Why did people in the 1500-1700 believe in witches?

Answer 1

People were scared of withces--and some still are--becasue they feared their powers. they seemed to have malevolent spells ready at their fingertips to use, and were terrified that they would harm them or their family or property. Many withces are good htough there are 'evil' ones who use bad, dangeorus and harmful magic for their own gain or glory, and people were mortified of the havoc they could wreak.

Answer 2

because strange changes were happening and people started to notice them more and more only subtle changes but they all noticed and so they blamed it on something they called it black magic and they began to believe that people (women) were causing this black magic who ever they suspected were killed.

Answer 3

There are numerous reasons that older people, particularly older women, were (and sometimes continue to be) thought to be witches, and all of the reasons are ugly.

Economics play a large role in all forms of bigotry. Older people, and especially older women, are often regarded as useless and bothersome. In some cultures, women were / are only valued for producing children and as sexual objects for men. When women were past childbearing age, they were not considered worth the food needed to sustain them, so accusations of witchcraft were used to justify doing away with them.

Older persons might own or control money or estates. Sometimes younger members of a family become impatient for their inheritance and find excuses to do away with their elders. In earlier centuries, the Roman Catholic Church enforced laws that granted the wealth and estates of condemned witches to the Church, so it was very profitable for the Roman Catholic Church to accuse and condemn wealthy widows and other elderly people who had no powerful family to protect them.

Reasons other than economics include jealousy, fear, superstition and simple irritation with crotchety old people. When any illness or epidemic strikes a community, especially in the age before modern science understood the causes of contagious diseases, people needed to find a reason for the illness. A old, quarrelsome or merely unpopular woman was an easy scapegoat.

Accusations of witchcraft continue in many areas of the world today, particularly in Africa and regions of illiteracy and scientific ignorance. Tendencies toward fundamentalism and anti-science within modern religions also increase the likelihood of witch hunts and bigotry toward the elderly and women.

Answer 4

They don't. Today, it is simply a kind of mythology that people use for entertainment.