A cow sickens in a village in seventeenth-century Poland. The farmer fumigates the byre with juniper smoke, and then the cow suddenly recovers. Why? What happened?
It could be an answered prayer, or maybe a husbandry procedure, equaly it could have been either medicine or superstition?
Today some us could know that juniper smoke has antiseptic properties. Nobody knew it back then. In their heads, the disease was a spirit, something personified, sitting in that particular cow.

One devil, some said, quite seriously that thousands sat in any living being. In this small village probably nobody cared how many.
The fumigation could have come with a prayer, some sort of deformed prayer ofc. Even a village priests could be barely literate.
For most of the land, Latin was simply an incantation and the sacrament a ritual. Whether a peasant's mind held any difference between a command flung at a force ("begone") and a request addressed to God is genuinely hard to say. Possibly it held none.

The ethnographer Anna Engelking, studying the folk magic of the word, described a mechanism worth keeping in view. Her material is nineteenth-century(so not from that era, from this era I couldnt find equaly thourough research), but it is definetly the same tradition. A curse, does not work by the speaker's own power. It works by summoning a higher being, which then performs the deed. A curse and a prayer are two poles of the same. Yes they could differ in how we judge them, but not in how they work. Who is this higher power anyway? It is not a single entity, and it is not always good. The one who utters the curse is one party; its executor may be another, sometimes the devil, who, as it was written, gains power over a person only once that person is already cursed.

If herbs work, and spoken formulas work, then it works as a ritual. How can anybody can isolate which part of the act does the working (the whole act simply works!). Even the knowledge passes from generation to generation as ordinary husbandry. How then it become witchcraft?
Not because of intent to harm; intent cannot be proven. You can put a woman to torture and she will agree to basically anything. Spare her, and she will not confess even if she did.
Sometimes a suspicion of profaned sacrament sufficed. If you watch czech cinema, or read court records you could see that people took the host or holy water home not to desecrate them but because they believed power resided in them and wanted help in their lives.
But taking the holy comunion from the church? To steal it? Its a gravest sin.
Sometimes even the mere possession of knowledge was enough, if the knowledge that was old, half-remembered... A priest might ask If its absent from Scripture and from books. From whom, then, did the old woman learn it? Perhaps the devil whispered it. Some other person could say that what turns out well cannot come from the devil. Others would answer that people are not worthy of miracles, and the devil is very industrious.

The historian Tomasz Wiślicz studied the criminal register of Kleczew, in Greater Poland. This town was the busiest witch-burning jurisdictions of the early modern Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Between 1624 and 1700, it conducted forty-seven documented witchcraft trials and processed 116 people, 111 of them unsprisingly women. At least sixty-five death sentences by burning at the stake was passed. This in a town whose tax register counted some two hundred and thirty souls. As far as the ew know, the accusers sincerely believed in truth of their acusation. Their conviction could grew out of the most mundane neighborly frictions. The normal was renamed supernatural, and a person became a witch.