Catholic authorities thought that the resistance shown to torture by the women accused of witchcraft was so extraordinary that it must be due to supernatural help from the Devil - or from other witches. (It has been suggested by some witchcraft authorities such as Dorleen Valiente that this help was more likely given by sister herbalists in the forms of painkilling preparations.) The current Catholic Encyclopaedia, in its entry on Witchcraft trials, stated that the most surprising element was that many women who were not tortured still maintained that they were witches even when on the scaffold. This suggested that they were proud of being witches.

The accounts given by suspects in witch trials of witch practices and beliefs are very similar in England and the continent - despite torture not being quite as hideously applied in England as on the continent. Although many were hapless victims, many were also young, strong, good looking and proud - not the hags of popular mythology and far from being the helpless old woman as often depicted Many of the accused apparently spoke in terms that would later become better understood when ethnographers recorded the work and words of shamans living in remote areas of Russia and the frozen north where the older forms of religion still survived. They spoke like these shamans of spirit journeys across lands and into underworlds, of flying, of dancing and of ecstasy. They often were not apologetic - despite their lives being in danger. They instead said they found their spiritual experiences in witchcraft rich and much to be valued.

So it seems that the witchtrials did not only reveal the misogynist hang-ups of men. Nor can all the many statements by those accused about their practice of witchcraft be discarded as the products of wishful thinking - as some historians have suggested who almost seemed to want to explain away this phenomenon. It is more likely that some testimonies reflected a form of spirituality that was perhaps more based on instinctive shamanism and animistic beliefs than on books. Among the Arctic tribes, shamanism was always understood as a talent discovered within oneself and not learnt from any book. Recent studies, such as "Between the Living and the Dead" by Professor Eva Pocs, based on the evidence of several thousand transcripts of witchtrials and accounts of folk traditions in central Europe, found between the 16th and 17th centuries a strong shamanic tradition of witchcraft survived in Europe in which people passed to and from the Otherworld in trance, dreams and visions, foretold the future, rode with the Wild Hunt and communed with the dead.