See, How I've always kind of understood why mainly women practice "witchcraft" boils down to this. My theory is that while men were off facing off against sabertooth tigers and chasing down woolly mammoths, All the women sat around camp had to come up with the mystical woo-woo "I can make magic happen with plants and waving around a stick" to make them feel like the most powerful woman in the group.
That's Tarl. The weak, effeminate, can't hunt, can't fight, grasping at anything he can to imply strength, tosspot that gets left behind in the cave with the other women and children.
Shove as many sage bundles up your arse as you like fag. It won't turn you into Gandalf.
Actually, the main purpose was 2 things, a medicine woman and a religious practicioner. Many women in multiple cultures often did the sacrifices or prayers for a bountiful harvest, a safe birth or for a deceased loved one to find their way into the afterlife.
Men would pray for victories in a hunt, battle, or for the gods to choose the newest leader, if they lived by that rule.
The healing aspect goes back an incredibly long ways, and has roots as recently as the 1700s with something called kitchen witches. These are known as the local healer, medicine woman, or "white witch".
Their job was creating recipes and tonics that helped with certain illnesses, pains, or even abortificents. And some are proven to work, things like red clover and certain weeds can induce an abortion. Garlic, carrot flowers, hazel and some types of tree root (like liccorice root) are proven to help with aleviating signs of illness.
For things like tooth pain, some stuff like clover oil is still used as a pain killer, venoms (where the term snake oil came from, the catch is the mexicans didn't have specific names for snakes, so european settlers took that to mean any snake, when it needed to be a venomous one soaked in liquor. It was supposed to be a specific one, diamond back or some such)
There was also the job of religious guidence of the gods, prayer for fertility, future sight or sight women/oracles, there were loads of actual, documented reasoning for magic. It was anything we could not explain, some modern tech is even jokingly called magic because the average person has no idea how it works, but that was just the explaination. That or a miracle from god.
And what we used to call magic, what worked is what's used in modern medicine. Snake venom is used in anti coagulants or blood pressure medications, for example.
What didn't work was dismissed as woo, but the main, argueably most important reason, was to give people a sense of comfort and help. While some stuff didn't physically work, it did in the short term due to how powerful the placebo effect works.
