The Witch You Were Warned About
7 Misconceptions About Witches & the Inner Wisdom We Were Taught to Fear
She was the woman who knew.
She knew which herbs healed and which ones harmed. She knew how to read the sky, listen to her body, hold space for grief, and speak truth even when the room went cold.
She was the midwife, the herbalist, the elder, the dreamer.
She was the widow who owned land and refused to be moved. The healer whose garden was a pharmacy and whose hands were a sanctuary. The woman who sat at the center of her community’s knowing and was trusted more than any priest.
And for hundreds of years, she was hunted.
The witch trials were not just a historical atrocity. They were a systematic erasure of women’s wisdom, sovereignty, and power. The stories told about witches were designed to make power look like danger, and knowing look like deviance. To make the woman who trusted herself look like a threat to God himself.
What’s remarkable is how many of those stories still live inside us—not as history, but as shame. As playing small. As the voice that says who do you think you are?
Before we look at the seven misconceptions, let’s start at the root.
what “witch” actually means.
Language is never neutral. The words we use to name things carry centuries of meaning and intention. So it matters, deeply, to understand what the word witch originally meant before it was weaponized.
The English word witch comes from the Old English wicce (feminine) and wicca (masculine)—both pronounced with a hard ‘tch’ sound, closer to ‘witch-eh’ and ‘witch-ah.’
In Anglo-Saxon England, these terms described a specific kind of person… a soothsayer, a diviner, a worker of magic.
In early Old English glossaries, wicca was used to translate the Latin word augur—meaning one who interprets signs and omens—and wicce was used for pythonissa, meaning a prophetess or seer.
The root verb was wiccian: to practice witchcraft, to divine, to know.
And witchcraft itself, was a compound of wicce and cræft, meaning skill or power. Craft. As in, a practiced, honed, embodied skill.
When we do our hot girl math and put it all together, witch once meant “one who practices the craft of knowing.”
None of the original etymological roots carry the meaning of evil. The evil was added later—carefully and deliberately as a political and ecclesiastical project.
By the 15th century, the publication of the Malleus Maleficarum (1487) had officially fused “witch” with Satan, heresy, and female corruption. In two centuries, a word that had meant knowing became a word that meant damned.
That transformation is important, because words are spells, and intention is everything.
they demonized sovereign women.
Here is what the history books rarely lead with…
The majority of women executed during the witch trials were not accused because they were practicing witchcraft. They were accused because they were sovereign. Because they took up space that powerful men wanted.
Roughly 80% of those convicted across Europe were women, and the largest demographic was women over the age of 40—widows, elder women, women who had outlived husbands and no longer had a male guardian to protect them or speak for them.
These were women who had accumulated knowledge, relationships, and sometimes property. Their very autonomy made them vulnerable.
The social profile of the accused was remarkably consistent across centuries and continents: older women, widows, immigrants, those without male protectors, those with unusual knowledge or unusual independence.
Midwives and herbalists were more vulnerable than most—not because they were more likely to be witches, but because their intimate knowledge of the body, of birth and death and plant medicine, fell outside the jurisdiction of the church and the emerging male-dominated medical establishment.
As an immigrant woman tip-toeing to 40, who’s never been married, has no children, and is known to have unusual knowledge… this hits home.
These were women who knew things. Who did things with their lives that was beyond the conventional expectation. Who held power over life’s most sacred initiations— birth, illness, death, grief—without the church’s blessing or a husband’s permission.
They didn’t burn witches. They burned women.
And perhaps they didn’t anticipate that we’d be back to do it all again.
Understanding this changes everything about how we hold the word, and how we hold ourselves when it comes to our innate wisdom. The witch was not a fantasy or a fairy tale. She was a real woman. She was sovereign. And her sovereignty was the thing that sentenced her.
So let’s look at seven of the most persistent misconceptions about witches, and ask ourselves, where have I been taught to disown my own magick?
