Witch

The word’s earliest application are, surprisingly, to males, a sense recorded from about 890 up to the early twentieth century. It was used of Pharaoh’s magicians in the Book of Exodus, of Merlin, and even of Christ in William Langland’s account of the Crucifixion in Piers Plowman (ca. 1362): “‘Crucifige,’ quod a cacchepole, ‘I warrant him a witch.’” (“‘Crucify him,’ said a debt collector, ‘I guarantee he’s a witch,’” (B Text, xviii, l. 46). The male sense is now obsolete, having been superseded by the diverse modern terms witch doctor, wizard , and warlock . While wizard has become entirely positive, warlock had in Anglo-Saxon the various senses of “oath breaker,” “traitor,” “wicked person,” “devil,” and “the Devil or Satan,” leading to the dominant modern meaning of “one in league with the Devil.”

The dominant feminine sense of witch is almost as old as the male, extending from late Old English to the present. The Legend of St. Catherine (ca. 1290) prescribes: “You shall bind a witch fast and immediately strike off her head” (100). However, Joseph Addison, writing in 1711, gives an expectedly rational explanation: “When an old Woman begins to doat, and grow chargeable to a parish, she is generally turned into a Witch” ( Spectator , 117). The Salem (Massachusetts) witch-hunt, occurring so bizarrely at a time of comparative enlightenment (1692), has left the memorial phrase in New England “to be as nervous as a witch.”

Unlike dragon, harpy , and hag , which show the stereotype of the feminization of the monstrous by means of malicious or humorous metaphor, witch is in origin a literal term with a serious diabolical denotation. Thus a woman accused of being a witch faced in the past terrifying consequences, even being burnt alive. According to Jane Mills, “Some estimates put the number of witches burnt, hanged or drowned as high as nine million” (1991, 264).

The historical evidence of the use of witch presents a problem of assessing how literally the term is to be taken, in view of the different motives of the observers, varying from early superstition, through the credulous persecution of the Inquisition, to the skepticism of the Enlightenment. Thus witchcraft is specifically prohibited in the Anglo-Saxon Laws of Athelstan (ca. 935, I vi), and a medieval text states: “His wife changed him through witchcraft into the shape of a wolf” (ca. 1350, Will. Palerne , l. 4044). Thomas Hobbes, skeptical in most things, asserted in 1651: “As for witches, I think not that their witchcraft is any real power” ( Leviathan , I ii, 7). Yet William Blackstone, the great English legal authority, insisted in 1769: “To deny the possibility of the existence of witchcraft or sorcery, is to contradict the revealed word of God” ( Commentaries , IV iv, 61). Apart from survivals of the supernatural association in popular culture, the term has now become largely part of folklore. Even so, it remains a powerful and provocative insult.

The stereotype of seductiveness, which the Inquisition and subsequent witch-hunts projected as demoniality or unnatural sexual intercourse with the Devil in the attractive human forms of incubi and succubi, has since been mollified into one of plain eroticism. There has also developed a division on the basis of age: the category of the repulsive old witch is re- corded from the fifteenth century, joined by the opposing sense of “a young woman of bewitching aspect or manners” from about 1740 in Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela (I xxiv 37). Various feminist writers, such as Anne Oakley (1976), have interpreted the persecution of witches as the eradication of paganism and the targeting of female victims by male-dominated callings like the Church and professions, notably medicine.