Witches of Anaga

Last updated May 05, 2019

The Witches of Anaga were (according to popular belief) women who were devoted to covens in the mountainous area of Anaga in the northeast of the island of Tenerife (Canary Islands, Spain).

Macizo de Anaga mountain range in the northeastern part of the island of Tenerife in the Canary Islands

Macizo de Anaga is a mountain range in the northeastern part of the island of Tenerife in the Canary Islands. The highest point is 1,024 m. It stretches from the Punta de Anaga in the northeast to Cruz del Carmen in the southwest. Anaga features the mountain peaks of Bichuelo, Anambro, Chinobre, Pico Limante, Cruz de Taborno and Cruz del Carmen. The mountains were formed by a volcanic eruption about 7 to 9 million years ago making it the oldest part of the island. Since 1987 it has been protected as a "natural park", reclassified as "rural park" in 1994. Since 2015 it is also Biosphere Reserve and is the place that has the largest number of endemic species in Europe.

Tenerife is the largest and most populated island of the seven Canary Islands. It is also the most populated island of Spain, with a land area of 2,034.38 square kilometres (785 sq mi) and 904,713 inhabitants, 43 percent of the total population of the Canary Islands. Tenerife is the largest and most populous island of Macaronesia.

The Canary Islands is a Spanish archipelago and the southernmost autonomous community of Spain located in the Atlantic Ocean, 100 kilometres west of Morocco at the closest point. The Canary Islands, which are also known informally as the Canaries, are among the outermost regions (OMR) of the European Union proper. It is also one of the eight regions with special consideration of historical nationality recognized as such by the Spanish Government. The Canary Islands belong to the African Plate like the Spanish cities of Ceuta and Melilla, the two on the African mainland.

These rituals were held in an area in the mountains of Anaga in the dorsal between San Andrés and Taganana.^[1] The area is called "El Bailadero", which refers to the dances performed by witches around a bonfire.^[1] It was believed that after the covens, witches came down to the coast to swim naked. With the passage of time, due to the influence of vampire stories in Eastern Europe, this led to the myth that witches incorporated the aspect of drinking blood, thus making them witch-vampire, typically tales were created that these witches sucked the blood of newborns as they slept in their cribs.^[2]

San Andrés is a village located on the island of Tenerife in the Canary Islands (Spain). It is located on the coast, at the foot of the Anaga mountains, 7 km (4.3 mi) northeast of the capital city Santa Cruz de Tenerife. It is administratively part of the municipality of Santa Cruz de Tenerife. San Andrés is one of the oldest villages of the Canary Islands, and was founded around 1497.

Eastern Europe is the eastern part of the European continent. There is no consensus on the precise area it covers, partly because the term has a wide range of geopolitical, geographical, cultural, and socioeconomic connotations. There are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region". A related United Nations paper adds that "every assessment of spatial identities is essentially a social and cultural construct". One definition describes Eastern Europe as a cultural entity: the region lying in Europe with the main characteristics consisting of Greek, Byzantine, Eastern Orthodox, Russian, and some Ottoman culture influences. Another definition was created during the Cold War and used more or less synonymously with the term Eastern Bloc. A similar definition names the formerly communist European states outside the Soviet Union as Eastern Europe. The majority of historians and social scientists view such definitions as outdated or relegated, but they are still sometimes used for statistical purposes.

Blood is a body fluid in humans and other animals that delivers necessary substances such as nutrients and oxygen to the cells and transports metabolic waste products away from those same cells.

There is also a theory that the origin of this legend, was from pagan rituals associated with rituals that celebrated guanches rain, these rituals were considered as an act of witchcraft by the Catholic Church.

Guanches aboriginal inhabitants of the Canary Islands that are no longer exist as a distinct ethnicity

Guanches were the aboriginal inhabitants of the Canary Islands. In 2017, the first genome-wide data from the Guanches confirmed a North African origin and that they were genetically most similar to modern North African Berber peoples of the nearby North African mainland. It is believed that they migrated to the archipelago around 1000 BCE or perhaps earlier.

Witchcraft or witchery is the practice of magical skills and abilities exercised by solitary practitioners and groups.

The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with approximately 1.3 billion baptised Catholics worldwide as of 2017. As the world's "oldest continuously functioning international institution", it has played a prominent role in the history and development of Western civilisation. The church is headed by the Bishop of Rome, known as the pope. Its central administration, the Holy See, is in the Vatican City, an enclave within the city of Rome in Italy.

Related Research Articles

Dianic Wicca, also known as Dianic Witchcraft, is a neopagan religion of female-centered goddess ritual and tradition. While some adherents identify as Wiccan, it differs from most traditions of Wicca in that only goddesses are honored.

Wicca, also termed Pagan Witchcraft, is a contemporary Pagan new religious movement. It was developed in England during the first half of the 20th century and was introduced to the public in 1954 by Gerald Gardner, a retired British civil servant. Wicca draws upon a diverse set of ancient pagan and 20th-century hermetic motifs for its theological structure and ritual practices.

A coven usually refers to a group or gathering of witches. The word "coven" remained largely unused in English until 1921 when Margaret Murray promoted the idea, that all witches across Europe met in groups of thirteen which they called "covens".

A Book of Shadows is a book containing religious text and instructions for magical rituals found within the Neopagan religion of Wicca, and in many pagan practices. One famous Book of Shadows was created by the pioneering Wiccan Gerald Gardner sometime in the late 1940s or early 1950s, and which he utilised first in his Bricket Wood coven and then in other covens which he founded in following decades. The Book of Shadows is also used by other Wiccan traditions, such as Alexandrianism and Mohsianism, and with the rise of books teaching people how to begin following Wicca in the 1970s onward, the idea of the Book of Shadows was then further propagated amongst solitary practitioners unconnected to earlier traditions.

The Vampire Chronicles is a series of novels by American writer Anne Rice that revolves around the fictional character Lestat de Lioncourt, a French nobleman turned into a vampire in the 18th century.

The vampire lifestyle or vampire subculture is an alternative lifestyle. The vampire subculture has stemmed largely from the goth subculture, but also incorporates some elements of the sadomasochism subculture. The Internet provides a prevalent forum for the subculture along with other media such as glossy magazines devoted to the topic.

<i>Vittorio the Vampire</i> 1999 Book by Anne Rice

Vittorio the Vampire (1999) is the second novel in Anne Rice's New Tales of the Vampires series. It is the only vampire novel by Rice besides Pandora in which the lead character of her series The Vampire Chronicles, Lestat de Lioncourt, does not appear; although Vittorio references him briefly.

The New Forest coven were an alleged group of witches who met around the area of the New Forest in southern England during the early 20th century. According to his own claims, in September 1939, a British occultist named Gerald Gardner was initiated into the coven and subsequently used its beliefs and practices as a basis from which he formed the tradition of Gardnerian Wicca. Gardner described some of his experiences with the coven in his published books Witchcraft Today (1954) and The Meaning of Witchcraft (1959) although on the whole revealed little about it, saying he was respecting the privacy of its members. Meanwhile, another occultist, Louis Wilkinson, corroborated Gardner's claims by revealing in an interview with the writer Francis X. King that he too had encountered the coven and expanded on some of the information that Gardner had provided about them. According to Gardner, the faith which they followed was the continuation of the Witch-Cult, a pre-Christian religion that originated in the paganism of ancient Western Europe. This was in keeping with the widely held theories then propagated by the anthropologist Margaret Murray and her supporters.

Nancy Holder is an American writer and the author of several novels, including numerous tie-in books based on the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She's also written fiction related to several other science fiction and fantasy shows, including Angel and Smallville.

Robert Cochrane, who was born as Roy Bowers, was an English occultist who founded the tradition of Pagan Witchcraft known as Cochrane's Craft.

The history of Wicca documents the rise of the Neopagan religion of Wicca and related witchcraft-based Neopagan religions. Wicca originated in the early twentieth century, when it developed amongst secretive covens in England who were basing their religious beliefs and practices upon what they read of the historical Witch-Cult in the works of such writers as Margaret Murray. It was subsequently popularised in the 1950s by a number of figures, in particular Gerald Gardner, who claimed to have been initiated into the Craft – as Wicca is often known – by the New Forest coven in 1939. Gardner's form of Wicca, the Gardnerian tradition, was spread by both him and his followers like the High Priestesses Doreen Valiente, Patricia Crowther and Eleanor Bone into other parts of the British Isles, and also into other, predominantly English-speaking, countries across the world. In the 1960s, new figures arose in Britain who popularised their own forms of the religion, including Robert Cochrane, Sybil Leek and Alex Sanders, and organisations began to be formed to propagate it, such as the Witchcraft Research Association. It was during this decade that the faith was transported to the United States, where it was further adapted into new traditions such as Feri, 1734 and Dianic Wicca in the ensuing decades, and where organisations such as the Covenant of the Goddess were formed.

In the neopagan religion of Wicca, a range of magical tools are used in ritual practice. Each of these tools has different uses and associations, and serve primarily to direct magical energies. They are used at an altar, inside a magic circle.

Georgian Wicca is a tradition, or denomination, in the neopagan religion of Wicca. In its organisation, it is very similar to British Traditional Wicca groups such as Gardnerian Wicca, however, it does not trace its initiatory line to one of the old English covens.

The Bricket Wood coven, or Hertfordshire coven was a coven of Gardnerian witches founded in the 1940s by Gerald Gardner. It was notable for being the first coven in the Gardnerian line, though having its supposed origins in the pre-Gardnerian New Forest coven. The coven formed after Gardner bought the Fiveacres Country Club, a naturist club in the village of Bricket Wood, Hertfordshire, southern England, and met within the club's grounds. It played a significant part in the history of the neopagan religion of Wicca.

<i>Dead to the World</i> (novel) novel by Charlaine Harris

Dead to the World is the fourth book in Charlaine Harris's series The Southern Vampire Mysteries, released in 2004. In Dead to the World, Sookie aids vampires Eric and Pam in their struggle against a coven of witches seeking to take over control of their area, and takes care of Eric after the witches erase his memory.

Blue Bloods is a series of vampire novels by Melissa de la Cruz. The series is set in Manhattan, New York. The complete series comprises seven books: Blue Bloods, Masquerade, Revelations, The Van Alen Legacy, Misguided Angel, Lost in Time, and Gates of Paradise. The author also wrote two companion novels, Keys to the Repository and Bloody Valentine, along with two spin-off series, Wolf Pact and Witches of East End. Blue Bloods: A Graphic Novel was published on January 15, 2013. The publication date of the final novel in the series.

Underworld: Blood Wars is a 2016 American action horror film directed by Anna Foerster. It is the fifth installment in the Underworld franchise and the sequel to Underworld: Awakening (2012), with Kate Beckinsale reprising her role as Selene. The main cast also includes Theo James, Lara Pulver, Tobias Menzies, Bradley James, Peter Andersson, James Faulkner, Clementine Nicholson, Daisy Head, Oliver Stark, and Charles Dance.

"Fade Into You" is the 8th episode of the sixth season of the American series The Vampire Diaries and the series' 119th episode overall. "Fade Into You" was originally aired on November 20, 2014, on The CW. The episode was written by Nina Fiore and John Herrera and directed by Joshua Butler.

References

1 2 "Los bailaderos". Bienmesabe.org. 2012-10-22. Retrieved 2015-07-25.
↑ "Mujeres y otros demonios: Brujería e Inquisición en Canarias". Lanzarotelandia. Retrieved 2015-07-25.

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.

[bienmesabe1-1] 1 2 "Los bailaderos". Bienmesabe.org. 2012-10-22. Retrieved 2015-07-25.

[2] "Mujeres y otros demonios: Brujería e Inquisición en Canarias". Lanzarotelandia. Retrieved 2015-07-25.