Witches and Wordsmiths, Sorcerers and Storytellers

by Iona Lee

Words conjure what is not there. Words can be weapons or tools. They can terrify or pacify,

please or disgust, influence and alter.

As a wand conveys a spell, a word brings with it feeling, meaning, abstraction and

history. A tyrant will cast chaos with his oratory. A storyteller will move with rhyme, rhetoric and

rhythm. A salesman will mystify with jargon.

Words are immensely powerful, but we comprehend that it is not the words themselves

that hold the power, they are not vessels, but rather symbols, that channel meaning.

In the past, however, people have believed - and in some contexts, still do - that power

resides in the words themselves: that certain words are magical in essence. Or, indeed, that all

words have the potential to be magical: that language is magical in essence.

I am going to attempt to show you that magic and language are historically and

inextricably intertwined, like the double helix of our DNA.

They are two sides of the same enchanted coin, spinning in infinity. Whether one believes in magic, or simply in the emotional

weight which can be afforded to language, magical language nonetheless exists and can be

used to give and take power. Before we go any further, I want to present you with two powerful words which may not

be familiar to you. I think they will be useful in helping to unlock insight into the ways we

perceive reality, and how that can be fluid.

The first is 'emic'. An emic understanding, is an understanding of something within the context of its time or culture. An etic understanding is an understanding of something from the context of today - looking from the outside in. Think of them as being like the difference between

empathy and sympathy.

One's perception of reality can shift. Just as the shafts of sunlight between trees

illuminate and refocus. It depends on your standpoint.

So then, magic, for our purposes, is an etic understanding of an emic reality.

Magic has been transmogrified by time and journeyed through a forest of a thousand

interlacing corridors to find itself subsumed by endless definitions and explanations: inspiration,

weather, hallucination, gravity, power.

It does not matter if we do not believe in the reality of magic today. Simply put, our

semantic realities have changed. What we once called alchemy has become chemistry. There

was once no appreciable distinction between astrology and astronomy, nor glamour and

grammar. Electrickery has become electricity.

These processes remain mysterious: the layman can now call the lighting of a match a

work of science, but probably does not fully comprehend the process, nor indeed, the reason for

the flame.

The same is true of the powers of speech and of language - we know that stories can

affect us, we know that insults can offend us, we know that proverbs can reassure us, but not

many of us can explain with facility, why. And that is okay - I am not a philosopher of language

or a scholar of the science of linguistics. I am but a mere poet, dealing in metaphor and double

meaning; explanation through abstraction; the beauty, and the truth, that lies in ambiguity.

Language and magic are pleasingly elusive, and one could only pin them down with sky nails -

but that doesn't mean that their use doesn't have consequences. It may sound fantastical to

suggest that words can take on material form and effect tangible change, but what then is a

promise doing, or an apology? What of the warning, and the wedding vow?

It is perhaps difficult for the modern mind to appreciate the physical power that

language will have possessed for the pre-literate people of pre-industrial Europe. The spoken

word was a formidable force. Whether a prayer, the swearing of an oath or a magical

incantation, speech was believed to manipulate the physical world.

Perhaps the most famous magical phrase, 'abracadabra', is thought by some to

translate to 'I create as I speak'. 'Hocus-pocus', may translate to 'this is my body'.

In fact, etymology is one particular beam of sun that can highlight language's gnarled roots in

magic. Think of words like 'curse' or 'charm'. The meanings of these words have wandered

down two separate woodland paths.

We still understand 'charm' to be a magic spell, but it has

also come to signify a means by which one might gain another person's liking. The double

meanings of these words are at once literal, and metaphorical.

Science has explained a great deal of what was once perceived to be supernatural;

but, if you were to charm someone today, the result might very well be the same as if you had

used magic.

This dichotomy is true of many words that are still in use. 'Glamour' is a variant of the

Scots word 'gramarye', meaning a spell. Both come from the English word 'grammar'. Grammar

itself once meant magic, but now we understand it to be the rules governing the structure and

composition of language. The way one constructs one's statements influences people, and this

influence has, at times, been perceived to be magical.

This is also true of the word 'spell' itself. A spell is an incantation with occult power, but,

it is also how we form words with letters.

So we have established that both magic and language are powerful and have, at times, been

understood in an emic sense to be one and the same. They can, also, in an etic sense, be

understood as metaphors, or mirrors, for one another.

This is important, as well as interesting - but why?

Well to answer that, we must first ask: what does magic do?

It interferes with the perceived "natural" order of things.

A pervasive fear of the Wild Wood exists throughout folklore and literature. Psychologists have

interpreted the trope of journeying into the forest as a metaphorical journey into the mind - the

forest is our subconscious. The sometime friend and frequent foe often found within the forest is

the witch; she lives in a house in the glade within our collective subconscious.

What is a witch? The witch is a universal archetype. The witch is a practitioner of

witchcraft.

She is also an insult, an oracle, a midwife, a myth, a crime, a religion, a sex symbol, a

crone, a healer, a hag, a mother, a maiden, a goddess and a wise old woman. She repulses

and seduces. She heals and harms. She brings life in to this world and destroys it. She is order

and chaos. She gives birth to the moon and she eats the sun.

The changeable nature of the witch is a reflection of the unpredictable and complex

nature of us all. But, she is a woman. She is what is un-human about the human experience.

We are not accustomed, from either a literary or a social-historical standpoint, to the idea of a

woman's character being permitted to be complex.

The lack of power historically afforded to women has tended to make them be seen

one-dimensionally, and this has been reflected in our narratives, stories and media. The witch

represents our humanity, but we deny her her own humanity, as she is multi-dimensional, and

therefore, monstrous.

The binary of gender was until recently generally taken for granted, and the apparent

polarities of man and woman and good and evil seem to have aligned, so that the "mysteries" of

womanhood became intertwined with the mysteries of witchcraft. To name something is

hopefully to attempt to understand it, but a name confines as it defines. Our understanding of

what the word 'woman' means is, itself, evolving.

I believe that at the root of almost all accusations of witchcraft was a concern with the words,

language and stories of women, and the power and influence which a skilful use of language

might afford them. There is a historic distrust of women who are good with language or who

claim a public voice: and we must learn from history. The witch trials of Europe and the New

World were, in an emic sense, an attempt to silence the spells of witches - but we might

understand them in an etic sense as a policing of women's speech. The witch may be

considered a woman, but what is far more important to me is that she was a wordsmith. As

Christina Larner says, 'she has the power of words'.

A wise person would possess an extensive vocabulary. She would know the names of

the plants and herbs that were best for healing. She would learn the names of the stars and

constellations. She would memorise folk tales and perhaps the names of the spirits that lived in

the old, contorted trees, the wishing wells and thresholds. Many extant spells rhyme or use

repetition. Just as in literature, the rhetorical devices used in magical speech resonate

powerfully; like a rhyming couplet winks the curtains closed. The witch plays with language to

make her spells more powerful.

Historically, and in many cases currently, women have been excluded from power by male

institutions. The world of word-smithery is an area in which power has been available to women.

A curse, a spell, a muttering under the breath were things to which a woman could resort in

opposition to male primacy. This adds to the stereotype of women as underhand and possessed

of 'slippery tongues': if one truly believed in the potential harm that words could cause, and if

words were often the only resort for a woman, given her lack of autonomy, then it would make

sense to be wary of the words of women.

The existence of such things as the Scold's Bridle are testament to a masculine

concern with what women might say and how they might say it.

Additionally, women may have turned to cursing to bring colour to their domestic

existences. Witchcraft represents another way. It is excitement, rebellion, mischief and

autonomy. The witch is not simply a creation of the patriarchy; women have invested in the

character as a fantasy which allowed them to express taboos, unacceptable desires and

revolutionary ideas.

It is believed that many women killed during the witch trials were in fact storytellers with

linguistic and narrative skill evident in their confessions. If this were true, it would imply that

some witches were persecuted not for their use of wicked magic, but for their daring to engage

with the gifts of knowledge and of language.

Storytelling can be a way of imparting wisdom - and wisdom, ideas or experts are often

viewed with suspicion in times of social change. At times we have burned witches, other times

we have burned books.

The most powerful in a society police the language of the oppressed. A woman's failure

to control her tongue seems to have been the root cause of many accusations of witchcraft. A

witch's words were her weapons. A witch's words were the only weapons she had to rail against

authority.

As Malala Yousafzai wrote in her book I Am Malala: 'Let us pick up our books and our

pens... they are our most powerful weapons'.

We must arm ourselves with the powers of language; name the things that we wish to

understand; voice those words which intimidate, which seem a Pandora's box of malevolent

power. By speaking these truths outloud, we harness this power, and if spoken enough they will

turn to love spells muttered underneath the breath.

History can seem to have established a normality which is in fact not necessarily

'normal' at all. We are so used to men as leaders, as storytellers, as speakers that society has

often identified them as naturally better suited to these roles. However, women have been too

often denied the opportunity to prove this assumption incorrect.

The witch trials have become a paradigm of the way in which society, even the state,

has punished the oppressed for attempting to utilise one of the few powers generally available

to them. Thankfully, things have got better for most women during the past four centuries, but

women remain to a degree oppressed; and they are by no means the only oppressed group.

By telling our stories, we can perhaps redress the imbalance in the normalisation of our

experiences. Stories are an insight into the inner lives of those other than ourselves. It is

through stories that we can understand and empathise. It is through writing that one makes

sense of something. Poems are puzzles to solve. Storytelling is humanising.

The witch is a woman, perhaps, but women are not witches. They are humans who

have long been misunderstood, for they have been unable to speak for themselves.