Welcome to the Endless Knot!
What connects witchcraft, dreams, paper clips,
and trees?
The answer is magical, as we’ll find out
in this year’s Halloween video!
The word magic had a long way to travel before
making it into English.
The earliest citations for the word in the
Oxford English dictionary are in the Middle
English of Geoffrey Chaucer.
The word was borrowed through French and Latin
ultimately from Greek, where it got its adjective
form magikos.
But the root of this word wasn’t originally
Greek.
The Greek noun form magos comes from an Old
Iranian word magush, probably through Old
Persian from Old Median.
Magos makes it into English too, as the word
mage, and in the plural form as magi, which
is probably mainly known now from the three
Magi visiting the baby Jesus in the nativity
story.
Ultimately the word can be traced back to
Proto-Indo-European *magh- “to be able,
have power”, the source of a number of other
English words such as the auxiliary verb may,
might, both the verb and the noun, and machine,
so basically words about ability or power.
Now the shift in meaning of this word is the
important thing here.
The Old Iranian word magush referred to a
priest or perhaps originally a priestly caste.
This was the original sense in Greek too,
referring specifically to the Zoroastrian
priests of the Persians, but it gradually
came to have the connotation of “magician”
rather than “priest”, and it’s in that
sense that we have the English word magic.
Well, one religion’s holy priest is another
religion’s dangerous magician.
And this distinction was applied within religions
too, with for instance early mainstream Christians
denouncing the Gnostics as adherents of magic,
and later Protestants referring dismissively
to Catholic magic.
In fact the definition of “magic” is pretty
tricky even today — and so I’ve brought
in someone much more knowledgeable about it
to help me.
Andrew Mark Henry, of Religion for Breakfast,
has thought a lot about this: so, Andrew,
what’s the difference between ‘magic’
and ‘religion’?
And where does ‘science’ fit into it all?
Thanks Mark—those are some tough questions!
Because as you already said, magic and religion
are very subjective terms.
One person's religion is another person's
scary deviant magic.
In fact, for the Romans, the Latin word “magia”
had very pejorative connotations.
Roman authorities used it as a term to label
the rituals that they didn't like or that
they found violent, secretive, or deviant.
This long history of magic being considered
a dark, subversive category of rituals has
influenced how modern scholars have tried
to define it in relation to science and religion.
In the 1920s, the archbishop Alexander Le
Roy states that “Magic is the Perversion
of science as well as of religion.”
And in the 1960s, the archaeologist Alphonse
Barb declared that magic is a degenerate form
of religion.
Just like how food slowly rots away, magic
is the end result of pure religion slowly
rotting under weight of human selfishness.
The thing is, these aren’t academic ways
to define magic.
It has only been in recent decades that scholars
have tried to craft objective definitions
of magic with varying degrees of success.
The archaeologist Drew Wilburn for example
defines magic as “mechanistic ritual”
that “adopts elements of religious practices,”
sometimes exoticized forms of religious practice,
to serve personal ends such as trying to heal
a sickness, curse a rival, or exorcise a demon.
As for science, magic is deeply intertwined
with the history of science.
I often joke that Isaac Newton wasn’t the
first great scientist, but the last great
magician because he wrote tons of books on
the occult…astrology, alchemy, stuff like
that.
Many of the famous names of the Scientific
Revolution and the Enlightenment were also
into the occult.
And it makes sense on some level that magic
and science historically overlap.
Crafting a magical potion, for example, has
elements of science…experimentation, expert
knowledge, the attempt to change nature through
the manipulation of certain ingredients.
It is here in the modern period that we have
strictly differentiated between magic, science,
and religion...the lines between these three
categories of knowledge were much more blurry
for people in the past.
Thanks, Andrew—that’s helpful, but as
you say, I guess there’s no definitive way
to distinguish between magic and religion
and other forms of knowledge, especially in
the ancient world—and that brings us back
to the Magi.
The word magush or its Greek form magos referred
to a priest of the Zoroastrian religion.
To this day, a certain type of Zoroastrian
priest is called a mobad, which is a contraction
of magu-pati meaning something like “priest-master”.
The details are a little unclear, since most
of the evidence we have of them is from the
foreign perspective of Greek writers, but
it seems the magush caste were priests in
an older Iranian polytheistic tradition, but
sometime around the eight century BCE they
adopted the monotheistic Zoroastrian religion.
It seems that with the unification of the
Persian empire under Cyrus the Great the specifically
Median magush caste spread more generally
throughout Iran.
The later 5th century Greek physician and
historian Ktesias referred to Zarathustra,
who was the founder of Zoroastrianism, and
whose name became Zoroaster in Greek, as a
magos himself.
Whatever the exact details might be, the magushes
came to be associated with Zoroastrianism.
It’s important to keep in mind that Zoroastrianism
wasn’t a completely new religion, but a
modification of older traditions.
Scholars aren’t certain when the prophet
Zarathustra lived, but it’s estimated to
be in the 2nd millennium BCE, or perhaps a
little later around the 7th or 6th century
BCE, closer to the time of Cyrus the Great.
He was a religious reformer, who promoted
the idea of one god, Ahura Mazda, and the
importance of human free will and personal
ethics over ritual and sacrifice.
Ahura Mazda’s name, by the way, which means
literally “wise spirit or lord”, comes
ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European roots
*ansu- “spirit” which also produced the
words Æsir and Asgard, the names of the Old
Norse gods and their abode respectively, *men-
“to think”, and *dhe- “to set or put”.
Over time, the other old Iranian gods came
to be demonized, and were referred to as daevas.
Daeva is cognate with Sanskrit deva, one of
the terms for a deity in Hinduism, and goes
back to the Proto-Indo-European root *dyeu-
meaning “to shine”, but also used to refer
to a sky father god *dyue-pəter, which spread
with the Indo-European languages, becoming
Jupiter in Latin, Zeus in Greek, and Tyr or
Tiw in the Germanic pantheon, now reflected
in the word Tuesday.
It’s also the root behind words such as
divine, deity, and Latin deus “god”, as
in deus ex machina, literally “god from
the machine”, referring to an unlikely solution
to an unsolvable problem to resolve a plot.
And as we’ve seen already , machina and
English machine come from the same root as
magic.
The other important concept of Zoroastrianism
to keep in mind are the principles of Asha
and Druj, meaning roughly “Truth” and
“The Lie”, and the ongoing struggle between
these forces, essentially a dualistic battle
between good and evil.
The word asha or arta comes ultimately from
the Proto-Indo-European root *ar- “to fit
together”, which also gives us such words
as order, harmony, rhyme, and rite, as in
a religious rite.
The word druj or drug comes ultimately from
Proto-Indo-European *dhreugh- meaning “to
deceive”, a concept we’ll return to.
Fittingly for this time of year, this root
also leads to the Old Norse draugr, a kind
of undead creature similar to a revenant or
zombie, probably via the idea of a phantom.
The word also gives us the English word dream,
which makes sense if you think of dreams as
deceptive.
This brings us to the connection between dreams
and magic, as one of the roles of the magush
or magi seems to have been dream interpretation.
Another word we have for dreams, at least
bad dreams, is nightmare, which also has its
origins in Old English.
Actually, the compound word nightmare doesn’t
show up until the late 13th century, but is
made up of the Old English words niht and
mare.
But Old English mare and the word nightmare
itself didn’t originally refer to a bad
dream.
The Old English mare originally referred to
a kind of female incubus, who would sit upon
people’s chests while they slept, producing
a feeling of suffocation, and that was the
original meaning of the compound nightmare
as well.
By the 16th century, the word nightmare could
also refer to the feeling of suffocation,
and it wasn’t until as late as the 19th
century that nightmare could refer to any
bad dream.
Now Old English mare can be traced back to
the Proto-Indo-European root *mer- which meant
“to rub away, harm”, a sense we can still
see in the derivative mortar, as in a mortar
and pestle.
That root also led to a number of words having
to do with death, such as mortal and murder.
Interestingly, it’s also the source of the
first element of Mórrígan, the Irish goddess
associated with both war and fate, specifically
with the foretelling of death or victory in
battle, who may have been the source of the
figure in Arthurian legend Morgan le Fay,
a magical enchantress.
Now when we think about dreams and nightmares
and supernatural beings who attack you in
your sleep, we might also think of the character
Freddy Krueger in the 1984 film A Nightmare
on Elm Street, who attacks his teenage victims
in their dreams.
This film, along with the 1978 film Halloween
(with a newly released 2018 sequel), appropriate
for this time of year, featuring Michael Myers
who also targets teenagers, are perhaps two
of the best known examples of the genre of
slasher films, a subgenre of horror films.
Horror films, which drew their inspiration
from Gothic literature like Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula,
were kicked off by early film pioneer Georges
Méliès, who used a variety of visual effects
techniques such as as substitution splices,
multiple exposures, and time-lapse photography
to achieve the supernatural events in his
horror films, which he also used in his early
science fiction films.
Méliès, who had also been a stage magician,
bringing us back to magic again, also developed
the trick film genre, using those same film
techniques, what we might call trick photography,
to allow a magician in a film to be able to
do the seemingly impossible.
And so magic tricks also bring us back to
the idea of deception that we saw with the
root of the words dream and druj.
The word trick comes into English from Old
French trique “trick, deceit, treachery,
cheating” and trichier “to cheat, trick,
deceive”, and is thus related to the word
treachery, but the origin of the Old French
words is uncertain.
They might come from Latin tricari “to trifle,
dally, play tricks”, from the plural noun
tricae “perplexities, wiles, tricks”,
which also gives us the word extricate, literally
“to get out of perplexities”.
Alternately, it might instead come into French
from a Germanic source related to Dutch trek
“drawing, pull” which also has the sense
“trick, cunning” and is traceable back
to the Proto-Indo-European root *dhragh- “to
draw, drag on the ground”.
There’s a related rhyming variant of this
root *tragh- “to draw, drag, move” which
comes into Latin as trahere “to pull, draw”
which comes into English in a number of different
forms, such as traction, tractor, train, attract,
contract, and treat.
The sense development for treat goes like
this: the Latin frequentative form of trahere
is tractare “to manage, handle, deal with,
discuss”, which comes into Old French as
traitier “to deal with, act towards, set
forth (in speech or writing)”; this comes
into Middle English with the sense “negotiate,
bargain, deal with”, and we can see this
sense in the related word treaty; and from
this developed the later senses of “to heal,
cure” and “to entertain with food or drink”
and “anything that gives pleasure”.
So if this tricky etymology is correct, Halloween
trick-or-treating doesn’t really offer a
choice as it’s etymologically redundant!
Now getting back to magic tricks, which deceive
the audience for the purposes of entertainment,
the stage magician often achieves this through
misdirection and sleight of hand, often using
a magic wand to draw the gaze of the viewer.
Now of course beyond the worlds of stage magic
and fiction, with Harry Potter’s wand and
Gandalf’s staff, there are ancient traditions
of wands used for magical purposes, probably
based on the sceptres that were widespread
symbols of rulership.
For instance, in Homer’s Odyssey, the witch
Circe uses a magic rod (called a rhabdos Greek)
to transform Odysseus’s men into swine,
and in the biblical book of Exodus when Moses
and Aaron try to coerce Pharaoh into freeing
the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt, the first
wonder is Aaron throwing down his rod (which
is translated into Greek as rhabdos in the
Septuagint) and transforming it into a serpent.
Another bit of stage magic that also has a
real historical foundation is the crystal
ball, now the cliché of the amusement park
fortune-teller.
In the 16th century, John Dee, mathematician,
astronomer, and occult philosopher, who was
an adviser to Queen Elizabeth I, gazed into
crystals in an attempt to see visions of angels.
This is part of a larger category called scrying,
in which the practitioner stares into a reflective,
refractive, or luminescent surface or object,
such as water, a mirror, or fire, in order
to gain some sort of prophecy or revelation.
And in a sense, this is kind of similar and
sometimes overlaps with dream interpretation
otherwise known as oneiromancy.
One famous example of this comes from the
biblical book of Genesis, the famous Joseph
who had the coat of many colours.
Joseph was given that coat because he was
the favourite son of his father Jacob, who
was also by the way prone to receiving dream
visions, having earlier received the vision
of a stairway to heaven, no not that stairway
to heaven, Jacob’s Ladder.
Well, in addition to receiving that technicolour
sign of his father’s favouritism, Joseph
also had two dreams which symbolically showed
his brothers bowing down to him.
So his brothers were naturally jealous of
him, and sold him into slavery, and convinced
their father that he was killed by wild beasts.
Through a series of adventures in Egypt, in
which Joseph accurately interpreted the prophetic
dreams of fellow prisoners, and later interpreting
the dream of the Pharaoh predicting seven
years of abundance followed by seven years
of famine, thus advising him to store up surplus
grain, Joseph was made the vizier of Egypt.
Now during that famine, many people came to
Egypt to purchase grain, including his brothers.
So Joseph devised a trick for them, planting
a silver cup in the sack of one of his brothers
and then pretending it was stolen.
When Joseph’s steward found the cup in the
possession of the brothers he said it belonged
to his master, and was the cup Joseph used
for divination, in other words, scrying.
Well in the end Joseph was reunited with his
brothers and father, but his prophetic dream
had come true, his brothers did bow down do
him as vizier.
And this isn’t the only ancient story of
a cup being used for scrying.
In Persian mythology is the Cup of Jamshid,
a magical cup that contained the elixir of
immortality and was also used for scrying.
Many Persian literary texts describe this
cup being used by Jamshid and other mythological
kings, including in Shahnameh the great national
epic of Greater Iran, which tells of the mythological
and historical past of the Persian empire,
including the life of the prophet Zarathustra.
Which brings us back once again to Zoroastrianism
and prophecy.
The word prophecy comes from Greek pro “before”
+ phanai “to speak”, and a particularly
deceptive form that essentially tricks its
recipient is the self-fulfilling prophecy.
One of the most famous literary examples of
this is in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, in which
Macbeth gets the prophecy from the witches
that he will become king and then goes on
to make it happen by killing the king and
usurping the throne.
In Oedipus the King by the Greek playwright
Sophocles, in order to avoid the prophecy
that the baby Oedipus will grow up to kill
his father, his parents leave the baby to
die on a mountain top, but he is rescued and
given to surrogate parents, with the result
that when Oedipus grows up and gets the prophecy
that he’ll kill his father and marry his
mother, he leaves his supposed parents to
avoid it, and ends up fulfilling both prophecies.
Or if you want a more recent example, to return
to Harry Potter again, in reaction to the
prophecy that a child born on a certain day
will kill him, Voldemort tries to murder the
infant Harry, thus making Harry the one who
is eventually able to defeat Voldemort.
Now one of the reasons that self-fulfilling
prophecies work is that they give the receiver
the confidence to make those events happen,
as in the case of Macbeth.
The word confidence, by the way, comes from
the Latin intensive prefix com- and the word
fidere “to trust”, and lies behind the
term confidence trick, sometimes shortened
simply to con, thus bringing us back to the
theme of deception, which is well known in
the gambling con in which the victim is allowed
to win several times to build up his confidence
before taking him for all he’s worth.
A famous historical example of a self-fulfilling
prophecy involves Cyrus the Great, founder
of the Achaemenid Empire, who I mentioned
earlier.
According to the Greek historian Herodotus,
Cyrus’s grandfather Astyages, had prophetic
dreams which were interpreted by the Magi
as meaning his grandson would usurp his throne.
Fearing this, he ordered his general Harpagus
to kill the baby, but he couldn’t bring
himself to do it, and passed the job on to
a cowherd, who also couldn’t go through
with it, and brought the baby up as his own.
Years later when Cyrus had grown up and all
of this was revealed, Astyages punished Harpagus
by killing his son, but after the Magi backpedaled
and said that they had misinterpreted the
dream, Cyrus was spared.
In revenge, Harpagus encouraged Cyrus to revolt
against Astyages and take over, and he did
just that.
So I guess the moral of the story is, watch
out for those Magi dream interpretations!
And returning to the Magi and the word magush,
its first attestation is in the Behistun inscription
by Darius the Great, the fourth king of the
Achaemenid Empire, which is a bit of propaganda
that tells of how he came to the throne.
Basically, when Cyrus died, he was succeeded
by his son Cambyses II.
According to Herodotus, Cambyses had a dream
in which he saw his younger brother Bardiya
sitting on the royal throne, and had him secretly
killed.
Then, according to Darius, a magush named
Gaumata impersonated the dead Bardiya, and
eventually came to the throne.
Darius soon after usurped the throne from
the impostor Gaumata.
Of course it’s entirely possible that Darius
made this up to legitimize his claim to the
throne with Gaumata being an impostor, and
he further legitimizes his claim by stating
in the Behistun inscription that he became
king by the grace of Ahura Mazda.
Whatever the truth may be, we certainly see
several more examples here of our recurring
theme of deception, not to mention prophetic
dreams.
With these sorts of stories circulated by
Greek authors, it’s not too surprising that
the Magi gained the reputation for not only
being magicians but also for being devious
and deceptive.
Furthermore, unlike Greek priests, the Magi
would whisper their prayers and ritual texts
in a low voice, and in the unfamiliar Avestan
language of the Zoroastrian religious texts,
which may have sounded to the Greeks like
incantations.
Interestingly, the native Greek word for magic,
goeteia, with goes meaning “sorcerer”
or literally “one who howls out enchantments”
comes from the Greek verb goan “to wail,
groan, weep” from a Proto-Indo-European
root that meant “to call, cry”.
The Greeks had other words for particular
types of magic, such as nekromanteia “necromancy”
or the communication with the dead for prophetic
purposes, from nekros “dead body” and
manteia “divination, oracle”, derived
from mainesthai “to be inspired” from
*men- “to think”, one of the Proto-Indo-European
roots that lies behind the name Ahura Mazda.
And the word pharmakeia, from which we get
the word pharmacy, referred the practise of
using of drugs, poisons, and medicines.
But the word mageia soon became a more general
term for magic in Greek.
Nevertheless, the Greeks were often also quite
skeptical about magic.
Herodotus recounts the story of Darius’s
successor Xerxes, who when sailing his fleet
to attack Greece, was hindered by a storm,
but the Magi were able to quell the storm
with their sacrifices and incantations allowing
them to proceed.
Or, as Herodotus dryly wrote “perhaps it
abated of its own accord”.
And in that self-fulfilling prophecy play
Oedipus the King, Sophocles has Oedipus use
the word magos as a term of abuse directed
at the soothsayer Tiresias when he gave him
a prediction he didn’t like.
So the word also came to have the sense of
a “charlatan” in Greek.
The Magi in the biblical nativity narrative
probably originally implied the use of magic
and astrology, since they predicted and located
the Christ child from the stars.
But in later Christian traditions, the Magi
are often rendered as “the three kings”
or “the three wise men”, reflecting later
Christianity’s discomfort with magic, which
they held to be the work of the devil.
In any case, the Greek words magos and mageia
were subsequently borrowed into Latin as magus
and magia, initially with the specific reference
of Persian practises, as for instance by the
Roman orator Cicero, but soon in the more
general sense, as for instance by the poet
Virgil.
Interesting, Virgil came to have a rather
magical reputation himself.
A practise arose of using Virgil’s writings
for a form of bibliomancy, that is divination
using books, called specifically Sortes Virgilianae
or Virgilian Lots.
Basically the way it works is you take a text
and randomly pick a passage from it, by for
instance balancing a book on its spine and
letting it fall open to a random page, and
that passage would give you your prediction
or answer your question.
Virgil wasn’t the first author to be used
this way: the Greek poet Homer is the source
for the Sortes Homericae, with the philosopher
Plato reporting a similar form of this being
used by his former teacher Socrates to predict
his execution day, but the practise continued
into the Roman era.
Later on, Christians would use the Bible for
the Sortes Sanctorum.
But the Sortes Virgilianae was the most popular
technique, with one early example being Hadrian’s
use of it to judge the emperor Trajan’s
attitude towards him, when it correctly predicted
that he would be adopted by the emperor as
his heir.
The practise continued through the middle
ages and into the early modern period, and
correctly predicted the death of King Charles
I when the Viscount Falkland suggested the
king try this as a light-hearted pastime when
they came across a finely printed and bound
edition of Virgil.
To mitigate the damage the viscount tried
it himself, hoping to hit upon some irrelevant
passage and discredit the king’s prediction,
only to correctly predict his own death.
I guess with divination you should be careful
what you ask!
The really surprising thing here though is
that in the middle ages, Virgil came to be
thought of as a magician himself, and numerous
stories and legends, that had nothing to do
with the poet’s own biography, sprang up
about Virgil being an astrologer able to predict
the future and a wizard able to perform great
feats of magic.
Some of the things that sparked this belief,
were the mystic element in book six of the
Aeneid, and the prophetic nature of his fourth
Eclogue which Christians took as prophesying
the coming of Christ.
Even his name was seen as being a clue, since
the name Virgil is similar to the Latin word
virga “wand”, and he was said to have
a maternal grandfather named Magus — well
his mother did indeed come from a Roman family
with the name Magia, though it’s not related
to the word magush.
In medieval Wales this reputation was so strong
that the Welshified version of his name became
a generic term for magician, which today is
the modern Welsh word for pharmacist!
Now that Latin word sortes or sors in the
singular form comes from the Proto-Indo-European
root *ser- “to line up”.
In Latin the word was originally used to refer
to the little pieces of wood used to draw
lots, but later came to refer to what is alloted
by fate and thus “fortune” and then to
any kind of fortune-telling.
From that it later developed the sense “rank,
class, order”, and it’s that sense that
we see in the English word sort.
The word sortition refers to the drawing of
lots, like a lottery, and the word lottery
is related to the word lot, coming from a
Germanic root, and thus brings us back to
the theme of gambling which we last saw in
the gambling con.
The other way this root makes it into English
are the words sorcery and sorcerer from Old
French sorcerie and sorcier, originally one
who predicts or influences fate or fortune,
but broadening to mean one who uses magic.
The more precise word now for fortune-telling
by drawing lots is cleromancy, another of
those -mancy terms like necromancy, bibliomancy,
and oneiromancy.
The first element of cleromancy is Greek kleros
“lot, allotment”, from the Proto-Indo-European
root *kel- “to strike, cut” from the idea
of “that which is cut off”.
Also from Greek kleros is Greek klerikos,
Latin clericus, and English cleric, clerk,
and clergy.
So how did we get to here from there?
Well from the sense “allotment” kleros
also came to mean “inheritance” which
is how it was used in the Greek translation
of the biblical book Leviticus in reference
to assistants to the temple priests: “Therefore
shall they have no inheritance among their
brethren: the Lord is their inheritance”.
So the word came to refer to matters having
to do with priests, and eventually priest
and the priesthood itself.
In the middle ages, clerks, sometimes now
pronounced clarks, were the only well-educated
people available, and so in addition to their
religious duties also used their skills as
accountants, and from that we get the modern
sense of clerk, which has broadened further
to include clerical bureaucratic duties and
even store clerks.
The word cleric was re-borrowed into English
to replace clerk which had thus become ambiguous.
But clergy brings us back to the theme of
priests, like the original role of those Magi,
though the clergy probably don’t engage
in cleromancy, in spite of the etymology.
Probably.
So far we’ve talked about priests and other
male magicians—but what about witches?
The word witch obviously carries a lot of
baggage with it.
For one thing, it’s a gendered word referring
specifically to women, and beyond its main
magical sense witch or old witch can be used
as a contemptuous term for a disliked woman.
Though it should be noted that in more recent
times there has been an attempt to reclaim
the word witch in a more positive context,
as for instance is sometimes done by the neo-pagan
world of Wicca, and in the Harry Potter world:
Hermione is indeed the most gifted witch of
her generation.
Witches in the middle ages and early modern
periods were suspected of many things, including
preventing conception in women and attacking
male fertility, sometimes actually stealing
men’s penises, storing them in large chests
or in birds’ nests in trees.
Historically many women have been persecuted
for the supposed crime of witchcraft, justified
in part by the 15th century Christian treatise
Malleus Malificarum, The Hammer of Witches,
and you can tell it’s specifically women
targeted there because of the feminine Latin
ending -arum.
It’s hard to know how many women were persecuted,
tortured, and burned during the witch-hunts
of the 15th-18th centuries, but some estimates
place it at 60,000 to 200,000 to even as high
as several million.
And it is perhaps little surprise that the
word wicked is derived from the same Old English
root that produced the word witch.
I guess you could say that wicked witch is
etymologically redundant.
Witch comes from the Old English word wicce
meaning “witch”, which has the masculine
form wicca meaning “male witch, wizard”,
from which we get the modern word wicca in
reference to neopaganism.
It should be pointed out that there is no
historical line of connection for this word
from Old English to the present, with the
word having been reintroduced into modern
English in the early 20th century.
The further etymology of the word witch is
very disputed with many suggestions being
made.
The Brothers Grimm, who I suppose would know
a thing or two about witch stories, proposed
that Old English wicce and wicca come from
the Proto-Indo-European root *weik- “to
separate, divide” reflecting the practise
of cleromancy, which according to the Roman
ethnographer Tacitus was a part of early Germanic
religious practise.
But Indo-Europeanist Calvert Watkins proposed
that it comes from the root *weg- meaning
“be strong, lively” in the sense of “to
wake, rouse” reflecting the practise of
necromancy, in other words “one who wakes
the dead”.
If true witch would be cognate with wake,
watch, and wait, as well as vegetable, which
is probably not the sort of thing you give
out to trick-or-treaters dressed up as witches!
And though there are numerous other suggested
etymologies, I’ll give you just one more,
that it might be traced back to a homophonous
root *weik- which in this case means “consecrated,
holy” and has a number of other derivatives
connected to religion and magic.
For instance German Weihnachten literally
“holy night” used specifically in reference
to Christmas (but we’d better leave Christmas
aside because this is Halloween).
And Latin victima (and English victim) in
reference to animals used in religious sacrifices.
But most interestingly for our purposes the
words guile and wile, both referring to deceit
or trickery, which would then be akin to Old
English wigle “divination, sorcery”, but
which also bring us back to our ongoing theme
of deception.
But there are a lot more terms for male magic
practitioners.
In the Harry Potter world, that would be wizard,
but wizard has more of a positive connotation,
so for a better parallel to witch, let’s
first turn to the word warlock.
Interestingly, the word didn’t originally
have any connection to magic.
In Old English wærloga meant “traitor,
liar, oath-breaker”, reminding us again
of the theme of deception, and by extension
it was sometimes used to refer to the devil.
It’s only later on in the 16th century in
Scots that the word came to be used as the
male equivalent of a witch.
Etymologically it breaks down into two elements,
the second of which is leogan “to lie”,
which also gives us the word lie.
The first element is wær “faith, fidelity,
agreement” from the Proto-Indo-European
root *wērə-o- “true, trustworthy”, which
also leads to the Latin word veritas, sometimes
thought of by the Romans as the personification
of truth, and related to such English words
as verify and veracity.
So literally a warlock is a “truth-liar”.
Now this brings us to the concept of truth,
the opposite of lies and deceptions, opposing
ideas which you’ll remember as the opposing
forces in Zoroastrianism asha and druj.
There are a number of words in English that
mean truth, including the now somewhat archaic
word sooth.
The Old English form soð was actually quite
common, and comes from the Proto-Indo-European
root *es- that supplies several of the forms
of the irregular verb to be, such as is and
am, as well as words such as yes, essence,
and sin.
Though the word sooth today is somewhat obscure,
the compound soothsayer, meaning a fortune-teller
or prophet, is rather more well known, being
used for instance to describe Tiresias in
the Oedipus story, along with seer, literally
one who sees.
The word truth itself has a fascinating etymology.
It goes back to the Proto-Indo-European root
*deru- “to be firm, solid, steadfast”,
which also has the specialized senses of “tree”
and “wood”, especially “oak”, including
the word tree itself.
It’s also the second element in the word
Ásatrú, a term used to refer to a neo-pagan
group focused on the Old Norse mythological
tradition, which means literally “faith
or allegiance to the Æsir” the pantheon
of Norse gods, and we’ve already seen that
first element as the root lying behind the
name of the Zoroastrian god Ahura Mazda.
The Norse by the way also had their own tradition
of magic called seiðr, associated with the
gods Odin and Freyja.
The word seiðr comes from the Proto-Indo-European
root *sai- meaning “to bind, tie”, which
also has the derivatives sinew and secular,
which originally as Latin saeculum meant “age,
span of time”, and came to mean “worldly,
not religious”.
Other derivatives of *deru- “solid, tree”
are dryad, a tree nymph in Greek mythology,
and druid, the high-ranking priestly class
who also wielded considerable secular power,
among some Celtic peoples.
So the druids are another example of a priestly
class, like the Magi and the clergy, who were
also mistrusted by external cultures, in this
case the Romans during the Roman Britain period.
The second element of the word druid comes
from the Proto-Indo-European root *weid- “to
see”, which has such other derivatives as
vision, view, and evident, as well as wise,
wisdom, and wit, so a druid is someone who
is wise about trees.
And from the word wise, we also get, in the
Middle English period, the word wizard, literally
a “wise man”, but it soon gained the more
specific sense of a magician.
Also from this root we get the Old English
term witenagemot, referring to the council
of advisers to the king in Anglo-Saxon England,
who technically were in charge of electing
the kings.
Though this political body didn’t survive
past the Norman Conquest of England, it seems
to have been the inspiration behind JK Rowling’s
wizengamot, the wizard court of law in the
Harry Potter world, obviously also playing
off the word wizard.
But as we’ve seen the word wizard comes
from this same root anyway.
And in any case, the wizards we know today,
such as Albus Dumbledor and Gandalf, are also
quite wise, and indeed witty.
And all this talk about wizards and magic
brings us to our conclusion, tying many of
these elements together, specifically to the
deck building game Magic: The Gathering published
by the games company Wizards of the Coast,
who by the way are also the current publishers
of Dungeons & Dragons, after they bought out
its original company TSR.
In various versions of D&D different levels
of magicians or magic users as they were called
in the game were known by specific words,
many of which we’ve covered in this video,
such as seer, magician, enchanter, warlock/witch,
sorcerer, necromancer, and wizard.
The game Magic: The Gathering—which also
has magic users known as ‘mages’, by the
way—was developed by Richard Garfield, who
had been a combinatorial mathematics doctoral
student at the University of Pennsylvania,
and apparently he created it so that he and
his friends would have something to do while
they waited for everyone to turn up for their
D&D games.
Garfield has two other claims to fame: his
great-great-grandfather was James A. Garfield,
a rather minor US president, having been assassinated
within his first year in office; and his grand-uncle
Samuel B. Fay invented the paper clip.
Unless you ask the Norwegians, who have their
own candidate for this honour, Johan Vaaler,
whose version of the paper clip was adopted
as a symbol of resistance against the Nazis,
after pins or badges bearing national symbols
were banned.
As for Magic: The Gathering itself, it originally
had an aspect of gambling since according
to the original rules one was supposed to
ante up a card in order to play, which the
winner would be able to claim at the end of
the game, and even now the packs come with
random assortments of rare cards which can
be quite valuable.
So whether it’s card tricks or Tarot cards
or the 3-card Monty con or Magic: The Gathering,
or all the way back to exotic Zoroastrian
priests and self-fulfilling prophecies, falsely
accused witches and crystal-ball gazing wizards,
it seems perhaps that for magic, luck, deception,
and shifting perceptions have always been
on the cards.
Thanks for watching!
My special thanks to my friend and fellow
YouTuber Andrew of Religion for Breakfast,
who suggested this topic, and helped me out
with the crucial definition of ‘magic’!
Why not check out his video “What is the
History of Magic Wands” for more on that
topic.
If you’ve enjoyed these etymological explorations
and cultural connections, please subscribe,
& click the little bell to be notified of
every new episode.
And check out our Patreon, where you can make
a contribution to help me make more videos.
I’m @Alliterative on Twitter, and you can
visit our website alliterative.net for more
language and connections in our podcast, blog,
and more!
