Did the original Celtic Tribe of Witches originate with the merger of two boy-bands?
Likely, we'll never know for sure.
Listen as I weave my tale.
2000 years ago, a Celtic-speaking people known as the Dobunni, the “[People of] Two Bands”, lived in the Severn basin of what is now England.
(600-some years later, they morphed—maybe I should say shape-shifted—into an Anglo-Saxon-speaking people called the Hwicce, the origin and namesake—so say some—of today's Witches. But that's another story for another night.)
Though the origin of the Dobunni's name is disputed, if indeed it does mean the People of the Two Bands, there are parallels with the ethnonyms of other Celtic-speaking peoples: the Continental Tricorii and Petrucorii clearly mean “Three [War-] Bands” and “Four [War-] Bands” respectively.
But the koryos—war-band—for which these peoples were named was not just any kind of war-band.
How, you may have wondered, did the Indo-European-speaking ancestors manage to conquer, populate, and bequeath their languages to virtually all of Europe and much of Western Asia?
On current evidence, it would appear to have been a kind of franchise operation.
The traditional pantheons of most Indo-European peoples featured, not one, but two gods of war. (In current terms, we would denote these Thunder and the Horned.) These were respectively the patrons of two different fighting forces: the teutâ (in Witch English, this would be thede, “tribe”), the initiated, adult men of the tribe, and the koryos (WE here), the uninitiated youths still in training for full adulthood. Each of these fighting forces had its own patronal god: Thunder to the thede, the Horned to the here.
(Ah, just savor that alliteration. Sometimes the language seems to be expressing an opinion of its own, doesn't it?)
This explains why, to this day, it is the Horned who presides both at initiations and at the rites of man-making of the latter-day Tribe of Witches.
According to Kris Kershaw in his 2000 monograph The One-Eyed God: Odin and the (Indo-) Germanic Männerbünde, the boys of the koryos/here lived together in the wild—often the forest—while they learned the skills and lore necessary to adult men of the People. Set apart by their unkempt dress and hair—think dreads*—and wild behavior, they had a reputation for being the fiercest, most fearless, most unrestrained fighters of all. Unmarried, owning nothing, testosterone-fueled, they had nothing to lose. It was they who reaved the cattle of neighboring tribes, and terrified the Red Crests by charging into battle stark naked, wearing nothing but a neck-ring and a belt.
(Easy, when you don't own armor or a helmet to don anyway. Still, say what you will, that's bravado!)
Since it was only after full initiation into tribal manhood that one could marry and acquire land and property, it was these bands of uninitiated youths who spearheaded the Indo-European expansion. Once the thede had settled down for a while, available land and goods would become scarce.
In search of new territory and herds of their own, it was the boy-bands who led the charge.
