The History of Witchcraft, From the Witch of Endor to WitchTok

Near the end of 1 Samuel, the king of Israel is about to fight the Philistines, and he’s afraid. Samuel the prophet is dead. Saul asks the Lord for an answer and none comes, in a dream or through a prophet. So he asks his servants to find a woman who can consult a spirit. That’s a dangerous request, because Saul himself has driven the mediums and spirit workers out of the land.

They find a woman at Endor. Saul disguises himself, goes at night and tells her: “Bring me up Samuel.” Samuel doesn’t give him a way to win the battle. He tells Saul the kingdom has been taken from him, and then this:

“Tomorrow shalt thou and thy sons be with me.”

— 2:09

Saul’s story isn’t the beginning of witchcraft. It’s one account of a person turning to the forbidden when the permitted means have stopped answering. This film, an overview ledger of witchcraft, asks a bigger question: how did witchcraft go from an accusation that could destroy a life to an identity people choose for themselves?

Before the witch had a name: what the oldest records actually say

Before writing, the ground gets uncertain. Prehistoric images have been read as evidence of shamans, but you can’t point to a horned figure on a cave wall and announce you’ve found the first witch. We can start where people left words describing what they feared.

One provision in the law of Hammurabi starts with a man who has accused another of sorcery without proving it. The accused goes to the river ordeal. If the river overcomes him, the accuser takes his estate. If he survives and is declared innocent, the accuser is put to death, and the accused takes the accuser’s estate. Watch at 3:25.

“The accusation does not put only one life at risk.”

— 3:57

So near the beginning of the written record, witchcraft already has two histories. One is what people do to reach hidden power. The other is what people do to one another because they believe that power has been used. Mesopotamia had a night-long ritual in which an exorcist works for someone who believes he’s been bewitched by an enemy he may not be able to name. Egypt placed heka, usually translated as magic, inside the work of gods, priests, physicians and kings. The line wasn’t drawn around ritual itself. It was partly about who had the right to act.

Who is allowed to answer? The line Saul crossed

The Hebrew prohibition puts consulting the dead beside divination and sorcery, and it sets all of them beside the promise of a prophet raised up by God. That’s the boundary Saul crosses on purpose. When he explains himself to Samuel, he says God has departed from him and no longer answers.

“The sacred original is prophecy, a word received from God. The counterfeit offers access on demand.”

— 6:30

If the answer won’t come through the appointed door, find another door. In the Odyssey, Odysseus meets his dead mother among the shades, and three times he reaches for her and three times she slips from his arms like a dream. That’s a poem, not a séance, but hearing the dead and getting the person back were already two different things.

The early Christian accounts move the danger again: using the right name without the authority to use it. In Acts, at Ephesus, men try an exorcism in the name of Jesus whom Paul preaches. The spirit doesn’t dispute the name. It disputes them: “Jesus I know, and Paul I know, but who are ye?” The possessed man overpowers them, and the account ends with practitioners burning their books.

The Roman world also left the instructions. In Roman Egypt, the Greek magical papyri include a love-binding rite that reduces the desired person to a bound figure. What the practitioner calls love can be a request that another person lose the freedom to refuse.

“The figure is small. The claim made over the human being is not.”

— 8:56

The night ride that never left the bed

Around the year 906, a church text now known as the Canon Episcopi describes women who believe they travel at night with Diana. It isn’t their confession. It’s an instruction to the clergy, and it tells priests to teach that these journeys don’t happen in the body. The women have mistaken dreams for travel. The canon doesn’t say the devil is imaginary or that sorcery is harmless. It says the night ride is a deception working through dreams.

That becomes a problem for later writers. If an older church text calls the night journey a delusion, on what ground can anyone insist a witch really went? Meanwhile, the Sworn Book of Honorius wrapped operations aimed at spirits in Christian prayers. The sacred words stay recognizable. What changes is their use.

Email list

Like this? Get the The Dispatch.

One email when a new episode drops: the video, the documents behind it, and what didn't make the cut. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.

Email address Join the Dispatch

You'll get a confirmation email first. Unsubscribe in one click.

The witch trials: when one accusation became a company

By the later Middle Ages, harmful sorcery was being joined to a bigger accusation: a pact with the devil, apostasy and membership in a hidden company. An isolated act could now be evidence of an organization.

“If one person belongs to it, the next question is who else was there?”

— 12:17

Heinrich Kramer gave that world its notorious printed form, the Malleus Maleficarum, the Hammer of Witches (I have a copy right behind me in the video), and it had to answer the older rule about night flight. It wasn’t one moment when a continent changed its mind. It was a struggle over which accounts to believe, what the devil can actually do and what the law can punish.

Learned men were trying to talk to the unseen too. In Kraków in 1584, John Dee recorded Edward Kelly’s sessions with a being presented as their instructor, including the instruction that the calls “are to be uttered of me backward and of you in practice forward.” The diary shows what was recorded, not who was speaking. In 1628, Johannes Junius wrote secretly to his daughter from prison, describing torture and explaining that he confessed to escape it. The official record gives a confession. The letter gives her another account of how that confession came to be. Salem left a record of accusation, examination and execution, and of countermagic performed beforehand at the direction of a member of the minister’s own congregation.

Then the law changed the crime. Britain’s Witchcraft Act of 1735 stopped treating witchcraft itself as the offense and punished people who pretended to have such powers.

Spirit raps and Margaret Fox’s confession

In 1848 the Fox family of Hydesville, New York, reported sounds that seemed to answer the children, and it became a founding story of modern spiritualism. According to the accounts, three committees in Rochester in 1849 couldn’t establish how the sounds were made. In October 1888, by the contemporary account Reuben Briggs Davenport published, Margaret Fox stood up at the Academy of Music in New York, said the phenomenon was fraudulent and produced the raps with her foot. In 1889 she took the confession back. Her recantation doesn’t erase the mechanism she demonstrated, and a failed search was never proof of a spirit.

Did the witches keep a secret, older religion?

WitchTok and the questions that never change

Now the boundary is access. Research on WitchTok describes people sharing spells, showing altars and presenting religious identities in short videos, right next to products and personal brands. A viewer can see a ritual explained and ask questions without first being committed to a coven. That’s a long way from Endor, but the requests are recognizable.

“Tell me what is hidden. Protect me from what I cannot see. Make someone answer. Let death not be the end of that conversation.”

— 23:59

I do wonder, though. The chapter doesn’t end when Samuel stops speaking. The woman of Endor feeds the broken king, and he leaves that night. The later account records the deaths of Saul and three of his sons. His visit to Endor didn’t change the ending. So was Samuel’s message the final judgment on Saul, or was going to the dead the final step in losing God’s favor? When someone consults the dead, the answer is very rarely anything good. I wonder whether seeking out that forbidden knowledge is what actually seals your fate, or whether it was sealed before.

Watch the full episode

The film puts the records on screen: the stele and tablets, Dee’s diary in his own hand, Junius’s letter, the photographs, and the Endor account read straight from Scripture. Subscribe on YouTube for the cases behind the history.