Correct! And therefore…
Now, see, something like that is a lot more likely to offend me than a silly pointy-nosed icon hung on a door.
I did not choose my faith to be counterculture. I chose it because it was the only spiritual path that made sense. For years I never mentioned it to anyone outside the community, because I worried about people’s reactions. I certainly don’t bring it up often on these boards (except when directly relevant).
The board has rules against wishing death on someone. I wonder, though, if it’s permissible to wish newt on someone? 
I think NorwegianBlue would have made one, but I suspect he’s too busy pining for the fjords 
To go where Monty python has never gone:
If… she… weighs… the same as a duck,… she’s made of wood.
To continue this logically then, if a duck weighed the same as a witch, the duck would be made of wood.
And the Great Cecil has decreed that a duck’s quack will echo.
So . . . if the wooden duck’s quack doesn’t echo, the duck is a witch.
Burn it! Burn it! Burn it!
As a witch myself, all I can say is that I’m offended that Wiccans have found celebrating Halloween offensive.
What a bunch of fucktards - people like that gives Wiccans/witches/Neo-Pagans a bad name.
Makes me want to hold 'em down and forcibly glue on giant warty noses and apply green face-paint, then dress 'em in black robes and pointy hats and parade 'em down the street. So THERE! Double-dumb-ass on THEM!
Halloween has long been suspect among some Christian fundamentalists because it’s too pro-Wiccan. Kids were encouraged to dress up like supernatural beings and were rewarded with candy. My guess is that it was some Christians who wanted the Halloween celebrations banned and figured if they could get the ban blamed on Wiccans it would be a bonus.
I read an essay that claimed that what we think of as the traditional “witch” outfit (pointy hat, cloak, etc.) was actually a style of dress favoured by women in general around the times of the witch-burnings.
The idea of a “witch” looking like that was a way for people who lived during the Enlightenment to blame women for the witch-burnings, saying; “Ha, ha. Those stupid ignorant peasant women were so superstitious they believed witches could make their cows go dry. Well now we have science and we know better.”
I don’t know anything about how close to the Enlightenment the Burning Times were, or about fashion back then, so I can’t really confirm or deny. Just putting it out there, in case no one has ever heard this argument.
FTR, let me join the other Pagans and Wiccans on this board by saying the whole thing is just silly. We have our own holiday around this time, and whatever anyone else is celebrating is no skin off our nose.
I heard – not from a reliable source, so I can’t confirm it – that the depiction of witches was based on a kind of garb common to countryfolk that was considered old-fashioned in the cities.
Witches in stories were generally rural. I can’t actually think of one set in any of Medieval Europe’s cities.
The “Burning Times” is a bit of a problematic concept.
It wasn’t just pagans of various kinds getting it. Frequently practitioners of folk medecine (whatever their religion), “sodomites,” atheists, and even members of the “wrong” kind of Christianity (Catholic in Protestant countries, and vice versa) were condemned as witches. So it’s hard to sort out who was being burnt for what. I’m not an expert, but I don’t think it was so much a “Burning Times” (that is, not one long age) as a few thousand short but brutal explosions of paranoia, egged on by the various Christian churches.
What I’m trying to say it’s hard to put a precise date on something like this.
The best I can do it this: much of Europe was holding witch trials for about 3 centuries, from 1450 to 1750. But the first known killing of a “witch” by Christians was Hypatia of Alexandria, a neo-platonic woman who was killed by a Christian mob in AD 415, mostly for practicing divination. And there were at least a couple of witch-hunts in Europe that were disturbingly recent.
The Enlightenment pointed out the obvious: that hunting down anyone who was different and killing them for hurling hexes at people was mass-hysteria. They started making their arguments in the early 1700s – it’s probably thanks to them that this witch-hunting business had mostly stopped by around 1750.
At least until it was resurrected by HUAC in the late 1940s.
That’s fraggin’ brilliant. Never seen it put that succinctly in my life.
Well put.
OK, lemme get this straight…
-
There is a religion called Wicca, whose members have chosen this newer name for their long-standing neo-pagan belief so as to remove all obvious ties to images of green-skinned warty female caricatures who fly on brooms, known popularly as “witches”.
-
The green-skinned caricatures, since this widespread renaming of the religion, have in no place on Earth been recently referred to as Wiccans, as in “The Wicked Wiccan of the West”.
-
Having successfully removed the connections, these people are supposedly now complaining that these green-skinned caricatures are religiously oppressive, inasmuch as they do not represent anything associated with the religion?
Sounds like crap to me. If they have given up calling themselves “witches”, they have no claim. They do not get to control how the language is used. I might like to refer to my upbeat mood as “gay”, without implying a reference to sexuality, but that’s tough shit for me.
Seeing as how several actual Wiccans have raised complaints in this thread, I can only assume the reasoning was offered facetiously by the school board.
What next, the Witch of Agnesi will have to be removed from mathematics textbooks?
tomndebb, let’s look at the etymology of witch/wicca.
Eric Partridge, in Origins, connects witch with the Latin word victima, referring to ritual sacrifice, and he says these both derive from Proto-Indo-European *weig- ‘to sacrifice’. The Germanic origin of witch refers to the concept of sacredness deriving from the ancient religious use of sacrifice. Partridge connects it with Old High German wihen, German weihen ‘to consecrate’, and OHG wih, Middle High German wich, ‘holy’.
John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins and Joseph T. Shipley’s Dicitonary of Word Origins both echo Patridge in connecting witch with victima ‘sacrificial offering’ and weihen ‘consecrate’. What this suggests to me is that the name of Wicca comes from the very concept of religion itself. Shipley also relates the idea of victim to the root of victory.
The etymology in the American Heritage Dictionary, 4th ed., cites “Old English wicce, witch and wicca, wizard, sorceror.” These are derived from Proto-Indo-European ***weg- ** ‘to be strong, be lively’. Derivatives include wake, watch, wait, vigilante, reveille, vegetable, and velocity. Specifically, the AHD connects wicca with the concept of being awake, and traces it back to the suffixed form weg-yo- > the Germanic *wikkjaz necromancer (<“one who wakes the dead”). Buddhism is another religion derived from an IE root meaning ‘to be awake’: *bheudh-.
The AHD does not corroborate Partidge’s etymology connecting wicca with victim; it does not even trace a PIE root for victima, but stops at Latin without going any further back.
This BBQ Pit thread was started to lambaste those who would ban holidays because they see themselves as “victims,” ironically.
But note that the 4th edition of the AHD, published in 2000, disagrees with its witch etymology from its 1st edition of 1969. The 1st ed. derives witch from the PIE root *weik-[sup]2[/sup] and says: “In words connected with magic and religious notions (in Germanic and Latin).” The 1st ed. derives both witch and victim from this root, but says *weik-[sup]5[/sup] ‘to conquer’ is a different root. There are so many differences between the etymologies in the 4th ed. and the 1st ed. of this dictionary, it looks as though the etymology department had been overthrown in a coup d’état and replaced by a radically different faction.
The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology says:
So Barnhart agrees with Partridge about connecting it with Germanic religious words meaning ‘holy, sacred’, but doesn’t trace it back to Proto-Indo-European.
The etymology in Webster’s New World Dictionary has a different explanation for the source of the witch concept: “< IE base *weik- to separate (hence set aside for religious worship), whence Gothic weihs, holy, OE wig, idol.” This dictionary’s etymology for victim derives it from the same root and cross-references it to “witch.” However, I have not found any other source that has *weik- as an IE root meaning ‘to separate’. Where’d they get that from?
An Indo-European Comparative Dictionary by Stuart E. Mann does not show “witch” or “wicca” among its daughter language derivatives. But it does derive the Old English word for ‘idol’ from a different root: from *ueik- ‘like; likeness’, the source of Greek eikon, icon. Mann derives the Germanic root for ‘sacred’ this way: from *ueik- ‘settlement, dwelling’ (the source of Greek oikos ‘house, home’, from whence we get ecology, and Norse vik ‘village’). According to Mann, the Germanic forms of this root produced Gothic weihs, ‘village’, Old High German and Old Saxon wih, ‘temple’, Middle High German wich ‘dwelling, town; (adj.) holy’, cf. also wihe, wiwe ‘dedication’.
It seems the etymologists cannot quite agree on the ultimate source of witch, but I would say the connection of wicca with other ancient Germanic religious words meaning ‘sacred’ and ‘holy’ is the strongest. This corroborates the Wiccan claim that they are reviving (or rather reconstructing) the Old Religion.
Which is fine by me. I have no problem with anyone choosing to identify their belief system as Wicca. The word was out of use in English for hundreds of years and they can revive it with any spin they’d like to place on it.*
However, that is not what has occurred. Rather than identifying themselves as Wiccans practicing Wicca, or evens wicces with a 12th century pronunciation, a number of them have specifically identified themselves by the modern word witch with a manufactured etymology of “wise woman.” The word witch has never fallen out of use in English and has (back to its appearance in print around 890) always meant an evil-doer relying on the supernatural and never meant a wise woman.
It is one thing to grab an old word (or even invent a new word) based on some derivation of the /wg-/ or /wk-/ phoneme in order to hearken back to a pre-Christian belief system. It is a rather different matter to grab a word with a specific meaning and a consistent history connected to evil, paste it on one’s forehead, pretend that it has an etymology that it never had, and then get all upset when people hear the word–still in currency with its original meaning of evil-doer–and whine that those people are being unfair for using the word correctly when one wants to use the imaginary meaning.
As a practical matter, if a person identifies himself or herself as a witch, I politely accept that information. I am not out to ridicule people for their beliefs. However, if they choose to aggressively try to make claims about the name they have chosen (or whine about its use by others), demonstrating clear ignorance of their history, I feel compelled to fight that ignorance.
- I have found no appearance of wicca for 800 years before Gardner. Wicce, from which wicche clearly derived was the feminine counterpoint to the masculine wicca, and it, too, had fallen out of use by around 1300. In fact, the 890 reference and a later citation from the tenth century each use the spelling wicca(n), however, by the 13th century, the (feminine) spelling wicche, with a pronunciation closer to our witch had already come into use and the word wicca(n) had fallen into disuse, leaving that word open to revival with a different meaning if so desired. The use of wicca for a benign worker of magic might have amused some language scholars who recognized its first appearance in the laws of Alfred as a prohibition against sorcery, but it would not have carried 800+ years of consistent use with a specific meaning the way that wicche/witch has.
It would be interesting to have input from a scholar of Judaism, as there are two references to witches in the Pentateuch, based upon the KJV translation:
The only other reference I located was in I Samuel 28, where King Saul has put all the witches and wizards out of the land, but when his prayers are unanswered, he seeks out a witch to call upon the spirit of Samuel to answer his questions.
Curious as to the original words and their meaning when translated into the 1611 KJV.
Go for it, but it’s apparently quite difficult. Some dear friends attempted turnip-carvery a few years back, and apparently turnips are not NEARLY as cooperative as pumpkins. They succeeded (they’re talented), but the lessons learned were apparently: digging holes is hard. Carve the main chimney to hold the candle and leave it at that. “Carve” the face by kinda sculpturally shaping the turnip rather than chipping more holes in it.
</hijack>
FWIW, I’m with those that suspect that no actual witches complained, and the blame for this extremely silly idea rests solely with the brainless school admin. Way to suck all the joy out of childhood!
Don’t some translations say … shalt not suffer a poisoner to live…?
I think so too. It may just be more political correctness run amok.
The only other translations in my library use the word “sorceress” in place of witch.
The witch vs. poisoner discussion was addressed pretty thoroughly in the thread Exodus 22:18: Witch or Poisoner? about four years ago.
The Hebrew word being translated, MeKhashefah, indicates a person who is using a form of prohibited magic. Witch seems like a perfectly good translation to me. (The linked thread also provides speculation regarding the source of the “poisoner” error,)
Well, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the White Witch was so-called simply because her skin was chalk-white and she dressed to match*, but she was definitely a nasty, harmful person.
The thing is, there are so many different depictions of witches, who can say which (ha!) is definitive?
Jason and Marcus, in the comic strip Fox Trot, once went trick-or-treating dressed in suits and ties. They were greeted at every door with shrieks of terror and handfuls of candy. At the end of the sequence, it was revealed that they also wore name tags identifying themselves as IRS agents. 
And I think I said this before, but I’ll say it again: When I was a kid, they told us in Bible school that it was good to dress as a devil for Halloween, because that was mocking Satan and showing that you weren’t afraid of him.
*and if you read the books in their proper order, you’ll find out why afterwards.
Okay. Its because they thought some kids might not afford a costume and would feel left out.
sigh
Another neo-pagan checking in to say What The Fuck?!?!? Really. Don’t go all defending my delicate sensibilities on my behalf when no Wiccan even asked you to cancel the holiday for us! But also, What The Fuck?!?!? to all the reporters and news outlets, and even a certain Fake News Show on Comedy Central (yes, that means you, Jon! You’ve severely disappointed me this time!) who are **only ** reporting reason #3. Like we need another reason for people to hate us. Thanks.
And what the hell is up with kids needing to buy a costume so they don’t feel left out? I’ve never had a store bought costume, nor has my son. And no Halloween costume has ever cost me more than $30 to make (that was an authentic French courtesan, a la Moulin Rouge, including making a corset) - most of them were under $5 or free! (The personal favorite involves a clear garbage bag and a $1 bag of colored balloons. Viola - you’re a bag of jelly beans!) If schools are so concerned, why don’t they let the kids make Halloween masks in school during their Halloween party? At least then their art education will have a moment (the only moment of art, in some schools, thanks to budget cuts.)
Ya know what else bugs me? My Wiccan friends who wear jeans and a T-shirt and tell everyone they’re “Dressed as a witch for Halloween.” No, you’re dressed like a putz. Good Lord and Lady, people, you spend 7 Sabbats a year wearing all the satin and silver you can get your fairy-dust stained hands on and for this one you dress like a Muggle? It’s not a political statement, it’s annoying. Get over yourself.