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Voodoo and Witchcraft are often confused, and both are often incorrectly associated with Satanism, the worship of a malignant deity. Although to the outsider, both religious expressions would seen to give obeisance to a devil, neither Witchcraft nor Voodoo worships the satanic or the demonic.

Witchcraft, the “old religion,” or the “ancient craft of the wise,” is a nature-based religion, which is thought to have had its genesis in the later Paleolithic period, a time when Stone Age humans had to adapt themselves constantly to changes in the weather, climate, and food supply. Wicca, a more contemporary expression of Witchcraft, has evolved into what its followers term “Neo-Paganism.” Voodoo has come to wear many guises, as we shall learn, but its roots are at least 10,000 years old.

Primitive humans were primarily hunters, who needed the meat obtained from their prey, and they needed the animal skins for clothing. When the hunting was bad, their very existence was threatened. Because humans have the gift of reason—and imagination—the more reflective among the early people spent some time wondering why the hunt was successful at times and not at others? Certain members of the group claimed to have visions, and when some of these visions came true, these gifted ones, the shamans, discovered that there was a spirit who decided these things. If certain rules were followed that spirit could be persuaded to allow prey to be slaughtered for subsistence by the human hunters.

Certain members of the group claimed to have visions, and when some of these visions came true, these gifted ones, the shamans, discovered that there was a spirit who decided these things.

The concept of certain spirit beings who assist a magician, a Witch, or a Voodoo sorcerer quite likely hearkens back to the totem animal guides that attended the ancient shamans, for the familiars express themselves most often in animal forms. The black cat, for instance, has become synonymous in popular folklore as the traditional companion of the witch.

The ancient Greeks called upon the predrii, spirit beings who were ever at hand to provide assistance to the physicians or magicians. In Rome, the seers and soothsayers asked their familiars or magistelli to provide supernatural assistance in their performance of magic and predictions.

Experienced practitioners of Witchcraft may have the ability to manifest a spirit ally or assistant and allow it to assume the physical form of a human being so that it may carry out the Witch’s biding, but the supernatural servant is not a person whose will has been taken from him or her. In fact the entity has never been human at all, thus retaining its status as a familiar, rather than a zombie.

In his classic work The Golden Bough, Sir James George Frazer points out two factors influencing the nature of primitive religion: (1) the older concept of a “view of nature as a series of events occurring in an invariable order without the intervention of personal agency;” and (2) the later development that the “world is to a great extent worked by supernatural agents, that is, by personal beings acting on impulses and motives.”

The earliest rites of primitive religion consisted of sympathetic magic, which is based on the belief that something that resembles something else is able to become or attract that which it resembles, or a given cause always produces a certain effect. It was by such a process that Stone Age humans sought to ensure the success of the hunt. In Witchcraft from the Inside, Raymond Buckland writes: “One man would represent the God and supervise the Magick. As a God of Hunting, he was represented as being the animal being hunted. His representative, or priest, would therefore dress in an animal skin and wear a headdress of horns.”

Because of the importance of human and animal fertility, the Horned God was soon joined by a goddess, whose purpose it was to ensure the success of all reproductive activities. She was also the goddess who oversaw the birth of human and animal progeny. At a later date, when primitive religious thought had evolved to the point of belief in some form of continuation after death, the goddess oversaw human and animal death as well.

With the advent of agriculture, the goddess was called upon to extend her powers to ensure fertility of the crops. From this point on, the figure of the goddess began to overshadow that of the Horned God.

The population of medieval Europe descended from the central Asian plateau. Christianity and “civilized” ways were unknown to them and they brought their own gods, customs, and rituals into the land. At the dissolution of the Roman Empire, the civilizing force in Europe was the Roman Catholic church, and even though the ecclesiastical institution made great inroads into the pagan culture, it could not completely abolish the old rituals and nature worship.

Surviving the Roman Empire socially in the Middle Ages was the oppressive feudal system. Proud warriors were reduced to the role of serf farmers. Partially because of the frustrations of the common people, the celebration of nature worship and various adaptations of the ancient mystery religions began to be practiced in secret. It was in their enjoyment of the excitement and vigor of the Old Religion that the peasants could allow themselves the luxury of experiencing pleasure without the interference of Mother Church, which sought to control and repress even human emotions.

Experienced practitioners of Witchcraft may have the ability to manifest a spirit ally or assistant and allow it to assume the physical form of a human being so that it may carry out the Witch’s bidding (art by Ricardo Pustanio).

But it was that same expression of seeing the divine in all of the Creator’s works that brought the wrath of the Church down upon the witches in the terrible form of the Holy Inquisition in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. On occasions when seasonal nature celebrations were witnessed by members of the Christian clergy, the gatherings were condemned as expressions of witchcraft and were named “Black Sabbats,” to distinguish the ceremonies as the complete opposite of the true and Holy Sabbath days. And then, of course, there was the matter of the Horned God, who must certainly be Satan, and the goddess, who was without question, Diana, goddess of the Moon and the hunt.

For the serfs, the observance of nature worship was an expression of their conscious or unconscious yen to throw off the yoke of feudalism. In the Middle Ages, the Christian influence seemed to vanish at night as great groups of people gathered around a statue of the Horned God and began professing their allegiance to the great deities of nature. To staunch Christians, this horned image was an obscene representation of Satan, a black, grotesque figure that was fiendishly lit by the roaring fire in front of it. In the flickering light, the torso of the figure appeared to be human while the head, hands, and feet were shaped like those of a goat and covered with coarse, black hair.