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“How do you say 'taboo' in Witch?” I ask.

Reconstructive linguistics is both art and science. My linguist friend is not only conversant in the Anglian dialect of Old English spoken by the Hwicce, the original Anglo-Saxon Tribe of Witches, but is capable of saying what the word would look like if it had survived through the centuries to our day.

Since neither the Hwicce nor their modern Witch counterparts were/are big on religious prohibitions, there's no direct correlation of either concept or vocabulary in this case. He makes several suggestions according to the precise nuance that one is looking for.

Then the arrow strikes home.

“In the religious sense of 'something with dangerous sacred power', I'm thinking wigh,” he says.

(Rhymes with high.)

We have now entered the realm of intrinsic cultural difference. In modern English, we tend to use the word 'taboo' to mean something forbidden.

(Arabic uses the word harám in very much the same way. Believe me, one doesn't live in the Middle East for very long before getting thoroughly sick of hearing the word haram. Translation: “You can't do this because my religion forbids it.”)

That's not what the pan-Polynesian word tabu meant, though. In the pre-christian thought-world of Old Polynesia, tabu was...well, quite precisely, “something with dangerous religious power.”

I recognize the rightness the instant that I hear it. The word not only gives us back a lost piece of ancestral vocabulary, but through it we re-enter the thought world of the ancestors. Such is the power of reconstructive linguistics.

Dirty Hands

I'm in mid-offering when I realize, with a start, that I've forgotten to wash my hands.

This breaks a pretty major taboo. When you approach the gods, it's important to be clean in body, mind, and soul. “Zeus does not receive an offering from dirty hands,” says Hesiod—speaking, one presumes, both literally and figuratively. In the old days, in the greater temples, you would bathe your entire body before, fasting, you made the morning offering.

(No more would one be in a fit state to make an offering if one were furiously angry. That's a related, but different, issue.)

These days, though, are not those. No one's paying me to do this. These daily offerings and prayers are an act of love, pure in themselves. But in the general way of things, at minimum one washes one's hands first.

And now I've forgotten. What should I do?

Between one word of the chant and the next, I make my decision. Zeus, younger god that he is, may not accept offerings from dirty hands. But I'm offering to the tribal gods of the Witches.

Even in the old days, Witches were different. While others worship gods with human faces in fancy temples, the Witches held to the Old Powers, what G. K. Chesterton called “the gods before the gods”: Earth, Sun, Thunder, Sea, Moon, River, Mountain, Fire, Tree.

Inexorable in their own way they may be, but the old gods are pragmatists at heart, understanding things like need. They're not perfect, nor do they expect us to be. The niceties are all very well, but need rules us all.

In ritual, there are infractions and infractions. Sometimes an extra offering will repair the breach. Sometimes all you can do is to start over again.

Molly Leigh, Molly Leigh,

chase me 'round the apple tree.

(Children's rhyme)

If you should happen to go to the churchyard of St. John the Baptist in Burslem, Staffordshire, you'll have no difficulty picking out the grave of Molly Leigh, the witch of Burslem (1685-1748). Unlike all the other graves, it's laid out North-South instead of East-West.

But let's let Sybil Leek tell the story:

The local witches asked for permission to erect a regular tombstone for Molly Leigh. This request was refused, but a few days later, a rough tombstone had been erected. The local witches had dragged the altar stones from their Sabbat meeting place several miles away and made a crude tomb. No one dared move the stones. The grave can be seen today with the strange rough stones piled over it at the very edge of the churchyard of St. John's in Burslem (21).

Like many of Sybil's stories, this one doesn't quite hold together. Through all the permission-asking and stone-dragging, wouldn't the witches have been outing themselves? What did they do for an altar at Sabbat after they'd moved the stones?

When I first heard this story back in the late 60s, I envisioned—per Sybil's description—something rude and megalithic. Quite other is the real thing, though: sculptured, architectural almost. Well, witches have always been good at Reuse, Repurpose, Recycle. That must have been quite some Sabbat meeting place, though.

In fact, Sybil has grafted her story of the Old Religion onto local folklore. Grafting, of course, is something else witches have always been good at. How, though, did the local children, with their macabre game of tag around the grave, know that the altar's secret name was the Apple Tree?

In the old days, few witches received an identifiable grave. One might expect that Molly's would have become something of a pilgrimage destination for modern witches.

To judge by the flowers regularly left at the grave—you can see some in the photo above—it has. If you like, you too can leave a virtual flower on her grave's webpage.

I left a spray of Sunwort there myself, with a poem:

Hot, isn't it? The lake sure looks nice and cool.

Don't go in, though. Not now, not yet: not in May. No swimming until Midsummer's Eve: that's what the ancestors said.

Until then, the water is the exclusive preserve of the People of the Water. You know who I mean: the ones that live in the lakes.

Oh, they're beautiful but dangerous. And they like us, all right. Too much. Go in now and you may never come out again.

Alive, anyway.

Midsummer's Eve, though, there's a blessing on the waters. The Sun and the Moon come down to bathe, and that's why we all go skinny-dipping that night. After that, the waters are safe.

Well, safer.

(Tribal Territory of the Dobunni)

So, remind me again why I should be concerned about a bunch of boy-boffing, bread-eating Redcrests?

I mean, really, what's with those Romans?

They're so cowardly that they can't have sex with an equal: it has to be someone weaker than them, someone they can overpower. That's what it takes to make their puny little dicks hard. That's why they like boys so much.

I mean, what's with that?

And what's with all that bread they eat, anyway? Bread, bread, bread: it's all they ever eat. No wonder they're such weaklings.

I mean, really: why can't they eat porridge, like real people do?

Porridge, now, that's real food.

Porridge makes you strong.

Of Thorunn's Death, and What Happened After

In the days of Leif the Lucky, a certain spae-woman named Thorunn died while visiting a neighboring district. On her death-bed, she asked that her body be taken back to her family farm to be barrowed, a distance of some three days' travel. She promised that those who carried out her request would not be the worse off for it. Five men from the farm said that they would see to this.

After her death, they built a coffin for her, loaded it onto a horse, and set off. Now, it is no mean feat to balance a coffin and body on the back of a horse, and going was slow. Toward the end of the day, they were caught in a rainstorm, and soon all five were drenched to the skin.

They stopped at a farm and asked guest-room for the night. The farmer was by no means pleased to see the men and their burden.

“You may sleep in the byre tonight,” he told them, “but, as I did not know of your coming, I cannot offer you a meal.” Wet and hungry, the men bedded down in the byre, and all agreed that the farmer's actions were stingy and mean.

That night, a thrall-woman went into the kitchen of the farm-house to smoor the fire. There she beheld a tall, pale woman, stark naked, slicing a cheese into pieces. The sight so disconcerted her that she went to the bed-closet where the farmer and his wife lay and told them of what she had seen.

The farmer's wife climbed out of the bed-closet and went to the kitchen. Sure enough, all was as the thrall-woman had said, but now the naked woman was slicing rashers off a joint of smoked lamb and placing them on a wooden trencher.

“Who are you? What are you doing in my house?” the farmer's wife demanded, but the naked woman gave no sign of having heard her, and continued her task without speaking.

The woman went back to the bed-closet and told her husband: “This is to do with those men in the byre.”

Mother Universe Herself

Mothers come in many kinds.

Today, we bless them all.

All mothers here present,

mothers that were

and mothers yet to be,

as well as all those who mother,

for—as I don't need to tell you—

mother is as much a verb as a noun:

may the Mother of All,

she who 13.8 billion years ago