Le Chat Noir�
The Modern, secular world
During the following centuries cultural, social, economic and technological developments resulted in the modern secular world view in which belief in witchcraft had no place and to which it appeared as incredible nonsense and superstition. While witchcraft today is largely a matter of only academic interest in Europe and America, although reports of witchcraft practices and beliefs in the traditional sense still occur today in Western societies, It is still a vital concern in Africa and among many of the peoples of other underdeveloped areas of the world.
The term Witchcraft is currently applied to two types of phenomena in modern societies, currently to one but erroneously to the other. The authentic use of the term refers to cases in which persons believed to have harmed others by witchcraft are physically attacked or perhaps even lynched. Such cases ussually occur in peasant communities in which old traditions are preserved and in which social mobility is slight, and hence they resemble instances of witchcraft in nonliterate societies. In such communities people are living in close association with kinsmen and neighbours and cannot easily escape from the social networks that hold them; consequently, interpersonal tensions build up until the flash point of an accusation is reached.
The incorrect use of the term refers to persons claiming to be witches who are reported to belong to covens, to assemble on appropriate calendrical occasions for sabbats at which they perform rituals of as long a tradition as the coven leaders claim descent from earlier witches. This kind of "witchcraft" seems highly respectable compared with the activities of the despised and hated mystical miscreants of earlier periods in our own society or of contemporary nonliterate or peasant communities. These (so- called) witches claim to be adherents of an ancient religion, the one to which Cristianity is regarded a a counterreligion, and in this way they seek to secure public recognition of thier eccentric activities by appealing to the cherished modern value of religious toleration.
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� Le Chat Noir / The Black Cat, 2001
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