Is aromatherapy linked to witchcraft?

[Arctic Spirit]

If so, how is it linked to witchcraft and why? Isn't it just alternative medicine?

 

[Phoenixgelb]

yep, definitely. smells funny, is sticky. most likely witchcraft. can you specify the question?

 

[Goth Farmer]

Well, a great deal of what we today call "alternative medicine" was called "witchcraft" in the past.

See, "witches" were often really healers and herbalists, midwives and shaman. That's what witchcraft is, a *craft* or study of how we interact with and can benefit from our natural world. It is understanding and using natural methods of healing and wellbeing, and seeking to serve and care for others. Like easing childbirth with Blue Cohosh and Motherwort -at one point in history this would be labeled witchcraft, and the midwife providing it would have been tortured and killed. Today, it's just "alternative".
Or adding herbs that promote respiratory health to chicken stew for someone with a respiratory infection-this would have been witchcraft to the "witch finders" of the past, but today it's just a good healthy stew.

Same with aromatherapy. If a women in 1602 had stood up and said " I can help people by using scents to affect their mood and health" she would have been tortured and killed. It would have been a terrible heresy to even infer that any healing besides that given by God the Father through his son Jesus Christ and delivered by the Mother Church was even remotely possible. If you couldn't pray it away, it was Gods will. If you tried anything besides prayer, it was witchcraft and born of the devil.

So, yes, aromatherapy is witchcraft.