Hello my name is ema sarajlic and today i will talk you about witches

So our first question is

Who are the witches

Witches, according to legends, myths and folk beliefs, are women who practice witchcraft to gain
supernatural powers to use for good or evil purposes. We have black and white witches.

Witches were women who were accused for witchcraft. usually they were ugly and scary womens as we
can see on the pictures. these were often widows and their essential symbol was a broom and a black
cat.

witchcraft

Witchcraft can signify magical activity directed against somebody's life, body, and property

there is good and bad witchcraft, and so there is witchcraft aimed at protecting or treating the
consequences of “bad” witchcraft.

burning witches

During the Middle Ages, many Catholic countries in Europe had anti-witchcraft laws, which were one way
of fighting heretics. Women were most often convicted, and the punishment was burning at the stake.
The first great burning of witches took place in 1482 in Seville.

The remains of well-known heretics, sinners and "witches" would often be shredded and scattered in the
landfill after a cremation by court order.

Witch hunt

A witch-hunt, or a witch purge, is a search for people who have been labeled witches or a search for
evidence of witchcraft. The classical period of witch-hunts in Early Modern Europe and Colonial
America took place in the Early Modern period or about 1450 to 1750, spanning the upheavals of
the Reformation and the Thirty Years' War, resulting in an estimated 40,000 to 50,000 executions.[a]
[1] The last executions of people convicted as witches in Europe took place in the 18th century. In other
regions, like Africa and Asia, contemporary witch-hunts have been reported from sub-Saharan
Africa and Papua New Guinea, and official legislation against witchcraft is still found in Saudi
Arabia and Cameroon today.

In current language, "witch-hunt" metaphorically means an investigation that is usually conducted with
much publicity, supposedly to uncover subversive activity, disloyalty, and so on, but with the real
purpose of intimidating political opponents.[2] It can also involve elements of moral panic[3] or mass
hysteria.[4

Hunt in Salem

The most famous witch hunt took place in 1692, when nineteen people were sentenced to death in the
American city of Salem, Massachusetts. Salem thus became a city that was later used in films, theater
plays and literature as inspiration for stories about witches, and today there is also a museum . In 1953,
Arthur Miller wrote the famous play inspired by the witches from Salem.
In Kenya, although various African religions, Islam and Christianity are widespread, the fear of magic that
culminated in May 2008, when in the area of Kissia, is still very pronounced, police arrested 19 people
suspected of burning eleven compatriots accused of witchcraft

ways to identify a witch

10 helpful hints the Malleus Maleficarum offers to identify witches:

1. Is she a woman?

While men have been persecuted for using witchcraft, the majority of those accused of being witches are
women.

Women were believed to be much easier for the devil to tempt.

Midwives were especially thought of as evil and likely witches. According to the book, they murdered
and then consumed babies.

2. Does she look like a witch?

Now, be careful here. The book references witches as looking old, “crone-like,” and hobbled.

The Rev. John Gaule in the 1640s insisted that “every old woman with a wrinkled face, a furr’d brow, a
hairy lip, a gobber tooth, a squint eye, a squeaking voice, or a scolding tongue is not only suspected, but
pronounced for a witch.”

Watch out, grandma.

3. Does a “witch cake” affect her?

This one is a stomach-turner. If you want to know if a person is a witch, you can take the urine of the
victim of a witch’s deeds and mix it with rye meal and ash and make a little cake.

Then, you feed it to a dog, or some small creature believed to be one of the witch’s familiars — a small
animal or imp that is kept by a witch.

If the person is a witch, the animal will fall into a trance and start naming names, and the witch will be
struck with pain as the animal eats the cake and calls her out.

4. How does she stack up against a Bible?

Here is where a good BMI would be helpful. One way used to determine if a person was a witch was to
weigh her against a Bible or, maybe a stack of Bibles.

The theory was that if she weighed less than the stack of Bibles, she was guilty. However, in some places,
you were witch material if you weighed more than the Bibles.

Of course, some were innocent only if the Bibles matched their exact weight.

5. How does she stack up underwater? In the ultimate damned if you do, damned if you don’t scenario,
suspected witches were often tied to “dunking chairs” and lowered into a river to see if they would sink.
Witches, who would not be baptized due to their contract with the devil, would be spat out by the water,
an element used in Christian baptism.

So the theory goes that if a person is dunked in the water and springs out, you’ve got yourself a witch.
On the filp side, if a person is dunked in the water and doesn’t come out, she was not a witch. Most
often what she was was a drowning victim.

The family at least could be comforted by knowing she was not a witch.

6. Does she talk to herself?

Another sign that a person was potentially a witch was if she was caught talking to herself. One of the
women killed during the Salem Witch Trials was Sarah Good, who was sometimes heard talking to
herself when she left a person’s home.

When confronted with the “evidence,” Good said she was reciting psalms from the Bible.

She was hanged and her body was believed to have been burned.

7. Does she have a “mark?”

If a woman had a mole or a birthmark, they could be accused of having a pact with the devil. The mole or
birthmark was believed to be a sign of such a pact.

If you tried to get around the mole test and remove the mole, the scar was considered proof.

8. Does she not bleed?

If a woman had freckles, they would be pricked with a knife blade or a needle. If a woman did not bleed
when pricked, she was a witch.

The catch here was that official “prickers” would often use knives with retractable blades that made it
appear a person was stabbed but no blood or mark would be found.

9. Does she have a broomstick? Does she fly around on it?

This seems obvious, but if your neighbor has been seen flying on a broomstick past the elementary
school looking for children to bake into a pie, you could have a witch on your hands.

10. Can she say the Lord’s Prayer?

It was believed that witches could not say holy words, so they would be asked to recite the Lord’s Prayer,
without mistake, to prove their innocence.

One unfortunate woman misspoke the part of the prayer that says, “lead us not into temptation,”
dropping the “not.”

She was quickly hanged for asking God to lead everyone to be tempted to sin. A man was asked to recite
the prayer and did so perfectly but was still put to death because his recitation was considered a “trick.”