Welcome to Jenny's Place
"I hope you will enjoy finding out more about witchcraft and pagan beliefs. As so many seem to have some pretty wild preconceived ideas about witches, witchcraft and magik, I hope I'll not only dissuade you we are prone to launching ourselves on brooms from the roof tops, biting the heads off chickens or even burning Christians at the stake!" - Jenny

What is a Witch? I'm afraid nowhere near as exciting as the popularized impressions about us that are still being shed by religions made nervous by the instability of their very foundations.

There are perhaps three aspects to a witch. A witch would be the local wise woman She was the one everyone would go to when they had a problem, whether it was relationships, business dealings or any other problem in their everyday lives.

Next, she would be the village healer and midwife. With her knowledge of herbs she was sure to have a cure for your headaches, your warts and maybe even a hangover!

Lastly, the witch was the spiritual centre for the village, someone who would help everyone to understand their chosen deities and even represent them to their deity when need be, just like a vicar does for you in your local church.

Why did Witches become so feared? Sadly, when one religion start to think that it is more important than another it loses focus. It starts to judge all others, becomes insecure, and then seeks to undermine beliefs in the opposition. So, for example, our pagan god was turned into an evil being capable of all sorts of nasty deeds.

After being polytheistic (believing in many goddesses and/or gods) for thousands upon thousands of years we were confronted by a religion with only one god and worse still claimed omnipotence and that all others were wrong, or was that just the interpretation of man to suit his own purposes?

And as these new fangled religions became ever more insecure they began to fear anyone capable of thinking for themselves. Their own rituals were no longer carried out in a language that all could understand, and people were discouraged from even learning to read the texts. Undermining all this was a religion 30,000 or more years old that encouraged free thinking, self determination and independence from religious authority.

So witches became a useful target, the scape goat for any problem they couldn't fix, to focus the populous into whipped up hatred and the imagination of the new religion to cast accusations on the old knew no bounds.

Witches underwent a persecution that lasted several hundred years, perhaps ending in any major form with the repeal of the Witch Act in the early 1950's.

However, the unsubstantiated fears of the new religions still abound and you will still hear them rant on about what a wicked bunch we are! (Compared to the antics of some clerics in recent history, now languishing behind bars, I don't think we do so badly!)