Witchcraft occupies a charged and multivalent position across the depth-psychology corpus. It appears neither as mere superstition nor as simple folk-magical practice, but rather as a symbolic complex pointing toward the autonomous, often destructive operations of unconscious psychic forces. Victor Turner’s ethnographic work among the Ndembu situates witchcraft within a semiotic system of color, heat, and blood: witchcraft is ‘heat,’ the necrophagous consuming of communal life-force, set in polar opposition to the cooling, healing capacities of legitimate ritual. Turner’s installation-rite homilies explicitly demand that chiefs renounce witchcraft as the paradigmatic vice of self-aggrandizement against communal obligation. In the fairy-tale analyses of Marie-Louise von Franz, the figure of the witch embodies the chthonic underworld powers—dark feminine forces that have been insufficiently integrated into consciousness and therefore seek violent reconnection with the human world. Clarissa Pinkola Estés revalues this archetype through the lens of Baba Yaga, treating the witch not as purely destructive but as initiatory Wild Woman, a necessary and sovereign power of the psyche. Jung’s engagement with the term is characteristically oblique: witchcraft surfaces in alchemical and mythological contexts as the shadow-face of magical wisdom, its persecution symptomatic of collective psychological repression. Across these positions a central tension persists: is witchcraft a projection of unconscious destructive energies onto an outer figure, or is it an indigenous symbol for the genuinely dangerous autonomy of chthonic psychic powers?
to “heat,” which is a euphemism for witchcraft and for grudges that “ burn”; the red cock, whose color stands for “ the blood of witchcraft” (mashi awuloji) in Isoma (Ndembu witchcraft is necrophagous
Turner establishes that among the Ndembu, witchcraft is a structurally coded symbol of lethal social heat, blood-consumption, and the inversion of communal fertility—its opposite being the ‘coolness’ of health and ritual purity.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966thesis
Do not prepare witchcraft medicines that you may devour your fellows in their huts-that is forbidden! We have desired you and you only for our chief… you must abstain from witchcraft, if perchance you have been given it already!
In the Ndembu installation rite, witchcraft is named as the supreme political vice—the selfish devouring of communal goods—and its renunciation is the cardinal requirement of legitimate chieftainship.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966thesis
he chided the chief-elect for his selfishness, meanness, theft, anger, witchcraft, and greed. All these vices represent the desire to possess for oneself what ought to be shared for the common good.
Turner reads the ritual condemnation of witchcraft as part of a moral-structural argument: witchcraft belongs to the cluster of anti-communal vices that liminality demands be symbolically annihilated before a new social order can begin.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966thesis
The proposal of marriage by a witch is very unusual… the dark underworld powers, the chthonic powers, were not sufficiently integrated. They were expelled and left out, and the people had lost sight of them. Therefore there is a dynamism in those dark powers toward consciousness.
Von Franz interprets the fairy-tale witch as a symbol of repressed chthonic energies seeking re-integration with consciousness, whose destructive behavior is proportional to the degree of collective psychic dissociation.
, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, 1997thesis
in the sense of witchcraft and ghosts. Proper to Hecate is the dog, the animal howling in the moonlight, which, for the Greeks, symbolized the last word in obscenity. One could define the world of Hecate as the lunar aspect of the Demeter world.
Jung and Kerényi locate witchcraft within the lunar-chthonic sphere of Hecate—the shadow side of maternal fertility—connecting it to death, ghosts, and the dark underworld dimension of the Great Goddess.
, Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, 1949thesis
The Latin translation “serpent” for “witch” is connected with the widespread primitive idea that the spirits of the dead are snakes… In the Arabic text the “witches” refer to the female demons of the desert, the jinn.
Jung traces the alchemical figure of the witch to archaic chthonic demonology—serpent spirits of the dead and desert jinn—establishing its deep structural roots in the collective unconscious.
, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy, 1955supporting
Evans-Pritchard tells us that among the Azande “belief in death from natural causes and belief in death from witchcraft are not mutually exclusive”
Dodds, citing Evans-Pritchard, demonstrates that witchcraft belief operates as a complementary causal explanation within indigenous epistemology rather than as a simple denial of natural causation.
, The Greeks and the Irrational, 1951supporting
he saw a little house—and in it was a witch… “I know the stag well.” Then a little dog which came out of the house with her barked at the golden child furiously… she changed him into a stone
Von Franz presents the archetypal fairy-tale witch as guardian of the numinous stag—an anima-related figure whose punitive petrification of the hero dramatizes the lethal power of the unintegrated chthonic feminine.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974supporting
On the various magical ideologies and techniques, cf., among others, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande; H. Baumann, “Likundu, die Sektion der Zauberkraft”; C. M. N. White, “Witchcraft, Divination and Magic among the Balovale Tribes.”
Eliade situates witchcraft within comparative shamanic scholarship as a distinct but cognate phenomenon to ecstatic technique, directing the reader toward foundational ethnographic accounts of magical belief systems.
, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951supporting
Witch, 70, 73, 75-76, 145-146, 196, 274, 277
Signell’s index records the witch as a significant and recurring dream symbol in women’s analytic psychology, appearing alongside the Wise Old Woman and figures of intuition and transformation.
, Wisdom of the Heart: Working with Womens Dreams, 1991aside