![]() ![]() Obviously if there was another form of witchcraft prominently practiced in these hills and prairies, the practitioners weren’t going to come forward and set the record straight. There were no hedge witches, white witches, hearth witches – none of the modern terms adopted practitioners of Wicca and modern witchcraft. That’s what people believed, and that’s what people feared. She used these powers to do harm to others. By the time settlers start moving into Illinois from the east, a witch was a person, usually a woman, who sold her soul to the devil, in exchange for supernatural powers. For one important reason that’s easy to forget.īecause there are no such things as witches.Īt least not as they were commonly defined at the time. Pointing out the obvious about Southern Illinois witchesĬan we speak frankly here? Aside from some early cases around Cahokia involving Caribbean slaves practicing Voodoo or Hoodoo, there is no history of witches in southern Illinois to speak of till the late twentieth century. The Examination of a Witch by Thompkins H. Over a hundred years later, when settlers were coming in from the west, they brought that same fear with them. The fear that drove the people of the area to not just accept, but call for it was so volatile that actual witches weren’t needed to provoke it. ![]() In Salem, Massachusetts in 1692, 20 people were executed for witchcraft, and none of them witches. And so the legends of the past become more believed than they did at the time. Those articles are available online now, and seeing the respectable masthead, people read them as reliable. Newspaper editors of the time were notorious for taking local legends and giving them an air of legitimacy. Most of the early stories of witches comes from folklore, and later on, newspapers. And so the witch became an urban legend, like Black Annie, a noted southern Illinois witch that also managed to haunt countless towns and cities in north America and Britain. The higher the level of education, the less people feared witches, even if they still believed in them to an extent. These things put your life and your family’s life in jeopardy. That’s something to fear.īy the end of the nineteenth century people were moving to towns and cities, and the education system was getting better. And also it’s worth keeping in mind, witches were a rural phenomenon for the most part, living on the outskirts of the village or town.Ī witch could ruin your crops, raid your garden, steal your milk, make your gun unusable. Two centuries on and we still fall for witches.įrom a historic point of view, where the folklore of witchcraft differs from the modern interpretation is in a simple quality, often forgotten now. I could embarrass a lot of people who were convinced that film was real. And rather than telling it with a twinkle in the eye, those people tell it as fact, which eventually makes its way into folklore.Ī modern day example of this is The Blair Witch Project. ![]() It’s inevitable that some, or even most of the people might believe the tale. Many of the tales of witchcraft you find in local history books, are often the same tales told around the fire. That doesn’t mean that everyone believed in witches. That had less to do with the number of practicing witches, than it did with people’s fears, and belief in them. There was a time when it was believed that witchcraft was rampant in certain parts of Southern Illinois. They were usually women who has signed the Devil’s book in exchange for secret knowledge, power and pleasure. Witches were commonly defined in Southern Illinois in the same way that they were described in Salem. But a 19th century witch was believed to cause harm. Harm no one is the current mantra in witchcraft, and you’re threatened with a cosmic penalty for disobeying the law. Sure, a mother would tell her daughter her secrets, and those passed down are usually for healing. There was no codified system of beliefs passed down. The beliefs about witchcraft echoed those from the settlers homelands.Ī 19th century witch bore almost no resemblance to modern witches. Southern Illinois witches of the settler period were still old world witches. Who defined a witch here, as in most places, was those who feared them. A mistake, but because the witches were lost in the world of folklore. ![]() Where I made my mistake was trying to focus on the witches. I first approached researching Southern Illinois witches the way I would any subject … by getting to know the people. The Magic Circle by John William Waterhouse. For the French in particular, who first populated the Mississippi River banks, along with their slaves, this meant potions and poisons. The belief in witchcraft in Southern Illinois meant belief in old world witches. ![]()
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