Definition
Sorcery is a historical legal category encompassing the supposed practice of magic, witchcraft, or necromancy — particularly the invocation of evil spirits to produce harmful or supernatural effects. As a legal term, sorcery belongs almost entirely to the history of criminal law. It was prosecuted in ecclesiastical and secular courts across England and colonial America under statutes targeting witchcraft, conjuration, and enchantment. In modern law, sorcery has no operative legal definition; its significance is entirely historical and archival.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Magical power; the use of witchcraft or magic arts; black magic.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Divination by the assistance, or supposed assistance, of evil spirits, or the power of commanding evil spirits; magic; necromancy; witchcraft; enchantment.
The common and legal meanings are not in tension here — the law borrowed the popular conception wholesale. The distinction that matters for research is that legal sources treated sorcery as a prosecutable offense with defined procedures and punishments, not merely a cultural or theological concept. When historical legal dictionaries cross-reference sorcery to witchcraft or conjuration, they are pointing researchers toward the statutory and case law framework, not the supernatural belief system.
Common Confusion
Sorcery, witchcraft, conjuration, and necromancy were used interchangeably in both popular and legal sources across different periods and jurisdictions, but they carried distinct statutory meanings in some contexts. English statutes — particularly the Witchcraft Act of 1604 (1 Jac. I, c. 12) — enumerated specific offenses using specific terms, so conflating them in research can cause a researcher to miss or misread the operative charge. Bouvier's redirects sorcery to witchcraft; Rapalje & Lawrence redirect it to conjuration. Neither redirect is identical. A researcher should follow all three threads independently.
Why It Matters in Research
Sorcery is a navigational term in the Law Mind corpus, not a substantive one. Its dictionary entries function as cross-references rather than self-contained definitions, and understanding that structure is essential to effective research.
Three redirects, three different threads: Bouvier sends you to witchcraft. Rapalje & Lawrence send you to conjuration. Anderson does the same. These are not equivalent destinations. Witchcraft entries in historical legal dictionaries tend to track English statutory law and its American colonial reception. Conjuration entries often emphasize the ecclesiastical dimension and the common law's treatment of the offense. A researcher interested in how sorcery was prosecuted must follow all three.
Statutory precision matters. The Witchcraft Act of 1604 and its predecessors used terms like "witchcraft," "enchantment," "charm," and "sorcery" in ways that courts sometimes distinguished. The English Witchcraft Act of 1735 effectively decriminalized the belief in supernatural power itself while still punishing fraudulent claims to such power — a reversal that creates a significant interpretive fault line in any corpus spanning the pre- and post-1735 periods.
Colonial American law adds complexity. Several American colonies enacted their own witchcraft and sorcery statutes before and after independence, and the relationship between these statutes and English law was uneven. Researchers working in colonial records will encounter sorcery charges governed by local ordinances that may not map cleanly onto English statutory frameworks.
Modern appearances are rare but real. Sorcery occasionally surfaces in twentieth- and twenty-first-century legal contexts in immigration cases (claims involving persecution for alleged witchcraft practices in certain countries), in international human rights law, and in family law cases involving cultural or religious practices characterized by opposing parties as sorcery. These modern appearances require careful handling — the term carries historical freight that can distort analysis of contemporary claims.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three historical dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus treat sorcery identically: as a term requiring no independent definition because it is subsumed within witchcraft and conjuration. Bouvier's states simply "Witchcraft (q.v.)." Anderson's says "See WITCHCRAFT." Rapalje & Lawrence redirect to conjuration.
This consensus by cross-reference is itself historically informative. By the time these dictionaries were compiled (mid-to-late nineteenth century), sorcery as a prosecutable offense had been obsolete in English and American law for well over a century. The Witchcraft Act of 1735 had eliminated the offense in England; American jurisdictions had no successor statutes of equivalent scope. The dictionary compilers had no current law to report, only historical material already organized under adjacent headings.
What the historical dictionaries miss: they do not address the evidentiary and procedural dimensions of sorcery prosecutions, the ecclesiastical court jurisdiction that ran parallel to secular courts in England, or the specific colonial American statutory landscape. Researchers seeking that material must go beyond the legal dictionaries to treatises, session records, and statutory compilations of the relevant period.
Jurisdictional Note
Sorcery prosecutions followed fundamentally different legal tracks in England (where ecclesiastical and secular jurisdiction overlapped), colonial America (where local statutes varied significantly by colony), and Scotland (which had its own witchcraft statute and a more intensive prosecution history than England). Researchers should not assume that legal authorities from one jurisdiction illuminate practice in another.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Witchcraft Laws and Prosecution; History of Criminal Law in England and the American Colonies.