in Roman Law: The Reconstruction of a Crime.” Classical Antiquity 22.2 (2003): 313–339. [Documents how Roman legal categories around “magic” were constructed and deployed against specific populations, with the definition expanding as political targets changed.]

Primary Scriptural References

Key passages: Exodus 22:18; Deuteronomy 18:9–14; 1 Samuel 28:3–25; Genesis 44:5–15; Exodus 15:20; Judges 4–5; Daniel 1–2; Numbers 27:1–11. Hebrew text via Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft). Pre-standardization variant readings via Abegg, Flint, and Ulrich’s The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible (HarperOne, 1999).

Liddell, Henry George, Robert Scott, and Henry Stuart Jones. A Greek-English Lexicon. 9th ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940. [Standard reference for Koine Greek semantic ranges, including φαρμακεία (pharmakeia) and related terms across the New Testament.]

Brown, Francis, S.R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs. A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (BDB). Hendrickson, 1996. [Standard Hebrew lexicon; essential for tracking the semantic range of kashaph, ‘ob, yidde‘oni, and related terms beyond their English translations.]

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ashley Sophia is a model, actress, entrepreneur, and engineer. She applies systems thinking from her engineering background to understanding human behavior and building community pathways to independence — translating analytical expertise into accessible resources for the public.