Monster Mash (6)

Witches occupy an interestingly ambiguous role in the Halloween pantheon.  They aren't monsters -- witches are at least ostensibly human. And increasingly over the past couple of centuries, witches have moved out of the realm of horror entirely. 

To ancient cultures, witches were real and scary. I expect they were real, too. David Brin has pointed out that magic doesn't do much that's useful in daily life -- but magic is extremely useful for making people fear and respect a "magician" and give him food or money. Witches knew stuff -- both the words "Witch" and "Wizard" ultimately derive from terms meaning "wise or knowledgeable." Witches probably combined some genuine knowledge of folk medicine with a generous dollop of fortune-telling and con artistry.

The Halloween picture of the witch -- old woman, pointy hat, uncomfortable shoes -- seems to date from the 17th century, or from 19th century depictions of the 17th century. The Reformation era was the golden age of witch-hunts, as the breakdown of the unified Church left everyone convinced that the Devil was abroad in the world. Despite the rather overheated claims of neo-pagans, there wasn't any large-scale organized persecution of witches by Christian churches. Instead, there seem to have been plenty of local, small-scale, hysteria-fueled witchcraft panics. The most famous, of course, was in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692, which is why witches look like old women from Salem circa 1700.

Beginning in the 19th century, witches began to get rehabilitated. The first stage, of course, was simply contempt for the ignorant Puritans and/or Catholics who did the actual witch-hunting. Then Margaret Murray and Sir James Frazer postulated that witchcraft was a survival of pre-Christian pagan religion. (It isn't.) The stage was set for witches to make the transition from scary senders of curses and disease to misunderstood feminist alternative-medicine practitioners.

In the modern era, the mantle of witchcraft has fallen to two groups, which overlap in places. The first group are the Wiccans and related "neo-pagan" religions. I'm not going to debate the truth of someone's spiritual beliefs, but I will point out that Gerald Gardner made the whole thing up in the 1950s and nobody has been able to find evidence of an older tradition.

The second group may or may not believe in "witchcraft" as a spiritual system, but they do continue the ancient role of witches -- using magic to make people give them money. They range from storefront "psychic advisors" on the wrong side of the railroad tracks all the way to television psychics like John Edward, who talks to dead people whose relatives have paid him handsomely. These modern witches are truly evil, as they prey on ignorance, worry, and grief. For them, I recommend the advice of the Bible, Exodus 22:18 -- "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."