Witchcraft and Witchhunt
Witchcraft, in various historical, anthropological, religious and mythological contexts, is the use of certain kinds of supernatural or magical powers. Witchcraft can refer to the use of such powers in order to inflict harm or damage upon members of a community or their property. Other uses of the term distinguish between bad witchcraft and good witchcraft, the latter involving the use of these powers to heal someone from bad witchcraft. The concept of witchcraft is normally treated as a cultural ideology, a means of explaining human misfortune by blaming it either on a supernatural entity or a known person in the community. A witch is a practitioner of witchcraft.
Belief in witchcraft, and by consequence witch-hunts, are found in many cultures worldwide, today mostly in Sub Saharan Africa (e.g. in the witch smellers inBantu culture), and historically notably in early modern Europe, where witchcraft came to be seen as a vast diabolical conspiracy against Christianity, and accusations of witchcraft led to large-scale-witch-hunts, especially in Germanic Europe.
The “witch cult hypothesis”, a controversial theory that European Witchcraft was a suppressed pagan religion, was popularised in the 19th and early 20th centuries. From the mid 20th century on Witchcraft has become the self-designation of a branch of neopaganism, especially in the Wicca tradition following Gerald Gardner, who claimed a religious tradition of Witchcraft with pre-Christian roots
A witch hunt is a hysterical search for witches or evidence of witchcraft, often involving moral panic, mass hysteria and mob lynching, but in historical instances also legally sanctioned and involving official witchcraft trials.
The classical period of witchhunts in Europe falls into the Early Modern Period or about 1480 to 1700, spanning the upheavals of the Reformation and the Thirty Years War, resulting in hundreds of thousands of executions.
Many cultures throughout the world, both ancient and modern, have reacted to allegations of witchcraft with either superstitious fear and awe, and killed any alleged practitioners of witchcraft outright; or, shunned it as quackery, extortion or fraud. Witch-hunts still occur in the modern era in many communities where religious values condemn the practice of witchcraft and the occult.
The term “witch-hunt” is often used to refer to similarly panic-induced searches for perceived wrong-doers other than witches. The best known example is probably the McCarthyst search for communists during the Cold War, which was discredited partly through being compared to the Salem witch trials. Quotation: Wikipedia 
