Time to ride on a broomstick! Halloween and witches go together, no doubt about it! Witches ride on broomsticks!
But what is a witch?
The answer from most of you will probably be: “A witch is an ugly someone that is not very nice; but there are also good witches.”
Where does the idea come from?
Witches and witch stories started many, many years ago when people were very superstitious, that means that people a long time ago did not know about scientific facts and thought that if someone did something a bit out of the normal, they were odd, crazy and weird and should not be allowed to live with other normal people.
Unfortunately, even today, in some parts of the world, there are uneducated people who really do think that someone who is a little different is a witch, and that the “witch” should be removed, and so they attempt to do them harm.
But in the educated parts of the world, authors have made stories in books and films about fantasy witches. Harry Potter is one of the most recent books/films all about these fantasy people. Long ago, a popular book/film was The Wizard of Oz.
There are also some people in the educated world who are involved with living a lifestyle called Wicca, where they follow fortune telling and astrology; they do not really get serious about the supernatural fears that earlier cultures and uneducated parts of the world followed.
Not so long ago (in the big scheme of things), there was a man who lived in England. His name was Shakespeare and he wrote many plays, which were acted out in the theatre. One of his plays, called Macbeth, told of witches and these words in his play have become so famous we even say them today:
"Double, double toil and trouble
Fire burn and cauldron bubble"
(A cauldron is an iron pot that is put over an open fire. In those days when Shakespeare wrote his plays, people did not cook with electricity and gas like they do today; the people had to make a fire with wood to be able to cook.
A long time ago, there were some people who were trying to find a way to stop illness. They would boil up all sorts of strange ingredients in the hopes that the resultant brew would be a cure. Sometimes, they would make a brew that actually made people sick, really sick. Of course, the others would think these people were bad and called them witches.
Today, there are big laboratories where scientists make the new medications. By now, they know that many of those plants used by witches a long time ago are poisonous; so they don’t use those plants, nor do they use bat’s blood or snake poison.
During the time when these weird people were making the strange and often bad concoctions, the only broom (they called it a “besom” in those days) was made of sticks bundled and tied together at the end of a thicker, long stick.
The weird people not only used these brooms to clean their houses (as normal people did); they also used these brooms to sweep away negative spaces where they could then sit and make up strange sayings while they boiled up their bats’ blood and frogs’ eyes. This practice is referred to as “Hocus Pocus”.
These weird people, called witches, used to follow the way the sun and moon went around the earth. The sort of religion they followed was called “Paganism”. The weird people were involved in midnight scenes where they would dance around a fire and breathe in smoke and drink strange potions.
They said the potions made them fly. Stories were not written down in those days – all stories were told by word of mouth, so these stories got a bit confusing after a while. Eventually, the storytellers would draw the stories they were telling and even if there is no exact truth to the stories, witches were drawn flying on the broomsticks, just as they are today.
Why are witches associated with Halloween?
Halloween can trace its roots back to the time that people followed the Pagan way. They believed that supernatural forces and spirits would come out during the fall. Eventually, Christians converted the pagans and the two belief systems merged.
The church turned the witches, which ancient people looked to for wisdom and medicine, into devil worshiping hags. For many years, witches were thought to be evil; but eventually, festivals held in the autumn began to include the telling of ghost stories and other creepy traditions that were passed down through the generations and the festival of Halloween began to take root.
Stories of witches today are mostly about good and evil. There are many books that young children love reading, which tell stories about witches doing good instead of being evil.
Here is a list of some favourite witch books:
Zip Zoom on a Broom
Room on the Broom
The Sweetest Witch Around
Ten Flying Brooms
Meg and Mog
Wee Witches Halloween
The Witch Who Was Afraid of Witches
