The Many Faces of the Witch: Healer, Outcast, and Icon

Updated 21 September 2026 · 11 min read

The witch is the most misremembered figure in folklore, and the misremembering is recent.

Almost everything a modern English-speaking reader believes about her arrived in the last two hundred years. The idea that witches were persecuted midwives is from 1973. The idea that they were the last practitioners of a surviving pagan religion is from the 1920s and was demolished by the 1970s. The figure of the green-skinned hag is largely 1939 and MGM. Even the number most often quoted for the death toll of the European trials, nine million, was invented by a German antiquarian in 1791 and repeated for two centuries without anyone checking it. The current scholarly estimate is somewhere between forty and sixty thousand executions across roughly three hundred years.

None of this makes the real story smaller. It makes it stranger. What follows is four witches from four traditions, and what they actually were.

Baba Yaga: The One Who Sets the Test

Baba Yaga lives in a hut that stands on chicken legs and turns to face you. She flies in a mortar, steering with a pestle and sweeping away her track with a broom. Her fence is made of bones, and the skulls on the posts are lit from inside.

She is also, in a great many tales, the reason the hero survives.

This is the thing about Baba Yaga that flattens badly in retelling. She is not simply an ambiguous villain who occasionally helps. She has a function, and the function is structural: she is the threshold. The hero arrives, she demands to know whether they have come of their own will or been sent, she sets impossible tasks, and if they behave correctly, she equips them and lets them go. If they do not, she eats them. Both outcomes are hers to give and neither is a surprise.

Vasilisa the Beautiful is the clearest case. Sent to Baba Yaga for fire by a stepmother hoping she will not return, Vasilisa survives the hut with the help of a doll her dying mother gave her, completes the tasks, and is given a skull full of burning coals to carry home. The fire kills the stepmother. Baba Yaga did not save Vasilisa. She tested her, and then handed over something extremely dangerous with no warning attached.

One correction is worth making, because it appears constantly online. Baba Yaga does not command the elements and does not, in the main body of Russian and Slavic tale-collections, shape-shift. Her powers in the tales are specific and physical: flight, the hut, the servants, an appetite, and knowledge. The generic bundle of weather control and shapeshifting has been imported onto her from a general fantasy idea of what a witch does. She is more interesting without it, because what she actually has is authority, and authority is rarer in folklore than power.

She belongs to a landscape thick with household and forest spirits, the domovoi behind the stove, the rusalka in the water, the leshy in the trees, and Koschei the Deathless as her nearest male counterpart. In that company she is not an anomaly. She is the local specialist.

Medea: The Witch Who Was Not Originally a Witch

Medea is the Colchian sorceress who wins Jason the Golden Fleece and then destroys him. She is also a warning about how quickly a tradition can change its mind.

In the earliest strata she is a granddaughter of Helios and a priestess of Hecate, and her power is drug-craft: pharmaka, herbs and ointments and the knowledge of what they do. She anoints Jason so fire cannot burn him. She puts the serpent to sleep. She restores Jason’s father to youth. The Argonauts would not have got home without her.

The most famous thing about her may not be original to her at all. In Euripides’ Medea of 431 BCE, she kills her own children to punish Jason, and that is the version everyone knows. But there is a rival tradition, reported by later sources, in which the children are killed by the Corinthians and the city subsequently pays cult to them in expiation. Several ancient writers claim Euripides was paid by the Corinthians to shift the blame. That story is itself unverifiable gossip and should not be repeated as fact. What can be said with confidence is that the infanticide is not securely attested before Euripides, and that the single most notorious act in Greek witchcraft may be one dramatist’s invention that stuck.

The broader shape is clear enough. Medea starts as a helper with terrifying skills and ends as the archetype of the foreign woman whose knowledge is a weapon. Circe undergoes something similar on Aeaea: a goddess in Homer, a cautionary tale by the Roman period. In Greek myth the woman who knows things is never simply a neighbour.

Tituba: What the Record Says and What Was Added

Salem is the most written-about witch panic in the English-speaking world and Tituba is its most rewritten figure. Almost every widely repeated detail about her was added after the fact.

Here is what the 1692 documents support. Tituba was an enslaved woman in the household of Reverend Samuel Parris. She was one of the first three people accused, along with Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne. She confessed, after being beaten by Parris on her own later testimony, and her confession, unlike the denials of the other two, gave the court a narrative: a man in black, a book to sign, familiar spirits, other witches not yet named. That confession is widely regarded as the moment the panic acquired a shape it could expand into. She was jailed, never tried, and eventually sold to pay her prison fees. She was not executed.

Now the additions. Court records repeatedly describe her as an Indian woman. The identification of Tituba as African or of African descent is a nineteenth-century development, traceable through Longfellow and a chain of later writers, and it has been so thoroughly absorbed that it now appears in classrooms as fact. The scholarship, principally Elaine Breslaw’s work, argues that she was most likely an Indigenous South American, probably Arawak, taken into slavery and brought to Massachusetts by way of Barbados. The voodoo, the Caribbean spell-craft and the circle of girls being taught magic in the kitchen are all later inventions, chiefly literary, with Arthur Miller’s The Crucible the most influential of them.

This matters more than a footnote, because the popular Tituba does real interpretive damage. If she taught the girls magic, Salem has a cause and the cause is an outsider. If she did not, Salem is what the documents actually show: a community that produced its own catastrophe and then required someone unlike itself to be the origin of it.

The mechanism is not exotic. It is the same mechanism visible in the site’s entries for the witch, the warlock, and the familiar, the small animal or imp spirit of British witch-lore that served and fed on its keeper. The familiar is worth pausing on: it is overwhelmingly an English and Scottish feature, and its near-absence from continental trials is one of the clearest pieces of evidence that “the European witch hunt” was never one thing.

Witchcraft in Africa: Naming Instead of Generalising

Older writing on this subject, including the earlier version of this article, tended to run a continent together into a single paragraph about African witches, and then to claim that European colonists persecuted them. Both halves need fixing.

The generalisation first. There is no African witchcraft, in the singular. There are specific traditions with specific vocabularies, and the differences between them are the whole point.

Among the Azande of central Africa, mangu is a physical substance, an inherited growth in the abdomen, which can act while its possessor is asleep and unaware. E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s 1937 study of it is the founding text of the anthropology of witchcraft, and its central insight is that Zande witchcraft belief is not a failure of reasoning about causes. It answers a different question. The Azande know perfectly well that a granary fell because termites ate the supports. What witchcraft explains is why it fell at the moment those particular people were sitting under it.

Among the Yoruba, aje is a distinct power, associated principally with women and elders, feared and courted at once, and addressed collectively with great care. It is a different concept from mangu and it does not translate cleanly into English “witchcraft” either. Note that the site’s entry at Aje is a different word again, the Yoruba deity of wealth and profit whose shrine stands in Ile-Ife’s oldest marketplace. The tones and the meanings differ. That is a good illustration of why a single English label across a continent destroys information rather than summarising it.

The Yoruba religious world in general is not organised the way the European witch model expects. Orunmila holds the Ifa oracle, Eshu governs the crossroads and carries messages, Oshun and Yemoja rule waters, Shango the storm, Obatala creation. Divination and healing are ordinary institutional practice, not clandestine dissent.

Now the colonial claim, which the earlier version got backwards. European colonial administrations did not generally hunt witches. They passed laws denying that witchcraft existed and criminalising the accusation of it, along with the anti-witchcraft specialists whose job was to detect and neutralise it. The Cape Colony’s Witchcraft Suppression Act of 1895 is the model, and its descendants remain on statute books across southern Africa today. The effect was not to protect anyone. It removed the recognised, regulated channel through which a community handled a witchcraft accusation, and left the accusation itself intact with nowhere to go. Peter Geschiere’s work traces the consequence: witchcraft discourse did not fade under colonial rule and does not fade under modernity. It attaches itself to new inequalities, to sudden wealth, to politics and to migration, and it is thoroughly contemporary.

The honest version is harder than the one it replaces, and it is the version the evidence supports.

The Modern Witch, and Where She Came From

The witch as a figure of reclaimed power is genuinely modern, and knowing its date makes it more interesting rather than less.

Wicca was assembled and publicised by Gerald Gardner from the late 1940s, after the repeal of Britain’s Witchcraft Act in 1951, drawing on ceremonial magic, folklore and Margaret Murray’s thesis that the trials had persecuted a surviving pagan cult. Murray’s thesis is not accepted by historians and has not been for decades. Ronald Hutton’s The Triumph of the Moon is the standard account of how the religion was actually built, and it is notably sympathetic while being clear that the ancient lineage is not there.

Two further popular claims deserve retiring for the same reason:

The persecuted midwife. The claim that the trials targeted women healers and midwives comes chiefly from Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English’s 1973 pamphlet Witches, Midwives, and Nurses. It has been examined against trial records and does not hold. Midwives more often appear as witnesses and accusers than as the accused. David Harley’s 1990 article “Historians as Demonologists” is the demolition.
Nine million dead. Traceable to Gottfried Christian Voigt in 1791, who extrapolated wildly from a small local sample. Modern estimates based on actual trial records give roughly forty to sixty thousand executions, about three-quarters of them women, concentrated heavily in the German-speaking lands and thinly spread elsewhere. England executed relatively few and burned almost none, hanging being the English penalty.

What survives all this correction is a real and sizeable historical fact. Tens of thousands of mostly poor, mostly older, mostly female people were killed by courts across three centuries, and the reasons were social rather than supernatural: they were quarrelsome, they were dependent, they had asked for help and been refused, they were the neighbour you already resented when the cow died.

And the older figure survives too, in the traditions that never went through the trials at all. Lilith as the night demon and rebellious first wife. The Cailleach as the divine hag of Scotland and Ireland who shapes mountains and rules winter. Blodeuwedd, made out of flowers by Welsh magicians and turned into an owl for disobedience. The banshee, who does not curse anybody and only announces.

The through line is not evil and it is not empowerment. It is that these figures are all outside the household and necessary to it. That is the position the word “witch” has occupied in nearly every language that has one, and it is why the figure will not go away.

Explore More on Gods and Monsters

Slavic and Russian: Baba Yaga · Vasilisa the Beautiful · Koschei · Domovoi · Rusalka · Leshy · Kikimora · Slavic Mythology · Russian Mythology

Greek sorceresses: Medea · Circe · Aeaea · Hecate · Golden Fleece · Argonauts · Greek Mythology

The witch in British and European lore: Witch · Warlock · Familiar · Cailleach · Blodeuwedd · Banshee · Lilith · English Mythology · Scottish Mythology

West African religion and power: Orunmila · Eshu · Oshun · Yemoja · Shango · Obatala · Aje · Yoruba Mythology · African Mythology