practitioners of magic, men and women who sought to manipulate supernatural powers, abounded. Rich and poor alike consulted cunning folk to recover lost property, to discover a cure for illness, for help in finding missing family members or livestock, for advice in making personal and business decisions, or to identify witches.
New Englanders were engaged in fortunetelling; carefully read almanacs for astronomical data essential to the practice of astrology; read about and pursued the mysteries of alchemy; and a few boasted about their knowledge of the occult (Levack, 1987, p. 65).
1.2. Condemnation of witchcraft by Church
Religious and secular authorities in Catholic and Protestant regions grew concerned about an organized cult of witches. In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII issued a bull condemning witchcraft as heresy, the exercise of supernatural powers obtained through a demonic pact. Two years later, with papal approval, Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, Dominican inquisitors, published the Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), the first major treatise on witchcraft beliefs (Levack, 1987, p. 11). By the early seventeenth century, works on witchcraft beliefs collectively offered a picture of a secret society of Devil-worshiping witches. Despite the efforts of writers like Margaret Murray, Montague Summers, and Jeffrey B. Russell to prove the existence of such cults, recent scholarship has demonstrated that no organized society of witches ever developed (Levack, 1987, p.12).
2. Profile of the Individuals Accused in Witchcraft
2.1 Gender
Women comprised almost eighty percent of those accused, making gender the most significant characteristic (Karlsen, 1987, p. 41). Moreover,