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WITCH: The Strange History of a Dangerous Word · The Occult Rejects

• 0:02
  Speaker 1: You see, something's going to happen. What? What's going to happen?
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: Something wonderful. What? I understand how you feel. You see,
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: it's all very clear to me now. Welcome to the
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: Occult Rejects. Today we are going to do something slightly
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: different from the usual history of witchcraft. because instead of
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: beginning with trials, sabbats, familiars, grimoires, cunning folk, pagan survivals, demonology,
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: or modern Wicca, we are going to begin with a
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: single English word and treat that word almost like an
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: archaeological object. Witch. It feels ancient enough to be self-explanatory,
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: as though an Anglo-Saxon lawgiver, a medieval priest, a village healer,
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: a woman accused before an early modern court, a 17th
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: century demonologist, Gerald Gardner and a modern pagan would all
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: recognize essentially the same creature standing behind it. Yet the
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: deeper we follow the evidence, the less stable that assumption becomes.
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: Across more than a thousand years, the word has been
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: used for harmful magicians, diviners, illicit healers, supposed servants of
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: the devil, fairytale monsters, criminal offenders, political metaphors, religious practitioners,
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: feminist symbols, and people who may not claim supernatural power
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: at all. which means that before we can ask what
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: witches supposedly did, believed, worshipped, or practiced, we have to
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: ask something more basic. When somebody in a particular century
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: used the word witch, what exactly did that person think
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: they were naming? That question matters, because for most of
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: the world's recorded history, witch was not primarily a title
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: people proudly chose for themselves. It was commonly applied from
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: outside by lawgivers, clerics, translators, theologians, neighbors, judges, Playwrights, antiquarians,
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: and lexicographers and those people did not always agree about
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: what belonged inside the category. Ronald Hutton has pointed out
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: that even modern historians inherit this instability, with some using
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: witchcraft principally for harmful magic, while others apply it much
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: more broadly to unauthorized magical practice. And the problem becomes
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: even more obvious once we discover that early English possessed
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: dozens of terms for supernatural practices and practitioners. There were
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: words associated with spoken charms, divination, illusion, drugs, poison, prophecy,
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: and other forms of ritual expertise. While witchcraft, spelled W-I-C-C-E-C-R-A-E-F-T,
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: the ancestor of witchcraft, stubbornly refuses to reveal its exact
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: original meaning from its structure alone. That gives us the
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: role for everything that follows. Whenever someone tells us that
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: witch originally meant wise woman, that it meant one who
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: bends reality, that the Bible plainly commands the death of
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: the same kind of witches imagined in early modern Europe,
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: that Wicca is simply the unchanged survival of an Anglo-Saxon
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: witch religion, or that every ancient culture possessed witches in
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: exactly the same sense, we are going to ask which
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: word actually appears in the source, when that source was composed,
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: when the surviving manuscript was copied, who was doing the naming,
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: what other terms existed beside it, and whether the person
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: being described would have recognized the label at all. The
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: history of witch is therefore not a clean genealogy of
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: one timeless magical profession, but a history of classification, in
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: which the meaning of the word shifts according to who
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: possesses the authority to apply it. The secure ancestry of
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: modern English witch begins in Old English, where we encounter
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: not one isolated noun, but an entire family of related forms. Wicca, W-I-C-C-A,
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: traditionally identified as masculine. Then we have Wiki, W-I-C-C-E, its
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: feminine counterpart, witchian, the verb for practicing the associated activity, witchcraft,
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: again W-I-C-C-E-C-R-A-E-F-T, the craft itself, and related formations such as W-I-C-C-E-D-O-M, W-I-C-C-U-N-G,
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: and W-I-C-C-U-N-G-D-O-M. Bosworth, Toller, the great historical dictionary of Anglo-Saxon,
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: glosses Wicca with words such as magician, sorcerer, soothsayer, or wizard,
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: while Wicce, W-I-C-C-E, is glossed as witch or sorceress. But
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: those English equivalents are modern scholarly summaries rather than definitions
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  Speaker 1: handed down by the Anglo-Saxons themselves. The earliest evidence survives
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: overwhelmingly through Christian literate institutions that were translating, preaching against,
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: legislating against, glossing or otherwise classifying practices they regarded as
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: spiritually suspect, which means our oldest evidence is already filtered
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: through the people doing the condemning. Even the apparently simple question,
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: what is the oldest surviving form of the word, turns
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: out to be more complicated than it looks. One well-known
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: early form, W-I-C-C-U-N-G-D-O-M, appears in the old English poem, Daniel,
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: where Nebuchadnezzar summons those among his people, who most widely
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: practiced or possesses the mysterious Wiccandom in order to interpret
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: his dream. Older scholarship sometimes treated the poem as extremely
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: ancient because the biblical poems contained in the Junius manuscript
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: were once connected with the 17th century poet Cadman, but
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: that attribution has long since collapsed and the surviving manuscript
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: itself belongs much later, around the later 10th century. The
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: poem may preserve older material, yet its precise composition date
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: remains uncertain. so it cannot honestly be presented as a
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: secure 7th century occurrence merely because earlier generations wanted the
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: poem to be that old. What makes the story more
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: interesting is that the word family may still reach back
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: earlier than Alfred, although in a different kind of evidence.
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: Glosses associated with the works of Aldheim, whose interpretive tradition
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: reaches back into the 8th century, preserve Wiccan beside another
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: supernatural term, Helrun. as competing Old English equivalents for Latin
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: words connected with female divination, including Pythonisa and Divinatrix. The
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: surviving manuscript containing these glosses are later, so we did
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  Speaker 1: not possess an 8th century piece of parchment on which
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: someone freshly wrote the word Wiccan, but the glossarial tradition
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: is old enough that philologists have argued the vocabulary itself
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  Speaker 1: was already circulating in the 8th century. This is exactly
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: why the distinction between date of composition or gloss tradition
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: is and date of the surviving manuscript matter so much.
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  Speaker 1: The word may be older than the physical witness in
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: which we now encounter it. That gives us an unexpectedly
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: good answer to the oldest form problem. We cannot point
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: to one magical first witch and announce that English history
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: begins there, because the evidence survives through overlapping textual traditions
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: whose dates are not identical. But by the 8th and
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: 9th centuries, the Wicca or W-I-C-C-E family is clearly established
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: enough to appear in glosses, poetry, and eventually royal law.
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: Rather than one pristine original definition, the earliest evidence already
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: shows us the word being used inside translation and classification.
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: The reign of Alfred the Great, from 871 to 899,
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: provides one of the most important historical anchors because Alfred's
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: legal compilation adapts biblical material that would much later become
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: notorious in the King James Bible as thou shalt not
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: suffer a witch to live. Yet Alfred does not simply
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: choose one Old English equivalent for the biblical magical practitioner. Instead,
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: his wording includes, if I'm pronouncing these correctly, Galdor Craftigan, Skinlicken,
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: and Wiccan, placing three categories of practitioner beside one another.
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: Whatever precise distinction separated them, an educated Old English writer
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: apparently believed there was a meaningful difference between a practitioner
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: and associated with Galdor, a practitioner associated with skin, and
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: a Wicca or W-I-C-C-E. That list may be one of
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: the strongest pieces of evidence in the entire history of
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: the word, because it immediately undermines the assumption that Wicca
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: simply meant any person who practiced magic. If that were
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: all the word meant, the presence of separate magical categories
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: beside it would be difficult to explain. Galdor belongs broadly
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: to the semantic word of spoken or sung charms and incantations.
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: while skin, S-C-I-N, is associated with appearance, illusion, deceptive manifestation,
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: or phantasm. Yet the passage gives us no neat definition
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: explaining what precise activity made the third practitioner a wicca.
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  Speaker 1: The earliest English evidence therefore does something wonderfully frustrating. It
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: proves that the word existed while refusing to give us
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: the simple occupational definition we want from it. The grammar
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: makes the evidence even more slippery. Old English possessed masculine wicca,
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: and feminine W-I-C-C-E. But several of their inflected forms collapse together,
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: especially in the plural. So a form such as Wiccan
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: does not by itself allow us to look at a
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: manuscript and announce confidently whether the people being described were
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: male or female. That means the popular claim that the
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: oldest recorded witch was a man needs considerable qualification. The
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: existence of the masculine noun Wicca is beyond dispute and
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: remains enormously important because it destroys the idea that the
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: English word was inherently female from its beginning. But one
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: of the oldest famous written forms of the word is
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: grammatically incapable on its own of telling us the sex
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: of the practitioners it describes. The evidence is therefore simultaneously
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: stronger and stranger than the simplified version usually repeated online.
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  Speaker 1: This also means that the modern fantasy taxonomy in which
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: a female magician is naturalized called a witch while a
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: male magician must be a wizard or warlock is historically backwards.
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  Speaker 1: Old English already possessed a masculine witch word, and Middle
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: English will later allow W-I-C-C-H-E to be used for people
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: of either sex. Wizard, meanwhile, has its own separate history.
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: and really does belong to the linguistic family of wise,
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: while warlock originally belonged to a completely different semantic world
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: involving oath-breaking, treachery, and deception before later becoming associated with
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: male magical practitioners. The three words were never created as
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  Speaker 1: a neat gendered set. The spelling Wicca, W-I-C-C-A, creates another
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  Speaker 1: trap because modern readers naturally pronounce it through the modern
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: religious name Wicca, but Old English pronunciation followed a different history.
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: In the relevant phonological environment, the consonantal sequence represented by
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: the double C was palatalized and developed toward the affricated
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: C8 sound that survives in modern witch, so an approximate
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: modern rendering of Old English wicca would sound closer to witcha,
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: while WICCE would have sounded something like witche. Modern English forms,
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: such as WICCHE, preserve that development before the final unstressed
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: vowel disappears. eventually leaving the modern English word witch. The
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: result gives us one of the strangest linguistic ironies in
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: modern occult history. Witch, W-I-T-C-H, despite looking less archaic, is
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: the continuous historical descendant of the Old English sound development
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: while modern Wicca, W-I-C-C-A, despite visually reproducing the ancient spelling,
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: is a 20th century revival pronounced with a hard K.
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: We will return to that when Gerald Gardner enters the story,
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: because the modern religion preserved the appearance of antiquity more
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: faithfully than the historical pronunciation. The double consonant itself also
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: creates a deeper etymological problem. Anatoly Lieberman has emphasized that
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: Old English Wicce contains a genuine gammonic, a lengthened consonant
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: whose historical origin needs explanation, and he has suggested that
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: it may preserve the result of an older assimilation in
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: which two different consonants became similar. The difficulty is that
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: the earlier consonantal cluster is itself hypothetical, meaning that the
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: spelling recorded by Anglo-Saxon scribes may preserve the result of
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: sound changes that had already happened before the word entered
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: surviving English texts. That is one reason the remote ancestry
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: of Wicca remains harder to reconstruct than the immediate history
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: from Old English into Modern English. The most famous explanation
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: in modern pagan, occult, new age, and popular witchcraft literature
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: is that witch originally means wise woman. And the claim
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: is attractive precisely because it fits the modern reclamation of
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: the witch as a figure of suppressed knowledge. There is
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: a legitimate scholarly reason that knowledge enters the etymological discussion.
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: Because one family of serious proposals has attempted to connect
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: the word with Germanic vocabulary and associated with knowing, seeing, divining,
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: or possessing unusual knowledge. Old English had witan, w-i-t-a-n, meaning
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: to know, wita, w-i-t-a, a counselor or wise person, and w-i-t-e-g-a,
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: a prophet or seer, while modern English still preserves obvious
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: descendants of the broader family in words such as wit
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: and wise. Lieberman himself has continued to explore reconstructions in
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: which the remote ancestor of the witch word may have
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: referred to some kind of diviner, knower, or possibly healer.
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: The problem begins when a plausible etymological hypothesis becomes the
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: absolute statement that witch literally means wise woman, because the
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: actual grammar does not support that formula. Nothing in Wicca, W-I-C-C-A,
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: or W-I-C-C-E means woman. and the existence of masculine Wicca, W-I-C-C-A,
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: makes that immediately obvious. Even if a knowledge-based etymology eventually
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: proves correct, the most we could responsibly recover would be
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: something in the territory of a knower, diviner, seer, or
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: specialist in unusual knowledge. Depending on the reconstruction, the female
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: component belongs to the later cultural history of the witch
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: rather than to the demonstrable structure of the ancient word.
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: There is almost a perfect linguistic punchline here because English
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: already possesses a magical word whose connection with wisdom is
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: much clearer. Wizard. The medieval ancestor of wizard generally developed
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: from the lexical family of wise, originally referring to a
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: wise or learned person before supernatural associations became dominant. So
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: the magical word that actually has the clearer historical relationship
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: with wise is not witch but wizard. while the word
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: endlessly advertised as meaning wise woman is the one whose
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: ultimate etymology remains unresolved. Another major family of proposals move
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: away from knowledge and towards roots associated with turning, bending, twisting,
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: or changing direction, which has produced a second enormously popular
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: occult explanation, that a witch literally means one who bends reality.
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: Once again, A historical hypothesis has been transformed into a
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: modern metaphysical definition far stronger than the evidence permits. Older
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: etymologists did explore Germanic roots involving turning or bending, and
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: if some version of that theory was ever established, it
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: might suggest a person who alters, redirects, or turns something,
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: but historical philology contains no hidden Anglo-Saxon definition in which
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: a Wicca is described as someone who bends reality according
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: to the will. That language belongs to modern magical philosophy,
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: not old English lexicography. Other proposals have connected the word
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: with divination, sacredness, consecration, sacrifice, awakening, necromancy, and communication with
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: the dead. But virtually every proposed solution runs into difficulty
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: somewhere in the required combination of sound, morphology, and meaning.
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: The problem is made worse by the lack of one
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: clean family of unquestioned cognates across Old Norse, Old High German, Gothic,
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: Old Saxon, and the rest of the Germanic languages that
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: would allow us simply to reconstruct a proto-Germanic ancestor and
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: trace it downward. Proposed relatives exist, but no universally accepted
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: family tree solves the word. That uncertainty matters because the
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: etymology someone favors usually determines the prehistoric which they imagined.
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: A knowledge root gives us a seer or wise specialist.
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: A bending root gives us a transformer. A divination root
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: gives us a fortune teller. A sacredness root can produce
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: a religious functionary. And a harmful magic interpretation gives us
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: an occult aggressor. Each theory threatens to smuggle an entire
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: social identity into a word whose earliest surviving context refused
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: to hand us one, which is why the most responsible
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: conclusion is also the most interesting. We know where modern
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: witch comes from immediately, but we do not know with
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: certainty what lies beyond Old English Wicca and Wicca. Rather
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: than forcing an answer from a disputed prehistoric root, the
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: better way forward is to reconstruct the linguist world around
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: the word, because the Anglo-Saxons repeatedly placed Wicca beside other
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: categories whose meanings are somewhat easier to recover. Once those
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: neighboring terms are put back on the map, the earliest
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: witch begins to appear not as one universal magician, but
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: as one figure inside a much larger and largely forgotten
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: vocabulary of charms, illusion, divination, drugs, poison, prophecy, supernatural knowledge,
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: and hidden harm. Once the neighboring vocabulary is restored, Anglo-Saxon
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: supernatural practice stops looking like one undifferentiated world called witchcraft
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: and begins to resemble a crowded semantic field in which
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: different words emphasize different techniques, dangers, and kinds of knowledge.
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: Ronald Hutton has counted more than 30 Old English terms
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: associated with magical practices or practitioners, and several of the
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: most important appear beside Wicca or Wicca in ways that
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: strongly suggest meaningful distinctions even when those distinctions can no
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: longer be reconstructed with complete precision. One of the clearest
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: examples is Galdor. commonly translated as charm, spell, or incantation,
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: with Galdor craft describing the associated craft and Galdor craftiga
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: the practitioner. The vocal dimension of the word is important,
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: but modern scholarship has complicated the old habit of treating
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: every Galdor as a fragment of surviving pagan magic. Carrion
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: Arthur's work across the Old English Corpus shows that Galdor
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: could certainly appear in hostile Christian discussions of illicit supernatural practice.
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: Yet it also occurs in explicitly Christian contexts involving healing rites, prayers,
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: sacred formulas, spiritual discernment, and liturgical performance. In other words,
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: the word itself does not necessarily mean pagan spell. Depending
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: upon context, it could describe ritualized speech operating with a
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: Christian manuscript culture. That makes Alfred's decision to place Galdor-Craftingen
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: besides Skinlicken and Wiccan especially valuable. If Galdor primarily foregrounded
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: spoken or sung ritual action, Sincraft belonged to another semantic
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: territory associated with illusion, deceptive appearance, apparition, or praestigia, while
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: Skinlicker designated a practitioner operating within that world. Surviving glosses
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: connect to skin, family with deceptive marvels and magical manifestations,
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: and some even use it where Latin sources employ words
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: of necromancy or sorcery. The boundaries are not clean, but
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: that very messiness is historical evidence. Old English and Latin
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: categories overlap without matching perfectly, so a translator might use
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: different English words for the same Latin term or one
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: English word for several Latin categories. A second extraordinary cluster
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: grows around lib, or lib, L-Y-B-B, a word connected with
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: medicinal or potent substances in compounds such as lib-lac and lib-craft,
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: whose meanings stretch uneasily across territory that modern English separates
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: into medicine, potion-making, poisoning, and magic. Some Old English passages
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: use the vocabulary for harmful preparations or poisonous drinks, while
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: others play lib-lac directly beside witchcraft. That overlap will matter
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: later when we encounter Greek pharmak, language in Exodus, because
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: pre-modern vocabularies often refuse our modern separation between pharmacology, poison,
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: enchanted substances, and supernatural harm. Translating Lie Black simply as
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: witchcraft can erase the substance or poison element, while translating
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: it simply as poisoning can erase the magical one. Then
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: there is W-I-G-L-E-R-E, Wiggler, usually rendered as diviner, soothsayer, augur,
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: or sorcerer, with surviving compounds showing that divination could itself
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: be subdividing according to technique. Old English could identify an
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: astrologically oriented diviner and even a practitioner who interpreted birds,
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: which means that divination was not merely one amorphous supernatural act,
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: but a category capable of internal specialization. More importantly for us,
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: Wiglaris repeatedly appeared beside Wiccan in ecclesiastical and legal texts,
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: meaning that a Wicca cannot simply be defined as a
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: diviner without explaining why writers sometimes bother to name both.
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: Another broad term, drycraft, could be used for magical art
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: and appears in translations of Latin expressions such as Ars
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: Magica and Malfica Ars, yet Hutton points out something particularly
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: suggestive about its legal history. Despite being treated negatively in
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: ecclesiastical literature, dry craft does not appear in the criminal
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: law code pattern in which witchcraft repeatedly does. That absence
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: cannot prove exactly what witchcraft originally meant, W-I-C-C-E-C-R-A-E-F-T, but it
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: strengthens the possibility that the witch word carried a particularly
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: disreputable association with harmful or dangerous practice, rather than functioning
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: as a neutral umbrella for every form of magic. The
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: vocabulary becomes stranger again with hagtesse, a word later connected
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: with hag and sometimes casually translated as witch, but whose
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: Old English uses move through a partially different supernatural world.
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: An Elfrissian glossary uses hel rune vel hagtesse to render
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: Latin pythonisa, while other examples connect hagtesse with classical furies
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: or its supernatural attack, including afflictions imagined in terms similar
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: to elfshot. That term clearly overlaps with later witch imagery,
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: especially the monstrous and female-coded elements, but it is not
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: simply another spelling of W-I-C-C-E. The same is true of Hellroom,
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: another female-coded supernatural or divinatory category that appears in glossary
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: material and sometimes stands behind the witch word rather than
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: beneath it. By this point, we could say something more
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: precise than merely claiming that Anglo-Saxon England possessed lots of
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: magic words. A Wicca was evidently not identical with every
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: Practitioner of Charms, because Galdor had its own vocabulary. Not
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: identical with every Diviner, because Wiggler existed. Not identical with
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: every Manipulator of Illusion, because Skincraft had its own terms.
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: Not simply a worker with potions or poisons, because Lieblock
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: and Liecraft existed. And not the only female supernatural category,
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: because Hagtesse and Helrun occupied neighboring territories. The boundaries may
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: have overlapped and one practitioner could presumably be described through
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: more than one term, depending upon what they believe to
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: be doing. But the surviving language warns us against imagining
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: one universal Anglo-Saxon profession called witchcraft. The criminal law codes
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: then give the witch word a sharper edge. Legislation dealing
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: with homicide places Wicca Craftum, Liblicum, and Mordatum together when
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: a person has been killed, associating witchcraft poisonworking, and murderous
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: or clandestine deeds within the same legal problem. Hutton interprets
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: these as hidden or dishonorable forms of killing, distinct from
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: open combat, which is significant because nothing here resembles the
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: fully developed early modern mythology of sabbats, flying witches, or
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: formal pacts with Satan. The underlying fear is older and
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: more immediate, that someone might cause another person's death through
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: concealed means that were difficult to detect, prove, or retaliate against.
• 25:28
  Speaker 1: The legal process was also more complicated than the cartoon
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: version in which an Anglo-Saxon community identifies a witch and
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: simply executes her. Athelstan's provisions involved accusation, oath clearing, sureties,
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: and procedures through which an accused person might defend themselves,
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: while the most severe penalties belonged to cases in which
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: hidden practices were believed to actually have caused death and
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: guilt had been legally established. For the biography of the word,
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: the important point is that the Wicca craft has entered
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: the criminal vocabulary of lethal hidden harm, and it appears
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: beside Lieblach. Witchcraft and poison can therefore be linked without
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: being identical. During the turn of the 11th century, Wulfstan,
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: Archbishop of York and one of the most influential ecclesiastical
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: lawmakers of his age, gives us further combinations in which
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: Wiccan and appears besides with Glarus, with related texts adding
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: practitioners of sincraft or liebcraft among offenders condemned as threats
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: to Christian order. The penalties include exile and, in some versions,
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: death for refusing banishment. But the semantic pattern matters more
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: than any individual punishment. Divination, deceptive supernatural practice, hidden harm,
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: and witchcraft are increasingly being grouped inside a Christian moral
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: framework without yet collapsing into one perfectly uniform concept. Under
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: Connaught in the early 11th century, that framework becomes still
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: broader through condemnations of heathenship or heathenism, where illicit supernatural
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: practice can appear besides sacrifice, forbidden veneration, divination, and other
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: activities interpreted as disloyalty to Christian worship. This is an
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: important turning point because the witch word is now being
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: drawn into a theological system in which the central question
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: is no longer simply what technique a practitioner uses, but
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: where the practitioner's power, allegiance, or religious legitimacy supposedly comes from.
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: The supernatural vocabulary is being moralized. That process becomes especially
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: clear in Alfred of Ancient, whose sermons and instructional writings
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: use Wicca, Wicca craft, and related terms broadly enough to
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: include divination and forms of magical healing, while explaining their
• 27:47
  Speaker 1: apparent effectiveness through demonic agency. For Alferic, a forbidden practitioner
• 27:52
  Speaker 1: might seem to produce a successful result, but that success
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: does not demonstrate an independent occult science. It demonstrated demonic
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: deception because supernatural power operating outside legitimate Christianity could be
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: interpreted as an attempt by demons to redirect human trust
• 28:11
  Speaker 1: away from God. Alferic even associates Wiccan with encouraging offerings
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: at Trees and Stones. Practices he condemns as heathen, which
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: allows us to watch a Christian author take several forms
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: of supernatural activity and placing them beneath one moral explanation.
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: Hutton compares this semantic pressure with something that had already
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: happened to the Latin word maleficium in latent Roman and
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: Christian usage. The term strongly associated with harmful magic could
• 28:39
  Speaker 1: be expanded by religious authorities until practices that were not
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: necessarily harmful in ordinary social terms, including divination or healing,
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: could also be classified as spiritually dangerous. If something similar
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: occurred with witchcraft, then one possible history of the English
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: word is not that it originally meant every kind of magic,
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: but that a term already carrying particularly bad associations was
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: gradually stretched outward by clerical writers until more and more
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: unauthorized supernatural activity could be condemned through it. That possibility
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: also explains why we should not leap directly from Alferic
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: to the 17th century witch hunter. By the 11th century,
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: the witch word has accumulated associations with hidden harm, dangerous practice,
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: Christian religious disobedience, divination, illicit healing, and increasingly demonic explanation.
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: But the complete early modern witch stereotype still does not exist.
• 29:37
  Speaker 1: We do not yet have one fully standardized figure who
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: necessarily flies to a Sabbath, signs a formal covenant with Satan,
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: copulates with demons, receives the familiar, and belongs to an
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: organized conspiracy against Christianity. Those elements will be assembled much
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: later through demonology, theology, folklore, law, and judicial culture. Before
• 29:59
  Speaker 1: that can happen, however, one of the most consequential transformations
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: in the entire history of the word occurs through translation,
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: because the English witch becomes attached to a biblical prohibition
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: written many centuries before the English language existed at all.
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: To understand what happens when readers encounter the sentence, thou
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: shall not suffer a witch to live, we have to
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: move backward through English, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, because the
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: famous biblical witch, is not one ancient figure preserved unchanged
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: across those languages. It is the product of a chain
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: of translations, each carrying its own assumptions about what sort
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: of supernatural practitioner the verse was naming. The sentence, Thou
• 30:44
  Speaker 1: shalt not suffer a witch to live, is so deeply
• 30:47
  Speaker 1: embedded in the English-speaking history of witchcraft that it is
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: easy to hear it as though the word witch itself
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: has descended directly from the ancient Hebrew text. But the
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: book of Exodus says, contains no English witch, and no
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: category that can simply be lifted unchanged from the ancient
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: Near East and dropped into the demonological world of early
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: modern Europe. In the Masoretic Hebrew text, the practitioner named
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: in Exodus, Mekesipa, a grammatically feminine singular form usually rendered
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: in modern English as something like sorceress or female sorcerer.
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: The grammatical gender is clear enough, but the exact social
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: or ritual range of the ancient term is not, which
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: means that even the seemingly safer modern translation, sorceress, remains
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: an approximation rather than a perfect equivalent. The situation becomes
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: even more revealing when the Hebrew Bible is translated into Greek,
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: because the Septuagint gives pharmakos, from pharmak, family associated with drugs, potions, preparations, poison,
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: and magical practices. That vocabulary eventually gives us English words
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: such as pharmacy and pharmaceutical, which is why modern discussions
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: sometimes swing to the opposite extreme and announce that the
• 32:02
  Speaker 1: verse really says poisoner rather than witch. That is also
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: too simple. Ancient Pharmac vocabulary occupies a semantic territory in
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: which substances, poisoning, enchantment, and magic can overlap. In replacing
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: witch with the narrow modern occupation poisoner, merely trains one
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: anachronism for another. There is even stranger detail hidden in
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: the grammar. The Hebrew mekesipa is a female singular practitioner,
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: while the Septuagint's pharmakos is grammatically accusative plural masculine. In
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: other words, even at this early stage, the translator is
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: not preserving the source category through a perfect one-word substitution
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: in number and grammatical gender. The Greek tradition is already
• 32:47
  Speaker 1: interpreting the Hebrew through its own linguistic system. That small
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: grammatical shift is almost a miniature demonstration of the larger
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: problem we are following throughout this episode. Once a supernatural
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: category crosses into another language, its boundaries can move before
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: anyone even begins arguing about theology. When Prohibition passes into Latin,
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: the vocabulary changes again. The Vulgate gives Maleficos non pateris vivere,
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: using the Maleficis Maleficium family associated broadly with evil doing.
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: increasingly in late antique and medieval Christian contexts with harmful
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: supernatural practice. Maleficium eventually becomes one of the major learned
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: words for destructive magic in European demonological and legal literature,
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: but the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin categories are still not
• 33:35
  Speaker 1: perfectly interchangeable. Mikesipa, Pharmacus, and Maleficos overlap enough for translators
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: to connect them, yet each term brings the conceptual baggage
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: of its own language and religious culture. Alfred's Old English
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: adaptation makes that interpretive process even more obvious, because rather
• 33:54
  Speaker 1: than selecting one English noun, he expands the prohibition through
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: the cluster Galdor-Craftingen, Sinliken, and Wiccan, the same three categories
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: we encountered earlier. This is one of the strongest reasons
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: not to imagine biblical translation as a simple conveyor belt
• 34:12
  Speaker 1: carrying one unchanged supernatural profession from Hebrew into English. Alfred
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: appears to be translating through a living Anglo-Saxon vocabulary whose
• 34:21
  Speaker 1: categories his audience could recognize, and one foreign term is
• 34:24
  Speaker 1: effectively unpacked into several English ones. Several centuries later, however,
• 34:30
  Speaker 1: modern English Bible translation begins compressing the complexity back toward
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: the single English word that will become famous. The Wycliffeite
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: Bible gives the line as thou shall not suffer witches
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: to live, demonstrating the association between Exodus and the English
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: word witch predates the Reformation and the reign of James
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: by generations. That fact alone destroys the persistent claim that
• 34:53
  Speaker 1: King James personally introduced witch into the verse because of
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: his documented obsession with demonology. The English biblical witch was
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: already old before James was born. By the time William
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: Tyndale published his Pentateuch in 1530, the wording had moved
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: essentially into the form that English readers still recognize. Thou
• 35:13
  Speaker 1: shall not suffer a witch to live. Coverdale's Bible retained which,
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: the Bishop's Bible retained it, and the Geneva Bible likewise
• 35:21
  Speaker 1: used the word, so the translators of the King James
• 35:24
  Speaker 1: Version in 1611 were preserving an established English tradition rather
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: than inventing a new rendering. The famous KJV wording matters
• 35:33
  Speaker 1: enormously in later cultural history, but it belongs at the
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: end of a much longer translation history rather than at
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: its beginning. That changes the interesting question completely. Instead of
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: asking why King James supposedly altered scripture to condemn witches,
• 35:47
  Speaker 1: we should ask why English translators found witch an acceptable
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: equivalent for an ancient ritual category at all, and what
• 35:54
  Speaker 1: happened when generations of readers forgot that an equivalence had
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: been chosen. By the 16th and 17th centuries, witch had
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: accumulated associations with harmful magic, criminality, forbidden divination, demonic assistance,
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: and eventually explicit satanic allegiance. which meant that every time
• 36:11
  Speaker 1: the biblical prohibition was read using the English noun, contemporary
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: ideas about witches could flow backward into the ancient Hebrew verse.
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: Scripture strengthened the danger of the English word, while the
• 36:22
  Speaker 1: changing English word simultaneously changed what readers imagined scripture had
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: always meant. Modern translations reveal how culturally overloaded the noun
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: eventually became. The NIV, ESV, NASB, and many others prefer sorceress.
• 36:38
  Speaker 1: while the NRSV tradition uses female sorcerer, and some versions
• 36:42
  Speaker 1: paraphrase the figure as a woman who practices magic. None
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: of these choices is perfectly neutral, but their very variety
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: shows that translators no longer assume witch is an invisible
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: or self-evident equivalent. The full chain therefore looks less like
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: one ancient witch traveling unchanged through history, and more like
• 37:00
  Speaker 1: a series of semantic negotiations. Hebrew, mekesipa, Greek, pharmakos, Latin, maleficos,
• 37:08
  Speaker 1: Alfred's cluster of Anglo-Saxon supernatural practitioners, Middle English witches, Tyndale's
• 37:13
  Speaker 1: singular witch, Geneva, bishops, and finally the King James tradition.
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: There is no need to invoke conspiracy or deliberate corruption
• 37:21
  Speaker 1: to make the history strange, because ordinary translation already does
• 37:25
  Speaker 1: something more consequential. It allows one culture's supernatural taxonomy to
• 37:29
  Speaker 1: be interpreted through another culture's vocabulary. Once that becomes visible
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: in Exodus, The same problem appears everywhere else in English
• 37:37
  Speaker 1: historical writing. Greek pharmakies, Latin malefica and venifica, classical strix
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: or striga, saga, soteliga, pythonisa, or culturally distinct northern European
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: diviners or ritual specialists have all, in different contexts, been
• 37:52
  Speaker 1: translated or summarized as witches. Sometimes the translation is useful shorthand,
• 37:57
  Speaker 1: but sometimes it quietly erases the very distinctions historians should
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: be trying to recover. That is how translation can manufacture ancestry.
• 38:06
  Speaker 1: If a Greek potion worker, a Roman harmful magician, a
• 38:10
  Speaker 1: biblical ritual specialist, an Anglo-Saxon witcher, a medieval healer, a
• 38:14
  Speaker 1: Scandinavian diviner, an early modern accused neighbor, and 20th century
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: pagan are all called witches in English, they begin to
• 38:21
  Speaker 1: look like regional versions of one universal ancient profession even
• 38:25
  Speaker 1: when the continuity exists largely in the translator's vocabulary. The
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: English word creates the family resemblance and then tempts us
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: to mistake that resemblance for historical proof. While witch was
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: being used to absorb categories from older languages, the English
• 38:40
  Speaker 1: word itself was also changing dramatically. The grammatical system that
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: had distinguished masculine wicca from feminine witche weakened along with
• 38:48
  Speaker 1: Old English inflection, and Middle English produced spellings such as W-I-C-C-H-E, W-I-C-H-E,
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: and W-Y-C-C-H-E. that could be used without preserving the older
• 39:01
  Speaker 1: masculine-feminine division. Surviving Middle English evidence therefore makes something explicit
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: that modern fantasy language often obscures. A witch could be
• 39:11
  Speaker 1: a man. That point is not merely theoretical. Medieval and
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: early modern texts can apply the word to male magical figures,
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: including the Arthurian Merlin, who in later Middle English tradition
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: can be insulted or categorized as a WYTCHE, despite being
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: one of the most famous male magicians in European literature.
• 39:33
  Speaker 1: By this stage, witch is no longer functioning as one
• 39:36
  Speaker 1: half of a neat grammatical pair, and there is no
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: historical rule requiring a man to be called a wizard
• 39:42
  Speaker 1: or warlock instead. At the same time, Middle English literature
• 39:46
  Speaker 1: gives us glimpses of witches doing something more complicated in
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: simply causing supernatural harm. In Piers Plowman, a witcher appears
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: in the context of charms and illicit healing, with people
• 39:57
  Speaker 1: resorting to such a practitioner when they seek relief outside
• 40:00
  Speaker 1: approved religious or medical channels. The writer condemns the behavior,
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: but the social fact beneath that condemnation is revealing. The
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: practitioner is being consulted because somebody believes they can help.
• 40:12
  Speaker 1: That distinction becomes increasingly important as we move into early
• 40:15
  Speaker 1: modern England. because the same supernatural world can contain a
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: feared witch believed to cause illness and a cunning man
• 40:22
  Speaker 1: or cunning woman hired to diagnose that illness, identify its
• 40:25
  Speaker 1: supposed supernatural source, find stolen property, recover lost goods, provide
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: protective charms, tell fortunes, or undo bewitchment. The techniques could
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: overlap while the labels remain socially different, which means that
• 40:38
  Speaker 1: from this point onward, the history of the word becomes
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: less a question of what magical practitioners actually did and
• 40:45
  Speaker 1: more a question of of who was allowed to be
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: called helpful, who was called dangerous, and who had the
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: authority to decide the difference. George Gifford's late 16th century
• 40:55
  Speaker 1: dialogues preserve this distinction unusually well because his ordinary characters
• 40:59
  Speaker 1: speak quite naturally about consulting cunning people for sickness, stolen goods,
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: and suspected bewitchment, while simultaneously fearing witches as dangerous neighbors.
• 41:10
  Speaker 1: Gifford himself, however, was a Protestant minister who wanted to
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: destroy that distinction. Supernatural assistance obtained through unauthorized means remained
• 41:19
  Speaker 1: spiritually illicit whether the apparent result was healing or injury,
• 41:23
  Speaker 1: because any genuine supernatural efficacy outside legitimate Christianity ultimately had
• 41:29
  Speaker 1: to involve the cunning woman who supposedly removed the curse
• 41:32
  Speaker 1: might therefore be spiritually no safer than the witch accused
• 41:36
  Speaker 1: of casting it, and perhaps more dangerous because her healthful
• 41:39
  Speaker 1: reputation encouraged people to trust her. That conflict between popular
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: classification and learned classification gives us one of the most
• 41:48
  Speaker 1: revealing lines in the entire history of the word. In
• 41:51
  Speaker 1: John Lilly's comedy Mother Bombay, when the title character is
• 41:55
  Speaker 1: confronted with the accusation that people say she is a witch,
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: she rejects the label with the wonderfully concise answer, they lie,
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: I am a cunning woman. She does not deny possessing
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: unusual knowledge. making predictions, or performing the role for which
• 42:10
  Speaker 1: people seek her assistance. She denies that witch is the
• 42:13
  Speaker 1: correct word for what she is. The joke works because
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: the audience understands that witch and cunning woman are not
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: socially interchangeable even if theologians increasingly insist that both practitioners
• 42:25
  Speaker 1: belong inside the same spiritually condemned category. William Perkins makes
• 42:31
  Speaker 1: that learned campaign explicit in his discourse of the damned
• 42:35
  Speaker 1: art of witchcraft. published after his death in 1608, where
• 42:39
  Speaker 1: he distinguishes harmful witches from what he calls good or
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: unbinding witches, practitioners commonly known outside theological literature as wise
• 42:48
  Speaker 1: men or wise women. These so-called good witches might diagnose bewitchment,
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: heal injuries supposedly caused by hostile magic, or counter another
• 42:57
  Speaker 1: practitioner's spells. Yet Perkins insists that their benevolent intentions cannot
• 43:02
  Speaker 1: rescue them from the category because their supernatural assistance ultimately
• 43:06
  Speaker 1: depends upon the devil. The adjective good therefore does not
• 43:11
  Speaker 1: neutralize witch so much as expose how negative the unmodified
• 43:15
  Speaker 1: word had already become. If witch naturally meant nothing more
• 43:19
  Speaker 1: than person who practices magic, theologians would have had much
• 43:23
  Speaker 1: lesser reason to distinguish continually between good witches, bare witches,
• 43:27
  Speaker 1: white witches, and unbinding witches. So the legal broadening visible
• 43:32
  Speaker 1: in 1604 also had a history of its own. England's
• 43:35
  Speaker 1: first parliamentary statute directed specifically against witchcraft was enacted under
• 43:40
  Speaker 1: Henry VIII in 1542, making conjurations, witchcrafts, sorcery, and enchantments
• 43:46
  Speaker 1: matter for secular criminal law rather than leaving them only
• 43:49
  Speaker 1: within ecclesiastical condemnation. That statute was repealed in 1547 during
• 43:55
  Speaker 1: the reign of Edward VI, but the category returned under
• 43:58
  Speaker 1: Elizabeth I in 1563 in an act against conjurations, enchantments,
• 44:03
  Speaker 1: and witchcrafts showing that statutory witchcraft could disappear from English
• 44:07
  Speaker 1: law and then be deliberately rebuilt within a generation. The
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: Elizabethan law is particularly revealing because it still graded the
• 44:14
  Speaker 1: seriousness of magical offenses according to their alleged effects. Witchcraft
• 44:19
  Speaker 1: that caused a person's death could become a capital crime,
• 44:22
  Speaker 1: while lesser injuries and other magical offenses carry lesser punishments,
• 44:25
  Speaker 1: and the statute also reached activities such as using magic
• 44:28
  Speaker 1: to discover lost or stolen property or to provoke unlawful love.
• 44:33
  Speaker 1: The legal vocabulary was therefore already doing something similar to
• 44:37
  Speaker 1: what theologians had been doing conceptually, drawing destructive maleficium, divination,
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: love magic, and service-type practices into overlapping statutory categories. The
• 44:48
  Speaker 1: 1604 Act did not invent that process, but it intensified
• 44:52
  Speaker 1: and demonized it. Formally titled An Act Against Conjuration, Witchcraft
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: in Dealing with Evil and Wicked Spirits, the Jacobean statute
• 45:00
  Speaker 1: added explicit language about consulting, covenanting with, employing, feeding, or
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: rewarding evil and wicked spirits, and it imposed the death
• 45:09
  Speaker 1: penalty for some of the most frightening acts associated with
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: diabolical magic, including the use of human remains in magical
• 45:16
  Speaker 1: operations and witchcraft believed to have killed, wasted, consumed, pinned,
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: or lamed another person. Yet the statute still reached activities
• 45:24
  Speaker 1: that look remarkably like the services attributed to cunning practitioners
• 45:28
  Speaker 1: including using witchcraft, enchantment, charms, or sorcery to discover buried treasure,
• 45:34
  Speaker 1: locate lost or stolen goods, or provoke someone to unlawful love.
• 45:38
  Speaker 1: A first conviction for some of those lesser offenses could
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: bring imprisonment and public exposure in the pillory, while repeated
• 45:44
  Speaker 1: conviction could escalate to death. Read as a sequence, the
• 45:49
  Speaker 1: statutes of 1542, 1563, and 1604 show the legal witch
• 45:51
  Speaker 1: being constructed in stages. first as a secular felony category,
• 45:59
  Speaker 1: then partly according to the harm magic supposedly produced, and
• 46:03
  Speaker 1: then finally as a category increasingly entangled with explicit demonic
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: agency while still absorbing divination, love magic, treasure hunting, and
• 46:12
  Speaker 1: service-type practices. The same law also helps explain why an
• 46:16
  Speaker 1: accusation could become socially explosive, even before anyone entered a courtroom.
• 46:21
  Speaker 1: By this period, calling a neighbor a witch could imply
• 46:24
  Speaker 1: not merely eccentricity, or unusual ritual knowledge, but the intentional
• 46:28
  Speaker 1: production of sickness, livestock deaths, infertility, wasting disease, unexplained accidents,
• 46:34
  Speaker 1: or death itself, all within a culture where certain forms
• 46:38
  Speaker 1: of witchcraft had become felony offenses. The word, therefore, did
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: more than describe a supposedly supernatural person. It reorganized how
• 46:45
  Speaker 1: a community interpreted misfortune. An argument followed by a sick child,
• 46:51
  Speaker 1: a denied request followed by the death of a cow,
• 46:53
  Speaker 1: an angry remark followed by unexplained pain, or an old
• 46:57
  Speaker 1: quarrel remembered after a sudden death could begin to look
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: like pieces of one hidden pattern once somebody supplied the
• 47:03
  Speaker 1: explanation which. This is why witchcraft accusations so often develop
• 47:09
  Speaker 1: through accumulated reputation rather than through one spectacular event. Communities
• 47:14
  Speaker 1: did not necessarily discover an obvious magical criminal and then
• 47:18
  Speaker 1: neutrally collect evidence around them. Stories, suspicions, previous quarrels, illnesses, rumors,
• 47:24
  Speaker 1: inherited family reputations, and unexplained misfortunes could gather over years
• 47:29
  Speaker 1: until one person increasingly became the explanation through which unrelated
• 47:33
  Speaker 1: events were interpreted. Once the label had attached itself, every
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: new accident could confirm the old suspicion. while older events
• 47:41
  Speaker 1: could be remembered directly because the community now possessed a
• 47:44
  Speaker 1: supernatural cause capable of joining them together. Which was therefore
• 47:49
  Speaker 1: an etymology now describing a pre-existing social identity. Under the
• 47:53
  Speaker 1: right conditions, repeated accusation could help manufacture that identity. Learned
• 47:58
  Speaker 1: demonology then supplied an increasingly elaborate explanation for how the
• 48:02
  Speaker 1: accused person's supposed power operated. A villager might begin with
• 48:07
  Speaker 1: the practical belief that an angry neighbor had caused an illness.
• 48:10
  Speaker 1: But Christian theologians faced a deeper problem because orthodox doctrine
• 48:14
  Speaker 1: did not comfortably allow ordinary human beings to possess autonomous
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: supernatural powers capable of overriding nature at will. If the
• 48:22
  Speaker 1: harmful effect was real, some greater spiritual agency had to
• 48:26
  Speaker 1: make it possible, and demons provided the answer. The local
• 48:30
  Speaker 1: person feared for causing hidden supernatural injury, could therefore be
• 48:34
  Speaker 1: absorbed into a theological system involving Satan, apostasy, demonic assistants, familiars, covenants,
• 48:41
  Speaker 1: and eventually the much wider European imagery of nocturnal assemblies
• 48:45
  Speaker 1: and the witch's sabbath. This transformation did not happen all
• 48:49
  Speaker 1: at once, nor did every English accusation contain every element
• 48:53
  Speaker 1: of continental demonology. The older belief in harmful magic remained crucial,
• 48:58
  Speaker 1: and many accusations still began with intensely local disputes rather
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: than with claims of participation in a vast satanic conspiracy.
• 49:07
  Speaker 1: What changed was that the learned theory can now explain
• 49:09
  Speaker 1: the feared neighbor's power by placing that person inside a
• 49:13
  Speaker 1: cosmic drama. The alleged witch had once been dangerous because
• 49:17
  Speaker 1: hidden supernatural harm was attributed to her. them. The demonological
• 49:21
  Speaker 1: witch became dangerous because that harm could be interpreted as
• 49:25
  Speaker 1: evidence of an alliance with the devil. That distinction matters
• 49:28
  Speaker 1: because it prevents us from projecting the complete 17th century
• 49:31
  Speaker 1: witch backward into the old English Wicca. The Athelstanian lawgiver
• 49:37
  Speaker 1: concerned with witchcraft as one possible form of concealed lethal harm,
• 49:41
  Speaker 1: and the Jacobian legislators speaking of evil spirits, corpse magic, charms,
• 49:45
  Speaker 1: stolen property, and unlawful love belong to one long linguistic history,
• 49:50
  Speaker 1: but they are not describing one unchanged institution. The word
• 49:54
  Speaker 1: has accumulated doctrine, legal definitions, theological explanations, and social expectations
• 50:00
  Speaker 1: until a term whose precise earliest boundary remains uncertain can
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: eventually carry an entire supernatural cosmology. The word has accumulated doctrine,
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: legal definitions, theological explanations, and social expectations until a term
• 50:16
  Speaker 1: whose precise earliest boundary remains uncertain can eventually carry an
• 50:20
  Speaker 1: entire supernatural cosmology. The increasingly feminine image of that creature
• 50:25
  Speaker 1: is another acclamation rather than something contained inside the original word.
• 50:30
  Speaker 1: Women form the large majority of those prosecuted for witchcraft
• 50:33
  Speaker 1: across much of early modern Europe. often estimated at roughly
• 50:37
  Speaker 1: three-quarters or more of accused or prosecuted persons overall, although
• 50:41
  Speaker 1: the proportion varied dramatically according to region and period. Some
• 50:45
  Speaker 1: areas produced substantially larger numbers of male defendants, and scholarship
• 50:49
  Speaker 1: on male witches has demonstrated how misleading it is to
• 50:53
  Speaker 1: treat them as rare exceptions to a definition that was
• 50:56
  Speaker 1: inherently female. The gender pattern is historically real. The idea
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: that the noun itself always meant a woman is not.
• 51:04
  Speaker 1: The reasons for that imbalance are too complicated to reduce
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: to one slogan. Learned demonology certainly contained profoundly misogynistic arguments
• 51:12
  Speaker 1: about female weakness, sexuality, credulity, speech, and successability to demonic deception.
• 51:18
  Speaker 1: But accusations also developed through patterns of poverty, household responsibility,
• 51:22
  Speaker 1: neighbor conflict, disputed charity, healing work, reputation, family relationships, occupational vulnerability,
• 51:30
  Speaker 1: property disputes, and the ordinary social tensions through which people
• 51:34
  Speaker 1: encountered one another. Regional differences are large enough that no
• 51:37
  Speaker 1: single model explains every prosecution. Yet repeated association gradually created
• 51:42
  Speaker 1: a cultural prototype in which witch became increasingly female even
• 51:47
  Speaker 1: after the language itself no longer required it. By this point,
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: the pattern is clear. The language did not make the
• 51:53
  Speaker 1: witch female. Culture increasingly did. Old English had masculine Wicca
• 51:59
  Speaker 1: and feminine Wiccae. Modern English weakened that grammatical distinction and
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: early modern prosecutions included both men and women, yet art, theater, demonology, folklore,
• 52:10
  Speaker 1: and eventually dictionaries increasingly presented the witch as female until
• 52:14
  Speaker 1: the association began to feel grammatical rather than historical. That
• 52:19
  Speaker 1: culture prototype becomes so powerful that modern popular language often
• 52:23
  Speaker 1: assumes wizard or warlock must be the ancient male counterpart
• 52:26
  Speaker 1: of witch. even though neither word originated as the opposite
• 52:30
  Speaker 1: sex of the witch. By the 18th and 19th centuries,
• 52:33
  Speaker 1: centuries of accumulated theology had become so deeply attached to
• 52:37
  Speaker 1: the word that dictionary definitions could make relatively late ideas
• 52:41
  Speaker 1: appear almost primordial. Noah Webster's 1828 American Dictionary of the
• 52:47
  Speaker 1: English Language, for example, defines a witch first as a
• 52:51
  Speaker 1: woman who by compact with the devil practices sorcery or enchantment.
• 52:55
  Speaker 1: Placed beside the Old English evidence, that definition becomes almost
• 52:59
  Speaker 1: an archaeological cross-section of semantic change. Woman, devil, and compact
• 53:04
  Speaker 1: have all become central to the dictionary meaning, even though
• 53:07
  Speaker 1: none can simply be extracted from the morphology of ancient Wicca.
• 53:12
  Speaker 1: Webster is not discovering what the word always meant. He
• 53:15
  Speaker 1: is recording what many centuries of theology, prosecution, literature, and
• 53:20
  Speaker 1: gendered imagination have taught English speakers to hear when the
• 53:23
  Speaker 1: word is spoken. Yet even while the witch was becoming
• 53:26
  Speaker 1: culturally more specific, the word was simultaneously escaping literal supernatural
• 53:31
  Speaker 1: belief through metaphor. Bewitch could mean the literal exercise of enchantment,
• 53:36
  Speaker 1: but it increasingly described fascination, attraction, or charm so powerful
• 53:41
  Speaker 1: that someone seemed to lose ordinary resistance. A face could
• 53:45
  Speaker 1: be bewitching, a voice enchanting, and a personality charming without
• 53:49
  Speaker 1: anyone seriously proposing that a felony had taken place. The
• 53:53
  Speaker 1: supernatural vocabulary survives if the belief in the supernatural act
• 53:57
  Speaker 1: becomes unnecessary. The same transformation occurs more darkly with witch hunt.
• 54:01
  Speaker 1: Once the expression acquires a political and social metaphorical meaning,
• 54:05
  Speaker 1: especially during the 20th century, the word no longer has
• 54:08
  Speaker 1: to refer to magical practitioners at all. A witch hunt
• 54:12
  Speaker 1: becomes a campaign of obsessive accusation, persecution, or suspicion directed
• 54:16
  Speaker 1: against some targeted class of people. There is a grim
• 54:19
  Speaker 1: symmetry in that development. because after centuries during which people
• 54:23
  Speaker 1: were hunted because they were called witches, the English language
• 54:26
  Speaker 1: eventually turns the history of those accusations into a name
• 54:29
  Speaker 1: for the mechanism of persecution itself. Before the word could
• 54:33
  Speaker 1: become a positive religious identity, however, English law would undergo
• 54:38
  Speaker 1: one more remarkable reversal. And this one may be the
• 54:41
  Speaker 1: cleanest demonstration anywhere in the story of how completely the
• 54:44
  Speaker 1: legal meaning of witchcraft could change. In 1604, The state
• 54:48
  Speaker 1: had legislated against witchcraft because supernatural acts were treated as
• 54:52
  Speaker 1: potentially real and criminal. By the 18th century, Parliament would
• 54:57
  Speaker 1: increasingly approach the supposed practitioner from almost the opposite direction,
• 55:01
  Speaker 1: punishing not the effect of witch, but the person who
• 55:04
  Speaker 1: pretended to possess powers that the law was becoming less
• 55:07
  Speaker 1: willing to acknowledge as real. The statute, commonly known as
• 55:11
  Speaker 1: Witchcraft Act of 1735, Conventionally dated by its parliamentary session,
• 55:16
  Speaker 1: although it received royal assessment in 1736, marks one of
• 55:20
  Speaker 1: the strangest reversals in the entire history of the word,
• 55:23
  Speaker 1: because Parliament did not merely reduce the punishment for witchcraft.
• 55:27
  Speaker 1: It fundamentally changed what sort of offense the law imagined
• 55:30
  Speaker 1: it was dealing with. The earliest statutes had treated supernatural
• 55:34
  Speaker 1: acts as potentially real crimes. Asking whether somebody had used witchcraft, enchantment, charms,
• 55:40
  Speaker 1: or spirits to injure another person, discover hidden information, provoke
• 55:44
  Speaker 1: unlawful love, or accomplish other forbidden ends. The 18th century
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: statute instead repealed the older witchcraft laws and directed its
• 55:52
  Speaker 1: penalty toward people who claimed or pretended to exercise witchcraft, sorcery, enchantment, conjuration, fortune-telling,
• 56:01
  Speaker 1: or occult means for discovering lost and stolen goods. The
• 56:05
  Speaker 1: legal problem had moved from the dangerous effectiveness of supernatural
• 56:08
  Speaker 1: power toward the claim to possess supernatural power in the
• 56:12
  Speaker 1: first place. That shift needs one important qualification because the
• 56:15
  Speaker 1: word pretend in 18th century legal English did not necessarily
• 56:20
  Speaker 1: mean fraudulent deception in precisely the modern sense. It could
• 56:24
  Speaker 1: also mean to claim or profess, which helps explain why
• 56:27
  Speaker 1: later courts could apply the statute without first proving that
• 56:31
  Speaker 1: the accused privately knew their supernatural claims were false. Nevertheless,
• 56:36
  Speaker 1: the conceptual reversal is extraordinary. In 1604, English law could
• 56:41
  Speaker 1: condemn someone because witchcraft was believed capable of producing real effects.
• 56:45
  Speaker 1: Under the later statute, the law increasingly approached the supposed
• 56:49
  Speaker 1: practitioner as someone claiming powers the state no longer needed
• 56:52
  Speaker 1: to recognize as objectively real. The legal witch had moved
• 56:56
  Speaker 1: from supernatural criminal toward false or prohibited claimant to supernatural ability.
• 57:02
  Speaker 1: That 18th century change remained legally relevant for almost an
• 57:05
  Speaker 1: unbelievable length of time. During the Second World War, the
• 57:10
  Speaker 1: Scottish physical medium Helen Duncan became entangled with the same
• 57:14
  Speaker 1: statute more than two centuries after its passage. Duncan had
• 57:18
  Speaker 1: built a career around seances in which he claimed to
• 57:20
  Speaker 1: materialize spirits. In 1944, after authorities investigated her activities in
• 57:26
  Speaker 1: wartime Portsmouth, she was prosecuted under the Witchcraft Act of
• 57:30
  Speaker 1: 1735 for conspiring to pretend that she could exercise forms
• 57:35
  Speaker 1: of conjurations. The prosecution was not required to prove that
• 57:39
  Speaker 1: the dead could not communicate with the living. The legal
• 57:41
  Speaker 1: question concerned Duncan's claim to exercise the prohibited power. She
• 57:46
  Speaker 1: was convicted and sentenced to nine months imprisonment, and the
• 57:49
  Speaker 1: spectacle of a modern British court reaching back to an
• 57:52
  Speaker 1: 18th century witchcraft act during the Second World War became
• 57:56
  Speaker 1: controversial enough that even Prime Minister Winston Churchill questioned the
• 58:00
  Speaker 1: use of such antiquated legislation. The Duncan case matters here.
• 58:04
  Speaker 1: Not because she was literally being accused of the same
• 58:07
  Speaker 1: kind of witchcraft prosecuted under James I, but because she
• 58:11
  Speaker 1: demonstrates how radically the legal meaning attached to supernatural claims
• 58:15
  Speaker 1: had changed while the vocabulary survived. A 17th century defendant
• 58:20
  Speaker 1: might be prosecuted because authorities accepted the possibility that forbidden
• 58:24
  Speaker 1: magic could kill, waste, lame, or enchant. Duncan could be
• 58:29
  Speaker 1: prosecuted under a law designed around the claim to occult
• 58:32
  Speaker 1: power itself. The word witchcraft remained inside the statute even
• 58:36
  Speaker 1: after the assumption underneath it had shifted almost completely. That
• 58:41
  Speaker 1: legal framework finally disappeared in 1951, when Parliament passed the
• 58:46
  Speaker 1: Fraudulent Mediums Act, repealing what remained of the Witchcraft Act
• 58:50
  Speaker 1: and replacing it with legislation aimed specifically at people who
• 58:54
  Speaker 1: fraudulently represented themselves as spiritualistic mediums or claimed powers such
• 58:59
  Speaker 1: as telepathy and clairvoyance for deceptive purposes. That distinction is
• 59:04
  Speaker 1: subtle but historically enormous. The state had moved from punishing
• 59:09
  Speaker 1: effective witchcraft to punishing the profession or claiming of supernatural
• 59:13
  Speaker 1: ability to framing the problem more explicitly as fraud. And then,
• 59:19
  Speaker 1: only three years later, Gerald Gardner published Witchcraft Today. Few
• 59:24
  Speaker 1: chronological juxtapositions could summarize the changing history of the word
• 59:28
  Speaker 1: more perfectly. In one direction, Britain had only just finished
• 59:32
  Speaker 1: dismantling a legal framework in which the word witchcraft still
• 59:36
  Speaker 1: appeared in criminal legislation. In the other, Gardner was publicly
• 59:40
  Speaker 1: presenting witchcraft as a religion and describing a community of
• 59:43
  Speaker 1: practitioners who deliberately claimed dissent from the very people earlier
• 59:48
  Speaker 1: generations had condemned. The same word that English law had
• 59:51
  Speaker 1: spent centuries criminalizing was becoming something a person could voluntarily
• 59:56
  Speaker 1: place on the cover of a book describing their own
• 59:59
  Speaker 1: spiritual tradition. Gardner referred to the practitioners themselves as the Wicca,
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 1: usually with a single C, and connected them with what
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 1: he believed to be the surviving remnants of an ancient
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 1: pre-Christian witch religion. Those claims did not emerge in isolation.
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 1: Gardner lived in an intellectual environment shaped by occultism, ceremonial magic,
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 1: folklore studies, romantic ideas about pagan survival, and particularly the
• 1:00:28
  Speaker 1: influential witch cult theories associated with Margaret Murray, who had
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 1: argued that the victims of the European witch trials included
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 1: members of a surviving organized pagan fertility religion. Murray's historical
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 1: reconstruction would eventually be rejected by the overwhelming majority of
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 1: professional historians. Yet for several decades, her ideas exercised enormous
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 1: influence over how educated readers, folklorists, occultists, and eventually modern
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 1: witches imagined the relationship between the witch trials and pre-Christian religion. Gardner, therefore,
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 1: did not simply discover an untouched Anglo-Saxon word and restore
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 1: its original meaning. He participated in a 20th century reconstruction
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 1: in which ancient vocabulary, early modern witch mythology, ceremonial occultism, folklore,
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 1: modern ritual innovation, and claims of pagan continuity were drawn
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 1: together in a new religious identity. Ronald Hutton has described
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 1: how Gardner's Witchcraft Today in 1954 gave the emerging religion
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 1: the generic name Wicca with one C, which during the
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 1: 1960s developed into the now familiar Wicca with two Cs,
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 1: while scholars such as Ethan Doyle White have emphasized that
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 1: Gardner himself generally used Wicca with one C for the
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 1: people rather than consistently using Wicca with two Cs as
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 1: the formal name of the religion. And now the pronunciation
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 1: problem from the beginning begins. finally comes home. Modern Wicca,
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 1: pronounced Wicca, visibly resembles Old English Wicca almost perfectly, but
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 1: the continuous historical sound development of the Old English word
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 1: leads toward witch, not the modern pronunciation witcher. The irony
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 1: is almost too perfect. Modern witch looks less ancient but
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 1: preserves the historical sound development, while modern Wicca looks more
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 1: ancient but does not preserve the old pronunciations. The semantic
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 1: reversal is even greater than the phonological one. For most
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 1: of the historical evidence we have examined, witch is overwhelmingly
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 1: a name applied to somebody from outside. Lawmakers classify the wicker,
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 1: churchmen condemn the witcher, neighbors accuse suspected witches, theologians expand
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 1: the definition, courts decide whether defendants belong inside it, playwrights
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 1: use the word to distinguish one kind of magical practitioner
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 1: from another, dictionaries eventually write gender, criminality, and the devil
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 1: into the definition. When people associated with the beneficial supernatural
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 1: practice speak for themselves, we can even find them explicitly
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 1: rejecting the label, as Mother Bambi does when she insists
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 1: that she is not a witch, but a cunning woman.
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 1: Modern witchcraft reverses the direction of that act of naming.
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 1: A practitioner can now say, I am a witch, and
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 1: mean something almost opposite to what a 17th century accuser intended.
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 1: Not confession to harmful magic or allegiance to Satan, but
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 1: membership in a religion, participation in an occult tradition, engagement
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 1: with ritual magic, identification with nature's spirituality, or simply the
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 1: adoption of a personal magical identity. Not every modern witch
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 1: is Wiccan, and not every Wiccan necessarily emphasizes the identity
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 1: witch in the same way. but the linguistic transformation is unmistakable.
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 1: A word once capable of destroying someone's reputation becomes a
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 1: word someone may deliberately choose. 20th century feminist movements pushed
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 1: that reclamation even farther by turning the witch into a
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 1: symbol of female autonomy, suppressed knowledge, resistance, sexuality, social marginalization,
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 1: and persecution by patriarchal authority. Some strands of that modern
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 1: symbolism relied upon historical claims that do not withstand scrutiny.
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 1: including the idea that millions of witches were executed, that
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 1: the trials represented the extermination of one organized prehistoric goddess religion,
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 1: that essentially every accused witch was a healer or midwife,
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 1: or that the victims formed an underground pagan church surviving
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 1: unchanged from pre-Christian antiquity. Those ideas matter historically not because
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 1: they accurately describe the early modern trials, but because they
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 1: became part of the modern meaning of witches. Reclamation did
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 1: not merely change how people valued the word. It produced
• 1:04:52
  Speaker 1: new stories explaining what the word had supposedly meant all along.
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 1: And that brings us back to the myths we began with.
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 1: Which does not demonstrably mean wise woman. Even though a
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 1: connection with knowledge or divination remains one serious etymological possibility.
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 1: Which does not demonstrably mean one who bends reality. Although
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 1: turning or bending roots have been proposed. The old English
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 1: word was not inherently female. The wizard was never simply
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 1: the universal male version of witch, and warlock originally belonged
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 1: to the language of oath-breaking and treachery rather than functioning
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 1: as the ancient male counterpart. The King James translators did
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 1: not invent the biblical witch. Greek pharmak vocabulary does not
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 1: reduce neatly to the modern word poisoner, and modern Wicca
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 1: does not represent an unchanged Old English word, pronunciation, or
• 1:05:41
  Speaker 1: demonstrably continuous Anglo-Saxon religion. Yet correcting those claims does not
• 1:05:47
  Speaker 1: make the history of the witch less strange. It makes
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 1: it stranger. What begins as an uncertain Old English category
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 1: moves through lore, translation, theology, rumor, demonology, statue, skepticism, modern
• 1:06:01
  Speaker 1: occult revival, and finally reclamation without ever preserving one stable
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 1: social identity. The word survives because every period keeps loading
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 1: something new onto it. The history of which, then, is
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 1: not really the history of one magical profession. It is
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 1: the history of who gets to classify whom. Because the
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 1: boundaries separating which from healer, which from diviner, which from
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 1: cunning person, which from fraud, which from religious practitioner, and
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 1: which from political symbol has repeatedly been drawn by whoever
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 1: possesses enough cultural authority to make their definitions stick. A monk,
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 1: translating Latin, a king adapting biblical law, a neighbor explaining
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 1: a dead cow, a theologian explaining demonic power, a parliament
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 1: writing a felony statute, a dictionary writer defining a devil's compact,
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 1: a 20th century occultist reviving an ancient-looking word, and a
• 1:06:56
  Speaker 1: modern practitioner reclaiming an insult are all participating in the
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 1: same long struggle over the meaning of the name. After
• 1:07:05
  Speaker 1: more than a thousand years, perhaps the deepest question is
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 1: therefore no longer What does witch really mean? Because the
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 1: word has never agreed to give us one permanent answer.
• 1:07:15
  Speaker 1: The better question is, who in any particular century had
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 1: the power to decide what a witch was, and what
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 1: happened to the people who had to live inside that definition?
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 1: And that's the end of another Occult Rejects. Hope you
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 1: all enjoyed, and until the next one.