IT’S that time of year when children dress up as ghouls or witches and go door-to-door innocently collecting sweets. But the history of witchcraft is rather more complex.

Early witchcraft was a rudimentary and localised religion, bound up in fertility and survival – the two over-riding concerns for our species, then as now.

But, by degrees, the world progressed. The concept of society developed; so too the idea of established religion.

However, in the early years of Christian imperialism, the church much preferred to assimilate

by stealth.

For example, until 834,

All Hallows was on May 13 – it was moved to November 1 by Pope Gregory to overlay an older pagan festival. So, too, Christmas, to overlay the pagan winter solstice (also known as Yule, hence our Yule log).

Witchcraft’s journey to demonic intolerance took several centuries. In eighth-century Saxony, the death penalty existed for anyone killing

a witch.

In 11th-century Hungary, Charlemagne decreed that there was no legal remedy against witches “since they do not exist”.

Bit by bit, the church was flexing its muscles, however, and tolerance was chipped away.

By the 15th century in Hungary, the memory of Charlemagne now dimmed, a first offender found guilty of witchcraft was made to stand in the town square wearing a Jew’s cap, a symmetrical punishment alongside Europe’s other principal scapegoat.

Indeed, in many parts of Europe, the social exclusion of witches was only matched by the social exclusion of Jewish people.

It was merely a matter for individual societies to pick

the scapegoat which best

suited their particular circumstances.

In the Alps and Pyrenees they burned witches, in Spain they burned Jews – for the simple crime of being either a witch

or a Jew.

In 14th and 15th century Germany, it was the Jews who suffered; by the 16th century it was the witches. In the 20th century, it was the turn of the Jew again, the cycle of persecution turning full circle in the ovens of Auschwitz.

The last person in the UK

to be prosecuted for witchcraft was Scottish housewife Helen Duncan, jailed for nine months in 1944 because,as a spiritualist, she seemed to know too much about the war effort.

Charlie Laidlaw is a marketing consultant and novelist and lives

in East Lothian