From the article
Another explanation for the Pendle witch trials may lie in forgotten folk practices that often go unmentioned in official historical documents. Seventeenth-century Britons were mostly illiterate, lived by the rhythm of the agricultural calendar, and fought illness without the assistance of modern medicine. For decades, many historians subscribed to the notion that as Christianity replaced indigenous pagan religious systems in the British Isles from the late Roman period onward, magical superstition died out. Archaeologists, however, do find objects, markings, inscriptions, and other evidence of rituals and practices that should, they say, be considered magical. “When people start talking about magical invocations, they rarely try to define magic,” says archaeologist Christopher Fennell of the University of Illinois. “One definition of magic is that it is any kind of personal supplication from a once-dominant religious system which got pushed off center stage by a new system.” Christianity, Fennell says, by way of example, marginalized paganism in England, but individual rituals surviving from those belief systems continued to be carried on in private spaces.
