Cunning Folk

In English history, the cunning man or cunning woman is a professional or semi-professional folk magic user up until the 20th century. Such people were also frequently known as wizards, wise men, wise women, witch doctors or conjurers. The term white witch was infrequently used for cunning folk until recent times, except in the county of Devon.

Cunning folk are frequently confused with witches. The key difference between the two is that cunning folk were real, whereas there is no evidence that witches existed outside the imagination of those who believed they had been afflicted by them. The magic of the cunning folk was preventative and curative and so did not require visible magical phenomena to occur for people to believe in it, while that of the alleged witches was clearly absurd (such as turning into a hare or flying through the air) and so was presumed to occur while nobody was looking.

The remedy that a cunning man would prescribe might well involve identifying a suitable person as the witch responsible for the client's affliction, but it obviously does not follow from this that witches genuinely existed.

Jessica from spirit sighs Brushes ,and a shot from my nikon