Witch Appreciation Thread

One is a supreme entity with a sweet hat and the other is a shitty off-brand Wizardess because Mearls hates the Sorcerer class.

>Female
>Spellcaster
My characters are neither of those things and so feel no jealousy. But witches are P-cool, I like the ones who do their best to make everyone happy the most.

...

Oh, and Bow > Pointy Hat.
Prove me wrong, you can't.

>Arch wizard
Megumeme isn't a witch.
THIS is a witch.

That is a part of it.

Do big hats mean a witch is more fertile?

>pic
BEGONE DEMON

...

...

...

This is now a wizard thread

I love witches so much! Pointy hats and brooms!

Got any actual witches? Black goat sabbath witches, not sluts in big hats

sjw leave

"Hey, at least we didn't have to lose our virginities to demons."

Going to a witches sabbath, fucking a demon, weird ass material components and hedge magic.

>sjw
>black sabbath witches that perform skyclad rituals and symbolically marry and fuck a demon

Nah, you're just a pussy with a hat fetish

I thought I told the sjw to leave
Remember, trump won

So something I've always been curious. Magic users have always had some kind of religious bent to them in mythology but how did the arcane "I'm enlightned and empowered by my own intelligence" wizards come into being?

...

Too many young sluts in this thread. Not enough old sluts!

I belive medieval alchemists and scientists (healers and astrologists) were the first " wizards" that used intelligence and enlightment instead of religion.
either that or literary figures such as Merlin gave the ispiration for wizards imho

I LOVE THEM

I don't have enough magic wielders in my fantasy folder.

Nanny Ogg and Greebo?

So I just wrote a shitty essay about early modern European witches, and I still have a bunch of the texts I used laying around.
So ask me anything you've wanted to know about witches and maybe I can look it up for you.

Always beware old person in the line of work where people die young.

post the essay

did they shove brooms coated with hallucinogens in their cunts?

give essay

I'm not actually familiar with this witch story. Where did you hear about it?

I did say it was shitty.

Post it now.

...

youtube.com/watch?v=yia8H_V9aPY

>fateshit

Ah. Well witches flying is something that can be traced back to Greek and Roman times. The inclusion of the broom came about in the early modern era, but wasn't uniformly distributed (it took a long time to catch on in the Netherlands for example).
It's not actually clear how the broom came to be included, but the idea of witches flying became much more widespread in early modern europe in part because people needed a way to explain how suspected witches were able to travel vast distances to participate in the Sabbath.
This was a problem for early modern thinkers because flight wasn't supposed to be possible (and at points in time believing in it was thought to be heretical).
So you have this argument going on in the early modern era about whether witches could literally fly, or whether the devil was causing them to move across space without flying, or whether the whole thing was a vision conjured up by the devil.
In the mid-16th century a new theory was suggested. It went that witches flying was actually a hallucination produced by using ointments made from plants like belladonna or aconite.
As far as I know this is the earliest time this theory existed, and by this point the idea of witches flying with brooms was already well established in some places. Because of that I'm going to say that he has it backwards. It was probably the case that hallucinogenic ointment isn't why people started to believe witches used brooms to fly, instead it's how people who didn't believe witches could fly rationalized other peoples belief that they did.
Having said that I'm sure some people gave it a try. Not many though. I imagine a broom stick makes a very uncomfortable dildo.

Can you tell how exactly did belief in witchcraft disappear? When did most people start questioning it and by what time the majority of people stopped believing in it?

I suppose I meant more in the trope we typically see in games but I suppose that works as well

So that question is actually very difficult to answer. We don't really know why people stopped believing in witches because we don't really know why they started believing in them in the first place. There are a lots of different theories, of varying plausibility.
We're on much more solid ground when discussing when it occurred, since that leaves much more material evidence.
Widespread belief in witches (on a scale large enough to lead to witch panics, folk magic/religion is a different matter) has emerged intermittently in lots of different places. There were points in Roman and Greek society where it was significant, and there are parts of Africa today where the belief is endemic.
In Europe belief in witchcraft appears to be extremely sparse and largely ignored by the powerful for more or less all of the medieval era.
Belief in witches in a form we would recognize only really begins to emerge and spread by 1450ish and is declining considerably by the early 18th century.
It's difficult to tell exactly how this played out because one of the prime historical records of peoples belief in witchcraft comes from witchcraft trials.
So when we see a decline in trials it could reflect a general decline in peoples belief in witches, or it could reflect changing legal procedures or shifting elite attitudes towards witchcraft.
In general though I would say that by the mid 18th century in Western Europe belief in witches was well and truly in retreat.
If it really interest you then the Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America has a really detailed breakdown of what we know about witchcraft prosecutions in different regions.

...

Not a demon, a witch

>Witches are good
I wonder who could be behind this post

this still weirds me out to this day.

>How do other female spellcasters deal with their crippling inferiority to the witch Master Race?
The hat really is the only thing that sets witches apart from other female spellcasters with any reliability, since the other defining characteristics of female spellcasters vary wildly from setting to setting.

But it's such a baller hat.

You can have both, you know

>tfw titty witches aren't real
>no witch fuckbuddy who uses lewd magic
>demon girls aren't real
>dragon girls aren't real
>monster girls aren't real

they cant

>>monster girls aren't real

>tfw no titty witch gf

...

>Will never have a titty witch monster gf
>Instead I get to open the news and watch tragedy after tragedy day after day

This is the worst reality of them all.

...

Until prove otherwise, this is what Disciple of the Witch - Five looks like.

Is this a song parody? I'm having trouble placing it if so.

It's Cake
youtu.be/u7aDstrDMf0

More hats.

...

...

The hat is the greatest indicator of magical power. I hope your setting gets this right.

Hats or mana tanks?

Historically? They’re self-taught in hedge magic. Hermetic magic is for inducted mages.

>mana tanks?

Oh so THAT'S where they store all their extra mana. No wonder.

Ars Magica manages to do the difference between hedge magic and hermetic magic fairly well (though the latter isn't really based on real-world mysticism at all)

...

in my setting, they really don't.

Witches and druids kept magical traditions alive (or at least written down, recorded, and studied to ensure accuracy of these recordings) during a 1200 year period without magic when it was considered dangerous and prone to attracting some god-eating monster's minions.

meanwhile, other titles for casters generally are linked to 'the civilized world' and mass production magic schools that tend to try to streamline and miss the point of magic and even restrict the gifted who don't always wield magic the same way from one to another. (Sometimes a fireball spell is an explosion that manifests at a certain point, sometimes it's a ball of fire that rockets towards opponents, sometimes the flames are red, sometimes they're green, and sometimes it's not actually a ball and might be able to fill out tax forms for you)

...

I honestly suspect Merlin wizard to be retroactively affected by later wizard tropes in his decision and his original form to be a wild fey man.

He was. Original he was a mad bard living in the woods

...

...

...