In European folklore the word witch covered very different people: the village healer, the neighbour blamed for a sick cow, the forest hag of fairy tales and the scholar who read the stars. Many of them would have been offended to be called a witch at all. Here are the main types, from the helpful to the feared.
Cunning folk and herbwives
Most villages had someone who knew herbs and charms. In Britain they were called cunning folk, and they worked from the Middle Ages into the early 20th century. They healed people and livestock, found lost or stolen goods, told fortunes, made love charms and, above all, protected their clients against witchcraft. The historian Owen Davies estimates that there were as many as several thousand of them in England at any one time before the mid-1800s. Ordinary people saw them as the opposite of witches. As Davies puts it, witches were evil but cunning folk were useful. The modern term hedge witch looks back to this tradition of practical, homely magic, which lives on in The Hedge Witch.
The village witch: bosorka and striga
In Slovakia the feared witch was the bosorka. She was blamed for stealing milk from other people's cows, spoiling crops and causing illness, and on certain nights of the year people protected their homes, stables and cattle against her. Her darker cousin, the striga, was a night witch whose name goes back to the Latin strix, the screech owl that the Romans believed drank the blood of infants. In some stories she drifts close to the vampire, and Romanian folklore went further, with the strigoi.
Ježibaba, the witch of the forest
Russian and Ukrainian tales tell of Baba Yaga in her hut on chicken legs. In Slovak and Czech fairy tales she is Ježibaba, the old woman of the forest who may help the hero or try to cook him. Many of these tales were collected in the 19th century by folklorists such as Pavol Dobšinský in Slovakia. More creatures from the same tales are in Creatures of Slavic Folklore.
Night battles: the benandanti and the táltos
Some magic-workers claimed to fight witches, not to be them. In Friuli, in north-eastern Italy, the benandanti of the 16th and 17th centuries, the good walkers, said they had been born with a caul and that on certain nights their spirits left their bodies to battle witches. They fought with stalks of fennel, the witches with stalks of sorghum, and if the benandanti won, the harvest would be good. The Inquisition put several of them on trial between 1575 and 1675, and the historian Carlo Ginzburg made them famous in his book The Night Battles (1966). Hungary had the táltos, a healer and seer believed to battle for good weather. Their closest cousin is Thiess, the good werewolf of Livonia.
Learned magicians
At the other end of society stood the learned magicians, scholars who mixed astronomy, mathematics and magic. The most famous is John Dee, adviser to Queen Elizabeth I, who studied the stars and tried to speak with angels through a scrying stone. His heirs are the almanac makers and star readers behind The Star Witch and the mirror gazers of The Mirror Witch.
Familiars
English witch trials of the 16th and 17th centuries often accused witches of keeping a familiar, a spirit in animal form such as a cat, a toad, a dog or a black bird, which did their bidding. Folklore also believed that a wound to such an animal would appear on the witch herself. The keeper of familiars in the Mortvane coven is The Raven Witch.
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