Wicca
Witchcraft

Identification as a witch can provide a link to those persecuted and executed in the Great Witch Hunt, which can then be remembered as a holocaust against women, a repackaging of history that implies conscious victimization and the appropriation of 'holocaust' as a badge of honour — 'gendercide rather than genocide'. An elective identification with the image of the witch during the time of the persecutions is commonly regarded as part of the reclamation of female power, a myth that is used by modern feminist witches as an aid in their struggle for freedom from patriarchal oppression.

— Religious studies scholar Joanne Pearson

Historian Wouter Hanegraaff noted that the Wiccan view of witchcraft was "an outgrowth of Romantic (semi)scholarship", especially the 'witch cult' theory. It proposed that historical alleged witches were actually followers of a surviving pagan religion, and that accusations of infanticide, cannibalism, Satanism, etc., were either made up by the Inquisition or were misunderstandings of pagan rites. This theory that accused witches were actually pagans has now been disproven using archive records of witch trials. Nevertheless, Gardner and other founders of Wicca believed the theory was true, and saw the witch as a " positive antitype which derives much of its symbolic force from its implicit criticism of dominant Judaeo-Christian and Enlightenment values".

Pearson suggested that Wiccans "identify with the witch because she is imagined as powerful - she can make people sleep for one hundred years, she can see the future, she can curse and kill as well as heal... and of course, she can turn people into frogs!" Pearson says that Wicca "provides a framework in which the image of oneself as a witch can be explored and brought into a modern context". Identifying as a witch also enables Wiccans to link themselves with those persecuted in the witch trials of the Early Modern period, often referred to by Wiccans as "the Burning Times". Various practitioners have claimed that as many as nine million people were executed as witches in the Early Modern period, thus drawing comparisons with the killing of six million Jews in the Holocaust and presenting themselves, as modern witches, as "persecuted minorities".
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