Elizabethan Superstitions: Witchcraft, Astrology, And Alchemy

Elizabethan Superstitions: Witchcraft, Astrology, and Alchemy The people in the Elizabethan times had many different beliefs, including the supernatural. They believed the stars and planets could tell the future and determine your luck. The average Elizabethan person also had beliefs in other supernatural things like witches or alchemy. In addition, it is said that magic was used everyday and played a normal part of Elizabethan culture. Wise people were given potions, remedies, and charms, which were thought to ward off evil spirits, heal livestock, and even get you love (Grimbly). They also believed that witches existed and made deals with the devil and caused droughts that killed farmers' crops. Another one of their interesting

It may sound superstitious; however, “To the Elizabethan mind it was unreasonable to suppose there was no planetary or celestial influences upon men, since so much of the vegetable growth on the Earth visibly depended on the sun, while the moon’s influence was no less visible in the tides” (Rowse 260). Everyone believed in some sort of thing that seems superstitious to us now, but to them it was science. Actually back then many physicians were astrologers and used the positions of the planets to know the healing abilities of medicines (Grimbly). Even the royalty back then hired astrologers for advice on when to attack or even on what to wear to a special occasion. Surprisingly Queen Elizabeth 1 even had her own court astrologer named John Dee (Grimbly). However it was not just royalty using astrologers for advice, it was practically everyone that used astrologers to tell them their futures or personalities based on their birth month to know their fortune or their future with another person(Grimbly). That is how popular astrology was back then to just the normal pedestrians, because they wanted to know their destinies. Astrology was a very popular belief back then, not just to the rich and powerful, but to the normal people of the times as well, which is why it was such a popular

Witches were around eighty percent women that were elderly or deformed in some way. In Europe witches were said to fly through the air on broomsticks with other witches, but in England they were mainly accused of killing neighbors livestock, deforming childrens toes, or even making trees fall on barns (Stewart). It seem weird that so many people believed in witchcraft, but the theory of witchcraft was built up by knowledgeable people, usually theologians or clerics(Rowse). One of the crazy things about witchcraft is that “There were people who actually believed that there were no witches, but this was disproved by the confessions of the witches themselves. These were infallible arguments; the witch-hunters held these trump-cards so long as people believed the nonsense of the literal interpretation of the scripture, and had not the sense to see through the confessions” (Rowse). This explains why so many people thought that witches were real because they would confess to being one. After the last explanation it may seem like infallible proof, but the hard truth is that the authorities would torture the alleged witches to get the confessions, and sometimes they would go to far and wipe out entire communities. An example of this happening is a witch hunt that happened in Germany that left two villages with only two people between both of them (Grimbly). This means that people were on edge about the witches and would hunt them