Essay:Witch
Controversy rages over whether witches existed as conceptualised in contemporary western culture.
On the one hand, there is the "traditional" view of witchcraft as a survival of neolithic paganism which opposed or at least deviated from Christianity. This is the view founded on the ideas of 19th century writers such as Michelet and Leland whose scholarship is, to put it mildly, the subject of dispute: Michelet did no original research and was writing an anti-clerical polemic for money; Leland collected real folklore but put a very significant spin upon, as well as at least partially concocting, his material. It is these writers who were much of the inspiration for wicca and modern paganism, such as Margaret Murray and Gerald Gardner, in defining an image of witches as continuing an unbroken pagan practice and of being the victims of the Inquisition in the "Burning Times", which is where the link from the Western Mystery tradition in this wiki comes from.
On the other, there is the researh-based view of witchcraft which looks new but isn't really. It was obvious to researchers familiar with the actual source documents of the Witch Trials and the Inquisition that not only were the victims clearly not witches, they were not even predominantly male. There is very little if any hard (or for that matter soft) evidence for the survival of a self-defined, explicitly pagan witch cult or sub-culture. What there is, far more interestingly, is a vast inheritance from pagan antiquity which has been filtered through (and occasionally innovated within) the historical hegemony of Christianity, contained within folklore, customs, esoteric and ceremonial tradiitions, and the landscape itself. The modern sythesis -- or, loess charitably, invention -- of Wicca, and its parallel and related cousins paganism and druidry is but the latest flowering of this phenomenon. Another, even greater fruition was the Hermetic explosion of the Renaissance; but it is only with Wicca that witches per se can fairly be said to have come into public existence, and enjoyed public acceptance.