ROM the beginning of christianity priests and church leaders were obsessed with eradicating everything they called ‘occult’ and especially witchcraft. The zealous woman-hating obsessed Heinrich Kramer or his ‘holy name’ Henricus Institorius produced his Maleus Malificarum of ‘hammer of the witches’ which portrayed women as evil, especially those women who practiced natural healing, functioned as midwives or any woman with knowledge who would not conform to church doctrine. The Dark Ages were the time of the evil reign of the church, who killed anyone who would not convert to christianity.
About 60,000 women were accused, tortured and burned at the stake from the 1300th to 18th century. They wanted to clear the world of witchcraft. But the majority of the victims of the reign of blood by the church were christian women. The real witches remained in the shadows, in secrecy and we, the witches, survived the horrors. So who was evil?
tymologically speaking the word Witch means: someone who has knowledge, from the Germanic/Anglo-Saxon ‘Wit’, what ‘question, quest or a thing (ding) that needs to be answered’ means. Also the Germanic word ‘wet’ what ‘law’ of ‘outcome of a (legal) matter’ means. 
N the 1950’s Gerald Gardner introduced Wicca to the world as a new revival of Witchcraft. In 1950 the Witchcraft Act of 1735 1) was abolished, and Gardner thought the time was right to proclaim Witchcraft still existed and proclaimed to be a witch. By then Wicca became a new religion , with many modern branches.
Morghain’s Traditional Witchcraft 