Witchcraft and magic are topics of enduring interest for many reasons. Chief among these is their extraordinary interdisciplinarity: anthropologists, folklorists, historians, and more have contributed to build a body of work of extreme variety and consistence.
Of course, this also means that the subjects themselves are not easy to assess. In a very general way, we can define witchcraft as a supernatural means to cause harm, death, or misfortune, while magic also belongs to the field of the supernatural, or at least esoteric knowledge, but can be used to less dangerous e
ffects: such as for divination and astrology. In Western civilization, however, the witch hunt of Late Medieval–Early Modern times has set a very peculiar perspective in which diabolical witchcraft, the invention of the Sabbat and the persecution of many thousands of (mostly) female and (sometimes) male presumed witches, gave way to a phenomenon that is fundamentally different from traditional witchcraft, even if many case studies conducted in South America or Africa present similarities, especially in contemporary times (see Wachtel 1992; Geschiere 1997).
Another peculiarity of magic and witchcraft in Western civilization is given by the number of writings that detailed their nature, techniques, and effects: these include technical treatises about how to perform magic, such as in the case of necromancy (see Kieckhefer 1998; Gal et al. 2017), or the many writings explaining the powers of witches from the point of view of judges and inquisitors.
