Why, back in Elizabethan times, were people afraid of witches and witchcraft?
You’ll find actors up to the present day won’t say the name of the play, either. In their case, it’s because someone in a production did have a bad accident. So the name is “cursed”. Back in Elizabethan times, the Church had a big problem. Several groups were continuing to revere feminine divinity. If people believed that God was both male and female, the Church (obviously a boys-only club) would lose control of the people and all the people’s money. So they stirred up the “witch” thing to get rid of those who threatened their livelihood. Also, conveniently, they were able to kill off older widows and those with mental illnesses or other problems – the “undesirables” of the time. And if some of them happened to have anything of value the Church could claim, all the better. And don’t even get me started on the Spanish Inquisition. If you’d like to learn more, look up Gnostics, the Marians (a goddess group of the time), and the Templars. Yes, oddly enough, there is evidence that the Temp
It remains so today, actors do not mention Wm. Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” by name and still refer to it as “The Scottish Play”. It really has little to do with witchcraft. It just so happens that in it’s early days, during the lifetime of Wm.S. a lot of bad luck befell actors taking part in the Scottish Play. Fear of witches and witchcraft is widespread, not only back in Wm.S’s time but today also. The Inquisition was still working flat out in Spain until c1800 – torturing witches and heretics. Napoleon Bonepart put and end to it and closed the thing down. He also employed Goya, the great Spanish artist and painter, to make sketches and oil paintings of what he saw of the work of the Inquisition. Men and women were turned mad by the tortures. Witches are on the whole not bad. There are two kinds, the first is the [good fairy] the white witch who helps a girl fall in love with a boy and so forth. Second is [bad fairy] the black witch who casts evil spells on people, usually using something
