The Witch is a Wanderer in a Fateful Forest

Every year or three, a fresh surge of posts from different writers attempts a reconsideration or a new clarification of what a “Witch” is- or what a Witch ought to be. Naturally, they are all aiming at the perspective of this moment in time, which is both good and expected; for what must be millions of people by now, the term Witch has become important to self-identity and relevant to many of their aspirations. It’s going to attract commentary.

How such a strange word got to be so popular in this way is a complex and (now) controversial topic.

Most people who keep up with the sociopolitics of the word “Witch” already know some of the answer: a fast-spreading alternative spiritual practice emerged in the middle of the 20th century, and branched out just as quickly, bringing the term “Witch” and its ancient antecedent wicce or wicca to the public eye.

The incorporation of the Wiccan movement into the larger New Age and neo-occultist movement certainly spiced up what was a bedrock of Theosophy, Spiritualism, quasi-Eastern religion, and ceremonial magic with a new kind of “Pagan” flavor. The very idea of Witches as misunderstood and long-persecuted Nature worshipers, herbalists, fertility ritualists, and healers sometimes devoted to pantheistic Goddess-type figures or Horned Gods mistaken for Devils, was a fascinating twist.

This new surge of “Witch, reconsidered” also synergistically combined with certain academic theories that had gained a certain (short lived) credibility in those days, regarding the possibility of Pagan cults surviving in secret into modern times. It was enough to inspire the imagination of a lot of people, and offer to many others what seemed like a potent escape from the boredom, misogyny, and spiritual staleness of mainstream Western religions.

Here, hidden in our midst, was a ‘Nature spirituality’ older than the dim cultural Christianity that so many couldn’t connect with. And it was wrapped in the dressing of the Witch: a dressing that radiated with individualist power, mystical power, sex positivity, an accepting and tolerant spiritual community, excitement, and even the darkness of scandal and misunderstanding, which always brings a hint of cultural celebrity. It was adventure; it was a hidden side of life that was opening its doors to any who were brave enough to seek its mystery.

The passage of time and further academic study has tempered a lot of these initial passions and hopes. But before it did, a lot of people identified as Witches through this cultural phenomenon, and a lot of writers and media internalized this new twist on the historical narrative of “Witch”.

But this is only part of the story of how “Witch” got to be such a compelling factor in so many people’s modern identity.

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In many of my published works, and in my courses, I have repeatedly said that no one owns the word “Witch”, and no one can tell another how it must be used. Of course there’s some limits to this: it might be better to say that no one can tell another that they can’t self-identify with the word. And that’s true; but it’s also true that a word that simply anyone, anywhere, under any circumstances can take and use as they will, becomes a meaningless word. A word completely disconnected from its history is just as lost and hollow as humans who become disconnected from their history.

Words and language are already complicated things, on many levels. But one of the things they were meant to do was help us to co-exist and co-share in the world. If I tell you I have an apple, and you need an apple, and you come to me only to discover that I have a pear… you might feel put out a bit when I explain to you that I use the term “apple” to refer to the fruit that other people typically call pear.

There’s no law against me describing pears as apples, and I may even have a convincing reason to make this idiosyncratic language transformation in my personal use. But if you really needed an apple, my personal reasoning likely won’t make you feel any better.

Language- in this sense- was never supposed to be about individuals as much as the collective of all of us, and to help us all as we navigate through life’s enormous field of shapes, forms, and forces. Language rapidly becomes an agreed-upon story that we all share, so that we can describe important things to one another, find important things, and engage in co-creative acts with one another with some certainty we wouldn’t otherwise have.

There’s always the danger that the “agreed upon story” of language can become oppressive to some; when that is discovered, naturally the process of re-negotiating the collective story can begin, and that has its own twists and turns which society is always in the process of working out.

Today I’m not speaking to the oppressive stories and the linguistic skirmishes of our day; I’m speaking to something else: the original story of the word “Witch”.

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There are some who wonder if we’ve really lost the idea of a Witch entirely, owing to how idiosyncratically used the word has become. Those who are charitable to the idiosyncratic possession of the word will say that we’ve merely expanded the term, to allow for wider participation in its power. Those who are not so charitable will simply say “yes, we’ve lost the Witch.”

A very short history of the word “Witch” can easily restore us to an awareness of what the word originally referred to. It was the Anglo-Saxons who gave us the word, and before they were Christianized, the word seems to have referred to a female (wicce) or male (wicca) sorcerer- a person who had dealings with spirits and who was able, by their cooperation, to perform supernatural acts.

Of course, after the Christianization of these people, the spirits that the Wicce/Wicca were dealing with were believed to be the Devil and evil spirits. Before the main centers of Anglo-Saxon culture were Christianized, it’s likely that Witches were simply oracles and people who interacted with spirits, without the moral value of absolute “evil” attached to their spiritual helpers or their extraordinary activities. Witchcraft was a craft indeed- a set of skills that allowed for preternatural insights and outcomes.

The Old English Dictionary says that the words Wicce and Wicca are of unknown origin. Thus, we only have proposals or guesses regarding the etymology of these words, and the etymology is difficult. There may be a connection with the Old English Wigle, which means “divination”, or Wig, which means “idol.” The Proto-Germanic lexicons give us the term *Wikkjaz, which refers to “one who wakes the dead”, or a necromancer- and this could be related by some long distance.

In the (very Christian) Laws of Alfred, from the year 890, Witchcraft was referred to as a woman’s craft primarily, and those laws spell out some interesting connections for Witchcraft: they call for the execution of women who practice not only witchcraft, but also women referred to as gealdricge (women who do incantations) and scinlæce– female wizards or magicians. Scinlæce comes from a root that refers to phantoms or evil spirits.

All three of these ideas were combined in Alfred’s Laws. I think it’s pretty clear that what the later Christian Anglo-Saxons were up in arms against were leftover remnants of their Pagan cultural functionaries whose task it was to consult the dead through oracles, to do incantations to spirits, and to bring about different kinds of divinatory outcomes, alongside the other goals of sorcery- healing, harming, and the like.

Whatever these cultural functionaries were in the pre-Christian past of the Anglo-Saxon people, they became seen as utterly evil and deserving of death. And though these practitioners of a later-condemned range of organic cultural and mystical Arts were originally both male and female, the later Saxons came to view them as primarily female, doubtless for reasons rooted in misogyny.

There is never a moment in any written history where the term “Witch” is used as a good thing. Witches, from the time of Christianization onward (which is also when written records and more-or-less reliable histories from places like England, Ireland, or Scandinavia start) are portrayed as evil, as criminal, as frauds, and as deserving of the death penalty.

At different points in later history, the crime of Witchcraft might not always get people executed; it could be punished with shaming, penance, banishment, and other such things in the later Middle Ages, before being made again into a capital offense around the time of the Reformation. But it remains a crime, it remains notorious, it remains in a realm of scandal and moral offense which is seen as dangerous and destabilizing to communities.

By the 19th century, Western academics had begun to apply the term “witch” to the interanimistic spiritual functionaries within indigenous communities that were being engaged with (often in terrible ways) around the world. Their use of terms like “witch doctor” were originally meant to refer to practitioners of harmful magic in other cultures, though sometimes it could merely refer to healers or hex-breakers. Even as early as the 17th century, Puritan colonists in North America referred to the indigenous sorcerers of the Wampanoag people as “witches”.

This term- Witch– has for centuries referred to either harmful sorcerers (anywhere in the world), or to people in other cultures doing mystical rituals for various purposes, but always with a connotation that it’s non-Christian, Heathenish, and dangerous or at the least fraudulent.

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This is how it was until roughly the 1950’s when the Wiccan movement brought a new narrative about Witchcraft to the world. You might say that the word “Witch” underwent a rapid kind of media-driven rehabilitation, along with many books published revealing the hidden, non-harmful, and more wholesome Nature-respecting truth about Witchcraft.

That new narrative (it’s not really new anymore) is still the dominant narrative for many today. But outside of the Wiccan and (now) Neopagan narrative, academics and other contemporary occultists have studied the folkloric patterns, linguistics, and histories of Witchcraft in Europe and other places and come to other conclusions about the historical nature of the “Witch”.

It is important to note that “other conclusions” doesn’t mean “conclusions which must destroy all other narratives.” There is no official governing body giving us narrative control over a word or concept like “Witch”. There are only many people, all of whom have the same historical right of access to the word, and to what it will finally mean for them.

What we are faced with now is the potential to study different conclusions about “Witch” and (if we choose) to identify with one or another; or to understand Witchcraft as a historical and modern concept using one or another.

This need not be a competition or another tired grounds for attacking other people. Regardless of what some may feel about the ultimate impact of the Wiccan contribution to modern Witchcraft studies and understanding, Wicca brought a lot of people into a positive, stable connection with spiritual forces- and gave at least some people lifelong closeness with supportive communities. In our world, that’s no small feat.

From my perspective, “Witch” did originally refer to a cultural group of sorcerous practitioners who were living out a spiritual vocation. I believe they were people who were spiritually compelled- forced, by mysterious and Fateful Powers- to enter into the practice of sorcerous communion with the Unseen World. They weren’t called to a “religion” as we understand that term now, but to a craft, to an Art which certainly assumed many distinctive regional and cultural forms, and just happens to be the sort of extraordinary craft that one needs to be spiritually compelled to do.

Some of those original Witches may have felt that deep urge to their vocation, and learned their Arts from other humans. Some (I think many) learned those Arts from spirits themselves. Others may have tried to resist that deep urge and became ill or died from resisting it. Anyone interested in learning more about this notion of fateful compulsion and its ancient connection to sorcerous vocations will be greatly rewarded by a reading of Emma Wilby’s essential work Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits, as well as others who have written on it, such as Eliade and Merkur.

To me, a Witch is a Witch because they have no choice but to be a Witch. And this idea- Fateful compulsion– offends so many people today because the entirety of Western Culture and post-Christian Western culture is predicated on the foundational Christian belief in free will. The birth of Christian Western culture was a rebellion against the older Fateful powers and their replacement with the concept of free will as the ultimate moral position.

And this feature of our culture is still vibrantly alive in all of us now, from a pre-conscious level. Our modern construct of the “individual” is predicated on free will as its base.

I believe that Witchcraft at its heart is still a vocation. And many people who find themselves sunk in obsession with occult matters, suffering from a deep thirst for occult matters, and who eventually become quite lost in these strange places, are the souls who are still being called from a deeper level to resolve themselves to the Unseen World.

In ancient times, that resolution to the Strange Powers of the Unseen was typically for community benefit: the “Witched” person served a community function. After Christianization, that function was denied or buried and its place taken by new social functionaries in the form of Christian priests. But spiritual functions- or vocations- cannot be simply buried or forgotten. These things operate from the soul-level, from the Fateful level, beyond the “choices” that social-fiction individuals believe they must make.

The Unseen, in other words, will always get itself heard. It will shape some souls to be its open doors (or its swinging doors anyway), sometimes allowing for glimpses of the healing depths- and the harming depths. Because in every indigenous society that has taken the time to share their stories of sorcerers, some sorcerers are not mediating positive, healing things in some simple way; men and women possessed or influenced by bad powers or harmful, predatory powers are known and feared. And this was certainly true in pre-Christian Britain and Europe, too.

It’s not for no reason that the anthropologists and ethnographers of the past used their own fear-laden word “Witch” to refer to certain indigenous cultural sorcerers. The Helping Powers and the Ruinous Powers are both real inside the body of Nature. And some human beings in every age of the world will become entrapped or compelled by one or the other, becoming their mediators. Some of those humans can approach the level of cultural heroes; some of those humans can become feared, hated, and the basis for darker legends. And some can become both.

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At any rate, the urge to Witchcraft is ultimately something from the deep- a vocation, a Fateful call, that will entangle and claim certain people in every age of the world. Our world has given it many ways to do so, but the hour is growing very late.

There are some who say that the Witch was defined and known (either in Early Modern times, or in times before) as being a contrary figure to society. I think that was almost always true in Early Modern and Medieval times, but only sometimes true in Ancient times and before. With regards to today, a Witch doesn’t have to be a social contrary, but often will end up so, owing to how moronic and lost our society has become with regards to spiritual understanding, community, and belonging.

There are some who say that the Witch covers all regions of the social world, from highest to lowest, and can be anything or everything. That might be true in a small sense, but where a Witch ends up is never really a matter of their own choice. I reject the idea of “free will” and I know that all “will” is conditioned will.

And when the powers that make human souls into Witched souls come and claim what is theirs, it is their surreal influences that determine what becomes of the Witch. They condition the perceptual will of the Witch towards certain ends- just as so many other social forces condition our wills. But the Fateful compelling powers have ways and means of conditioning that far outshine the cheap conditioning of the ordinary human social world.

The Witch is a wanderer in a Fateful Forest. They are not the sole nor ultimate authors of where they end up, or what their strange sagas might mean during their lives, or long after their lives are over. They are participants with spirits who compel them, who teach them, who shape them.

If the Witch’s society is not amenable to Witchcraft, that same dark compulsion could lead them to death or infamy. If their society is not so hard-nosed, then their adventures could be many and of a different sort. But the re-awakening of a Witch in this modern world is not just a localized soul-transformation in a person; it is the re-emergence of something very old, so old as to border on the timeless.

And from that timeless/ancient place, primal and organic constructs of “self” extend and still stand. Modern constructs of self, born in our tooth-gratingly false modern radical individualist fictions are like paper and straw compared to these older experiences of self, these older realities of self-as-connected to the powers of life and death.

Deep down, we are all highly-aware and creative functions of the greater world; we are born from it, conditioned and shaped by it. There is never a time when the “lonely self” has the full executive input that we dream it should have, into what it does. The self is always participant with many other forces, and with the Witch, that self is participant with a surreal and phantasmagoric panoply of forces that our world either condemned into devilry long ago, or declared non-existent.

One way or the other, ambitions to declare that the “Witch” must be a rebel, an outsider, an activist, a liminal figure, an all-encompassing figure, a great spiritual sage, a healer, or any other idea of this nature, are hopeless ambitions. These are rational ambitions, trying to scaffold themselves around an urge and a vocation that drags us ineluctably towards the trans-rational reality of this world.

A Witch will be what a Witch will be, in line with those powers that compel them. I would say that a Witch’s life is no longer their own, or that a Witch’s life is not their own, but that means little when you realize that no one’s life is really their own.

We belong to the World, to one another, to the storms, to the oceans, to the stars, to the winds, to the non-human animals, and to the hosts of spirits that surround us, all of them contributing their own strange influences to our dreams and souls. Every “choice” is the outcome of many forces interacting.

My eternal ideological foes (the radical individualists) will scoff at this; they need to be the sole magnificent stars of their own stories, and so it goes.

But for those who understand this, no explanations or arguments are needed. For those who do not, no explanations or arguments will ever matter. It is not human beings who finally teach anyone about this: it is Spirits and stranger forces that do. And they don’t teach it by telling anyone; they force people to feel the reality of how we truly exist in this world.

And once it has been felt at the soul-level, one is both free and not free, forever. If the Witch is liminal (as the Witch certainly was in the past at times, and is in the present at times) it is this paradox that comes closest to describing the true nature of liminality.

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The images used in this blog post are by Eva Wald