It's not easy to decide what to write as your first blog post, but because this is the blog of an eclectic witch and witchcraft will be our main theme, I imagined it would be interesting to take a journey back in history and find where exactly the word witchcraft comes from.
Starting from the word for "to separate", we can follow traces of spirituality and divination until roughly around the year 1000, where we clearly find proof of an Old English version of the word witchcraft.
The earliest word I could find comes from "A Proto Indo European Language Lexicon, And An Etymological Dictionary Of Early Indo European" by Julius Pokorny, linguist known for his work in Indo-European etymological research as well as in Celtic studies.
His book is the standard reference work in the field of Indo-European philology, even if most scholars are sharply critical of it, especially as he was a very peculiar figure.
Sadly, I could find no other work referring to the word that didn't have Pokorny's book as a source, so we will start with this.
The word is "ṷeik", sometimes written by others as "weyk" and the original translation of it from the book is the German word "aussondern", meaning in this case "to separate", "to choose" , "to filter" (or "to select" for Austrian German).
The Proto Indo European language is the one from which all Indo-European languages descended, it was spoken by people who lived roughly between 4500 b.c. and 2500 b.c. and there are no written texts from it.
It can luckily be reconstructed by comparing Indo-European languages, but there's no way of knowing what it sounded like. You can find online some reconstructions and tales read out loud by scholars, if you're interested in it.
From "ṷeik" are said to derive two Proto-Germanic words that we can be interested in.
Proto-Germanic is also a reconstructed language and one of our references this time will be "A Handbook of Germanic Etymology" by Vladimir Orel, Russian linguist.
"wīxaz" meaning "holy" or "sacred" comes from this book.
Our second source will be the "Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic" by Guus Kroonen, historical linguist specializing in Indo-European languages.
There we find "wikkōn", meaning "to practice sorcery".
We are now around 500 b.c.
Let's now jump to Old English with Ernest Weekley, British philologist, who stated in "An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English":
"the priests of a suppressed religion naturally become magicians to its successors or opponents."
Because of this, he believed the Old English word "wicce" and "wicca" to come from the Proto-Germanic word for "holy" and "sacred".
What we're sure of is that in "a Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary" by John Richard Clark Hall, scholar of Old English, we find the word "wiccian" with the meaning of "to use witchcraft", similar to the Proto-Germanic "wikkōn", as well as "wicca" with the meaning of "wizard", "astrologer" and "soothsayer" and "wicce" with the simple meaning of "witch".
"Wicca" meaning "soothsayer" is really interesting to me because it could fill the logical gap between "wikkōn", "to practice sorcery", and the Proto-Indo-European root word "weyk" meaning "separating", thinking about Indo-European divination practices often including animal sacrifices, skinning of the animal to wear or to lie on top of, and consuming the meat or parts of it.
This is pure speculation, but I do find it interesting.
Here is also where our journey ends, because we also find the word "wiccecræft", probably as a compound word between "wicce" and "cræft" meaning "the art of" as we can imagine by other definitions from the same book. Some examples are:
"Tæl", "number", becoming "tælcræft", "arithmetic", "Tungol", "star, planet, constellation", becoming "tungolcræft", "astronomy", and "wīg", "battle, war", becoming "wīgcræft" meagning "the art of war".
Witchcraft, coming from "wiccecræft", seems to be the art of the "wicce", used in the feminine way for both men and women as "wizard" is etymologically a completely different word with a completely different story.
Evidence of the use of the word is in Aelfric's "Lives of the Saints", written between 990 and 1002 a.d. [on the left, a scan of a page of the Book, with a list of its chapters, taken from the British Library's website].
Alfric was the abbot of a Benedictine abbey in Eynsham, Oxfordshire, and he wrote in a version of Old English from the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex. Here I found several examples. One of them:
"[...]mid lufe eoƿ for-beode · eoƿer nan ne axie þurh ænigne ƿicce-cræft · be ænigum ðinge · oððe be ænigre untrumnysse ·[...]"
translated as:
"[...] (I) with love forbid you, than any of you should enquire throught any witchcraft concerning anything, or concerning any sickness."
In this chapter, "Of Auguries", witchcraft referred is the practice of witches and we read that witches practice divination and give offerings to stones and trees. They're also compared several times with pagans (in a later chapter they are said to have false Gods and we read "their Gods" both referred to "heathens" and witches at least a couple of times in the book).
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